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What's an extremely obscure computer game you played back in the day?

Maybe not Obscure to UK gamers from the 80s, but I doubt many outside these shores ever played it
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Super Ship II

for the Macintosh 68020

2 player versus game. Up to 8 computer opponents. Played so much of this with my brothers.

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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).

really? Do you have an image of that? LOL

I've never played a Total War game, so that's why I'm asking 😅
 
Back in the day I enjoyed WAX WORKS by accolade a lot.

Was that game obscure and rare?? There was no internet back then
 
Alright, I'll take this chance. An educational game. I think I had two with the same characters. You were like furry animals. One of them was set in a castle and you'd go through different doors to do different stuff. I remember a thing with differences between facts and opinions. I think a bridge of custard was involved?

Please help me, this foggy memory torments me so. I must know what game this was!
 
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.

Yeah, that game was very disappointing. Especially because its prequel, BC's Quest For Tires, was one of my first Commodore 64 games and I really enjoyed that one:

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Maybe not Obscure to UK gamers from the 80s, but I doubt many outside these shores ever played it
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Man, that turtle looks almost as hardcore as this guy:

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That's one of my favourite Commodore 64 cover arts :)
 
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.

It's based on the newspaper strip B.C. by Johnny Hart. Why do I know this? Why do I care? Congratulations, you've made me feel so very, very old. ;_;
 
Lmao I just came from reading that. Guess it wasn't obscure at all but fuck me if I've ever met anyone who knew what it was.

I remember it very well, but I never really understood how you played it. I think every time I started it, I made a new character and goofed around until I was finally killed.
When I think about it, I also played Ultima III the same way I would play a GTA game nowadays : killing everyone in the cities and stealing all the chests until the guards would kill my party. Then making another party.

First game that came to mind was Masquerade on Apple II, but it's not really that obscure I guess...
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I don't know how obscure it is, but I used to love playing St Dragon on the Amstrad 6128 (also available on the C64, Amiga etc).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7hDPjU9ras

Great shmup, like a cross between Snake and Gradius. The tail pieces of the ship are impervious and can block bullets, but they also function as a life bar as far as I remember, you lose them when you get hurt. Haven't played it in 20+ years, was great to watch that playthrough.
 
Operation Neptune.

Loved my educational games back then.
Seems no one remembers this one, though.

Oh man I loved this game back in the day! Probably the only educational game I played that I really enjoyed the gameplay of.

For me it would be Gold of the Americas, kind of like a faster playing Sid Meier's Colonization, just nowhere near as popular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvaIqrefIc4

Another one would be Madspace, a Russian? game that my brother got from one of his friends that I've never heard anyone talk about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L6yCQ11d2I
 
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Bölz. Truly a project of the 90's, from the silly premise down to the frankly absurdly catchy soundtrack (I loved the soundtrack as a kid). For the longest time I thought maybe this game was a fever dream or something I made up until some evidence finally surfaced on the Internet that this game actually existed and I'm not crazy.

My brother and I also played a lot of Fire Fight, a game with both Epic Megagames and Electronic Arts logos on the box (back in the day when they were actually called Epic Megagames and Electronic Arts, not Epic and EA! Good times), although the game was made by a Polish company. Another very catchy soundtrack mind you.
 
I played the RPG The Aethra Chronicles - Volume One: Celystra's Bane quite a bit back then. It was a shareware game with 640x480 16 colour graphics, but it was quite complex, at least looking back at it now. It doesn't seem like it ever got a Volume Two.

Going back another ten years or so, I played Parsec and Tombstone City on the TI 99/4A. I actually was able to dig up the machine a few years back and grabbed Parsec off Ebay. It sucked :D
 
Best game ever made that no one knows about, could only drool about it when invited by my bestie who had it on his Amstrad Cpc 64: Glider Rider

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True ancestor to Just Cause too! ;)
 
I absolutely loved the over-optimistically titled Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_Worlds_I:_Future_Magic

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(Not at all Sigourney Weaver and Arnie there...)

An engaging plot, great freeform gameplay, some really fun exploration, and a devious copy protection book. At certain points in the game, instead of displaying dialogue onscreen, a character would say something like "read entry 47", and you'd have to look up the text in a separate book. What was fiendish about this was that it had loads of stuff in there that never actually appeared in game, so if you (ahem) went digging through looking for spoilers you'd get completely the wrong idea about the plot. It was really nicely done!
 
That came in source code as a sample game in one of the QuickBasic (I think.. or was it TurboBasic) distributions.

Holy crap I remember that game, used to play that on the high school computers. You are correct in that it was a game built in QBasic, loved messing around with the parameters to change things in the game.
 
Endless Online
Played that one myself, and I seem to recall killing a lot of golden pigs, can't seem to remember why though... =P

Battle Chess was fantastic. Surprised something like this doesn't exist today.

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I loved that game as a kid, my dad had it on floppy disks and I remember having to refer to the manual for passwords that were required to play whenever you would start it up!


Here's one that I used to get a kick out of, was introduced to it by my grandfather...

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The Ward. A point'n'click adventure I found in a second hand store for 2 bucks. It looked good and was certainly playable, but I don't remember much beyond getting stuck on a puzzle early on in to the game (but that was my ineptitude and not the games fault.)

Some reviews.
 
Questprobe Hulk and Spider-Man. These games were unfair as hell because the commands were terrible. I remember rage quitting when I was like 12. I never did beat either game. I actually downloaded them a couple of years ago but never got to them. Maybe now I will.
 
The Space Bar. A point and click adventure game where you're a detective questioning a bunch of weirdo aliens in a bar.

I never got very far but I had a ton of fun with it.

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Oh man, I would of had a ton of fun with this back in the day. Never heard of it before today.
 
We used to play an add game where you raced other people in different malls and pick up the right items and get to the cashier as fast as possible. The game wasn't good but it was fun since you could leave your shopping cart behind and do trickshots with the items you got.

Mall maniacs
 
Honestly speaking, to pretty much anyone from outside of the UK or Europe, 99% of my ZX Spectrum collection would be classed as being obscure.
 
Honestly speaking, to pretty much anyone from outside of the UK or Europe, 99% of my ZX Spectrum collection would be classed as being obscure.

Yep :), but not so obscure in the UK. Skool Daze and Samantha Fox Strip Poker are two of my most memorable from the Spectrum which may be pretty obscure to US people. They were pretty big in the UK though.

Well, I'll go with my first system, which will be pretty obscure to most here; the Acorn Electron, which was basically a cut price BBC computer. For those who have never heard of Acorn, they evolved into ARM (Acorn RISC Machines), who basically power the vast majority of devices today.

The game that I got with that ... Boxer, which I used to play on a black and white TV, it looks quite a bit different in colour!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqse-xfVv70
 
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overkill. pretty fun shooter dealy.

edit: I have no idea if this is obscure at all, i just remember playing it when i was little and ive never heard of anyone else knowing what it is
 
I remember playing a text based, daily limited turns, Robin Hood themed game on a BBS back in the day. It was fun because it was multiplayer and such where you could challenge other players to duels.
 
Outside of Leisure Suit Larry (which we obviously shouldn't have played as children), the game ROTOX was a game my brother and I played.
I can honestly say neither of us remembered asking for the game as we weren't really even allowed to use my mothers SUPER FAST 286 (with Turbo button!) and yet somehow... this terrible game was in our home.

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overkill. pretty fun shooter dealy.

edit: I have no idea if this is obscure at all, i just remember playing it when i was little and ive never heard of anyone else knowing what it is

Well, I've never heard of it, but I wouldn't take the OP's definition of obscure too literally. Any game with only two screenshots on the internet is likely to be a highly sought after undumped extreme rarity! From the screenshot it looks similar to Xenon 2.
 
Dark Earth.

I'm not sure how obscure this was...but it was almost 20 years ago.
I really don't remember anything about the game, apart from the fact that I loved it, even if I don't know if I ever finished it!

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Well, I've never heard of it, but I wouldn't take the OP's definition of obscure too literally. Any game with only two screenshots on the internet is likely to be a highly sought after undumped extreme rarity! From the screenshot it looks similar to Xenon.

aha true. it's on the DOS games archive as freeware! i just tried it out with dosbox. it's infinitely harder than i remember. good lord.
 
I'm trying to remember the name of this game - it was played in a web browser in the late 90s, early 2000s. It was sort of a board game, viewed I think from an isometric perspective? And you could place like, monsters and buildings(?) on the board and you played against another player online? This all sounds very vague but this was a long time ago for me, I don't remember the name, and I haven't heard anyone talk about it in like fifteen years.

Does anyone have a clue what I'm talking about?
 
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