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What's the most obscure game you can think of?

BennyBlanco

aka IMurRIVAL69
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KàIRóS

Member
Thousand Arms ATLUS' first Dating Sim RPG way before Persona 3, they probably saw the success of the dating sim aspect in Sakura Wars and tried to bank on it, it's alright but battles are super slowww.


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Sojiro

Member
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Anytime I see people ask for some obscure SNES games, this is the first one I always mention. I love this game, its quirky as hell, has super catchy and memorable music, has great gameplay, and is just plain fun. It wouldn't be in my top 10 SNES favorite list (that's a stacked ass top 10), but I could work it into a top 20 though.
 
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Shifty

Member
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One of my favorite games is pretty obscure.
Hell yes, I loved this game. Spent far too long painstakingly recreating Gradius ships in the editor after getting my hands on a non-shareware copy.

And what a novel idea, scanning your hard drive and generating levels out of file hashes.
It might seem quaint to the casual onlooker now we're in the post-procedurality era and computer literacy is more common, but at the time this game evoked the same tech-magic mystique as TRON. Top level stuff.

And fun bit of trivia: Inner Space is so old-school that it'll refuse to run off anything except a floppy disk.
No doubt you can get around that with virtual devices these days, but trying to archive it (read: hand it out to my school friends) presented some unique challenges at the time :messenger_grinning_sweat:
 
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Hell yes, I loved this game. Spent far too long painstakingly recreating Gradius ships in the editor after getting my hands on a non-shareware copy.

And what a novel idea, scanning your hard drive and generating levels out of file hashes.
It might seem quaint to the casual onlooker now we're in the post-procedurality era and computer literacy is more common, but at the time this game evoked the same tech-magic mystique as TRON. Top level stuff.

And fun bit of trivia: Inner Space is so old-school that it'll refuse to run off anything except a floppy disk.
No doubt you can get around that with virtual devices these days, but trying to archive it (read: hand it out to my school friends) presented some unique challenges at the time :messenger_grinning_sweat:
I’ve bought the game a few times. Still have the floppy. The company will just send you the files in a zip now.

Not only did it do the files on your pc thing, but it did the rivalry thing people praised in Shadow of Mordor. That didn’t even seem like a big deal to me during SoM because I’ve played a ton of Inner Space.
 
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Shifty

Member
I’ve bought the game a few times. Still have the floppy. The company will just send you the files in a zip now.

Not only did it do the files on your pc thing, but it did the rivalry thing people praised in Shadow of Mordor. That didn’t even seem like a big deal to me during SoM because I’ve played a ton of Inner Space.
Yeah, the relations and factions were really cool - it made the virtual world feel more alive to have NPCs with agency who you could make friends or enemies of, then settle beef with them in a Dodge City duel.

I remember favouring the Knights for their ship designs and disdaining the Fuzzy Ones for being a bunch of hapless hooligans.
Or the cops who could physically cuff a ship and drag it off to court for summary judgement :messenger_grinning_smiling:

I've long since lost my physical copy, but I'm going to have to trawl some abandonware sites and see if this'll run in Wine.

Some footage for the thread, because everyone deserves to hear the sultry ship AI / narrator lady say Show no mercy:

 

OuterLimits

Member
Currently playing the game Relayer which is a $60 mech based SRPG(Kadokowa Games) on the PS4/5. It only has 8 reviews on Metacritic(upper 70s average) and zero reviews on Amazon. I had never even heard of the game and just noticed it when browsing the strategy section on the PSN store and decided to impulse buy it. It's actually a pretty decent game.

as a kid, I was playing the obscure Koei strategy games like Genghis Khan, and Liberty or Death. The Romance of the 3 Kingdoms strategy games were pretty obscure as well, but the series became more known when Dynasty Warriors became popular in the PS2 gen.
 

Dr. Suchong

Member
Loved this game but was never able to beat it. Harsh time limit and great graphics for its time. Zamzara for the C64


Wow, I'm pretty sure I had this via a free full game with Commodore formats cover tape.
But my Data cassette player chewed it up the day I got it so I never got to play it.
Day sucked lol
 

jigglet

Banned
Legend of the River King. One of my favs. Developed by the original Harvest Moon team. HM went on to become a huge IP, but LORK faded into obscurity.
 

TintoConCasera

I bought a sex doll, but I keep it inflated 100% of the time and use it like a regular wife
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Used to like this game but I never see people mentioning it.
 

Sp3eD

0G M3mbeR
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Diner! For the intellivision. It is the sequel to the arcade game Burgertime. One of my both fondly and painful remembered games of all time. I remember throwing tantrums when I was 4 over this game due to its difficulty in later levels….but I kept playing everyday and never gave up.
 

Evil Calvin

Afraid of Boobs
Clock Tower?

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This is a great thread! Always love chatting about forgotten/obscure games that very few really talk about.

Here are two quite obscure adventure games with creep and unsettling atmospheres. These types of games have a certain flavor that is totally unique:

Bad Day on the Midway (a game designed by the weird musical band, The Residents)
Very strange point and click game that evokes memories and feelings that you've never had...
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The Dark Eye
Another strange point and click game. Wholly unique, nothing like it has been made since. Very unsettling vibe.
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The Residents also had Freak Show. I still lave the long box of that.
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
I think this might be cheating as it's 1980's but





Used to get put on this when I finished maths class early in my first school.

Don't remember the music being pirates or the Caribbean mind I think the video just added that.
 

Cryio

Member
My first ever PC game, when I got my PC in 2005 at 14 years old: Viper Racing.

Some random PS1 era game where you do races and your car can shoot balls of metal. It's a crapshoot of a game, haha.
 

BlackTron

Member
I want to say Chex Quest but even that made it to Steam a few years ago, so I guess more people were thinking about it than I ever thought possible.
 

Holammer

Member
I'm currently reading all the Archie Comics Sonic (yes, I'm apparently crazy and it's a horrible slog to read). Couple of issues had advertisements for a game I never even heard of back in the days or until now, it's called The Ant Bully. Released on PS2, GC, PC and Wii. With releases on so many formats, one would imagine it would leave a more noticeable footprint.

 
I was going to say Hylics, but anything you can open Steam and search for doesn't really feel that obscure.

And the absolute deepest pull I have is so obscure I've never been able to find it - some bizarre homebrew PSP isometric RPG thing with PS1-ish graphics, a tentacle monster hivemind thing called 'the huntress', magic cast effects that looked like yellow swastikas, and an extremely oppressive psychological horror atmosphere. If anyone knows what the fuck I'm talking about I'd be grateful to know, because it still haunts me today.

So in absence of that, I'll throw in Blitter Boy: Operation Monster Mall; A top-down shooter for PS1 that got included on one of OPSM's coverdiscs as a Net Yaroze title back in the day:



Brilliant little game with an off-beat sense of humor and some cool demoscene-looking 2D effects. The Fruit Drops weapon is a work of genius.


I remember doing this! The name always eluded me, but no wonder - that's about as 90s of a title as you could hope for :messenger_sunglasses:

If memory serves it was a pretty decent game too.

Blitter boy was great! Also remember playing that alien first person shooter on one of them demos too. Caddicuras done a video on PS1 demo discs (not a fan of his) but worth a watch.
 

Kaachan

Member
I got a disc with some really weird snowy mountain climbing game from a Frosty Flakes cereal box once

I couldn't even find any pictures or footage of it, so I'm not even sure it exists for real or if I'm just dreaming

Whatever it was I remember that the graphics made me really uncomfortable as a kid
 
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