It could even be a youtube video or movie that you don’t think anyone reading this has heard of besides you.
The Illusion of Gaia for SNES. I don’t know anyone who has heard of it.
I still have the T-shirt that came with the box set!
It was a weird game, honestly.
I think the other two games in that series (Terranigma) didn’t get official English versions, but there are fanslations if you want to play them.
I don’t believe I played it, but I remember that box art. They probably had it on the shelves of my local blockbuster video. I think it might have also been a cover feature in Nintendo power.
That’s how I played originally was renting it. The box art was awesome.
Yep, know about it. But I was more of a ‘Secret of Mana’ and ‘Secret of Evermore’ person myself.
My mind went straight to the SNES too, but with Chaos Seed, the feng shui dungeon building oddity. I have a feeling people might be familiar with SNESdrunk around here, though.
I replay that game every couple of years, one of my all time favorites. My brother still had the cartridge.
Now I’m gonna need to play when I get back home, thanks stranger!
Rented Illusion of Gaia so many times!
My favorite video game as a kid was called Red Storm Rising, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, and played on a Commodore 64. It put you in command of a submarine facing off against the Soviet navy. Graphics were very basic, but it had a very intelligent engine that lead to needing to use real strategy to win.
Almost no one else has ever heard of it.
Almost no one else has ever heard of it.
I dare you to go to NoncredibleDefense and repeat that
Eh, they talk about the book. The video game is far more obscure.
You should take a look at the game Cold Waters, if you haven’t already.
I’ve never seen a video on this, but surely someone else has heard of it.
Back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, I got a CD in a cereal box with a PC game on it. the game was I think some kind of gamified flight sim, and the interesting part is that there was a decal of a plane on top of the CD surface. On the other side of the CD, there was another game (maybe a racing game?) And it had a corresponding decal, so the CD had decals on both sides and could be inserted both ways in your player to play each game. I’ve never seen that anywhere else (2 -sided CD or CD readable surface with decals) and I remember the game actually being somewhat fun, but promotional games of the era are very often lost media.
I did a little digging and found that Nestle added CDs to their cereals! There were quite a few different titles with different labels. Maybe these links well help you find your games?
There’s a bunch more content here:
It was this one https://archive.org/details/nestle_game
But in french instead of Portuguese. Thanks for the throwback!
The original Death Race 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine. It may have had a small comeback when the Death Race remake came out but this isn’t the kind of movie you’d see randomly on tv.
I edited the nudity out of that so we could screen it at work. There’s a LOT of titties in that movie.
Fun story, my dad met a guy who talked about a movie he had seen once, where racers ran over people to score points, my dad thought this guy was taking the piss and never considered the movie might be real. Until one day he was watching TV randomly and stumbled on the movie. But as people from the era of cable TV might remember, it was hard to know the name of the movie you just caught midway through, unless the channel showed the name of the movie you were out of luck, so I grew up knowing that this movie existed, but never knew the name. When the remake came out the plot seemed familiar enough for me that I immediately went to check what it was based on and finally put the final nail in the coffin of a long family mistery.
My parents love this movie, I saw it many times growing up. Every time they drive past someone in a wheelchair that movie gets mentioned.
Yes! This is a movie my parents let me watch when I was like ten or eleven and it definitely stuck with me.
“What’s that?” “A hand grenade” best pun in cinematic history, un-toppable. I’m a huge Death Race fan, and CarWars, and the Twisted Metal game. Gun cars are just cool
Just saw the trailer. I thought 2000 was the year it came out but it came out in 1975.
There was a local band where I am 20+ years ago called Naucet. With songs such as “This is Not a Convenient Time to be Stabbed”. I have absolutely no idea what happened to the band, where they went, what they did. I can find no reference to them anywhere online whatsoever. I have a musician friend who was friends with them(maybe just one of them, I forget at this point) and has copies of their music on an old hard drive somewhere in a closet. Been a number of years since I’ve seen/heard from said friend, so I can only assume whether or not he still has that old hard drive. If he does, then for all I know, that might be the only place in existence that you can find that music.
I love stuff like that. I’ve got demo tapes and 7" records from local punk bands from the 90s. Some were kids from my school or kids I used to skateboard with.
A lot of it is just rubbish, but it means something to me. I’ll put a few songs on every couple of years, laugh at the hand-drawn artwork, reminisce, and sing along.
Pretty sure there’s very few, if any, other copies of some of that stuff around anymore.
Alright let’s go, I love niche things:
Movies:
- Bubba Ho-Tep
- Joe’s Apartment
- Six String Samurai
- Krull
- The Greasy Strangler
- A Boy and His Dog
- Fido
- Within the Woods
- Undead or Alive
- Cemetery Man
Tabletop:
- Car Wars (maybe, depends on crowd)
- The worlds worst diagram of ship controls included as an insert in a Paranoia box
- All Flesh Must be Eaten
- Fairy Meat
- Cult of Ecstacy (for Mage the Ascension)
- Did you know that according to Dragon Magazine players can participate in orgying for a number of days equal to their con SCORE?
- Castles and Crusades
- Tunnels and Trolls
- Remember Car Wars? They did a crossover with GURPS, called GURPS Autoduel, and it is amazing.
- HOL (Human Occupied Landfill)
- The second publication of the HOL supplement, Buttey Wholesomeness, where the cover is printed BUTTery HOLsomeness. That one was just a pita to find I started wondering if it was just a PDF concept cover. Only took me like 8 years to find a physical copy.
- Mars Attacks board game
Games:
- Sim Tower
- Redneck Rampage
- The Diablo 1 expansion, Hellfire, that Blizzard said not to make but a division of Sierra of all companies yolod it into existence anyway.
- The Neverhood
- Toy Story for Gameboy
- Battlezone, back in the day when you were fighting green triangles
- Descent
- I wasn’t going to at first but I want to throw in some of my favorite Magic the Gathering cards: Nature’s Wrath (haha, holy shit mono green, go home you’re drunk), the art of the Pride secret vault thing for Bearscape, the art for Spy Network looks like Friend Computer from Paranoia, Kudzu, Stunted Growth
My music taste is so underground you guys I’m very cool like that. There’s a surprising number of trans folk punk musicians from the Pacific Northwest. I’m getting sleepy but if anyone wants me to bombard them with folk punk artists (trans or otherwise) lmk I’ll totally hook you up
Car Wars! Man that one could certainly test one’s patience! Not as exciting as the picture on the box. 3-4 hours of dice rolls to negotiate a u-turn…
I’ve been collecting rulebooks for that game for the last ten or so years. Maybe my favorite tabletop. It flows pretty smoothly if everyone is familiar with the rules but for sure even if you’ve been playing it for a decade you’ll always hit something that’s like “I have no clue how to resolve this”. And the learning cliff is for real so actually getting people interested in it enough to become that familiar with the rules is as hard as the game lol
I used to love the lore of Steve Jackson Games a lot more than the actual games for this very reason.
It’s like trying to code a driving/racing simulator while playing it in real time. On paper…
I don’t need a bombardment but I’ll certainly take a top 5 folk punk bands! (Trans or otherwise).
Folk punk in the PNW where at least someone in the band is trans: Pigeon Pit, Left at London, Sister Wife Sex Strike, and Porch Cat. I know I’m missing some, maybe Kimya Dawson counts (non binary, lives in PNW, but from New York and Moldy Peaches was a New York band).
If I’m just going to do top 5 folk punk in general though, hard to pick and it changes often but let’s go with: Apes of the State, Days n Daze, She/Her/Hers, Jeffrey Lewis, and Pigeon Pit (I fucking love Pigeon Pit okay)
Awesome! I’ll let you know what I think of Pigeon Pit for hors d’oeuvres and go from there 🔥
Get the chance to check them out yet?
I know now why you love Pigeon Pit, okay! They’re great.
I forgot about Redneck Rampage. For some reason I associate the feeling of that with Blood, and it looks like they’re both from 1997. I’ll have to go fire it up and see if there are any similarities
Same engine (Build)
There’s a new Decent game, fun times
Whaaaat? I need it in my life
Fido the zombie movie?
Make sure you get me a head coffin.
Bubba Ho-Tep is an awesome little Bruce Campbell movie if people are looking for something to watch. I remember Fido was pretty big among B Grade / Comedy horror fans about 10-15 years ago.
Sim Tower was really fun growing up. I was expecting that when came out fallout shelter and was mad and disappointed. I feel like most people have seen screenshots or characters from The Neverhood but probably couldn’t name what it was from. I never played it but remembered it growing up and only found the name out a year ago.
I wouldn’t say Joe’s Apartment is niche.
It’s just not good and easily forgotten.
Joe’s Apartment
being niche makes me feel old…
I’ll occasionally catch myself singing "welcome to Joe’s toilet, plop plop plop, ahh ahh ahhh…"😂
looks like the full movie is on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Z7fSRrn2QI tried not to add too many things that are just old but previously super popular, instead of niche. Time really does add obscurity though
Tbf me and an old bf of mine would watch it a lot, but I don’t know that I would call it “popular” among anyone else, so it probably does qualify… 😂
I’ve seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob’s Ladder. That was a night well spent.
Out of the games, I’ve played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried – never really made much sense out of that one though.
I don’t know if it’s that obscure… but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games – do you remember the song with the lyrics “I’m just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life”?
That’s amazing nobody’s ever seen those movies! And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map. Fun game. I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.
Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)
I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself – I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn’t understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it’s clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates… (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)
I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
I hadn’t played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn’t great when you asked this question – but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such – and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It’s got orange and white stripes. It’s scratched up a little bit, but it’s still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to “improve performance”… lol)
The game opens with a short animated splash screen – a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game’s logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off – somewhat confusingly; it wasn’t immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn’t find it very helpful.
The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don’t really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it’s not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.
There’s an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.
The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don’t know well enough to name – but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going “AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!” over and over.)
I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) – and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it’s also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a “boing-a-boing-oing-oing” failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.
The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there – or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can “build” a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn’t seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).
Unfortunately I don’t have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:
By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.
which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I’m running it on has a 3.7GHz processor – obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance – but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p
Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print – although I haven’t tried it.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when I got to stay home from school, I remember that around 11am the local PBS channel would air short videos from regional public service stations around the country, or low-budget cartoon shorts with an experimental vibe to them, who knows where they were made or by whom.
One example was of a short fella who sang the same “Ey yey-yey-yey” refrain over and over again, those around him got increasingly annoyed but he wouldn’t stop. At the end, a mob slowly converges around the character, encircling him… and he just keeps on cluelessly singing the “Ey yey-yey-yey” refrain.
The mob covers the guy, there’s a quick collective roar, then it recedes to show a tombstone. The last shot is of the “Ey yey-yey-yey” echoing as we see the image of the grave, frozen on the screen.Another one, which I vaguely remember was filmed by a North Carolina public television station, a live action short of a kid that gets bullied at school, at the end the bully or bullies have some sort of accident in the woods, the kid is witness to this, and the shot freezes on the kid looking straight at the camera, with a voiceover along the lines of “What would YOU do in this situation?”… and it ends, right there, not with a resolution but with a cliffhanger and a moral question.
EDIT: grammar for clarity
25+ years ago there was a release on some Warez sites called “beer police”.
From what I remember, It was a game set in some future sci-fi world with flying cars with a 5th element vibe.
Only ever saw it for a few hours at a mates house, so my memory is sketchy, but I’ve never found any other mention of it.
There was a curious video game I played for a week straight in the early 90’s before my copy got stolen at a party.
It was called Scrongjhul and featured a fish with legs who had extra big knees with spikes. It was sort of a platform game but then part mystery story and part choose-your-own-adventure.
I think you had to get to the top of a mountain for something special. If you did it enough times and collected codes the game would generate then you could send off for some special prize.
Moraff’s Escapade for early Windows, or more specifically, the glitch levels in it.
If you spam the “next level” cheat button (which if I remember correctly is F8) enough times you’ll go past the levels that were intentionally designed and start exploring the game’s RAM.
Interesting!! I’ll have to check that one out. I was a big fan of Moraff’s World and i played a lot of Steve Moraff’s other shareware games back in the day. Never heard of that one though!
I’d never met anyone but my mom who’d played Solomon’s Key prior to Nintendo straight up adding it to the NSO.
The other game I never hear about was the ID4: Independence Day floppies that came in cereal boxes or something. Don’t really remember the games that well but I do remember trying to collect them all.
Also, I once basically got gaslighted into thinking that Falling Down was just a fever dream of mine until one day I’d heard the name in a Tech N9ne song and it all clicked again.
I have never met anybody else who played the Wall-E game for Wii.
The movie Tampopo, about ramen. Great film.
I love this movie
The restaurant in London wagamama was inspired by this movie and I used to work their when living in London in the late 90s
That sounds like it would be a great experience.
I think everyone should at least watch that scene where the guy first shows you how to eat ramen. First you touch everything, just so…
I am looking for a sci-fi story that I read in the 80’s. It was a story about the future and I am sorry but the only vivid detail I remember was that parents had actually gone to a store to purchase a gift (a bicycle I believe), and the person at the store thought it was strange to have people actually come to the store, but let them in to shop.
there is this film from the late 80s called miracle mile about a guy who answers an incoming call at a payphone outside a diner in los angeles, and its a panicked military officer who dialed the wrong phone number who says he just launched americas nukes and that a nuclear retaliation will hit american soil in about an hour. a lot of the film is spent without being fully convinced of the authenticity of the phone call and the film has a slightly dreamlike pacing which makes it feel pretty tense, and theres a scene that stuck with me where the main character has a nosebleed in the diner after the phone call. i feel like even as far as cult films go this one is a little under the radar and, even though its not a life altering film, probably deserves a little more credit than it gets.
came here for something like this.
can say the same about “Six String Samurai”, watch without reading anything
