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[Falk]

There are two obscure games I remember most fondly. First one is Albion, a German-made RPG which takes cues from both JRPGs and CRPGs. It's very Phantasy Star-esque in that it has a sci-fi/tropical fantasy theme, and switches between top down and 3D first person segments. Great artstyle and a pretty original plot. It's on GOG and you can read a RPS review here: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/08/03/abion-review/

Man, as a kid I got completely, completely lost in the first town and kept restarting. I even made it into some kind of basement once and shot monsters till I ran out of bullets.

Story intrigued me but I never had time to go back and play it through to completion - couldn't justify it in this day and age.

 

[VlaudTheImpaler]

I'll have you know that this thread sent me on an 2 hour hunting spree in order to figure out the name of this game.

Warpath (Classic)

I used to play the crap out of this game and thanks to this thread I found out that there is a way I can play it today.

Link to download: http://www.synthetic-reality.com/warpath.htm

Thank you so much. It's a blast from the past.

And holy crap they have a newer version! How did I miss this?

Link to download: http://www.synthetic-reality.com/warpath32.htm

Video for those who are interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ7Txf8hZEY

 

[Espo83]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika_(video_game)

This video is good quality but doesnt have the awesome intro song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uDrgNkQu14

This has the intro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IpYuXJ6u6A

 

[obeythed1734]

Never heard or seen anyone mention this.

I credit this game for teaching me the phrase "the mind is a terrible thing to waste"

You just pulled me through a wormhole of nostalgia. I'll think about this game every few years and always have the same warm feeling wash over me. Cheers.

By way of contributing without the ability to post images I will mention another Sierra game, Torin's Passage, which I never beat as I always ended up stuck on some weird final crystal puzzle.

And then there is Square Z which you can still find hosted on many DOS game hosting sites that was a wicked puzzler that my family and I still battle each other for high score in all the time!

 

[Altazor]

PICKLE WARS.

It was a sort of Prince of Persia clone, I barely remember anything about it except that I kept on playing it despite its shittiness.

Hell, I didn't even remember its name until a couple of years ago.

 

[NOLA_Gaffer]

Played all of these. I actually hear Scorched Earth mentioned surprisingly often, I don't think it's really obscure. Maybe CHAMP Kong is, it's another game in that genre.

Solar Wings reminds me, Dare to Dream is another game of the shareware era which doesn't really get a lot of attention for some reason. By Cliffy B!

Dare to Dream was freaking WEIRD. I never got very far in it but that screenshot definitely brings back some memories.

Anyone else remember/play this?

Hugo's House of Horrors was my very first PC game. My family bought it from KMart out of a bin of software on floppies that was all published by some sort of reseller. (Their logo was a kangaroo, I believe.)

The irony is that we had bought a 486 not long before--a state of the art multimedia PC with a CD-Rom drive and all the bells and whistles...and here my sister and I were playing this super-simple DOS game from years prior.

 

[potatohead]

My favorite was probably Midnight Rescue

Omg.... how do people remember these games lmao ^^

 

[The 8-Bit Raider]

Crime Fighter on Dos. You can build up your own gang, extort people for money, break into homes, kidnap children for ransom money....great fun for 12 year old me.

Update: This game is now available for Iphones and android devices!!!

http://www.pssoft.de/english/index.html

 

[Vibranium]

A 2001 game I played in elementary school called Otto Matic, where you play as a robot who fights Brain Aliens. The final boss is a total parody of Mother Brain.

 

[BumRush]

El Fish. You could catch and breed fish and add them to your aquarium. It was my jam for about 5-6 months starting one summer.

 

[Green Mega Man]

Microprose made a pretty sweet tank combat simulator game back in the 90's. You had a crew with skills, ranks, and promotions, and different systems could be damaged/repaired. I loved it.

 

[NOLA_Gaffer]

A 2001 game I played in elementary school called Otto Matic, where you play as a robot who fights Brain Aliens. The final boss is a total parody of Mother Brain.

Pangea Software but out some great software back in the day. Anyone that purchased an iMac in the late 90s and early 2000s is very familiar with their work.

They actually ported a bunch of their stuff to iOS, including Otto Matic.

http://www.pangeasoft.net/iphone/otto/

Speaking of Mac, any mid-90s Mac owner worth their salt remembers Glider.

 

[Vibranium]

Pangea Software but out some great software back in the day. Anyone that purchased an iMac in the late 90s and early 2000s is very familiar with their work.

They actually ported a bunch of their stuff to iOS, including Otto Matic.

http://www.pangeasoft.net/iphone/otto/

Oh man, too bad it's not on Android. I read up on Pangea thanks to this thread, they did have some cool looking stuff.

 

[Nielm]

Orbs of Attrition.

I think it was on a PC Gamer Magazine demo disc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkxNJZLnYSQ

 

[GuyKazama]

I never see Galapagos: Mendel's Escape mentioned by anyone. You indirectly controlled a little AI spider through puzzles.

Also, on Windows, Win Trek was my favorite Star Trek: TNG (unlicensed) game:

It is at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/WinTrek93w_1020

 

[SerratedX]

Troin's Passage got 2 mentions in this thread so far. Another great Sierra game along with Dr. Brain that will forever be burned into my mind along with the "Train of Thought"

 

[Green Mega Man]

Got it free with my first Packer Bell computer.

Most important game in my time as a gamer, as its what introduced me to the concept of games having real stories and good production.

Its sequel, Burred in Time, is even better.

Wow I'm in the same boat. First PC came with this. At first I remember being missed it had no combat, but as soon as you travel to pre-history to the vault I was hooked.

 

[deoee]

I couldn't speak english nor did I ever see the cartoon.

But it was in space, so I loved it.

 

[Labrynian Rebel]

Solar Winds. Could never finish it, but I did set a stapler onto the keyboard to fly in one direction for hours to get to a star system because I couldn't find the hyper drive.

I couldn't speak english nor did I ever see the cartoon.

But it was in space, so I loved it.

This game made me interested in space for the first time as a 1st grader. Good times.

 

[ichtyander]

There's a DOS game called Sound Race I played in the mid 90's, found it in a pack of BASF diskettes. I've never been able to find any info on it, no screenshots, videos or anything, and for a while I thought I might've mixed it up with something else, although my brother and I both remember it, if somewhat vaguely.

It was a platformer, not sure if single screen or scrolling, very simple graphics, looked very much like something made in RSD Game-Maker. I remember the goal was to collect diskettes and CDs I think, there might've been some speakers and music notes in there, lots of colorful and eye-bleeding gradients, and I remember it worked really slow-mo on what might've been a 486 PC.

I posted about this game on the Abandonia and Mobygames forums and on Reddit a while ago and someone from Austria actually contacted me about a year ago, saying they also remember the exact name and some details about the game, so there are now like four people I know that have played this extremely obscure piece of software that nobody seems to know anything about.

I've tracked down pretty much all of the once unknown games I've played in my youth, but finding this one has been an interesting adventure so far, especially the moment when other people contacted me about it.

 

[UberLevi]

 

[Altazor]

Apart from Pickle Wars, gonna add these, too:

Never heard or seen anyone mention this.

I credit this game for teaching me the phrase "the mind is a terrible thing to waste"

I had a demo version of it! So cool, I never got around to play the full game though

I lived for Warlords II. My friend and I would take turns on the same PC, making the other person cover their eyes or leave the room so as not to cheat.

Wow it's playable online now!

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Warlords_II_1993

Never played Warlords 2 but did play the demo version of Warlords III and I quite liked it. It was really fun, and I liked that sort of gritty fantasy artstyle it had.

Solar Wings reminds me, Dare to Dream is another game of the shareware era which doesn't really get a lot of attention for some reason. By Cliffy B!

so good! Only played (again, heh) the first shareware episode when I was a kid, so I grew up not knowing how the story ended... until I decided to watch a complete playthrough a couple of years ago. Good stuff. I think it was CliffyB's first game?

oh man, Castle of the Winds... I played this many times back when I was a little kid, but considering english isn't my first language and I definitely didn't know anything about it back then, it's a miracle I managed to do any kind of stuff there. I think I just looked at the numbers and little icons and tried to extrapolate any kind of information about it, lol.

Also, gonna add this one: I.M. MEEN

Apparently it was some... sort of educational game? To me it was a timewaster, I liked getting lost in those mazes but never could advance much. It was like a kiddie Doom clone or whatever.

 

[blu]

Was Gorillas obscure? It might've come installed on IBMs at some point, not sure.

That came in source code as a sample game in one of the QuickBasic (I think.. or was it TurboBasic) distributions.

 

[Murugo]

Gladiator, a top-down DOS game where you hire an army of fighters to wage battle. Classes of fighters include soldier, barbarian, elf, archer, mage, cleric, thief, druid, orc, skeleton, elemental, slime, fairy, and ghost. You can switch between any of your fighters to control during the battle.

PICKLE WARS.

It was a sort of Prince of Persia clone, I barely remember anything about it except that I kept on playing it despite its shittiness.

Hell, I didn't even remember its name until a couple of years ago.

The music is still etched into my brain. Please get it out.

 

[Aroll]

GNOME. Have yet to find one other person who has even heard of the game.

 

[Cth]

Modem Wars for c64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdGEbveLU1Q

RTS via 300 baud..

Henry's House
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e_P84Sudyc

The Dark Souls of platformers

Echelon
Space Flight combat puzzle explorer sim w/ voice control headset
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9hebX2QXzs&t=6m3s

 

[Altazor]

The music is still etched into my brain. Please get it out.

OH GOD MAKE IT STOP.

I don't understand how I could actually endure that audiovisual assault on the senses when I was a kid.

 

[RunTheBrules]

The Dagger of Amon Ra. Never was able to get into that museum though.

 

[Galactic Barret]

The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain.

Its was such a fun edutainment game that my teachers install it in all the school computers.

 

[Nuclear Pancakes]

Mageslayer comes to mind.

Skunny

I used to also play this isometric adventure game of some kind... you played as an old wizard and it was in some kind of castle with lots of potions and stuff. Anyone remember the name!??

Yep..Played it. I always remembered it as Skuzzy. But there was also a Kart racing game called Skunny Kart...think it came on one of those 1000 Games demo disks. Lots of free/shareware...games like Cyber Dogs, One Must Fall, Bodycount, Doom, Hi_Octane, Magic Carpet. Fun times.

 

[Slick Butter]

This was my favorite game when I was younger, BOOM:

It's a genius combination of Bomberman and DOOM. I remember its music was really cool too. Plus, it had co-op!
Here's a channel with all the music.

 

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Keef the Thief - One of Naughty Dog's early games, before they hit the big time with Crash Bandicoot.

 

[MisterHero]

STAY TOONED

I wish there was a modern remake so I could keep playing and watching the cartoons over and over. Don't change the art, just make it freakin playable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDdR1oHKTkM

 

[SerratedX]

How about the game within Encarta the MS Encyclopedia?

 

[Theobromin]

Sit back, children, gramps is talking about his childhood.

When I was a kid my father decided he needed a computer and bought a Schneider PCW 8512, also known as Joyce. (Those of you living in the UK might know it from its original manufacturer, Amstrad.)

My father wasn't too keen on computer games, so it took me some weeks of begging to be allowed to buy myself a game for this wondrous machine. Off we drove to the nearest city, entered a computer shop and lo and behold, they had not one, but three different games for the Joyce. Two of them were made by Infocom (one even the infamous "The Lurking Horror", if I recall correctly), but since I didn't know any English back then the salesperson recommended a game called "S.A.S. Raid" (and with that name I'm sure every one of you can understand why I can't even google a single image of it ...).

I put 70DM on the counter and took my new possession home, eager to explore the worlds my new treasure would show me. Well ...

... Well. The instructions to the game where in English, so it took me a while until I finally managed to start it. The game greeted me with a horrible stick figure standing in the middle of a map of (I think) 5x5 squares. I could walk left, right, up and down, with no big changes to the map: After every move I still saw the same squares, just sometimes other stick figures appeared.

When the stick figures touched my figure the text "You have been caught" was shown on the monitor.

Again, little me didn't know any English, so I grabbed a dictionary, thumbed through it and translated the sentence word by word.

"You" -- that's me!
"have" -- well, I did or got something, sounds good.
"been" -- boy, this is a tough one! Finally, I found something in the dictionary that looked familiar -- "bee". So -- "been" must be a multiple of that?
I don't know how, but I even managed to get the connection from "caught" to "catch", so ... The game is telling me that I caught some bees? What do I want with them? And what do they have to do with that guy dressed in black on the cover?

But catching something must be good, so naturally I always chased the "bees" when they appeared on the screen. Was a very disappointing game for me, cost me a lot of money and I never came any further than chasing bees ...

Fortunately, I got hold of another game for the computer, a collection even: Classic Collection II, this one. It contained three games: a skiing game, a shmup and a Donkey Kong clone -- I especially loved the last one. Without that collection and Head over Heels my gaming career might have ended right then and there.

 

[retroman]

The first game that came to mind was Mr. Postman for the Atari 2600. This was the art on my cartridge:

Strangely enough, there are quite a few completely different versions of cartridge art for this game:

This is what the game actually looked like:

The story is pretty awesome:

 

[Altazor]

I couldn't speak english nor did I ever see the cartoon.

But it was in space, so I loved it.

OH GOD YES. My parents bought me the LatinAmerican Edition, and I loved it.

Here's the PC Box I remember (though it was, obviously, in spanish)

 

[manzoman96]

Played this all the time.

Also not sure if this was irrelevant since it is a "trail" game but I never saw anyone else have this growing up.

 

[collige]

Worlds of Billy aka Drilling Billy. A pretty cool puzzle/platformer based around digging holes to trap enemies. I've replayed it fairly recently and it holds up quite well. The game is a free download now as well for anyone who wants to check it out (runs in a DOSBox wrapper).

 

[Hedrush]

My enduring gameplay memory is wandering around a big map not knowing what I was doing, and eventually the other wizard showing up and just fucking me over with lightning bolts

You know that's pretty much how I remember it too. It was a strange game, I can remember being heavily addicted to it.

Another game from my childhood that springs to mind and was certainly obscure is Grogs Revenge. You played this unicycling caveman and you had to work your way up to the top of this mountain on your unicycle via a series of caves which held different kinds of trials and trying to avoid captain caveman. It was pretty rubbish.

 

[Theobromin]

That came in source code as a sample game in one of the QuickBasic (I think.. or was it TurboBasic) distributions.

QBasic, came with MS-DOS 5.

 

[Ragnar Blackmane]

Some insane posts in here

and some rc racer

90s had their colors right and sound on point

Oh man, that game was free with an issue of the German Mickey Mouse Magazine around 1999/2000 and pretty much everyone my age (23-25) that I know has played it, knows about it and would like to play it again. Damn shame it's really hard to find anywhere on the web (particularly the enhanced version with more maps), it's like searching for a needle in a haystack. the game was rather amazing though.

Would like to give a shoutout to Aquanox, but I guess that series is slightly too well known, even if sadly rather obscure outside of Europe (and Germany in particular).

Never played Warlords 2 but did play the demo version of Warlords III and I quite liked it. It was really fun, and I liked that sort of gritty fantasy artstyle it had.

Seems like we found out where Creative Assembly got their current set of post-siege occupation options in Total War games from (which even have the same design/layout and the same sort of illustrations for each option, hah).

 

[AHappyPanda]

That came in source code as a sample game in one of the QuickBasic (I think.. or was it TurboBasic) distributions.

QBasic, came with MS-DOS 5.

Gotcha gotcha.

My brother and my cousins and I dumped a lot of time into that stupid game haha

 

[Despera]

i think i played Rodents Revenge

Literally Flashing her tits.

 

[Nick]

Cosmic Osmo! I miss that game so much.

 

[eternalthree]

Fire Fight for PC - 1996. wow,... i'm old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrTz2SpsIXA



o so many frigging hours lost to gaming,.......

 

[Sinatar]

Fire Fight for PC - 1996. wow,... i'm old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrTz2SpsIXA



o so many frigging hours lost to gaming,.......

Oh wow I had completely forgotten about that game, it was really good too.

 

[xDUMPWEEDx]

SU-25 Stormovik. LOVED this game back in the day.

 

[2blackcats]

Realm

 

[F0rneus]

I have very fond memories of Ironblood. Great OST. Dat boss theme