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TwystNeko posted:One of my favorite obscure Dreamcast games is Lack of Love, a sort of RPG game. It was only released in Japan, and there is no translation for it... Which doesn't matter, as there is no dialog in the game at all. The only text is found in the menu, to list off the abilities of your current evolution. I had a chance to play through a game recently called 'The Note' for the PS1 that was apparently fairly obscure. Was a cumbersome first person adventure game where you were a journalist looking for some missing kids in a European mansion and there might be some gorgons and death gods and a bizarre mishmash of enemies in there. And instead of buttons being normally assigned, you could assign actions to specific buttons which sounds cool....but you only had four slots to assign 12 actions, so you ended up having to switch things around a lot. It was also poorly dubbed and janky, and I guess they only pressed a very limited amount so the game is apparently rare? Oh yeah, and instead of a health bar, you instead would blink and your eyes would close more the closer you were to death....gently caress, that was an odd turd of a game.
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Aug 23, 2017 22:36
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drat. Shows how long it's been since I looked at that. The old hard drive I had the videos on is long gone, and I no longer have a Dreamcast. 
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Aug 23, 2017 23:18
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TwystNeko posted:drat. Shows how long it's been since I looked at that. The old hard drive I had the videos on is long gone, and I no longer have a Dreamcast. Looks like the archive saved your videos on archive.org, so they're still extant! You just have to click on the red banner right above 'Introduction'.
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Aug 23, 2017 23:21
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Picayune posted:Looks like the archive saved your videos on archive.org, so they're still extant! You just have to click on the red banner right above 'Introduction'.
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Aug 23, 2017 23:38
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Just beaten Megaman 2 for the first time. Better than 1 by far, I felt like I needed savestates a lot less, and the weapons were more fun to use, even if the crash bomb was only really useful against that one puzzle boss, which was at least a clever idea although it must have been unbearable on the NES due to dying meaning that you respawnes but with the ammo you expended now lost. It also felt that you didn't need to cheat at all - in the original game the only viable strategy felt like it was to cheese everyone with Elecman's weapon, which is unsatisfying at best. I'll probably give Megaman a rest for a bit before delving into 3 and onwards, because otherwise I'll probably burn out, they are very samey in structure and will eventually blur together.
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Aug 24, 2017 18:40
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Frankie Goes To Hollywood where you try to be a 100% complete person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWKPuBO69aQ
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Aug 25, 2017 08:21
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I just spent a drat hour trying to find a scan of the magazine in which I saw a brief review of the Frankie game as a kid; I had never heard of the band, and the review made absolutely no sense whatsoever, so of course it stuck with me. In doing so, I came across this forgotten bit of edutainment that I've never played but oh man, the early years were truly anything goes: 
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Aug 25, 2017 13:31
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Pastry of the Year posted:I just spent a drat hour trying to find a scan of the magazine in which I saw a brief review of the Frankie game as a kid; I had never heard of the band, and the review made absolutely no sense whatsoever, so of course it stuck with me. I am sick and loving tired of all these decapitation based learning games.
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Aug 25, 2017 22:56
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Typing Of The Soon-To-Be-Dead
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Aug 26, 2017 00:00
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HenryEx posted:Typing Of The Soon-To-Be-Dead lmao
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Aug 26, 2017 11:50
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Dead Head Fred is one of my favorite games, it was only available for the psp. It's a detective mob-boss story about a man who lost his head and is trying to find it. What's so cool is how much content they manage to fit in the game plus the amount of witty/dark humor comments sprinkled throughout. The side missions were actually fun as well, and often deviated from the main story showing you areas of the game you would of never of explored. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG1BWYE5LII
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Aug 26, 2017 15:02
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Pastry of the Year posted:I just spent a drat hour trying to find a scan of the magazine in which I saw a brief review of the Frankie game as a kid; I had never heard of the band, and the review made absolutely no sense whatsoever, so of course it stuck with me. Post the LFest games you got
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Aug 26, 2017 15:42
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RagnarokAngel posted:Post the LFest games you got israel_nuke_gif.mp4
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Aug 26, 2017 16:06
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So, back when I was a kid, the local video game rental place had this sweet german RTS called Knights and Merchants. It's notable to me for a few things. First, buildings were built in stages, and you see things like individual shingles being laid, which was super cool to 10 year old Bunnyofdoom, and it's ridiculous supply chains and production chains. For instance, to make the basic food resource, bread, you need to build a farm, have it farm wheat, have a peasant bring it to a windmill, to be made to flour, then have another peasent take the flour to the baker, then take the bread to the inn. All four of those buildings you need to train a specialist for, and peasants can only really move poo poo, and can't be re-assigned. As well, you need to be an expert at civic planing because all these places need roads to them, which take time to get build as well. Also, not sure if you can really micro manage anything but troops. Gog link Steam link EDIT: Here's an LP of the first mission so you can get an idea of it. bunnyofdoom has a new favorite as of 20:05 on Aug 26, 2017 |
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Aug 26, 2017 20:02
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I'm replaying Naval Ops: Warship Gunner 2 right now and it's still one of my favorite games ever. It tickles that spergy part of my brain that wants to upgrade things forever and put increasingly giant guns on increasingly bigger ships. It's not balanced very well and a lot of the million different weapons are useless, but drat does it feel satisfying to unlock and test new parts and ship layouts. It's like EDF had a baby with Ace Combat, but in water. It's been 10 years now, why hasn't anyone remade the exact same formula on PC with even more stupid poo poo to put on ships remains a mystery to me.
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Aug 28, 2017 14:15
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Here's another one that I have never heard of anyone else playing. On one of those mediashare cd-roms from the 90's that had thousands of little shareware games (anyone remember Moraff's games?), there was this text-based bbs proto-rpg called Times of Chaos. It was a post-apocalyptic setting, worked kinda like a roguelike - there was an overworld map, a handful of dungeons, a very rudimentary stat system - I think it was just HP, Attack and Defence. What blew my mind back then was that after collecting enough money, you could actually build your own base anywhere on the map. Then once you had a base it opened completely new gameplay choices - you could research stuff to manufacture new equipment, security systems for your base, hacking tool to enter other people's bases (completely poinless since I played alone, but still). Once you amassed some crazy amount of money and research, you could build a transporter to send you to other planets. There were I think about 5 entire overworld maps for other planets made, but completely devoid of enemies or dungeons, with an environment that would kill unprotected players. Kinda weird and pointless, and with no indication from anywhere else in the game that such thing was even possible. For some stupid reason I spent way too much time "playing" that.
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Aug 30, 2017 10:21
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Keru posted:I love how speedrunners figure poo poo like this out. I remember that game, in fact it was one of the ones I had in an original legal paid-for not-pirated version on my Amiga, so the packaging and original floppy disk might possibly still exist at the back of a cupboard in my parents' house. Was pretty good at the time. Beat the poo poo out of Nikademus in the end (IIRC it was mostly a question of sufficient grinding and leveling-up, if you did enough of that first he went down easy.) Another game from about that time which was extremely my poo poo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lnEa_ICoBY
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Aug 30, 2017 12:01
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Groke posted:Was pretty good at the time. Beat the poo poo out of Nikademus in the end (IIRC it was mostly a question of sufficient grinding and leveling-up, if you did enough of that first he went down easy.) Phantasie III had a ton of grinding. You couldn't even risk going into the first dungeon until your priest got one of the later healing spells, because nothing else would restore lost limbs. The combat system let you pick between just dealing damage or gambling on potentially lethal (but inaccurate) blows to instantly remove limbs/heads, an interesting idea that falls apart when 30 goblins all try to cut your legs off. So you needed to hilariously outlevel everything. I looked it up after finding out what this game I played so much of was actually called, and it had some other cool stuff I had forgotten: It gave you the ability to reset encounters in completed dungeons and you had some control over your party's exp shares, which were both rare features at the time You visit the Castle Of Light in another plane at one point, and if you make a map you realise it's the mirror image of the late-game Castle Of Darkness, down to all the traps being in the same place. Nikademus shows up in disguise as some NPCs to either help or taunt you, and you only find out why if you commit evil acts (eg smashing statues in the Castle Of Light) - he's actually trying to get you to join his side, and you can indeed take a mission from him to assassinate the king, unlocking an ending where you and Nikademus take over the world. Brofessor Slayton has a new favorite as of 12:50 on Aug 30, 2017 |
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Aug 30, 2017 12:28
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Realms of the Haunting is a neat little cheesy survival horror game. It plays kinda like a combination of Myst and FPS games at the time like Doom. When the game wants to have a creepy atmosphere, it generally does a pretty good job. The game has decent art design, and there's fun 90s era FMV cutscenes throughout telling its goofy story. It also has a few inspired ideas about how to use its engine. There's parts where you move between rooms in a couple of areas and there isn't any way for that room to exist based on where you just were. Nothing as fun as two rooms being in the same relative position, but it's still a neat effect. The combat's kinda terrible, but there's some neat weapons later on. I also appreciate the attention to detail in the textures. The lighting engine in the game is pretty basic, so in places where it's appropriate, they took the time to paint in some lighting: There's a lot of less great stuff, though. Some of the puzzles aren't the best, and it kinda veers more toward fantasy toward the end in a lot of ways rather than horror. There's a really terrible part where the whole puzzle is you have to run around a huge Giger-inspired maze collecting 30 skulls or something. The ending's not very good, either. The controls are the worst part, though. I think by default it's set to arrow key movement, a mouse cursor like in Myst, and either space or clicking on an enemy is shoot or something like that. There's no real good way around it, either. You can set the keyboard better, but you do still need to use the mouse, and you can hold both mouse buttons down to do mouselook, but that's not useful, because you can't do anything while mouselooking. SuperGreatFriend did an LP of the game, and he ended up setting up a PS4 controller so that he could use the trackpad for the mouse, and somehow that really does sound like the best solution.
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Aug 30, 2017 16:16
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Auto Destruct, for the ps1. A couple years before gta made the jump to 3D, electronic arts put out an arcadey mix of twisted metal style car shooting game with Driver style objectives. you play as a man chasing cultists around in 3 different open cities modeled after San Francisco, New York, and Tokyo. It's mission based, with you being dropped off at a point in the city and left to head somewhere or race against the clock or an ai car. It's a very fast game and has a lot of secrets. if you bust through warehouses before heading to mission objectives you can get shields, homing missiles, and occasionally weapons that never appear by just playing through the storyline like macross swarm misses and super powered beam lasers. It also had a badass debug menu that let you change your car, physics and all, into limos and vans and stuff, along with a bunch of regular cheats. I loved this game so much and still consider it better than either of it's well known inspirations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a5dzhFyS3c
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Aug 30, 2017 16:53
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I abruptly remembered two obscure PC games from my childhood, which was littered with various CD-ROM adventure titles ranging from Myst to basically the entire Humongous Entertainment catalog. One was more of an activity center, but it's simply so obscure that I have to mention it. "The Wild, Asparagus-Eating Snaggledysnort" was a sort of activity-safari centered around tracking down the elusive, titular creature. I only found one single mention of it on the entire internet, in the form of one of those old educational game repositories having the disc in their collection, and I can't even find that now. A somewhat more well known one is "The Day The World Broke" which posited that the Earth was actually a giant machine run by hapless mechanics and one day everything abruptly goes haywire. It turns out that long ago somebody pushed the wrong button and sucked all of the dinosaurs deep into the Earth machine, where unknown to anyone they continued to live on and merge with machines. So it's up to you to get four particularly stubborn robo-dinos to budge from their hangout inside the core of the Earth in order to stop all the chaos topside. Really creative character designs and some great voice acting for the time. The backgrounds were hand-painted with a similar style to The Way Things Work, the humans were FMV, and the robo-dinos were CG. Just lots of charm. 
John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 20:04 on Aug 30, 2017 |
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Aug 30, 2017 18:38
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I just last night got an urge to replay an old DS RPG called Contact, which I played through and adored pretty much twice in a row when it first came out, and haven't touched since. I think about it a lot, though. It's hard to talk about it without spoiling too much. It was developed by Grasshopper and definitely has that sort of auteur-driven feel to it; it's definitely not anything like a Suda 51 game, but it has a very particular creative vision and sticks to it without making any sort of concessions. Whether that's good or bad really depends on how much the game ends up resonating with you. The music, graphics, and interface are all on par with the best of the Grasshopper games, in that they knew exactly what they wanted to accomplish and nailed it. One of the things that's really neat about it, in terms of narrative, is that you - the player - are actually the "main character," for all intents and purposes. You're addressed directly by one of the game's characters, who has basically given you the ability to control and manipulate Terry, who is the "in-game" main character. This meta element has probably been done to death by 2017, but in 2006, this was really neat, and the game goes all-in with it. That distinction between you the player and Terry the in-game character matters a lot. If you like "little things" in games, this one's great to check out, and doubly so if you actually enjoy just kicking back and grinding for an evening. There's a sort of job system: you switch to a job by putting on its associated costume.  And of course there's cooking and about a million recipes to discover and master and etc., which I am an absolute sucker for in games. It's both a cozy and unsettling experience, and has one of my all-time favorite endings in games, ever. I really recommend checking it out if you like unusual RPGs.
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Oct 10, 2017 13:03
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Huh. Just found this thread. Neat-o. One that I discover has recently finally been tracked down and put on archive.org that we had in my 5th grade's Apple II was Secrets of Science Island. It was one of those like the Broderbund games that came with its own reference book whose syntax it took directly from. Anyways, you're on an island, probably studied by your uncle or something generic like that, and a hurricane is on the way and you need to build a shelter. So you trundle around the village in your old jalopy while the timer ticks down getting parts of your shelter. The town is top down, reminiscent of the maps ib Mario 3. Each stop you get a part for answering a question correctly, and if your shelter isn't complete in time it's game over. In classic dick movery, it took us forever to realize the shelter included a separate garage structure on the graphic display and couldn't understand why the complete house kept still getting blown away. It didn't help that the time limit was balls tight. On a mildly more modern note, noone ever seems to mention the PSX Ghost In The Shell game despite it being super fun. Probably because rather than play as the characters, you're in control of one of those red spider tank robot things they use in the franchise. There's plenty of voice acting and cut scenes made just for the game though. The game is mostly a mission based platform shooter (where the missions are of the destroy the target variety) with the occasional rail shooter level. What makes the game good is just how natural the 3D movement is. You being a spiderbot means you can crawl on any surface you can fit on, plus having a web shot to swing with and dedicated strafe-slide buttons, all while moving at high speeds. I used to love flying around in that thing and might have to dig it back out soon.
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Oct 11, 2017 15:44
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You guys? Play SimGolf. You get to design a golf course and play on it and literally everything about the game is soothing and good and chill.
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Oct 15, 2017 13:23
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Pastry of the Year posted:You guys? Play SimGolf. You get to design a golf course and play on it and literally everything about the game is soothing and good and chill. I heartily second this! (Please disregard my incessant shitposting just this once.) It's a lorra fun.
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Oct 15, 2017 16:03
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Pastry of the Year posted:I just last night got an urge to replay an old DS RPG called Contact, which I played through and adored pretty much twice in a row when it first came out, and haven't touched since. I think about it a lot, though. I remember renting this game and really enjoying it! I always enjoy cooking games and mini-games so I really liked that. I don't have the greatest memory of it but I remember bits and pieces. Would you suggest using a walkthrough to find good items and stuff or just go in blind? I want to be able to find all the costumes and don't want to miss out on any content.
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Oct 15, 2017 23:24
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It’s been a good decade since I played it but I seem to remember the costumes all being plot-gated except for the ninja.
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Oct 16, 2017 00:27
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Pastry of the Year posted:You guys? Play SimGolf. You get to design a golf course and play on it and literally everything about the game is soothing and good and chill. I loving love that game and desperately wish gog would give it a release
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Oct 16, 2017 11:30
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Marathon! And Durandal. Halo is basically their baby.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:45
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Der-Wreck posted:I remember renting this game and really enjoying it! I always enjoy cooking games and mini-games so I really liked that. I don't have the greatest memory of it but I remember bits and pieces. Would you suggest using a walkthrough to find good items and stuff or just go in blind? I want to be able to find all the costumes and don't want to miss out on any content. It's been ages since I played but I don't think there's anything permanently missable. I do remember there being some random fishing sidequest that required an insanely high fishing skill to complete, which you could accept early and locked you out of other quests in the area until you finished it. (There's no way to abandon quests, either). Maybe look that up so you know to avoid it? I seriously cannot understate just how much grinding it takes to clear this random fishing quest - I just gave up on ever seeing the other quests in the area. In general I remember the game being incredibly grindy if you wanted to max stuff, although I don't think there was too much reason to do so other than completionism and a couple of random sidequests. You can (and should) finish the story itself without any grinding.
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Oct 16, 2017 23:42
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Snake Maze posted:It's been ages since I played but I don't think there's anything permanently missable. The only thing missable that immediately occurs to me is the Ja Dagna knife, which, if you're interested in getting, go ahead and look up. There's also some unique content on "WiFisland," and honestly I never did the WiFi stuff and frankly I don't even know if it works anymore. I'd be interested to know if one could access it with a DS emulator. I second the advice here, which I take to mean, basically: try to avoid a walkthrough or guide that reveals plot points, but the "in-depth guides" you'll find on GameFAQs about skills, weapons, recipes, etc., are pretty useful. Some of the requirements or paths to getting this or that trinket can be pretty obtuse. The way I personally play RPGs is a little weird, I guess: I'm usually either in the mood for grinding or for swallowing big chunks of story in a go. Therefore, I like to drastically overlevel early on, so that when I'm in a mood to advance the story, I know I can pretty reliably do so without hitting a "level gate". Contact is a great little game. Just don't burn yourself out before you explore its nooks and crannies. And it can be really satisfying to unlock all those recipes and read the (ahem) flavor text...
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Oct 17, 2017 11:41
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Scathach posted:Marathon! And Durandal. Halo is basically their baby. I don't believe it's 
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Oct 17, 2017 17:57
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Not an old one, but a game a lot of people apparently haven't heard of - I've just beaten Get Even on the PS4 and it is a really interesting game with a really fun and satisfying ending. The combat is a little overly difficult because the game wants to avoid massive fights so I felt no guilt bumping it down to easy, but the ending has multiple layers to it and that's great. I think all I need to do now is go through the levels again to get any evidence I missed. They also do a great job of making the character who you'd expect to be the most boring, Grace, the kidnapping victim who Cole Black (that's really his name) fails to rescue from a bomb, a really fun character in her own right, ever aggressive to her captors, but still a teenager who has trouble keeping her bold front up for too long, but in a way that she never feels weak. She's just out of her depth.
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Oct 18, 2017 10:52
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Croccers posted:https://alephone.lhowon.org I wasn't a Mac kid growing up. I came to Marathon sort of late, and by the time I did, I was sort of over first-person shooters, generally. BUT The story of the Marathon games is real good, and laid out in text readouts on the terminals you find throughout the game. If anyone wants to indirectly experience the story (which is what I ended up doing, and I loved it, even as just a series of screenshots), start here.
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Oct 18, 2017 11:13
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Does anyone remember the game Power Pete? It came with our Macintosh Performa in the mid-late 90s and holy poo poo was that a fun romp through Candyland. You went through all of these different themed stages (from candy to chess to dinosaurs) and all the violence was super well done while being kid friendly (complete with 50s Batman style "POWs!") and the weapons were varied and felt great. Isometric shooter iirc.
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Oct 18, 2017 11:45
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Pastry of the Year posted:The only thing missable that immediately occurs to me is the Ja Dagna knife, which, if you're interested in getting, go ahead and look up. There's also some unique content on "WiFisland," and honestly I never did the WiFi stuff and frankly I don't even know if it works anymore. I'd be interested to know if one could access it with a DS emulator. Awesome, that's good to know! I bought it earlier this week based on what I read in this thread and the memories it brought back. I'm excited to try it out again. I will definitely take my time playing it so as not to burn out. I can't wait to get up to some cooking!
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Oct 18, 2017 14:32
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Croccers posted:https://alephone.lhowon.org Holy poo poo yes
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Oct 19, 2017 03:10
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Apple Cider Spider on the Apple II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWLN0dUYs6Q I was too young to play it at all competently, but my next-door neighbor had it, and I would watch him play it for hours. The moving parts, the colors - it was magical. Tried it when I got older and discovered Apple II emulators and... I'm about as good at it as I was then, alas, but it's still a pleasure to look at.
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Oct 26, 2017 15:43
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I was an Amiga gamer as a kid - my younger brother and I played the poo poo out of this massive 1987 open-world RPG called Faery Tale Adventure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faery_Tale_Adventure The game world is still huge and intricate by modern standards. To walk from one corner of the land mass to the other probably would take 40 to 50 minutes, and it was a single seamless exterior world, not a series of separate rooms like the original Zelda games. It had a variety of weapons, nonlinear quests, random enemy encounters, and real-time combat. The music for it was pretty rad, too. I've probably forgotten about hundreds of Amiga games...
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Oct 26, 2017 16:22
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CommonShore posted:To walk from one corner of the land mass to the other probably would take 40 to 50 minutes, and it was a single seamless exterior world, not a series of separate rooms like the original Zelda games. What does Zelda have to do with this 
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Oct 26, 2017 16:43
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