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Back in the PS1 days I used to own a games store, so I had access to anything and everything at the time, life was good. There was a game called Burning Road that was RAD TO THE MAX as was the fashion of the day, but I swear it was more fun than Ridge Racer, Sega Rally etc. It's one of those games I never hear about : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEKNa22W9qc Man, the memories!
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Aug 21, 2017 14:39
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John Murdoch posted:
I never knew that Dodongo Dislikes Smoke was not actually a mistranslation - if the Dodongo boss in the original Zelda get's hit by the blast radius of the bomb it actually stuns him - he is physically weak to the smoke. I only knew that from an LP I watched a while back.
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Aug 21, 2017 18:48
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The Sausages posted:I remember trying hard to remember what the hell Future Classics was called. Kinda disappointed when I re-discovered it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y869RpFPJFU Yeah, doesn't really hold up. Though I kinda want a rip of the Tandy version's intro as a ringtone.
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Aug 21, 2017 20:25
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Besesoth posted:Likewise, I feel like I'm the only person who's ever heard of Xardion, a platformer where you could switch between three robot protagonists, one of whom had to die in order to add the titular Xardion to your party near the end of the game. Clumsy controls and artificial difficulty, but I was a Transformers fan as a kid so I liked playing robot heroes.  I'll also throw Metal Storm (aka 'that game where your robot reverses gravity at will' ) out there to complete the trilogy of obscure video games revolving around badass robots.
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Aug 21, 2017 21:29
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Rangpur posted:I'll also throw Metal Storm (aka 'that game where your robot reverses gravity at will' ) out there to complete the trilogy of obscure video games revolving around badass robots. I almost mentioned this game but I wasn't sure it was obscure enough. It's incredibly fun.
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Aug 21, 2017 21:39
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The internet age blurs the meaning of 'obscure.' A fair few people have probably heard of Clash at Demonhead, if only because they referenced it in Scott Pilgrim, but the number of people I know who played it I can count on one hand. I'm not even one of them!
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Aug 21, 2017 22:11
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On the topic of old or obscure ~enough~: I think something that people may miss about me is that I don't deliberately pick old or obscure games to talk about - it's just whatever I recently happen to have bought or downloaded, what I happen to be playing at the time. The time will come when I join in discussion of newer games, like Nier Automata and Persona 5, but that time is not now. Any patterns that crop up are entirely coincidental. The most recent licensed games I talked about were all bought on Saturday because they were cheap and looked interesting (Stitch: Experiment 626, Knight Rider and Mark of Kri, altogether cost £5.50). I'm not trying to be a gimmick like Lottery of Babylon, the cards just happened to fall that way.
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Aug 21, 2017 22:32
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Pastry of the Year posted:And here's a longplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSdhqAWdOas
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Aug 21, 2017 22:47
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Rangpur posted:There's at least one other person who played it, because the only thing stopping me from mentioning it alongside Metal Warriors was that I couldn't remember the name. Rangpur posted:The internet age blurs the meaning of 'obscure.' A fair few people have probably heard of Clash at Demonhead, if only because they referenced it in Scott Pilgrim, but the number of people I know who played it I can count on one hand. I'm not even one of them! I loved both of these - in fact, I still have both of them from when I owned them as a kid. (In fairness, I bought Clash at Demonhead from a friend.) 
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Aug 21, 2017 23:43
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Steamshovel Harry was a really cool Flash game that kind of got lost in the shuffle since it came out after that scene had more or less died thanks to cell phone games. The premise is that it's a platformer based on Newtonian physics where you navigate asteroid fields and larger meteors have stronger gravity and you control the height and power of your jumps by grabbing and throwing bits of debris; to paraphrase the opening song, "throw downward to double-jump, throw it up to not jump as high".
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Aug 21, 2017 23:43
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Chakan: The Forever Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDiOtr5X81Q&t=233s It was about a guy named Chakan who poo poo talked Death, so Death said he could never die until all the evil in the universe is destroyed. You ran around different worlds killing all kinds of awesome metal AF enemies. You had two swords,a sickle, a warhammer and all other kinds of weapons. The boss battles were pretty epic for a genesis game, and they were hard as balls. I never managed to beat it as a kid. There was supposed to be a Dreamcast sequel that never materialized, which is a shame because this was one of my favorites as a kid.
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Aug 21, 2017 23:48
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Rangpur posted:There's at least one other person who played it, because the only thing stopping me from mentioning it alongside Metal Warriors was that I couldn't remember the name. I had a copy of this as a kid. It was fun, although as a kid I was unable to appreciate the technical qualities of it. It's actually pretty hard to make parallax scrolling backgrounds on the NES; the hardware does not support multiple background layers, so it takes workarounds to create that effect. Some games like Mega Man 5 would have different "stripes" of the background scroll at different speed, or use palette-shifting to convey moving water rapids. Metal Storm however pointed does neither of those, and I can't tell how Metal Storm's backgrounds were created. Stages 3, 5, and 7 have 3 layers to their backgrounds. Stage 1 has only 2 but the second layer has higher detail. Stages 2, 4, and 6 have very simple backgrounds but they also have more complicated scrolling going on. It looks like they had to sacrifice graphic quality for the more complex stages, but that doesn't explain how they actually did it... They're still all vague machinery, cables, and pipes, but that befits the "inside of a space station" setting. On the same subject of working around NES limitations, the sprites used are quite large for the NES. Unless I am mistaken, NES sprites are limited to 16x32 pixels (1x2 tiles), and anything that wants to be larger than that has to be made of multiple sprites working together. Metal Storm has got a lot of flickering going on due to the number and size of the sprites on screen being more than the system is equipped to handle. That would explain why the HUD is so minimalist, and why the HUD disappears altogether in boss battles. Despite the sprite limitations, their animations are really fluid. Very few NES games achieve the level of detail that Metal Storm puts in, even for simple things like turning and aiming. That goes for the enemies too; even they have turning animations and very few of them just snap to a new direction. I see the third boss rotating slightly when it moves between its locations. You can't simply rotate sprites like that on the NES, the rotation sprites have to be manually drawn and inserted. There are also some neat mechanical designs it it, although some of them are made harder to read by the NES's sprite and palette limitations. I am particularly fond of the fifth boss, that has 3 parts that split and recombine in different forms to use different weapons. This is definitely a well-crafted NES game, and its ideas are ahead of their time even. It came out relatively late in the NES's life. Wikipedia tells me that the game came out in February 1991 for NA, or April 24, 1992 for JP. That is 4 months before the SNES's debut in NA, or a year and a half after for JP. If Metal Storm had been developed for the SNES, the developers would have had a much easier time achieving the effects that they wanted. Despite that, they succeeded, and the actual gameplay did not suffer for it, with well-realized uses of the gravity gimmick such as the big looping maze in Stage 2. tl;dr: Good Old Game!
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Aug 21, 2017 23:55
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Your Gay Uncle posted:Chakan: The Forever Man Chakan was the poo poo. Some of the coolest and most compelling backstories of the early 16 bit era didn't come from RPGs. I remember it had some kind of elemental potion system to enhance your powers too. Also the ending was dark as gently caress, Death points out all the stars in the sky and every one contains evil so the curse will essentially never be lifted Eternal Champions is another one that I spent as much time fanboying over the characters' backstories as I did playing the game. Dross has a new favorite as of 00:52 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 00:49
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The first real MMO http://jstart.wikia.com/wiki/KnowledgeLand Knowledgeland. Beat ultima online to the market. Granted, it's blatant advertising for their other games, but it was SO COOL in 1996 to be communicating with others over the internet while playinig the same game and working towards and against each other with trading cards back and forth, or both of you running and scrambling to get the next card. It wouldn't surprise me since knowledge adventure got rolled into the same holding company as blizzard if some of the coders made the jump over to work on WoW. Most of my old obscure games to list are all edutainment. That said, I've found a bunch on archive.org, and am currently installiing windows 98 just to be able to play some of them. (win98 is also available on archive.org now. who woulda thunk.) Dr Jankenstein has a new favorite as of 02:49 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 02:46
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Your Gay Uncle posted:Chakan: The Forever Man Some of my cousins had this game and I thought it was incredibly cool but only played it for about 10 minutes tops because it was way too loving hard.
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Aug 22, 2017 06:31
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Guy Mann posted:Steamshovel Harry was a really cool Flash game that kind of got lost in the shuffle since it came out after that scene had more or less died thanks to cell phone games. The premise is that it's a platformer based on Newtonian physics where you navigate asteroid fields and larger meteors have stronger gravity and you control the height and power of your jumps by grabbing and throwing bits of debris; to paraphrase the opening song, "throw downward to double-jump, throw it up to not jump as high". Nice try.
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Aug 22, 2017 07:02
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Palpek posted:What the hell? This is some avant-garde gameplay. You just helped me decide the next game I wanted to bring up: Lifespan for Atari 8-bit computers. Full disclosure: I haven't played this one, but I've read about it and watched videos of it, and it's really fascinating. A lot of you you've been around for a bit might remember a website that I believe was called The Black Forge, which was an in-browser game that allowed you to make a series of choices over the course of a human life right up until your inevitable, but usually surprising death. That site was an ambitious adaptation of a relatively well-known computer game from the mid 80s called Alter Ego, which was sold in male and female versions. This game could easily be the subject of an entire post or, hell, even an entire thread. Lifespan predates that by a few years, and also was an attempt to capture the experience of human life from birth to death, but in a much more abstract fashion. Here's a gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saQFOEaseH4 And the entry on Atarimania, where they've collected all the available info about it.  quote:Each game begins with the birth spiral screen, wherein the player is treated to a pretty light sequence. While waiting for the fetus to "develop", the gamer can move the joystick in any direction to add musical tones to the birth chorus.  quote:Gradually, the birth spiral fades away and the player becomes an infant in a playpen. The object of this screen is to isolate as many personality traits as possible (there are four altogether) to become as well-rounded a person as possible. To do this, garners move building blocks around the screen with their cursor, dropping the blocks near the corners of the playpen, thus keeping the free-bouncing personality traits from escaping. The more traits trapped, the sooner opportunities come knocking later and the longer the player's lifespan.  quote:The third screen brings the gamer's character to the threshold of adulthood - the opportunity gates. The gates are actually a dark, forbidding corridor filled with tiny points of light.  quote:Successfully entering an opportunity leads to the next scenario, situations and conversations. Unsuccessful tries have a negative effect on the gamer's health. This screen is an analogy to the social process, in which players must make contact with common interests (depicted as colored squares on the grid) in order to enter conversations with their peers. This must be done while avoiding creatures that rob the gamer of common interests. When enough common interests have been acquired and the player successfully joins a conversation, it's time for the most dangerous screen of all - the experience corridor.  quote:Hurtling through the corridor at lightning speed, the player has to steer clear of the dark Worries, Fears and Doubts that threaten the health of the character. Large, bright lights are Hopes, which can reverse some of the debilitating effects of failure. If the player is strong enough to cope with life experiences, he or she is rewarded with an extra character dimension and a beautifully animated Insight before returning to the earlier screens to continue play. There's a video of this simulated death experience, the "ending" of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQDCFRfqi2Y The uploader describes it as "nothing more than a poor man's demo. Imagine a bunch of random colors and sounds, with simple graphics and patterns being drawn all over the screen. Unfortunately for me, I ended the game with 32 years left (out of 96), which punished me with an interminable 10 minutes of said bullshit."
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Aug 22, 2017 11:51
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Does Monster Party count as obscure anymore? I know one of those youtube guys reviewed it or whatever but I think it's still pretty rare as far as the physical copy goes. The game is pretty hard and can be very frustrating but it does have several memorable bosses such as: The easiest boss and  this fried shrimp which has phases turning into an onion ring and some other fried thing that I can't remember. Zoda's Revenge (Star Tropics 2 - the first one was really good too but that's not really obscure I think) was also very good. All of these (plus ~180 other ones) are still sitting in their box at home gathering dust. There are probably many more obscure ones in there that I just can't remember because some games are obscure for a reason.
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Aug 22, 2017 12:19
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Populous had the most obtuse UI outside of Silent Hunter.
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Aug 22, 2017 12:25
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One of the games I had for the Amiga when I was young was Harlequin. It was a platformer where you played as a clown trying to restore the four pieces of the heart of his clocktower home. It was surprisingly open, with the levels all connecting in different ways. There were switches in it that opened doors dozens of levels away, one of the most memorable ones being turning on an oversized wall socket on the side of a pyramid in the hourglass-themed level to switch on a gigantic TV inside the electronics store so you could enter different levels based on what channel it was currently on. The game was pretty tricky, between fairly difficult platforming and the disorienting layout of the world. I never actually completed it. The music was pretty great, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c468tHl_Vgo
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Aug 22, 2017 20:53
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John Murdoch posted:Along similar lines, a lot of the hints in the original Legend of Zelda were mucked with in the translation. Even outside of the clunky grammar on display, some were shuffled around and some were completely made up for the English version (or perhaps drawn from older versions of the game). The completely arcane "10th enemy has the bomb" being a standout. I was watching an AGDQ of LoZ, and there's actually truth to this hint. There's some sort of hidden counter that determines what item enemies drop, and the 10th bomb drop eligible enemy you kill after getting hit will drop a bomb 100% of the time if none have randomly dropped one previously. I might be a little off, but that's the gist.
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Aug 22, 2017 21:27
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rydiafan posted:I was watching an AGDQ of LoZ, and there's actually truth to this hint. There's some sort of hidden counter that determines what item enemies drop, and the 10th bomb drop eligible enemy you kill after getting hit will drop a bomb 100% of the time if none have randomly dropped one previously. Almost. Without being hit, kill nine enemies and then kill a tenth with a bomb; it's guaranteed to drop a four-bomb cluster. (If you kill the tenth enemy by any other method you get a blue rupee.)
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Aug 22, 2017 21:57
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I googled it and there's even another weird level, which is that if said tenth enemy cannot legally drop an item the eleventh will drop a bomb cluster regardless of how you kill it.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:40
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Clash was a cool game. I liked how the main dude was named "Bang". There was also a lot of story/"cutscenes" for NES. Branching paths, too.
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Aug 22, 2017 23:58
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Firstborn posted:Clash was a cool game. I liked how the main dude was named "Bang". There was also a lot of story/"cutscenes" for NES. Branching paths, too. Despite being published by Vic Tokai, who was never a really big name along the lines of Konami or Capcom, Clash wasn't even super obscure at the time it came out. It got a fair bit of good press in Nintendo Power, up to and including one of those long features with maps, lists of characters, and etc. The thing is, though, even if you have that feature, and the manual, the game can be difficult, grindy, and sort of obtuse. It was probably developed with the success of Tower of Druaga in mind; it's the sort of game that really benefits from the collaborative effort that would eventually find its best home on the internet. That's probably why it didn't make a big splash at the time and get its due until the early emulator years. But yeah, it's ambitious and neat.
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Aug 23, 2017 00:10
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A PC game I played way back when was called Wizards and Warriors by D.W. Bradley on the PC. It wasn't the best CRPG, but it was quite engaging and had a lot of depth since you could build your whole party from scratch with plenty of options of races, classes and builds you could branch off to. Each member would start as a base class like Wizard, Warrior, Rogue or Priest and you could branch and multiclass from there as you explored the world. For what it is, I still like the game although it's difficult to get running properly on modern machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKFM_wHZvkg
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Aug 23, 2017 00:16
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Kuros posted:A PC game I played way back when was called Wizards and Warriors by D.W. Bradley on the PC. Young me played the Hell out of this game for the topless nymph enemies!  ...even at the time it wasn't really worth it 
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Aug 23, 2017 03:28
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rydiafan posted:I googled it and there's even another weird level, which is that if said tenth enemy cannot legally drop an item the eleventh will drop a bomb cluster regardless of how you kill it. Link to the Past has a similar drop system that seems random in casual play but follows very specific rules. It's how someone got caught cheating speedruns by splicing the video, people figured out how the drop system worked and it proved they were cheating.
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Aug 23, 2017 03:36
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Booourns posted:Link to the Past has a similar drop system that seems random in casual play but follows very specific rules. It's how someone got caught cheating speedruns by splicing the video, people figured out how the drop system worked and it proved they were cheating. I love how speedrunners figure poo poo like this out. I don't know how obscure this game is, since it's from like 1988 or so, but I played the everliving poo poo out of Phantasie III: Wrath of Nikademus when I was a kid. It's a pretty early cRpg that had all the hallmarks of the time, from absolutely mental difficulty to completely obtuse mechanics and story.  The opening title, featuring a short bit of intro music before you start your game in:  Pendragon, the central city on the continent of Scandor, or possibly a smaller subset of islands south of Scandor, I can't remember. You create your basic party from a selection of races, there's the 'main' races that's your standard fantasy faire of humans, elves and whatnot, with a selection of possible classes from each, also the standard lot. However, you could also pick the option 'random' which rolled a random monster race, humanoid monsters at least, that could only play two classes, Fighter of Thief. They had abysmal starting money, but could have really good stats if you got lucky. Usually this meant re-rolling the Random option and hoping it rolled on a Troll (for a fighter) or a Pixie or Sprite for a thief. It could get tedious. Once you had a team of strapping absolute murderhobos, you took one step out of town, got ambushed by five billion skeletons while asleep and murdered and then presented with the following bastard:  (DOS version here, couldn't find an amiga one) This guy judges you at the end of your life. Now, if you died on step one outside of the city, which was the usual way it happened, he'd do one of two things: outright destroy a character, or he could revive them as lvl 15 Undead. Now, a lvl 15 character sounds great on paper, but they'd functionally be the exact same level as when they died, statswise, and they couldn't level up. He'd do this for each character in your party and then you started back in Pendragon. If your party was high enough level, the third option kicked in, which was a full resurrection, with only a loss of Constitution (I think?) So you made a new party. This one made it to the nearby dungeon, the Pendragon Town Archives  Promptly getting murdered by the cast-iron bastard scribes and rangers that apparently really love firebolt spells. I don't know how that place didn't burn down, to be honest.  One of the cool things that Phantasie III did was, it had location damage, complete with unlucky decapitations when enough damage done to the head, or a broken arm (shortly followed by it being lopped off by the next pyromaniac librarian). So now your Troll Fighter only has one arm, and unfortunately it's his sword arm, so all he can do now is Parry, or maybe his leg gave way and now he's constantly on the ground and trying to attack with a big disadvantage to hit. Location damage/removal was only fixable by a high level Priest or Monk spell, Healing III and IV, or with an expensive healing potion. This meant you were most likely rolling a new fighter shortly, as this one was taking up compost duty in the party inn. There was quite a lot to explore in the game and I never quite finished it, though I have made it to the last dungeon, the castle of Nikademus himself. For it's time, the game had a lot of neat little improvements, like the aforementioned tracking of limb damage and having to actually deal with it (even if said dealing was just rolling a new schmuck to take on the role of 'take hits for the Priest until they get Healing III). The combat in the game was a separate screen that housed your team at the bottom with the enemies taking up the rest of the screenspace, including little animations for each enemy and player character, even if it was just a simple 2-sprite animation.  The actual dungeons had a map interface where you moved around to explore, that auto-mapped where you'd been, giving you the option to load or discard your map each time you entered it, the latter option being used if you started over from the start with a new party in a new game, since the maps stayed saved in between games. In all, I think I can firmly point at this game as being the one that taught me life isn't loving fair and there are skeletons at night.
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Aug 23, 2017 04:12
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Keru posted:life isn't loving fair and there are skeletons at night. Strong contender for new thread subtitle and it's only page 3.
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Aug 23, 2017 04:23
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Doomsayer posted:Young me played the Hell out of this game for the topless nymph enemies! It also doesn't help that they were trying to murder you.
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Aug 23, 2017 04:56
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Rangpur posted:There's at least one other person who played it, because the only thing stopping me from mentioning it alongside Metal Warriors was that I couldn't remember the name. We used to play Metal Warriors on emulators in animation class back in high school. It's actually a Hideo Kojima game which explains the badass mech battle. I always saw Zone Of the Enders vs. mode as a throwback to this game. This was easily the coolest thing you could play on SNES emulators when they first added net play.
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Aug 23, 2017 04:57
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Metal Warriors has nothing to do with Kojima. It was developed by LucasArts and only published by Konami, and made in the same engine used for Zombie Ate My Neighbors. The devs were just fanboys of Cybernator and games like it.
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Aug 23, 2017 05:15
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Pastry of the Year posted:You just helped me decide the next game I wanted to bring up: Lifespan for Atari 8-bit computers. Full disclosure: I haven't played this one, but I've read about it and watched videos of it, and it's really fascinating.
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Aug 23, 2017 06:31
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJNQxgKZPw Not terribly obscure, but the C64 version beats the NES version by miles. The voice in the very beginning gave me a decade of nightmares though, I still can't hear it without cringing.
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Aug 23, 2017 08:26
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Keru posted:Phantasie III: Wrath of Nikademus Oh hey, that's what this game is called. I remembered it being absurdly hard, and the little 4-tone "you are made undead!" sound effect, but not the actual name. Brofessor Slayton has a new favorite as of 13:27 on Aug 24, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 08:36
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Quad posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJNQxgKZPw I had this game on the Atari 2600. It's slightly simplified (no gatekeeper and keymaster, a few less things to buy at the start) and the graphics are slightly different, but otherwise the same game. It's way longer than it needs to be because once you've figured out what you're doing (which isn't difficult) you just have to repeat it the exact same way a bunch of times and then you basically just win the game. It's not a terrible game by the standards of the time, but it's not great.
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Aug 23, 2017 08:51
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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 did a full LP of it a few years back. It's a rather charming game, with a pretty nice soundtrack. I'm phone posting right now, so I'm not sure if the videos still work. 
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Aug 23, 2017 21:55
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Keru posted:In all, I think I can firmly point at this game as being the one that taught me life isn't loving fair and there are skeletons at night. I learned that too late with Minecraft.
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Aug 23, 2017 22:02
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On the Old front - I just beat the last two Robot Masters in Megaman 2 and got to Wily's Castle. Honestly wasn't impressed by Quickman's stage, it was not hard, just stupid. It was just "Fall past lasers for 3 minutes!" Felt less interesting than all the previous stages.
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Aug 23, 2017 22:31
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