games

Emily is Away

I’m incredibly lonely

God damn Sacrifice, it was an RTS-esque third-person wizard game from 2000 or so. I remember the story and voice acting being quite good, and everything in that game being extremely weird looking. You could pick your god (thunder, fire, stone, life, and death IIRC) and they all had different spells and minions. You needed souls to summon minions, and you could get more souls by battling the other wizards' minions and stealing their souls, by having some strange dudes with giant syringes take the souls and perform a ritual at one of your altars. The highest level spells were fucking awesome too, if you played as a fire wizard you could summon a giant god damn volcano on the battlefield. The goal was to sacrifice one of your minions at an enemy wizards main altar, and banish them from the realm (i.e. eliminate them from the game).

And holy fuck I've also just been informed that this game is available on Steam, brb

This one videogame I made as a hobby project. It sorta ties to my real identity, so I can't exactly name it.

Pulseman

Metal Warriors is a fantastic SNES mecha side scroller where you pilot various types of mechs which you get hop in and out of (some parts of levels can only be accessed with your little jetpack guy) and it has split screen multiplayer pvp which I used to play on an emulator over an ip connection with my friend on dial up like 20+ years ago.

Oh! I forgot my other one. Threads of Fate for the PS1! Very fun little Action RPG by Square. Didn't make much of a splash. God I miss when big companies made small games like that :(

Egypt: Old Kingdom

ancient egypt simulator. 4x strategy game where you start as a couple guys on the banks of the nile river and soon create the Egyptian Old Kingdom and all of the various monument that came with it, featuring some very in depth history lessons on the side

Blackwake. Super fun and unique team gameplay if you're lucky enough to join a server that isnt overrun with toxic gamers. or if you're lucky enough to play at all, since the game has been abandoned for a few years now and it's pretty much dead in terms of playercount. In my opinion though, it could've grown to become a truly incredible and timeless game if it weren't abandoned by the developer and left proprietary in an unfinished state so fans can't pick up development.

Bombe is a game where instead of playing Minesweeper you program a Minesweeper-solving AI.

Space Trains is a nice puzzle/strategy thing about trains in space (probably costs more than it should though).

Bumbler Bee-luxe is a fantastic arcade style action game, but it was for Mac OS 8 and the emulators for that suck to set up.

Armed and Dangerous

Mine is a point and click adventure called Yesterday on Steam.

Here I'll just screenshot my Steam review

Clash: Artifacts of Chaos

It's made by Ace Team, the Chilean studio that made Zeno Clash (this one is technically a sequel to those games) and some other games like Rock of Ages. Like their other games the gameplay starts out a little jank but if you can get past that it's got really cool presentation with a very unique style. Also has a short but sweet story with some cleverer themes than you'd expect and I really enjoyed the soundtrack.

TL;DR It's lower budget God of War from Chile and it rocks

There's absolutely no way anyone except me has played Gearheads, but it was pretty fun. These days, if something like this was made by one person on Steam, it'd probably be much more successful. As a retail release in 1996, on the shelves next to Quake and Mechwarrior 2? lol, nope.

SuperKarts was also fun (you know it's obscure nowadays when you have to specify ”superkarts game”, otherwise you just get videos of real karts), and there was a real dearth of arcade-style racers at the time on PC. IIRC this used the Wolfenstein 3D engine.

I can only think of games only I remember. The Last Eden. ZZT. Stormworks. These are all the same

I invented a sort of solitaire that I play with the Cardcaptor Sakura clow cards where I have 4 columns and one must place and migrate cards that share 2 or more letters in their name. The goal is to deal out the columns with 0 (free space), 1, 2, then 3 cards, top are face up, and the rest gets (around 10 cards) placed in a pile and revealed one-by-one until all the cards are placed on the columns or else it's a lose state. The deck consists of 50-something cards cards (minus the "jump" card which no other card shares 2 letters with) and is divided into 4 piles of 15-6 (i forget) for each round of this (prior to dealing). You win the game if you win 3 rounds out of 4.

I call it Clowitaire.

Original War (it's on Gog and Steam btw)

It's an RTS that had a pleasant spin on the genre. Your dudes and dudettes are all people with their own voices, characters and skillpoints (in theory, if you get a lot of them they kinda become samey but anyway). You have three character classes; soldiers who shoot shit, engineers who build shit and scientists who science shit and turn neanderthals into pack animals by taming them, they also heal people. You can freely send a soldier into the science lab, but their skills in science are probably so low that they wont help at all.

The "hook" of the game is that you only so many troops, you cant train them from a barracks, and you also have limited supplies which pop out every once in a while somewhere into the hostile wilderness. So every times you hear the noise of a supply drop, you have to scramble some dudes to go check it out, and because soldiers cant carry the boxes you need to have engineers there with em. You COULD send the engineers (or neanderthals) to fetch those alone, but if there's a saber-toothed tiger or an enemy soldier they're absolutely fucked.

You can have tanks and vehicles, but gas is also a limited resource that pops up every once in a while. That's why we have solar baby! The feeling of putting your heavy tank outfitted with solar panels into combat only for it to run out of power and everyone in the group is fucking erased sure is something. Nothing dies instantly though, everyone is injured first and lose consciousness, you have a few minutes to heal them to rescue them. All of the vehicles also break down just before exploding and you can send your engineers to repair them.

The story is pretty interesting too, the premise is that you're playing as an amerikkkan soldier being sent back in time because the soviet union invented time travel, but the only resource capable of powering them is all in Siberia. So the United Snakes sends your platoon over to mine the "Siberite" and take it over to Alaska. The time machine isnt very precise though, so that's why your dudes and dudettes and supplies just appear out of thin air randomly. Now the funny thing is that when you get to the past it's filled with soviet troops, who are there to mine the "Alaskite" and bring it over to Siberia.

There's some decent characters and the amerikkkan campaign atleast has three endings depending on your choices. The soviets are portrayed in a sussy light though, so proceed with caution.

I played a demo of this game back in 2003 maybe and found it later in a bargain bin. I never see anyone talking about it, so I must assume that I'm the only one to have played it.

Definitely i'm not the only one who played them, but few niche ones from the top of my head:

• Yao Guai Hunter - Chinese version of Slay the Spire in supernatural Wuxia climates, imo better than StS.
• Omensight - It's unusual for me to recomment action game, but this one is exceptional
• Shortest Trip to Earth - like FTL but better in all aspects
• Tale of Immortal - a full fledged Chinese xianxia webnovel experience. No shitting, if you ever read one of them and got the itch it's were you go to scratch it.

cosmic jam

but thats because its a game I'm making and its not done

Soul sacrifice delta, underloved game on an underloved console but I dumped stupid hours into it.

And my favourite is and always will be two worlds 1 and 2. I will die on this hill that they are good games.

Hammer & Sickle, a rather interesting Russian turn-based squad tactics game. It's sort of a sequel to Silent Storm, and that one seems to be decently well-known, at least among fans of the genre, but H&S is a lot more obscure.

There's some caveats, namely that the difficulty can get kind of bullshit at times, and the quest design is pretty harsh (with a lot of missions having hidden time limits), but it gets a lot of bonus points in my book for having you play as a communist agent fighting a neo-fascist conspiracy in West Germany, and actually bringing up stuff like Western countries recruiting Nazis for their intelligence services. And the gameplay's still pretty solid even with the difficulty balancing issues, although the good parts are mostly inherited from Silent Storm.

I also find it really interesting from a game-design perspective, in that it's a relatively short game (by the standards of the genre at least, it's still a lot more than, say, a CoD campaign, especially if you spend a bunch of time running around with no idea what you're supposed to do) but with a ton of reactivity and alternative paths. Yes, there's hidden failure conditions all over the place, but the game doesn't actually just end - each one of those is its whole alternate plot branch.

LUNACID: its a dungeon crawler in the vein pf old fromsoft games like kingsfield and shadow tower. It is such a vibe. The soundtrack is amazing, and there are tonnes of areas to explore. Cool npcs, and super relaxing hub area. There is so much to find and see. Also the creator is an enby so thats cool too.

NORTHERN JOURNEY: fps adventure game using medieval weapons where you go on a northern journey to find a maguffin for a mysterious flute player. You go across beautiful (Norway inspired) landscapes while having to fight off massive bugs, spiders, witches, trolls, snakes, and other such beasts. Very beautiful but tense game.

I'm going to say Space Beast Terror Fright. I really enjoyed it, it is basically a kind of Space Hulk type game - dark and spooky spaceship filled with unknown horrors you have to fight through and survive with friends. Actively developed too.

Chroma squad, if you like fire emblem type gameplay this is an hidden gem with geniunely funny dialogue (may be dated since i played it like 6 years ago) and beautiful pixel art.

Its not as obscure as other recommendations but i feel like it didnt get the praise it deserved.

Rosewater. it's still not out but I've played the demo and it's alright. it's an point and click adventure game which is the sequel to their previous p&c, lamplight city (which was also good in my opinion).

other than that most forgotten games I've played were a while ago, i can't remember them.

Offspring Fling is a cute little puzzle platformer where you try to clear each level as fast as possible. The mechanics go a little bit deeper than it appears at first.

Probably the obscure shareware games I used to play in the early 2000s. Can't even remember the names of any of them or any details, but I remember they were all from one website and they had a kind of 16-bit aesthetic.

Along those lines, when game demos were more common I used to just go to the Infogrames website and play all the demos I could get my hands on. I distinctly remember playing this Max Steel game that does not seem to exist, since the only game I can find of that era never came out on PC and had totally different gameplay. The one I remember had at least sections of the game with top-down driving your knockoff Batmobile around and taking bad guys. I really only have two explanations:

• There really was a Max Steel PC game, but it got canceled (seems unlikely)
• The reason I've been so sure it's a Max Steel game is that I remember the splash screen at the end of the demo had Max Steel in it. However, it's possible that was just a cross-promotion and the demo itself was for a totally different Mattel property (or perhaps not even Mattel at all).

Honestly, I should just go through that list on Infogrames because I'm almost certain it'll be on there. And if anyone can think of a game that fits description in the timeframe of around 1999-2002, definitely let me know!