Obscure Old Games

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nosimpleway
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby nosimpleway » Mon Jul 16, 2018 9:15 am

I read about Willow NES in Nintendo Power but never got to play it

Willow Arcade, though


This was in the front lobby of the local Big Lots, so young R2 was mindblown by how AWESOME IT LOOKED OMG

I mean in retrospect yeah that's pretty standard Capcom stuff but at the time it was p cool

(I was way too young to even snicker at "Bavmorda's fingers penetrate outside the village" give me a break)

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Lottel
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Lottel » Mon Jul 16, 2018 9:25 am

Grath wrote:Mohawk & Headphone Jack, a platformer for the SNES that was so complex that the developer had to invent a new compression algorithm to make it fit on a SNES cart and function smoothly.

It's also slightly insane.




My brother and I would rent games quite frequently when we were younger but had a hard time remembering which games we played and whether they were good or not.

I remember renting this game getting it mixed up with the gameplay of the Blues Brothers game like 6 times.

I never liked the game but whether that was due to me being a wee lad, it not being the Blues Brothers, or the game's own merits I can't say.
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Friday
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Friday » Mon Jul 16, 2018 3:45 pm

OH ALSO STAND IN LINE IN REAL TIME


wow i fucking forgot about that

goddamn IoG is so stupid/good
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beatbandito
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby beatbandito » Mon Jul 16, 2018 4:06 pm

sorry Friday but I knew all those game already so you must be a fake gamer girl
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Friday
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Friday » Mon Jul 16, 2018 4:12 pm

7. Planescape: Torment



I debated a long time in my head whether to include this on the list. It's certainly old enough, the question is does it meet my personal criteria for 'obscure'. It's certainly a game that you've probably at least heard of. In the end, though, my love for this game overruled obscurity concerns.

Back in this era, the slick hotness every PC gamer RPG fan was playing was Baldur's Gate or maybe Icewind Dale. Torment is built using the same engine, but it doesn't resemble those games in any other way.

How to explain this game to someone who's never played it? Well, for one, there are no swords. (Okay, I think there's one sword.) It's not set in ye olde medieval Englande. There's no evil plot to destroy the universe. The main character looks like beef jerky. The first character you meet is a floating, talking skull who speaks in an east coast accent. You can get a chaste succubus on your team. You can get a man who has become living fire on your team. You can get Judge Dredd on your team. You can talk to a letter of the Alphabet until he (it?) imparts galactic wisdom into your brain and vanishes.

Planescape: Torment requires almost zero combat. You can talk or sneak your way past almost every single fight in the entire game, including the final boss. The game is probably the high water mark for writing in video games and I've often heard it described as 'the best book you'll ever play.' And what a weird fucking book! Don't get me wrong, it's weird in a good way. This is a story that's less about conflict and more about self-discovery and character development.

The game begins with you waking up on a slab in a morgue and you quickly discover that you've been there before, because you can't die. You're covered in tattoos that are giving you instructions on what to do, but some of them are crossed out or overwritten and some of them are actually counter-productive because it turns out that some of your past incarnations are not exactly on your side. After escaping the morgue, you find yourself in Sigil, the City of Doors, at the central point in the Multiverse. Or rather, you find yourself in the slums of Sigil, surrounded by madmen and thieves.

If you like reading and you like sarcastic wisecracking skulls and intellectual thirst-slaking succubi, you owe it to yourself to find out what can change the nature of a man.
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Friday
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Friday » Mon Jul 16, 2018 4:30 pm

6. Escape Velocity: Nova



Hey, finally a game that you guys probably haven't ever heard of. And good luck fucking playing it! It's not on steam, it's not fucking anywhere. As far as I can tell, you have to actually time travel back to the early 2000s and have a mac to fucking play this.

(Actually I think you can go to Ambrosia's site and buy it for 30 bucks right now. But that ruins my time travel joke. The game is worth 30 dollars, believe it or not.)

Nova is the third and final installment in the Escape Velocity series of games. It's also the best. It's a 2D space shooter/trader game, where you begin with a lowly shuttlecraft doing passenger jobs until you save up enough credits to get a ship that can fight and start doing combat missions. It's not a unique concept or anything, but it was one of first to do it well and by well I mean -really- fucking well.

There's six? possible main storylines you can get involved with, tons of smaller side arcs, and a whole universe to explore. Become a rebel and fight the Feds. Become a Fed and fight the rebels. Become a pirate and fight the Feds and also anyone who looks at you cross-eyed. Become an Auroran and fight because fighting is fun. Become a Polaris and restore order to the galaxy. Become a Vell-os and fly around in a ship that's actually a psychic projection of your mind that doesn't obey physics. Become Irish and drink a lot.

Extensively customizable ships. Buy a giant cargo ship and put a bunch of turrets and missiles on it. Hire a bunch more giant cargo ships and do spice runs. Attract pirates and disable and take over their ships. Railgun people from several screenlengths away.

This kind of gameplay is familiar to anyone who loves the spacesim genre, but trust me when I say that EV: Nova did it first, and for the most part did it better. It's not overly complex or too simple to be boring. You could start with the original Escape Velocity, which has the core gameplay elements there but lacks Nova's welcome additional complexities, but skip EV: Override because it sucks.

In conclusion, Star Citizen is never coming out in your lifetime at best and a scam at worst. Play EV: Nova instead.
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Thad
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Thad » Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:14 am

Friday wrote:Back in this era, the slick hotness every PC gamer RPG fan was playing was Baldur's Gate or maybe Icewind Dale. Torment is built using the same engine, but it doesn't resemble those games in any other way.

I bought the D&D Anthology (the Baldur'ses, the Icewinds, Torment, and evidently something called Temple of Elemental Evil) on sale some years back, but it was one of those things where trying to get them to run on Linux in widescreen at a resolution where I could both play the game comfortably and read the text comfortably was such a config-file-editing hassle that I never got around to actually playing any of them. I occasionally consider buying the Enhanced Editions, which should run fine on my computer without any of that fuckery, but damn I've got so many games I've bought and haven't played as it is.

Including Torment: Tides of Numenera. Which I hear is pretty good! Maybe I'll play that. Except I just started Borderlands 2, and I'm still in the middle of RotTR and KotOR 2, and I'm only a little ways into Wasteland 2, and I was thinking after Wasteland 2 I might try Divinity: Original Sin or Pillars of Eternity, and say, my Wii U's out of warranty now so I may as well mod it and download a copy of Breath of the Wild so I can get back to playing that, because my disc quit working. Except that damn, I spent like a whole weekend overclocking my computer so I could crank up Dolphin; maybe I should finish Xenoblade? And then maybe when I'm done with that I can try Xenoblade X, which I bought for cheap back in March but haven't played yet.

And then I spend so much time trying to decide what I'm going to play that I end up just drinking beer and fucking around on the Internet and never get around to playing anything.

Except Borderlands 2. I've been playing that a little bit.

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Friday
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Friday » Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:29 am

yeah, honestly I should make a "top ten games in your library that you should ignore forever in favor of other games"

it would be more useful to today's gamer
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mharr
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby mharr » Tue Jul 17, 2018 8:30 pm

Torment is pretty much a classic pointy clicky adventure using the engine and trappings of an RPG, it's a short story and almost-murder-free runs are available. It's not the Monster that Ate the Weekends unless you want it to be.

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nosimpleway
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby nosimpleway » Tue Jul 17, 2018 10:42 pm

Well, that's kind of the thing. There's So Much There that I can't help but always feel like I'm missing out on something.

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Friday
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Friday » Tue Jul 17, 2018 11:53 pm

5. Faxanadu



I -almost- cut this from the list because it's one of the weaker games I'll be talking about. A lot of 'obscure' lists go for 'obscure and playable' over 'obscure and good' (which is what this thread is) so you end up with a bunch of clunky but interesting games.

Faxanadu resides somewhere between "clunky" and "good", in my opinion, so it just barely managed to not get cut for not being good enough. It's certainly old and weird enough to be on this list.

Anyway, what is Faxanadu? Well, it's ah, uh, a sidescrolling platforming RPG.

So, uh. I guess it's like SotN.

Like imagine if they made SotN, but for the NES, and they kinda didn't really know what the hell they were doing but it turned out alright?

I don't really know what else to say about it. I told myself I wouldn't put any games on this list that anyone reading it couldn't play and find fun, that this wasn't going to be a "hey, look at this old game that was interesting but it's not really playable anymore" list. That being said, I do recommend Faxanadu if you are in a VERY retro mood and want to pretend you're playing the grandfather of all metroidvanias (and don't want to play Simon's Quest or Metroid)
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Friday
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Friday » Tue Jul 17, 2018 11:58 pm

4. Wild Guns



FUCK YEAH WILD GUNS

I guess this game isn't quite as obscure anymore now that it's been remade as Wild Guns: Reloaded (which supports up to 4 players and adds 2 new characters, one of which is a dog) but it's still a kick-ass underplayed and underappreciated gallery shooter. Well, sort of a demi-gallery shooter, you actually do have to move your character around and jump and dive to avoid bullets and shit.

The theme is ROBOTS AND THE OLD WEST and you can pick up dynamite that people throw at you and throw it back.

What the fuck else do you want? Go buy Reloaded and let's do a 4player playthrough I don't have any real life friends who will
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Blossom
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Blossom » Thu Jul 19, 2018 12:54 pm

Friday wrote:5. Faxanadu



I -almost- cut this from the list because it's one of the weaker games I'll be talking about. A lot of 'obscure' lists go for 'obscure and playable' over 'obscure and good' (which is what this thread is) so you end up with a bunch of clunky but interesting games.

Faxanadu resides somewhere between "clunky" and "good", in my opinion, so it just barely managed to not get cut for not being good enough. It's certainly old and weird enough to be on this list.

Anyway, what is Faxanadu? Well, it's ah, uh, a sidescrolling platforming RPG.

So, uh. I guess it's like SotN.

Like imagine if they made SotN, but for the NES, and they kinda didn't really know what the hell they were doing but it turned out alright?

I don't really know what else to say about it. I told myself I wouldn't put any games on this list that anyone reading it couldn't play and find fun, that this wasn't going to be a "hey, look at this old game that was interesting but it's not really playable anymore" list. That being said, I do recommend Faxanadu if you are in a VERY retro mood and want to pretend you're playing the grandfather of all metroidvanias (and don't want to play Simon's Quest or Metroid)


Goddddd I remember this game, I played it so much. It's so incredibly hard though.
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Thad
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 19, 2018 9:04 pm

I somehow stumbled across this while searching for information on Mr. A comics:



I have never played this game and was unaware there was an Usagi Yojimbo game until approximately 90 seconds ago. However, per Wikipedia, it was well-received upon its release in 1988.

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Copen
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Copen » Mon Jul 23, 2018 11:15 pm

Does Darius Twin count?



This was basically Ikaruga on SNES before Ikaruga.

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mharr
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby mharr » Fri Nov 30, 2018 9:06 am

I've been down an ancient DOS games rabbit hole recently thanks to http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/hg101s ... f-all-time and rediscovered the glories of bizarre ZZT user creations, it's basically Kroz with a dungeon editor built in, but the community treated it as a 32k demo scene challenge/Unity 1990 edition.

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Downloaded all 2,203 levels from zzt.org (Weighing it at an unmanageable 128M), which seems to have been dead and static for over a decade, and pulled their review database into a spreadsheet because the site didn't seem to have any order by rating options and could easily disappear forever tomorrow.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Also the Archive has them ordered by infamy. https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_zzt

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Thad
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby Thad » Wed May 15, 2019 12:25 am

Lottel wrote:For my upcoming birthday I ordered a translated reproduction cart of For Whom the Frog Tolls

So there's that.

I started it and it is indeed quite a bit of fun. I mentioned already that it's in Jeremy's Greatest Game Boy Games list from 5 years ago; I also found this video edifying.



tl;dw it's a quirky little precursor to Link's Awakening, and it combines a top-down overworld with side-view platformer dungeons and automatic combat (you walk into an enemy and watch turn-based combat play out based on your stats and equipment). It was never released in English but there's a translation patch.

I'm still early in the game but I'm already quite charmed by it. I'm a little surprised this hasn't attracted a bigger following than it has; it really feels like the sort of game that should have inspired a slew of indie knockoffs in the past few years.

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pacobird
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby pacobird » Wed May 15, 2019 10:50 am

Nihon Falcom is still making Xanadu series games, the most recent of which being Tokyo Xanadu which is quite a bit different than Faxanadu but definitely holds true to the series hallmark of absolutely horrible controls.

NAH I KID faxanadu scarred me as an uncoordinated child and it seems wrong to hold it against it

(tokyo xanadu is boring tho)
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beatbandito
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby beatbandito » Wed May 15, 2019 11:00 am

Oh, hey, I played a decent chunk of Xanadu Next without realizing there was such a lineage. It was pretty okay, played like a more action-oriented version of the Ehrgeiz dungeon crawler mode.
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Re: Obscure Old Games

Postby pacobird » Wed May 15, 2019 11:16 am

Anyway, my contribution here is Great Greed, the OG Gameboy "classic" food-themed Dragon Warrior knockoff where you save the environment by exposing corrupt politicians, helping villagers escape the yoke of arbitrarily-changing laws designed to trip them up in a manner distressingly similar to the DoJ's Investigation into the Ferguson Police Department, and gay-marrying the King.
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