Ask Lemmy

I got this. Someone, please prove me wrong. I'll PayPal you $82.76 if you find this.

There's a cartoon from the 80s (could be late 70snor early 90s) called Howard The Duck.

You'll never find it, because of the wildly popular movie bearing the same name.

The "Howard the duck" I'm referring to was a cartoon movie that was about a Mallard duck who got separated from his flock while they were migrating south for the winter.

Howard finds himself in NYC for the winter, where he spends time with rats and frogs. They show him around NYC via the sewers.

There's a scene where they're beneath the world trade center and Howard and the frog marvel at is enormity. Then, the frog reminds Howard that "Nothing lasts forever; especially in New York." (This is an exact quote, sparing punctuation.)

The VHS I had ended with a music video by some band with the word "dogs" (junk yard dogs? Something like that) in their band name. The music video was trippy AF. There was barking in the song. The visuals were mostly patterns of colorful circles.

Like, this sounds like a fever dream, but if you've seen it and can locate it, it will make sense. I swear.

My memory is shit but I'd describe the art style as watercolor. Animated watercolor. Fro the 80s. So, yeah. Sorry.

Fuck it. $20.

Fuckit 2: 4 payments of $20.69

The Farmers Daughter. It was a text-based video game for the C=64 similar to Zork.

The premise was that you are a traveling lightening salesman whose car breaks down. You stop at a farmhouse to use their phone, and the beautiful daughter answers the door.

Your mission is to try to bang her. If the farmer catches you, he shoots you with his shotgun. If her brothers catch you, they'll analy rape you to death. You need condoms but they are stuck to the shelf.

The Illusion of Gaia for SNES. I don't know anyone who has heard of it.

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.

Mad Dog McCree. A literal "video" game. Live action first person pointy shooty thing.

Ok I'm back with another but I have the answer to this one.

I sent $20 inside a greeting card to Amon Amarth back in like 2000 or so. I'm a melodic death metal nerd and Gothenburg really set the tone. anywho, I'd heard their drummer had a side project, called "Curriculum Mortis"

I got a burned CD from the band. Unmarked. I uploaded it to soulseek. The iPod it was on eventually died.

I went a solid decade with only memories of this band.

I recent found someone uploaded the whole demo to YouTube. Of you enjoy melodic death metal, especially older, grittier less.refined, and also know Amon Amarth, just know, you know something very few know about: https://youtu.be/H1JWaADbcsA

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.

In 1990, a series of CGI animation collections began release on VHS tape. The Mind's Eye was the first experience many people (myself included) had with pure computer animation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%27s_Eye_(film_series)

The best known segment from the first tape is Stanley & Stella in Breaking the Ice, which was first released in 1987. You can just watch it online now of course!

https://youtu.be/3bTqWsVqyzE?si=28YJchoAQSqfZY0P

The animation style reminds me a lot of Reboot, a childhood favorite. It still amazes me how interesting this style is even today, really shows how much more artistry and vision matter than technology. I believe this is also the first public demonstration of a flocking algorithm.

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.

Several years back I watched a Japanese film called Fish Story. It's a pretty weird movie, and the first time I watched it, I hated it, and almost turned it off. It was just kind of boring, and it was really confusing because it kept jumping between different stories, and it was not in chronological order. Then, right at the very end, a short segment tied everything together so incredibly. It blew my mind and I immediately wanted to watch the movie again. I have never experienced anything like that before or since. I don't know anyone else who's ever heard of this movie.

Anna and the appolypse, it's a fantastic zombie musical with insanely good songs. I have never met anyone in the real world or online who have heard of it (except a few who I forced to watch with me).

GTA IV Pakistan edition

Basically, just a GTA4 pirate rip and modded and sold on actual disks.

There are several, and they are hard to find online because any uploads of it probably don't exist anywhere anymore, and were already rare due to aforementioned disks.

Some of them are so regional and probably made by one person, the only way to find one is to get a computer HDD with it installed.

It was a game for PC around the year 2000, I don't even know the name of it. I've been searching for it for years. It's a point and click adventure game.

The premise is your spaceship breaks down on an alien planet. If you try to repair the ship immediately a giant alien spider will come and kill you.

After searching for a while you end up making friends with one of the aliens and sneak around one of the villages looking for parts.

I never made it past that point.

I highly doubt anyone will know what this is, I've tried multiple times on that reddit sub for games people can't remember.

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.

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.

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.

Strings (2004) movie. It's a trope-ish fantasy movie, but all of the characters are marionettes. The strings go up to the heavens and are taken into consideration with things like architecture having no roofs, and gates are arches that rise up out of the ground to prevent travel beneath them. Someone gets injured by the string on their arm getting cut, and their arm flops around lifelessly afterwards.

I have never met anybody else who played the Wall-E game for Wii.

The Belgian 80's metal band Ostrogoth.

Their website doesn't exist anymore and the only band-run social media page is on Facebook.

If you're a fan of retro heavy metal, give them a listen! They still tour, though you won't be finding much about it online.

Nerve Damage, a game that was I think made on a random gamejam, and the whole premise is to make a game that's actively trying to be as uncomfortable as possible to play, while also getting you into the flow and actually makes you enjoy it.

Unfortunately, I didn't find how to play it, and it didn't release as far as I know. I've heard about it on some kind of GDC presentation about Innovative/Obscure game design.

While that actually means that someone has indeed heard of, I've never met anyone else who got to play it. Or heard about it.

Hand of Manos. Most likely thee worst movie ever made. I found it for a screen writing class. The assignment was watch a bad movie then present it to the class. Easiest A+ of my fucking life.

Another weird one is, there used to be a sex Tetris type game for Windows 98 or earlier. Little naked people would drop down and when you got a full line they would jump off the screen. I don't know how that got on the family PC, but it was on it. I played it. So there's that.

Decades ago, my dad bought a PC that came with a free CD for a game called Retribution. The box art looked unlike anything I'd ever seen before (basically 3D graphics at a time when the Mega Drive reigned supreme). Sadly, the disc didn't work, but I've tried to get my hands on a copy, to no avail.

Looking at the graphics now, they weren't even that good...but for the mid-nineties for a small child, absolutely amazing.

My girlfriend in high school introduced me to Fishing with John and it's comedy gold. Way before Tim and Eric and all the other absurdist comedy shows. I highly recommend it!

Starsiege. No, not tribes. Starsiege, third game in the earthsiege series. Tribes was actually a spin off in the same universe that got much more popular (with good reason, tribes was awesome).

Starsiege was a pc game that came in a bigass box, complete with multiple books filled with lore from the game's universe. It wasn't as well received as mech warrior (another mech sim), so it didn't have a big community. But those of us that played it loved it to death. I think you can still get the game running if you don't mind fucking with a bunch of sketchy third party patches.

The movie Tampopo, about ramen. Great film.

All from the early 90's...

Life and Death II: The Brain - An old DOS medical game

Deadlock: Planetary Conquest- a competitive SimCity-like game

The Dagger of Amon Ra - A point and click mystery adventure game

Edit: added subtitle to Deadlock and video links

These religious NES games. The one I remember was called Exodus. It was basically a ripoff of an existing game, but Moses themed.

I saw Repo! The Genetic Opera when it came out in 2008. It's an opera, very little dialouge, if any, I haven't watched it in a while. Paris Hilton has a main role.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/14353-repo-the-genetic-opera

The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One - A D&D podcast. It's cast should be pretty familiar if you're into other D&D podcasts - Brennan Lee Mulligan is the DM, Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii and Lou Wilson are players - but it doesn't seem to have many listeners.

It strikes a nice balance between scripted narrative performances and actual play. It's edited and scored with a light touch that stops it dragging like the raw sessions of something like Critical Role, but preserving the authentic character breaking reactions as the dice takes it somewhere interesting. The players don't seem to be in on a "script", anymore so than the normal sort of out of session discussions you might have in a narrative heavy game at home, but the DM does a very good job of keeping it focused. It's also thankfully not another billion player table, three is much more comfortable.

The vibe is excellent. From cozy slices of life to drama that plays on your heartstrings as three childhood friends reconnect and go on an adventure. Its trailer conveys the tone pretty well honestly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9et3Othu4

On the Internet, everything is fundamentally both obscure yet ubiquitous, or so it seems. But in real life, there are at least 2 things that seem to be obscure to the point that people don't believe me when I mention it:

1. A Super Nintendo game released in the US as Super Ninja Boy. It was a follow-up to (or maybe remake of) Little Ninja Brothers on the NES. I've even been told that I was confused and that I'm probably thinking of Legend of the Mystical Ninja.

2. On the original Playstation, there used to be a series of demo discs that would have "hidden" features on them if you pressed the right button(s). One of those demo discs had the entire music video for Usher's song "Pony" and other than randos on the internet and my friends/family who saw it with me, I've never met anybody that remembers it. If anybody here does remember that demo disc, I think there was another hidden music video on there, I vaguely remember a band, with various shots of the drummer wearing black athletic-type shorts with a white band around the leg but beyond that I really do not recall.

I don't think it's totally forgotten, but an old nes game no one talks about called Bump n jump. You play a buggy in a top down style racer; think spy hunter. You're meant to race to the end of levels, crashing into (or avoiding) other vehicles for points. You can jump over bridges and gaps as well, and each level ends with a huge leap of faith ocean jump.

I feel like it was largely forgotten in gaming history, but I loved it when I was a child I put many hours into it.

Oh man, every time someone asks a question along these lines I always think of the movie Hank and Mike. I found it in a discount bin at a grocery store probably a decade ago so I took a little time to actually look into it more this time. I knew it was Canadian and unlikely a big hit, but apparently it was just so poorly received. It made less than $17,000 of the $2M it cost, and it's real tough to find anyone even reviewing it. I even struggled to find the music from it. (The one song is badass). And it's got a couple B-tier actors that I remember doing a great job, and I think Joe Mantegna really went for it in his role as the god Pan. Chris Klein kills it in this song.

The crude humor kinda puts people off I think but the satirical aspects cut a little deeper than the movie needed to. And probably when I discovered it I was depressed and had a drinking problem and the overall mood of it really felt at home to me at the time so I was able to just live in those aspects of the film and really absorb the more subtle message. It's definitely absurd in many points but there's a lot of heart in it.

I recorded a film off the tv channel Sy-Fy a few years backcalled AfterDeath (not the 2023 film that comes up in a search). It's possibly not that obscure, but I believe it was a low budget film so maybe not at all well known. Anyhow, it didn't record all the film for some reason so I have never seen the end (last 15min or so), but despite the clear lack of quality it had an interesting premise (a group of young people who wake up in a beach cabin but apparently in the middle of some quasi-nowhere). I was intrigued as to how the approach to playing out the scenario would end but maybe I enjoyed it more for not having been able to see the ending if it was z bad one!

Chakan the Forever Man on my Sega GameGear. I played it SO many times.

Arx Fatalis for og Xbox. I have it and haven't played it, but nobody I know has ever heard about it.

There was an old PC game called "Dominus". I don't really know much about it. My dad just randomly picked it up as an xmas gift one year for me. It was pretty sweet.

You're the lord of a kingdom that gets invaded by like eight armies. You have your own monster units you can deploy. You can deploy traps. You can cast spells. You can go down and fight hand to hand. If they make it to the throne room and kill you, it's game over.

If you capture enemy troops, you can interrogate them. There's a little animation where they get poked with a red hot iron poker. If you capture a leader, you can sometimes negotiate peace. If you capture an enemy mage, you can learn part of a secret spell. I never got a secret spell working, though.

It was super cool. Never met anyone who's played it.

Okay, here's one: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game. Not the SCUMM engine adventure game made by LucasArts, no I'm talking about the godawful action platformer that Tiertex smeared across every console and home computer of the early 90's like shit across the handicap stall in the men's room of a Ruby Tuesday. I knew it as the particularly heinous MS-DOS port but they put it on everything from the Commodore 64 to the Game Boy.

The controls are bad, the mechanics don't make sense, the level design is bullshit, the enemy design and placement is unfair, the graphics are mediocre, the audio is bad to horrible depending on the port...it has no redeeming qualities.

I hope it's obscure because lord it deserves to be forgotten. How do you take a white hot license like Indiana Jones and fuck it up so comprehensively?

When I was a kid I went to a Primus show and they were playing music before the acts came on. One was “Smoke On The Water” covered by Tom Jones and I’ve never been able to find it or even any information about it. I know it was this song and artist as I asked the engineer, it was a great rendition and I wish I could find a copy