The SNES version was superior to the PC one. There were a few weird changes to how you could command the hive that worked better in the SNES one.
The large scale colony land ownership system was just crazy, though. Each time would devolve into full 300 to zero for colonies and it was tough to grind control back one way or another.
Gonna try this but one of the games I really liked was actually delisted from popular flash sites back in the day and I forgot the name because it was a fictional fantasy single word title.
Lost it long before flash died, and I can only assume it was because the creator had requested a takedown which is really weird.
Try describing it to AI. From my experience, AI chats are pretty good in finding games, movies etc based on poor description, just ask for short list of game names so it will not write you essay about how old games are better. You can also describe it here
There's a few I remember which aren't on here. Nicktrolpolis is one of them. But it's consider all the other obscure games which did get preserved it's amazing.
Emulating Flash in HTML tech wasn't a problem for a long time already, but from what I can tell there are no tools for creating such animation that could rival Flash's popularity from back in the day. People are probably just using dedicated game engines that can target browsers.
this, there was a flash game where you are an evil genius. you have a base which you can later upgrade to a volcano or a moon base. you send agents to kidnap politicians or other villanous schemes. there were segments where your base was attacked and you had to use your resources to defend it.
a few months ago on a nostalgia trip I found a playable kitten cannon, I don't remember where. I think I was looking up new grounds or addicting games and found the website through a Wikipedia link.
They got frakin' hard! Especially the mechanics of the trains and when the baddies started shooting further. Tracking where the action was got tough when you had to split the team.
Yeah I had figure I out a strategy using the persuedatron, where it would get stronger the more people you persueded. If you started with civilians and got a bunch, you could then do security guards, then the police, then other syndicate agents. I still think this is the only way to beat that final level, but there are nothing but agents on that level.
I was going to say, I don't remember a Microsoft Ants but I sure as hell remember SimAnts.
I never figured out if bringing a piece of food next to an egg made it hatch faster but omg as I'm typing this right now I realize that makes absolutely no sense. Why the hell would an egg hatch faster if it has no mouth. Wtf was I thinking as a kid, loool.
For me it was a golf game but it was probably ASCII only, played on a green monitor, sometime in the late 70s. I loved that game. Either that or my memory is playing tricks with me.
Would look something like this, but... green, of course.
You could also check out this post on Atari Archive, this video by them too, and this collection of software you could search through using Ctrl + F and then "Golf". There's a lot of possible matches there.
There doesn't really seem to be a lot of actual playable options or even recordings of a lot of them, though.
There’s a non-zero chance it was a game someone he worked with just made. My dad used to work with a guy that would program playable text based games during his down time (this was in the 90s), he ultimately went on to work at an actual game company from what I remember.
I had to try and find it for the sake of this meme! I thought it was a PS1 game all these years, just found it.
Buck Bumble. An N64 game I played when I was a kid, flew around as a bee and shot down other bugs. Its was a good time, glad I was inspired to try and find it's name again!
For the engagement. I could literally google this or ask any of the half dozen AI search agents I have access to and likely get an immediate answer. I don't really care one way or the other.
But having said that....
Back in the day of the original Playstation, circa mid to late 1990s, there was a really intriguing robot battle game where you essentially implemented a visual program to run your battle robot then let it loose in a "3D" arena to run its course with the program you designed. You literally had no direct control over the real time action IIRC, the game was won or lost on how well you programmed your bot to fight.
The actual game was probably pretty shit by modern standards, but for the time it was unique and good enough to be intriguing. It was certainly not the kind of game that would have wide support, then or now. A bit nerdy, definitely complicated for the era.
My stupid fucked up brain remembers it as Armored Core, but that's definitely not the name of the game or even the right genre. I'll literally forget any correct response and likely end up asking this same question again in 10 years, so don't feel compelled to answer. Not like I'm going to fire it up again any time soon. My PS was stolen more than 2 decades ago and I'm pretty sure it was a game I rented a half dozen times but never owned anyway.
Oh shit I remember playing this, it was more like a sim with tanks, right? I remember cheesing it by constantly driving in a circle and shooting enemies when the barrel aligned with them.
ChatGPT was really hit-and-miss for me in this regard, and really more miss. Idk about other LLMs.
Instead, in this case I'd rather find the category for such games on Wikipedia, which seems to be Programming games, then click through the games to see which of them are on PS1 (or use a script I have for pulling such data from a category), then look at YouTube clips of the gameplay.
Old computer game, never have been able to remember the name. It was a sci-fi setting. I distinctly remember taking a ship of some sort and attacking multiple-legged walkers. I don't think it was a Star Wars game. You didn't just control the aerial vehicles as there were also grounds vehicles. You could change out weapons on the vehicle before the mission. There's a line that has stuck with me though: "You're replaceable, the (ship thing) isn't". I remember it coming in a PC game subscription service from the mid 90's. I think the service was called SOMC or something along those lines. It's where I also learned of SWARM and 7 Kingdoms. I still have yet to this day been able to find that sci-fi game, or even the subscription service (or evidence of its existence) again.
A boy and his blob. They made a modern sequel which lost a main gameplay component— puzzling out the puns for the various abilities, or at least making a hand written lookup chart. Just telling you that a punch jellybean makes a hole isn’t quite the same.
It took me FOREVER to find, but I was determined to find my old games. I assumed they were Sega Master System games, so I started watching videos like “best master system games” and such.
Then when I finally came across them, the memories all came rushing back like it was the 80s again! It’s so frustrating but when you finally find it, it’s such a good feeling.
We had a fighting game on NES. Japanese game, and we didn't even speak English (okay, maybe a few words), let alone Japanese.
There was literally nothing to quote in my search, apart from just using descriptions. It was frustrating, because otherwise it was one of the best NES games I have played.
Years later I somehow ran into it.
It was something like Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu.
Technōs had a whole line of sports games in this ‘super deformed’ style and with outlandish mechanics, as offshoots of the ‘Kunio-kun’ series. The games I know are lots of unadulterated fun.
Yes, these are the ones! I think I've seen the football one from afar, and I also played the ice hockey one. Considering the average level of NES games, I think they were rather interesting and full of combinations. I can't say much of the balance, but we were still kids, so heck knows.
What was that one where you were a stationary turret shooting at UFOs flying in? At some point the turret upgrades to a helicopter. I remember playing that on win 98 or something.
There's this game on the original macintosh that's been my white whale for decades. A samurai/ninja game with a heroes of might and magic style overworld map and and a fighting game style screen with a dense bamboo forest in the background. I've gone through a bunch of archives and I just can't seem to find it
There was a fantasy point and click adventure on the school PCs about two lost goblin or gnome children. I think it was some sort of learning game released during the 90s. The only things that I clearly remember are a mini game about getting red and yellow llamas across a bridge with a passing point, and a labyrinth where you had to solve riddles. Never figured out what it was.
Yes those are too old. I think it must have been something released near 1998. The game I remember was in a cartoon style and not as pixelated. It might have been something only released in German as well.
Took me two decades to find the game [Dominus]. Nothing worse than having the name of something on the tip of your tongue for that long. Used to play this game a lot when I was young, it’s not very good but it was a core memory. I cried a bit when I figured it out.
There was this game I swear was called Solaris but was not able to find. The whole thing is a model of a star system with a couple dozens of oddly-named planets and you need to "shoot units" at the planets you want to conquer. You basically have to estimate how many units you need to take it over or something.
I'll probably never be able to find it cause I can't even describe it so well haha
That's what sprang to mind for me as well. There's another version somewhere with viruses/bacteria where you're in a petri dish and can find/modify your dna for better traits in certain multiplying/attack/defending strengths.
There's two edutainment games I remember playing on school PCs back in the early 2000s (either 2000 or 2001) and I've found nothing about them since. Asking about them on the TOMT and TOMJ subreddits got me nowhere.
One was set in a castle and had an intro where the main character crosses a moat. I remember it for a particular minigame where you operate a catapult and have to launch cabbages at people hiding in barrels, following instructions like "90 degrees clockwise", "125 degrees anticlockwise", etc. If you successfully hit all 8 targets without fail, the victory message was "You cabbage head!"
The other was more like a loose collection of minigames and several different CD collections were released. I used to own one that I found in a supermarket bargain bin. The minigame I remember on this collection involved moving a pin to pop balloons. The background music was some kind of weirdly upbeat jazz song.
A very simple space sim that was just sitting in a folder that was either part of windows or one of my installed games, presumably an Easter egg for those just perusing the files. Maybe late nineties?
Like, the simplest starfield and cockpit and you just used the mouse to shoot lasers at stuff.
All of the sound files (only maybe a dozen sound effects at most) were in .wav format so I used the crappy mic I had at the time and recorded new sounds just with my mouth. Had a blast playing my "modded" version.
Haven't figured out what it was/what "real" software it came with.
For more engagement: a Doom reskin where you shot balloons at some (to child me) scary af toys that came alive and were ornery. Windows 3.1/DOS era, was part of a shareware collection.
Edit: You know what I don't think this was what I'm thinking about BUT I did play this and may be mixing the memory with another shooter in the same collection.
Chex Quest? I remember the cereal had a Doom reskin and it scared me too much. I feel like if they had just changed the worldspace default color from black to white it would've been less scary.
Edit: I'm pretty sure the game was "Super Solvers: Gizmos & Gadgets!" and I was remembering the intro/home screen!
I used to play this edutainment title in the early 90s. All i can remember is cartoonish art, a professor or scientist or something and you had to solve puzzles by building machines i think?
The game I remember had a top down view, and looked more modern than that. It might have been a late DOS game but our computer at that time ran windows 3.1 on top so it could have been an early windows game too.
The game I remember had a top down view, and looked more modern than that. It might have been a late DOS game but our computer at that time ran windows 3.1 on top so it could have been an early windows game too.
This is a weird one. I've been looking for a game for years and I've had no luck. My uncle took me on one of his drug deals, as he did very often and I played someone's ps1 or ps2 while they got high. All I know about this RPG/JRPG I played is there were summons and I can vividly remember the 2d world map. There was a mine/tunnel area and some kind of grand library or mansion area. I've been looking for this game for 20 years now with no luck. If I see the world map I'll recognize it instantly. So many of the RPGs of that time had sprawling world maps, but this was very confined. One screen with very obvious images for each area. I would be eternally grateful if anyone could help me find this game.
Edit: The mine/tunnel area was in the middle/bottom of the world map and the grand library or mansion area was towards the top right if I remember correctly.
You could try looking for a ‘compilation of PS1 jrpgs’ video on YouTube, showing gameplay of each game for half a minute. This could jostle the memory. And the same with ps2, if that doesn't work. However, afaiu there were a lot of jrpg games, so idk if anyone's made a comprehensive video.
That's a good idea. I found one video that covers over 420 JRPGs on PS1. I wish they did a list of world maps because that's the best way I'd recognize it.
Unfortunately no, it was a much brighter game. The main thing I remember about it was the world map. The map was colorful and had images for the ecosystems or locations. That is a good game though.
I don't think so based on what I found online. The main thing I remember about it was the world map. The map was colorful and had images for the ecosystems or locations. It had summons and I could be wrong, but maybe only the summons battled enemies. I could be way off on that last part though.
No unfortunately, it was a very bright game. The main thing I remember about it was the world map. The map was colorful and had images for the ecosystems or locations. Everytime I think about this game I spend a couple hours searching RPG world maps, but I've never found it lol.
I'm looking for the name of the 3D racing game my classmates used to play on the school club PC. It came out in the 2000s and ran natively on Windows. The first track in the career mode (as far as we ever got) was dirt and inside an nighttime arena. There were crowds and even some onlookers behind barricade blocks around the track. I don't think the cars could be damaged, and there were intended jumps over lower tracks sections, that could be enjoyed by driving from below to jump really high. Several views were available including one with a rear-view mirror, and a "blimp" aerial view in replay mode. It looked a lot like the nighttime arena tracks in ATV Offroad Fury (pictured) but with closed-cab vehicles.
I went down a retro pc gaming rabbit hole a while ago. It was the one game I couldn't get working on my machine. Feels good that something useful came out of it
I can’t remember if it was C-64 or DOS, but there was a sidescroll game where your character was on a quest in a forest where there were tree houses. They were called the “Grund” or something. Can’t find it anywhere.
Edit: I may have found it: “Below The Root” Gotta see if I can find it abandonware somewhere and try it again.
For me it was Ignition, a top-down racing game where you could play as a police car, a school bus, an ambulance, a yellow car or a blue beetle car.
There was also another racing game I don't remember the name of and likely never will, because it was a game that came on a blue floppy disk and actually was a 3D racing game, and all I remember is that it was a demo for a game that had you doing street races and it wasn't open-world, it was with proper tracks and it was a level at sunset in a city, with no traffic. As far as I can tell, it shouldn't really have been possible to have a fully 3D game on a floppy disk, but I guess since the game was just a demo, it could be squeezed down.
Ignition is one of the best in the top-down genre and arcade racing games overall, the mechanics work really well.
As for the other game: ‘Virtua Racer’ was released on Mega Drive (aka Genesis), and even Gameboy had some pure-3d racing games, though looking like crap. So it would definitely be possible to fit a 3d game on a floppy. However, I'm not so familiar with street racing games: you could try searching for a ‘DOS racing games’ compilation video on YouTube, if you played it in DOS.
In my high school, someone actually stripped down Quake 1 to have a handful of character models and iirc six multiplayer levels — so that the game fit on a floppy. This was copied and given out to people, and whenever the sysadmins removed the game from the class machines, it quickly found its way back again.
Brave Fencer Musashi for me. Played that game so many times through what I remember as the first boss, then didn't figure out how to progress when the world opened up
I have one of these! My memory is pretty hazy but he's everything I remember about it:
I played it in about 2003-04, pc rom game, point and click style where you were either trying to help find a series of items in a house or solve a mystery in a house? This was a kids game with a lot of shades of light blue if I remember correctly... Not a scary game, was in the first person, and I don't remember being in a team of other characters. I remember renting it from my local library a hefty number of times.
I keep trying to find this old educational game that was creepy. I don’t remember much else about it and it is frustrating to know I’ll likely never figure this out. I don’t even remember what kind of educational content it was like math or reading or what.
Edit: thanks for the suggestions, everyone. And keep em coming!
I don’t remember much about the game except it was set in a house of some sorts and had this really creepy vibe to it. I want to say it involved aliens, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Might have been monsters instead. They weren’t humanoid-like creatures though.
We got it the same time we got this other computer game called Radio Addition and may have been in a pack together, but might have just been next to each other when my mom bought them. It ran on Windows, to further narrow it down.
Y’all got me thinking more about it and I asked an LLM tonight and it said this was likely the game I’m remembering and it’s right!! Super creepy colors and music I remember.
So that solves the mystery for me lol. Thanks for the recommendations!
lol it’s funny because as I typed this, I was thinking someone would think that was it. I loved the Jumpstart games and especially the 3rd grade one. But that’s not it, unfortunately. I’m grateful I remember it, but I played it so much I can’t forget.
A round based strategy game with a hex based grid I think there where generic military units like warships u boots pioneers infantry trucks helicopter destroyers. It had a very rudementry 8 bit graphic and it is not Panther panic
If the game wasn't on DOS or Windows, the choice is smaller, but alas I don't see a list on Wikipedia with platforms. MobyGames might have it. Alternatively, I had a script somewhere that pulled the platform and other info from all pages in a category, but not sure currently where it is.
I grew up playing a very specific Minecraft trial world. You spawn on a beach with a single tree. Immediately inland was a large plains biome, but about 100 blocks to the side was an oak forest. In there (still visible from spawn), was a single large hill with a small cave in it which poked though it and made for a good base.
I am rather confident it was a Minecraft trial edition world. I believe I reset that map several times over before discovering how to make the trial last forever. However the trial seed on the wiki does not match for any game version. (It does match a different world I remember playing at least.)
I've probably spent about 10 hours over the last couple years periodically going on the hunt for it, and at this point I'll give out a small bounty for information.
It was PC. I've tried the PC gamer demo and the "North Carolina" seed for all probable game versions (1.3 to 1.6), and the base world generation just doesn't match. There is a hill nearby which could be close, but the biomes are all wrong.
There is a chance, albeit not very high, that it was a cracked version of the game using a seed I simply forgot with time, but it would be quite difficult to brute force that since I would then need to figure out both the version and seed. Given I am fairly certain I generated the same world a few times, it's possible I might be able to guess it.
Update: I have given the PC gamer demo another look after finding it on a very old hard drive. While it does not match my memory precisely, or even super closely, some key details do match, including one specific ore placement and the existence of two caves close to spawn. I suspect this must be the correct seed and I have been misremembering the details.
I remember a top down game from the late '80s or very early '90s where you drive a car along a highway and try to defend yourself against other cars using different weapons and tire-slashing spikes mounted to your wheels.
You'd start inside a semi-truck, drive out of it backwards, and at the end of the level, the truck would re-appear and you have to drive into it again.
Yeah this one was easy. I even forgot about the trucks (probably because they weren't there in ‘Super Spy Hunter’, which started as a clone before having been released as a sequel).
It's.... an old game. Maybe it ran on DOS, but it sure was Windows 95 era.
It was a game for kids where you had to spell words. It took place in Africa I believe, because I remember vividly that there were hippos. You had to solve puzzles before spelling words.
I might be misremembering the following : you played as a boy with a loincloth. When you succeeded in solving a puzzle he rowed upstream on a raft. I think I remember a man with a mask, might have been the kid himself.
That's about everything I remember about this. If someone knows anything...
For me it was a game that used to be on Adult Swim's website, it was a top-down open world pizza delivery game in the style of the first two Grand Theft Auto games. You had to deliver pizzas to some funny characters without crashing and damaging them or running over too many pedestrians and getting caught by the police. With the exception of mimes and guys in hot dog costumes which gave you bonus points, of course. You'd get fired if you got caught by the police too many times or wreck too many pizzas.
Ended up finally finding it last year, it's called Pizza City. It's no longer on Adult Swim, but has thankfully been preserved on other sites like Kongregate and archive.org. Still holds up to this day as a fun game!
"See no path oh soo bay see no path oh SOO BEE RAAAY"
I did not speak french when I was six. I do now, but apparently that doesn't automatically translate memories from thirty years ago. It took me about 5 years of actively looking for this to find it. I found it by asking in a big forum (not reddit but that sort of thing) for something like "people driving cars deforesting space with lasers".
This is me with SHMUPS. Oh, sure, I can find databases of the ones that were popular, but in the early to late 2000s there were so many PC SHMUPS with mouse controls that came on demo CDs or you could get from the front page of any demo shareware website...
Now all forgotten.
Some of them I used to play a lot and want to play again, but can't for the life of me find back.
A puzzle game where each (2D) map spawns with lasers and corresponding targets, and sometimes mirrors etc. You get to place some mirrors, T pieces, beam splitters etc. and have to fulfill each target.
There are so many clones of this out now it's nigh impossible to find, especially as the game is literally just called Laser. This one's also a clone I think but I just love this particular one.
I did recently finally find it again after more than a decade of looking.
Ok maybe Lemmy can help me. Does anyone remember a cartoon that used a key. A magic key. To draw a door and open to a new dimension? I have been looking for this show for decades and I can’t remember it. It had like care bare characters and children.
It was zool and commander keen for me. Hard to describe and find the answer on Google for odd candy mountain game and game with trees with weird ass eyes. Anyways, found it eventually lol
Theres a shitty flash game i spent years playing that ill never find again. Top down worms game very similar to vampire survivors in gameplay, only many years before it.
I'm still looking for a mobile game where I played as a necromancer in a castle fighting off the stickman armies of king Otto through spells and by flicking them into the air. It culminated with the necromancer standing upon a pile of corpses topped by the king himself. I really liked that game but it honestly could be lost media.
Mine was a GameCube game that was my first RPG outside of Pokemon. All I could remember was the coverart being a kid with a big machine arm on his back. Took me till probably 2011 to figure out what it was.
It was Evolution Worlds. I immediately bought it so I wouldn't forget it again. Played it and had fun till I got locked in an area where you have to beat a boss, but I was ill-equipped and I couldn't leave from where I saved to grind or get more items.
Racing game, late DOS, possibly early Windows. Three "eras" of American cars. There might have been loops. Cockpit-view only I believe. Possibly some sort of jet/boost.
Both of these games were awesome. I used to play the first one from the beginning every week with my childhood best friend because either we didn't have a memory card or the game did not accept saves.
Mine was a flash game, I think on miniclip. Sort of like a tower defense game but it also had a point and shoot cannon you'd use. Sort of near future kind of vibe. I think it had a green background due to being on a field. Top down. Main cannon was a big white one and you would build auto turrets to help defend.
Dinopark Tycoon (I went back to play it and I somehow did worse than my elementary school self, loool)
The other game I never found but it was on the same computer. It was a point and click puzzler where you played a character that looks very similar to the character in the modern game Braid. You start, stranded on a beach and worked your way inland. It had a creepy vibe due to the aesthetics.
I've found LLMs quite good for identifying things like this sometimes .. I also know how frustrating it is to remember and not be able to find the games!
Septerra core legacy of the creator, a pc turn based rpg i got in the early 2000s in some multi game pack at walmart or something. took forever for me to find it using the early internet. Its a unique title, but highly forgettable.
3d third person shooter with a female protagonist. Late 90 or early 2000s. Think something like Tomb Raider, but I am pretty sure it was not Tomb Raider. I don't remember much, aside from the tutorial level being in some kind of Portal chamber / Aperture Science like sterile tiled floor and walls with various lights.
If I remember correctly, the first real level was in an old big multi store warehouse or club house.
After having looked for this game for two decades and asked here, I realized perhaps I should ask ChatGPT. I gave it the same description and it came up with Oni (2001). And I am pretty sure that's it!
I have had a lot over time :
Motherload
Idk the name anymore, but something like fighter Z, a space invaders like game were enemies scroll in as you blast things away with a super jet.
A space discovery game, was in Norwegian. A mystical signal arrives and you need to research it and eventually send out a space ship.
I was reminded of another i missed,
Sinjid: Shadow of the Warrior. A ninja fighter flash game.
Last one I guess I might be missing was a 2d like game where the word was blocks like Minecraft but square board levels, angled like a diamond, I think it's called isometric. sorta like the q*bert games I think.
Don't remember much of the goal, but walk around and collect gems I think. I believe most levels were mostly green grass and water/rivers separating areas. Main character might have been a girl.
I once played a 2D RPG which I got stuck in at a point, because I filled all save slots right before getting to a blocking battle, for which I ended up not having enough weapons^[I had recently bought a weapon I then got another one of, just before the battle (as a gift for the battle), but was useless, because only 1 of the player characters could equip that] and then just falling 1 or 2 hits short of managing to pass it.
I have been meaning to retry it from the start (it was a freeware, I think) but I can't recall the rather peculiar name of it. I has been ~ 20 years.
Was probably my first introduction to 3D gaming, and because it was a hand-me-down I didn’t have any instructions on how to play it. It literally took my months to figure out how to move in that game, so in the meantime I just stood in place and spin around shooting at enemies until I died.
At some point at some friend's place I played a slightly GTA-ish game but it was all 3D stick figures and just running from the police and shooting thr stick men with guns.
One of my earlier memories was playing a strange game I haven't been able to find again. All I remember is: you control a car (I think it has flower decals on it?) and can drive through a desert/canyon area. You can also press a key which makes a rotor come out of the top of the car, allowing you to fly it like a helicopter.
I have no idea what the gameplay was beyond that, but I'd love to find it again.
I used to have this symbian game that had a small dragon as the main character and accidentally deleted it from the phone it was on. Never found it again :(
Yep, I have one of those. A side-scrolling scifi shooter for C64 from probably late 80s that I just remember a general vibe about. Not Nemesis, something where you fly above a sort of city. I have tried to remember its name for more than a decade probably.
One would think that there weren't that many of them but oh boy.
In fact, once I browsed through all the games in there and didn't find what I was looking for. It's so far ago and I was so young that I probably have a very distorted and overly positive view of what the game looked like.
There’s a game on the school computers in the late 90s where you choose between 3 numbers for how far you move, you are racing to the bottom of the screen, and some shortcut squares let you drop down.
I got two im thinking of :
One I am sure I can recover but hey, let's shoot for some engagement here, it was a sort of worms like but with pigs, were you could promote units to archetypes
The second one I couldn't find on my searches, it was a PS1 game (I think) in which you constructed your Mecha for battle royale rounds, and you could buy parts or change chassis. I remember an arena on a sort of battleship or structure in the sea, but I was unable to retrieve the name of this game.
Night Shift. A DOS game where you keep a factory cranking out toys and it gradually ramps up the difficulty by de-automating the machines that manage colour, materials, etc.
I did this just yesterday, trying to find an ASCII Dracula game. Played it on a friend's PC-like in the late 80s. I remember you controlled all the characters but could lose Mina and others during the game depending on your choices.
Remember going to the asylum to chat to Renfield to find clues to where Dracula was hiding
Try clicking through Category:Video games based on Dracula to see if any are in the approximately correct era and platform, and if the description rings the bell.
I can't remember the name now, but I recently found a game In have been looking the name of for years. It's something like Pharo's. Curse or something along those lines, but I'd have to check Flashpoint Archive for the name because they have the online demo.
The concept was just that each level had a different board layout and you had to move 3 pieces of some sort of symbol or artifact or whatever to be adjacent ( possibly in a certain order horizontally ) but balls spawn if you move witjo clearing them by matching 3 or using a powerup. You could move them to any empty space so long as the path was clear.
Can't find a copy of the actual game itself from a reputable website right now, but I know it exists.
It was a tower defense game before the term existed. Way back on a Macintosh back and white machine. You sat in the lower corner with a mortar and machine gun against people, tanks, helicopters, and jets trying to charge/shoot your position.
Oh! And The Dark Castle. There was a big the prevented you from finishing the game. Man I wish I could play it to completion.
Another awesome one is the tank game where you spawned on hills, then insulted each other before flinging various crazy weapon shots around (nikes, mirvs, napalm, dirt). Such fun.
I once played a first-person point-and-click adventure game featuring a player character who is a cyborg. I don't remember much about the game, but I do recall quite explicitly that it had a Hard Rock Cafe in the game. Haven't had any luck finding it.
The first one I found out was called Nanosaur and even has a free download. I played like 20 minutes of this in grade school one day and never got a chance to play it again during my childhood.
The other is insanely obscure, because I'm pretty sure I know the name of it but cannot find any trace of it. It's a fantasy themed RPG maker XP game I'm fairly certain is called "The Under" Where it starts as a training mission but your team discovers strange things going on and reality re-writing itself. It uses a real-time turn based combat (similar to final fantasy) and...
::: spoiler spoiler
Everyone in the party except the kobold dies at the very end.
:::
I'm also fairly certain the person making it started working on a sequel that had a small demo I played.
A quick google search brought up another RPG maker game called The Under, but this isn't the game I'm talking about.
Mine was probably on a demo disc around 2000s. It was like a battle on some destroyed city, had futuristic tanks, aircrafts and anti-air. The tanks had WW1-style tracks, like they were huge and squeaky and the size of the whole side. The anti-air had Σ-symbols (faction maybe) and shot blue lasers. The closest I have come to is G-Police, but that’s not it. It was on Win98 most likely.
I still dont know the name of a c64 game i played a lot as a kid. You had to move some kind of flying submarine through a maze and if you touch the wall you die. The first few screens you had to fly downwards.
After a long search i remembered that it also could be some game of a magazine disk, then i though it also could be also some obscure german one and looked through an big list of german c64 games and there i found it. Its called Mission Transmiter! It seems to be a really obscure one, no wonder nobody knows that one.
It started going downwards, but then also going left and right. It was some kind of maze. When iam back at my parents iam going to look for the disk boxes.
After a long search i remembered that it also could be some game of a magazine disk, then i though it also could be also some obscure german one and looked through an big list of german c64 games and there i found it. Its called Mission Transmiter! It seems to be a really obscure one, no wonder nobody knows that one.
Glad you found it! Unfortunately for me, it doesn't look like the game I remember playing. That one was more of a submarine shape with sideways movement. Maybe with monochrome graphics?
I'm going to have to ask my parents what they remember from those days. All my searches are coming up empty.
For Op: is it this?
Underrated.
The SNES version was superior to the PC one. There were a few weird changes to how you could command the hive that worked better in the SNES one.
The large scale colony land ownership system was just crazy, though. Each time would devolve into full 300 to zero for colonies and it was tough to grind control back one way or another.
Fucking loved this game, played the crap out of it.
Worse when it's a flash game, as I understand they're all dead now.
I just want to play the unknown snowboarding game with all the little hills to jump on again. Well that and the ever classic Kitten Cannon.
You can still play every flash game ever through the Flashpoint Archive
Gonna try this but one of the games I really liked was actually delisted from popular flash sites back in the day and I forgot the name because it was a fictional fantasy single word title.
Lost it long before flash died, and I can only assume it was because the creator had requested a takedown which is really weird.
Dude awesome thanks! Looks like running it on linux is a whole thing but doable, now I just neef to find out what the game was.
Try r/tipofmyjoystick on Reddit. This is one case where a larger audience definitely helps.
Try describing it to AI. From my experience, AI chats are pretty good in finding games, movies etc based on poor description, just ask for short list of game names so it will not write you essay about how old games are better. You can also describe it here
But be ready for disappointment, because at least ChatGPT is bad with obscure media, and even makes stuff up regularly.
There's a few I remember which aren't on here. Nicktrolpolis is one of them. But it's consider all the other obscure games which did get preserved it's amazing.
Flash is actually coming back to life via WebAssembly of all things.
Emulating Flash in HTML tech wasn't a problem for a long time already, but from what I can tell there are no tools for creating such animation that could rival Flash's popularity from back in the day. People are probably just using dedicated game engines that can target browsers.
No you can literally run Flash games on your browser again, thanks to ruffle.rs
this, there was a flash game where you are an evil genius. you have a base which you can later upgrade to a volcano or a moon base. you send agents to kidnap politicians or other villanous schemes. there were segments where your base was attacked and you had to use your resources to defend it.
overall an amazing game. never found it again :(
I'll have to check the details but, could that be Mastermind: World Conqueror? It's still on newgrounds
YOU FOUND IT!!!! THANKS, SO MUCH
tried search engines, tried AI, and nothing worked. but you did, you proven yourself better than the trillion AI investments.
a few months ago on a nostalgia trip I found a playable kitten cannon, I don't remember where. I think I was looking up new grounds or addicting games and found the website through a Wikipedia link.
Syndicate, by bullfrog
R.I.P. Bullfrog...
The Dungeon Keeper games will forever be among my top 10.
Magic Carpet and Genewars were such weird games.
I loved that game. Only for to play for a few weeks in Germany back in 1995.
Ran into it again years later somewhere and finally made it much further through the missions. Great game.
I never beat the final mission.
They got frakin' hard! Especially the mechanics of the trains and when the baddies started shooting further. Tracking where the action was got tough when you had to split the team.
Yeah I had figure I out a strategy using the persuedatron, where it would get stronger the more people you persueded. If you started with civilians and got a bunch, you could then do security guards, then the police, then other syndicate agents. I still think this is the only way to beat that final level, but there are nothing but agents on that level.
That was my favorite game as a kid. Too bad the only remake is a stupid FPS.
Yeah the remake totally misunderstood what the game was about.
‘Satellite Reign’ is the spiritual successor, released in 2015 and started by the producer and lead programmer for ‘Syndicate Wars’.
/cc @[email protected]
I played it for couple of hours and it seems pretty good. Thank you again.
I'll check it out, thanks.
You mean Sim Ants my dude
I was going to say, I don't remember a Microsoft Ants but I sure as hell remember SimAnts.
I never figured out if bringing a piece of food next to an egg made it hatch faster but omg as I'm typing this right now I realize that makes absolutely no sense. Why the hell would an egg hatch faster if it has no mouth. Wtf was I thinking as a kid, loool.
I don't mean SimAnts.
Microsoft Ants came out a few years later, on the Microsoft Gaming Zone.
It died when they pulled the plug on the platform, and part of me wishes they'd release it on Steam. But that's probably the nostalgia talking.
Anyone else think of Another World / Out of this world?
Mikearuba
Agusta... Agusta Agusta laser fires
It came as a demo with so many games. Finally played it a decade or so ago. It was pretty good.
For me it was a golf game but it was probably ASCII only, played on a green monitor, sometime in the late 70s. I loved that game. Either that or my memory is playing tricks with me.
Is it Focal Golf?
Would look something like this, but... green, of course.
You could also check out this post on Atari Archive, this video by them too, and this collection of software you could search through using Ctrl + F and then "Golf". There's a lot of possible matches there.
There doesn't really seem to be a lot of actual playable options or even recordings of a lot of them, though.
Awesome thanks. I don't think it's Focal. It was a computer my friend's dad brought home from work and I don't think it was on tape.
There’s a non-zero chance it was a game someone he worked with just made. My dad used to work with a guy that would program playable text based games during his down time (this was in the 90s), he ultimately went on to work at an actual game company from what I remember.
I had to try and find it for the sake of this meme! I thought it was a PS1 game all these years, just found it.
Buck Bumble. An N64 game I played when I was a kid, flew around as a bee and shot down other bugs. Its was a good time, glad I was inspired to try and find it's name again!
I love that game's title music.
Me too man, it’s stuck in my head now!
For the engagement. I could literally google this or ask any of the half dozen AI search agents I have access to and likely get an immediate answer. I don't really care one way or the other.
But having said that....
Back in the day of the original Playstation, circa mid to late 1990s, there was a really intriguing robot battle game where you essentially implemented a visual program to run your battle robot then let it loose in a "3D" arena to run its course with the program you designed. You literally had no direct control over the real time action IIRC, the game was won or lost on how well you programmed your bot to fight.
The actual game was probably pretty shit by modern standards, but for the time it was unique and good enough to be intriguing. It was certainly not the kind of game that would have wide support, then or now. A bit nerdy, definitely complicated for the era.
My stupid fucked up brain remembers it as Armored Core, but that's definitely not the name of the game or even the right genre. I'll literally forget any correct response and likely end up asking this same question again in 10 years, so don't feel compelled to answer. Not like I'm going to fire it up again any time soon. My PS was stolen more than 2 decades ago and I'm pretty sure it was a game I rented a half dozen times but never owned anyway.
Also Merry Fucking Christmas
Carnage Heart. OK, bye.
Oh shit I remember playing this, it was more like a sim with tanks, right? I remember cheesing it by constantly driving in a circle and shooting enemies when the barrel aligned with them.
ChatGPT was really hit-and-miss for me in this regard, and really more miss. Idk about other LLMs.
Instead, in this case I'd rather find the category for such games on Wikipedia, which seems to be Programming games, then click through the games to see which of them are on PS1 (or use a script I have for pulling such data from a category), then look at YouTube clips of the gameplay.
Old computer game, never have been able to remember the name. It was a sci-fi setting. I distinctly remember taking a ship of some sort and attacking multiple-legged walkers. I don't think it was a Star Wars game. You didn't just control the aerial vehicles as there were also grounds vehicles. You could change out weapons on the vehicle before the mission. There's a line that has stuck with me though: "You're replaceable, the (ship thing) isn't". I remember it coming in a PC game subscription service from the mid 90's. I think the service was called SOMC or something along those lines. It's where I also learned of SWARM and 7 Kingdoms. I still have yet to this day been able to find that sci-fi game, or even the subscription service (or evidence of its existence) again.
Could it be Earthsiege 2 by any chance?
Jesus fucking Christ is been 30 years! I think you found it! You fucking legend!
Happy to help, hope your Christmas became as good as it was 30 years ago ☺️
A boy and his blob. They made a modern sequel which lost a main gameplay component— puzzling out the puns for the various abilities, or at least making a hand written lookup chart. Just telling you that a punch jellybean makes a hole isn’t quite the same.
It took me FOREVER to find, but I was determined to find my old games. I assumed they were Sega Master System games, so I started watching videos like “best master system games” and such.
Then when I finally came across them, the memories all came rushing back like it was the 80s again! It’s so frustrating but when you finally find it, it’s such a good feeling.
Commander keen
You can get them as a bundle on steam!
😍
Edit: thank you for making me spend my money so recklessly. Thank gabe for the winter deala tho.
And they have carmageddon! Omg. I have been living under a rock!
We had a fighting game on NES. Japanese game, and we didn't even speak English (okay, maybe a few words), let alone Japanese.
There was literally nothing to quote in my search, apart from just using descriptions. It was frustrating, because otherwise it was one of the best NES games I have played.
Years later I somehow ran into it. It was something like Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu.
Shodai Nekketsu kouha Kunio-kun?
I had a hack of that game for the english version very funny game
Sorry if it is not the one but try it if you can
Nah, I just looked up mine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nekketsu_Fighting_Legend
But that one looks fun, too.
Technōs had a whole line of sports games in this ‘super deformed’ style and with outlandish mechanics, as offshoots of the ‘Kunio-kun’ series. The games I know are lots of unadulterated fun.
‘Nintendo World Cup’ — soccer
Nekketsu Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes — street basketball
Heard of these, haven't played yet:
‘Super Dodge Ball’
‘Super Spike V'Ball’
‘Downtown Nekketsu Koushinkyoku: Soreyuke Daiundoukai’ / ‘Downtown Nekketsu March: Super-Awesome Field Day!’ — obstacle course running and fighting
‘Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey-bu: Subette Koronde Dairantou’ / Go-Go! Nekketsu Hockey Club
‘Crash n' the Boys: Street Challenge’ — track and field, iirc
‘Kunio Kun no Nekketsu Soccer League’ / Goal 3 — seems to be a sequel to ‘Nintendo World Cup’
Downtown Nekketsu Baseball Monogatari: Yakyū de Shōbu da! Kunio-kun (on SNES)
Yes, these are the ones! I think I've seen the football one from afar, and I also played the ice hockey one. Considering the average level of NES games, I think they were rather interesting and full of combinations. I can't say much of the balance, but we were still kids, so heck knows.
What was that one where you were a stationary turret shooting at UFOs flying in? At some point the turret upgrades to a helicopter. I remember playing that on win 98 or something.
Is it Incoming from 1998?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNhvGHYoU3A
Yes! This is it lol
There's this game on the original macintosh that's been my white whale for decades. A samurai/ninja game with a heroes of might and magic style overworld map and and a fighting game style screen with a dense bamboo forest in the background. I've gone through a bunch of archives and I just can't seem to find it
Oh man, you're talking about Sword of the Samurai one of my all time faves!
https://www.mobygames.com/game/246/sword-of-the-samurai/
Aw man, that's not it but the game style looks the same, I'll have to look around and see if there are sequels/ports/knockoffs. Thanks!
There was a fantasy point and click adventure on the school PCs about two lost goblin or gnome children. I think it was some sort of learning game released during the 90s. The only things that I clearly remember are a mini game about getting red and yellow llamas across a bridge with a passing point, and a labyrinth where you had to solve riddles. Never figured out what it was.
You probably already checked Gobliins 2 and the other games in the series.
Yes those are too old. I think it must have been something released near 1998. The game I remember was in a cartoon style and not as pixelated. It might have been something only released in German as well.
Adibou ?
No, unfortunately that's not it.
I remember years ago I went looking for a game I used to play as a child where you start at a manhole cover and open it to reveal a beanstalk.
The game was called “the manhole”
I learned a lot about the internet that day.
🤣
Terror tubbies personally
Therapist: "The terror tubbies aren't real, they can't hurt you." The terror tubbies:
Took me two decades to find the game [Dominus]. Nothing worse than having the name of something on the tip of your tongue for that long. Used to play this game a lot when I was young, it’s not very good but it was a core memory. I cried a bit when I figured it out.
There was this game I swear was called Solaris but was not able to find. The whole thing is a model of a star system with a couple dozens of oddly-named planets and you need to "shoot units" at the planets you want to conquer. You basically have to estimate how many units you need to take it over or something.
I'll probably never be able to find it cause I can't even describe it so well haha
Do you perhaps mean solarmax (1/2)?
That's what sprang to mind for me as well. There's another version somewhere with viruses/bacteria where you're in a petri dish and can find/modify your dna for better traits in certain multiplying/attack/defending strengths.
Almost sounds like eufloria
apocalypsis.org ?
Probably not Stellaris right?
It turned out that star wars supremacy which I had long since lost the disc for was digitally released as rebellion.
Arseholes
It was only called Supremacy in the UK. I played Rebellion back in the late 90s
On this side of the pond it's called Star Wars Overlord
Playroom by Brøderbund
Still unfound, some game with a joust and a dungeon to explore, on Mac in the early 90s Edit: king Arthur’s magic castle
For books, a medieval themed book like where’s Waldo? But I don’t think it was a where’s Waldo book. I forget what you were looking for.., a spy?
There's two edutainment games I remember playing on school PCs back in the early 2000s (either 2000 or 2001) and I've found nothing about them since. Asking about them on the TOMT and TOMJ subreddits got me nowhere.
One was set in a castle and had an intro where the main character crosses a moat. I remember it for a particular minigame where you operate a catapult and have to launch cabbages at people hiding in barrels, following instructions like "90 degrees clockwise", "125 degrees anticlockwise", etc. If you successfully hit all 8 targets without fail, the victory message was "You cabbage head!"
The other was more like a loose collection of minigames and several different CD collections were released. I used to own one that I found in a supermarket bargain bin. The minigame I remember on this collection involved moving a pin to pop balloons. The background music was some kind of weirdly upbeat jazz song.
A very simple space sim that was just sitting in a folder that was either part of windows or one of my installed games, presumably an Easter egg for those just perusing the files. Maybe late nineties?
Like, the simplest starfield and cockpit and you just used the mouse to shoot lasers at stuff.
All of the sound files (only maybe a dozen sound effects at most) were in .wav format so I used the crappy mic I had at the time and recorded new sounds just with my mouth. Had a blast playing my "modded" version.
Haven't figured out what it was/what "real" software it came with.
Sounds like an old Excel easter egg
For more engagement: a Doom reskin where you shot balloons at some (to child me) scary af toys that came alive and were ornery. Windows 3.1/DOS era, was part of a shareware collection.
Bad Toys?
Edit: You know what I don't think this was what I'm thinking about BUT I did play this and may be mixing the memory with another shooter in the same collection.
Chex Quest? I remember the cereal had a Doom reskin and it scared me too much. I feel like if they had just changed the worldspace default color from black to white it would've been less scary.
Edit: I'm pretty sure the game was "Super Solvers: Gizmos & Gadgets!" and I was remembering the intro/home screen!
I used to play this edutainment title in the early 90s. All i can remember is cartoonish art, a professor or scientist or something and you had to solve puzzles by building machines i think?
Most likely it's The Incredible Machine by Sierra. https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_incredible_machine_mega_pack
The game I remember had a top down view, and looked more modern than that. It might have been a late DOS game but our computer at that time ran windows 3.1 on top so it could have been an early windows game too.
This one?
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-incredible-machine-1mg/play-1mg
The game I remember had a top down view, and looked more modern than that. It might have been a late DOS game but our computer at that time ran windows 3.1 on top so it could have been an early windows game too.
I loved the Super Solver games as a kid
This is a weird one. I've been looking for a game for years and I've had no luck. My uncle took me on one of his drug deals, as he did very often and I played someone's ps1 or ps2 while they got high. All I know about this RPG/JRPG I played is there were summons and I can vividly remember the 2d world map. There was a mine/tunnel area and some kind of grand library or mansion area. I've been looking for this game for 20 years now with no luck. If I see the world map I'll recognize it instantly. So many of the RPGs of that time had sprawling world maps, but this was very confined. One screen with very obvious images for each area. I would be eternally grateful if anyone could help me find this game.
Edit: The mine/tunnel area was in the middle/bottom of the world map and the grand library or mansion area was towards the top right if I remember correctly.
You could try looking for a ‘compilation of PS1 jrpgs’ video on YouTube, showing gameplay of each game for half a minute. This could jostle the memory. And the same with ps2, if that doesn't work. However, afaiu there were a lot of jrpg games, so idk if anyone's made a comprehensive video.
That's a good idea. I found one video that covers over 420 JRPGs on PS1. I wish they did a list of world maps because that's the best way I'd recognize it.
Legend of Mana?
Unfortunately no, it was definitely turn based and not an ARPG. The graphics weren't very different though.
Legend of Dragoon?
Unfortunately no, it was a much brighter game. The main thing I remember about it was the world map. The map was colorful and had images for the ecosystems or locations. That is a good game though.
Was it Shadow Madness maybe?
I don't think so based on what I found online. The main thing I remember about it was the world map. The map was colorful and had images for the ecosystems or locations. It had summons and I could be wrong, but maybe only the summons battled enemies. I could be way off on that last part though.
Might have been Shadow Hearts (Covenant) ? Because I vividly remember a tunnel area between Wales and England I think ?
No unfortunately, it was a very bright game. The main thing I remember about it was the world map. The map was colorful and had images for the ecosystems or locations. Everytime I think about this game I spend a couple hours searching RPG world maps, but I've never found it lol.
I'm looking for the name of the 3D racing game my classmates used to play on the school club PC. It came out in the 2000s and ran natively on Windows. The first track in the career mode (as far as we ever got) was dirt and inside an nighttime arena. There were crowds and even some onlookers behind barricade blocks around the track. I don't think the cars could be damaged, and there were intended jumps over lower tracks sections, that could be enjoyed by driving from below to jump really high. Several views were available including one with a rear-view mirror, and a "blimp" aerial view in replay mode. It looked a lot like the nighttime arena tracks in ATV Offroad Fury (pictured) but with closed-cab vehicles.
Leadfoot?
You are correct! Thank you!
How did you find that?
I went down a retro pc gaming rabbit hole a while ago. It was the one game I couldn't get working on my machine. Feels good that something useful came out of it
I can’t remember if it was C-64 or DOS, but there was a sidescroll game where your character was on a quest in a forest where there were tree houses. They were called the “Grund” or something. Can’t find it anywhere.
Edit: I may have found it: “Below The Root” Gotta see if I can find it abandonware somewhere and try it again.
For me it was Ignition, a top-down racing game where you could play as a police car, a school bus, an ambulance, a yellow car or a blue beetle car.
There was also another racing game I don't remember the name of and likely never will, because it was a game that came on a blue floppy disk and actually was a 3D racing game, and all I remember is that it was a demo for a game that had you doing street races and it wasn't open-world, it was with proper tracks and it was a level at sunset in a city, with no traffic. As far as I can tell, it shouldn't really have been possible to have a fully 3D game on a floppy disk, but I guess since the game was just a demo, it could be squeezed down.
Ignition is one of the best in the top-down genre and arcade racing games overall, the mechanics work really well.
As for the other game: ‘Virtua Racer’ was released on Mega Drive (aka Genesis), and even Gameboy had some pure-3d racing games, though looking like crap. So it would definitely be possible to fit a 3d game on a floppy. However, I'm not so familiar with street racing games: you could try searching for a ‘DOS racing games’ compilation video on YouTube, if you played it in DOS.
In my high school, someone actually stripped down Quake 1 to have a handful of character models and iirc six multiplayer levels — so that the game fit on a floppy. This was copied and given out to people, and whenever the sysadmins removed the game from the class machines, it quickly found its way back again.
This post prompted me to finally go work out what game I've been thinking about for the past decade and I've determined it was called mini mogul!
Best news I’ve heard all week!
Brave Fencer Musashi for me. Played that game so many times through what I remember as the first boss, then didn't figure out how to progress when the world opened up
It's so good! BFM is a top 5 PS1 game for me, easily.
I have one of these! My memory is pretty hazy but he's everything I remember about it: I played it in about 2003-04, pc rom game, point and click style where you were either trying to help find a series of items in a house or solve a mystery in a house? This was a kids game with a lot of shades of light blue if I remember correctly... Not a scary game, was in the first person, and I don't remember being in a team of other characters. I remember renting it from my local library a hefty number of times.
It wasn't one of the Goosebumps games was it?
No not quite 🫤
Hugos house of horrors?
Not quite it was less horror and moreso helping a character.. it's possible the characters were animals dressed as humans
Try r/tipofmyjoystick on Reddit. They have a larger userbase.
We should create an equivalent Lemmy community instead of funneling people to Reddit tbh
There's a reason I'm on Lemmy and not on Reddit anymore 🫣
There's
[email protected]
and I just created
[email protected].
I keep trying to find this old educational game that was creepy. I don’t remember much else about it and it is frustrating to know I’ll likely never figure this out. I don’t even remember what kind of educational content it was like math or reading or what.
Edit: thanks for the suggestions, everyone. And keep em coming!
I don’t remember much about the game except it was set in a house of some sorts and had this really creepy vibe to it. I want to say it involved aliens, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Might have been monsters instead. They weren’t humanoid-like creatures though.
We got it the same time we got this other computer game called Radio Addition and may have been in a pack together, but might have just been next to each other when my mom bought them. It ran on Windows, to further narrow it down.
Edit2: I found it by chance! The game I was thinking of was Math Blaster Mystery The Great Brain Robbery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3USKxJd4J4&pp=ygUUTWF0aCBibGFzdGVyIG15c3Rlcnk%3D
Y’all got me thinking more about it and I asked an LLM tonight and it said this was likely the game I’m remembering and it’s right!! Super creepy colors and music I remember.
So that solves the mystery for me lol. Thanks for the recommendations!
It's not Baldi's Basics, is it?
Oh no definitely not. This was early 90’s/late 80’s software.
Granny's Garden?
https://archive.org/details/Grannys_Garden_v2.0_1987_Stchel_Software
Not this one either, sadly. Thanks for the suggestion.
It’s crazy knowing what it’s not but not knowing what it is lol.
That and Mallory Towers were staples in UK schools.
Most of the fun was telling the Raven to fuck off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart_Adventures_4th_Grade%3A_Haunted_Island?wprov=sfla1
This one and the 3rd grade one with the robot were so good.
lol it’s funny because as I typed this, I was thinking someone would think that was it. I loved the Jumpstart games and especially the 3rd grade one. But that’s not it, unfortunately. I’m grateful I remember it, but I played it so much I can’t forget.
Here's hoping:
It was in the 90s. Top down, you could be either an Apache gunship or a tank for each mission.
EDIT: Folks, thank you for all the help and suggestions. Turns out it was "Seek and Destroy".
Jungle Strike https://www.mobygames.com/game/792/jungle-strike/
I really enjoyed this on GameGear. My brother had it and I remember it being hard, but fair. We did pretty well.
Might be this. I'll download and play. Though I seem to remember it was in the desert...
I don't think it's jungle strike. Do you remember if it was sprite based or vector?
Sprite based maybe? It was something like thirty years ago so we're reaching back. I can confirm that it was on PC and I THINK it was on Windows 95.
Either way, Jungle Strike is the sequel (prequel?) to Desert Strike. Desert Strike definitely has a lot of desert, as you have described.
Army Men : Air Attack ?
Not Army Men unfortunately. Though that was another series I loved!
SWIV?
Not SWIV, sorry but it looks neat! I'm going to give it a shot!
Gunfright on Spectrum
A round based strategy game with a hex based grid I think there where generic military units like warships u boots pioneers infantry trucks helicopter destroyers. It had a very rudementry 8 bit graphic and it is not Panther panic
Perhaps the ‘Battle Isle’ series?
P.S. Or ‘Panzer General’ or another of the dozens wargames made by Strategic Simulations Inc. There were quite a lot of hex wargames back in the nineties.
Sadly no. The units whee represented by pictograms from the sideview.
But yeah the problem is that there where so much and so many different ones, even made as shareware slop
You could try looking through Category:Computer wargames as to whether any of the titles click.
If the game wasn't on DOS or Windows, the choice is smaller, but alas I don't see a list on Wikipedia with platforms. MobyGames might have it. Alternatively, I had a script somewhere that pulled the platform and other info from all pages in a category, but not sure currently where it is.
I grew up playing a very specific Minecraft trial world. You spawn on a beach with a single tree. Immediately inland was a large plains biome, but about 100 blocks to the side was an oak forest. In there (still visible from spawn), was a single large hill with a small cave in it which poked though it and made for a good base.
I am rather confident it was a Minecraft trial edition world. I believe I reset that map several times over before discovering how to make the trial last forever. However the trial seed on the wiki does not match for any game version. (It does match a different world I remember playing at least.)
I've probably spent about 10 hours over the last couple years periodically going on the hunt for it, and at this point I'll give out a small bounty for information.
what platform? pc/ console?
I know pcgamer had a demo on pc but not sure if that sounds like your description
It was PC. I've tried the PC gamer demo and the "North Carolina" seed for all probable game versions (1.3 to 1.6), and the base world generation just doesn't match. There is a hill nearby which could be close, but the biomes are all wrong.
There is a chance, albeit not very high, that it was a cracked version of the game using a seed I simply forgot with time, but it would be quite difficult to brute force that since I would then need to figure out both the version and seed. Given I am fairly certain I generated the same world a few times, it's possible I might be able to guess it.
Update: I have given the PC gamer demo another look after finding it on a very old hard drive. While it does not match my memory precisely, or even super closely, some key details do match, including one specific ore placement and the existence of two caves close to spawn. I suspect this must be the correct seed and I have been misremembering the details.
I remember a top down game from the late '80s or very early '90s where you drive a car along a highway and try to defend yourself against other cars using different weapons and tire-slashing spikes mounted to your wheels.
You'd start inside a semi-truck, drive out of it backwards, and at the end of the level, the truck would re-appear and you have to drive into it again.
‘Spy Hunter’? It was on a whole bunch of platforms.
YES, that's it!
Yeah this one was easy. I even forgot about the trucks (probably because they weren't there in ‘Super Spy Hunter’, which started as a clone before having been released as a sequel).
Btw, there were sequels ‘SpyHunter’ in 2001 and then 'SpyHunter 2', for PS2/Gamecube/Xbox and desktops — though not with the top-down view.
And there's the 2012 ‘Spy Hunter’ for PS Vita and 3DS. Apparently also with the view from behind, and this time with poor reviews.
Major motion?
https://youtu.be/bASGBe6jhes
One of my favs growing up
It's.... an old game. Maybe it ran on DOS, but it sure was Windows 95 era.
It was a game for kids where you had to spell words. It took place in Africa I believe, because I remember vividly that there were hippos. You had to solve puzzles before spelling words.
I might be misremembering the following : you played as a boy with a loincloth. When you succeeded in solving a puzzle he rowed upstream on a raft. I think I remember a man with a mask, might have been the kid himself.
That's about everything I remember about this. If someone knows anything...
Sounds like Spelling Jungle. I remember that game had the dumbest ending - something about leaving the
hosefaucet on.Edit: it was a faucet
Of that was it, thanks !
ants.
It's Freddy fish
For me it was a game that used to be on Adult Swim's website, it was a top-down open world pizza delivery game in the style of the first two Grand Theft Auto games. You had to deliver pizzas to some funny characters without crashing and damaging them or running over too many pedestrians and getting caught by the police. With the exception of mimes and guys in hot dog costumes which gave you bonus points, of course. You'd get fired if you got caught by the police too many times or wreck too many pizzas.
Ended up finally finding it last year, it's called Pizza City. It's no longer on Adult Swim, but has thankfully been preserved on other sites like Kongregate and archive.org. Still holds up to this day as a fun game!
Micro-man. game came on a game collection cd I’ve never been able to find it online with the rest of the games
There was this side scrolling space themed bullet hell adjacent game they had on the computers when I was in elementary school.
There was this one with math equations that would fall to the bottom and you had to solve them quickly
This had 0 educational value except for levels being named after metals. That's where I learned what Tungsten was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bT77XP52uw&t=73
"See no path oh soo bay see no path oh SOO BEE RAAAY"
I did not speak french when I was six. I do now, but apparently that doesn't automatically translate memories from thirty years ago. It took me about 5 years of actively looking for this to find it. I found it by asking in a big forum (not reddit but that sort of thing) for something like "people driving cars deforesting space with lasers".
This is me with SHMUPS. Oh, sure, I can find databases of the ones that were popular, but in the early to late 2000s there were so many PC SHMUPS with mouse controls that came on demo CDs or you could get from the front page of any demo shareware website...
Now all forgotten.
Some of them I used to play a lot and want to play again, but can't for the life of me find back.
You could try r/tipofmyjoystick on Reddit, describing the game as much as you can remember. 2000s wasn't even really the peak of the genre popularity.
A puzzle game where each (2D) map spawns with lasers and corresponding targets, and sometimes mirrors etc. You get to place some mirrors, T pieces, beam splitters etc. and have to fulfill each target.
There are so many clones of this out now it's nigh impossible to find, especially as the game is literally just called Laser. This one's also a clone I think but I just love this particular one.
I did recently finally find it again after more than a decade of looking.
Plok.
I could never forget about plok, I still hear the music pop up on youtube every now and then
Ok maybe Lemmy can help me. Does anyone remember a cartoon that used a key. A magic key. To draw a door and open to a new dimension? I have been looking for this show for decades and I can’t remember it. It had like care bare characters and children.
ChalkZone?
Nah. Think lte 80’s and early 90’s. I wonder if I dreamed this shit up.
I only know Pans Labyrinth but it's certainly not a comic
I remember that in Beetlejuice, and there was a cartoon version of that.
Final Fantasy Unlimited ?
A magic key to draw a door? It's not the kid with the purple crayon cartoon?
No. Much older. Like lat 80’s early 90’s. I remember a friendly funny dragon with the characters.
It was zool and commander keen for me. Hard to describe and find the answer on Google for odd candy mountain game and game with trees with weird ass eyes. Anyways, found it eventually lol
Theres a shitty flash game i spent years playing that ill never find again. Top down worms game very similar to vampire survivors in gameplay, only many years before it.
If I remember the name I'll tell you.
From the ones I do remember: Airfix Dogfighter was cool.
Nanosaur
I'm still looking for a mobile game where I played as a necromancer in a castle fighting off the stickman armies of king Otto through spells and by flicking them into the air. It culminated with the necromancer standing upon a pile of corpses topped by the king himself. I really liked that game but it honestly could be lost media.
Doesn't quite check those boxes, but it definitely sounds like a game that was based on Defend Your Castle, from back in the days of Flash games.
I think you are right, that mechanic is very similar
Could it be Stickwars?
Holy shit it is thank you wth
Not compatable with my phone 😔😔😔 emulator time
A little bit of google-fu goes a long way ;)
Have fun!
Miner VGA, I still fire it up every now and then.
May the hair on your toes never fall off
Mine was a GameCube game that was my first RPG outside of Pokemon. All I could remember was the coverart being a kid with a big machine arm on his back. Took me till probably 2011 to figure out what it was.
It was Evolution Worlds. I immediately bought it so I wouldn't forget it again. Played it and had fun till I got locked in an area where you have to beat a boss, but I was ill-equipped and I couldn't leave from where I saved to grind or get more items.
Legends of Kesmai for me, I used to play it on AOL.
AIV Network$ (A4 Networks) - I searched for years, the name didn't make it easy to find.
Waku Waku 7, very silly fighter
For me it is a ski racing game that looks like about 2005 or 2009 type of game and has a sort of athletic/olympic winter games type of vibe.
Was it SSX?
Doesnt look like it.
Additionally it was also a PC game on Windows XP.
Racing game, late DOS, possibly early Windows. Three "eras" of American cars. There might have been loops. Cockpit-view only I believe. Possibly some sort of jet/boost.
Maybe fatal racing (whiplash)?
With guns: have a n.i.c.e. Day?
| have a n.i.c.e. Day?
That looks like it. Thanks.
Awesome game! I should try to find out how to play it today.
Edit: It's on Steam for 1,59€!
https://www.gog.com/en/game/have_a_nice_day
I'd try watching a ‘DOS racing games’ compilation video on YouTube.
Croc 2! I love him so much.
I prefer the first one but I love the little WAPOW boy either way.
Both of these games were awesome. I used to play the first one from the beginning every week with my childhood best friend because either we didn't have a memory card or the game did not accept saves.
Mine was a flash game, I think on miniclip. Sort of like a tower defense game but it also had a point and shoot cannon you'd use. Sort of near future kind of vibe. I think it had a green background due to being on a field. Top down. Main cannon was a big white one and you would build auto turrets to help defend.
For me it was two Mac games.
Dinopark Tycoon (I went back to play it and I somehow did worse than my elementary school self, loool)
The other game I never found but it was on the same computer. It was a point and click puzzler where you played a character that looks very similar to the character in the modern game Braid. You start, stranded on a beach and worked your way inland. It had a creepy vibe due to the aesthetics.
I've found LLMs quite good for identifying things like this sometimes .. I also know how frustrating it is to remember and not be able to find the games!
I got you fam, it's called NewZealand Story. https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-new-zealand-story-679
I recently re-discovered Deathtrack.
Septerra core legacy of the creator, a pc turn based rpg i got in the early 2000s in some multi game pack at walmart or something. took forever for me to find it using the early internet. Its a unique title, but highly forgettable.
Still on my list of games I wanna finish
3d third person shooter with a female protagonist. Late 90 or early 2000s. Think something like Tomb Raider, but I am pretty sure it was not Tomb Raider. I don't remember much, aside from the tutorial level being in some kind of Portal chamber / Aperture Science like sterile tiled floor and walls with various lights. If I remember correctly, the first real level was in an old big multi store warehouse or club house.
After having looked for this game for two decades and asked here, I realized perhaps I should ask ChatGPT. I gave it the same description and it came up with Oni (2001). And I am pretty sure that's it!
This is my guess as well. I still remember the tutorial.
Sounds like Oni. https://www.mobygames.com/game/3242/oni/
What platform? PC, Playstation?
PC
It sounds like Perfect Dark, but that didn't get a PC port until recently.
Fear Effect maybe?
Ah, that one cutscene in Fear Effect 2 jumpstarted my puberty.
Stealth game? There was a nice PS2 stealth/hacking fame with a female protagonist
I don't recall stealth, but I also only watched someone else play it for an hour or so.
I have had a lot over time : Motherload Idk the name anymore, but something like fighter Z, a space invaders like game were enemies scroll in as you blast things away with a super jet. A space discovery game, was in Norwegian. A mystical signal arrives and you need to research it and eventually send out a space ship.
I was reminded of another i missed, Sinjid: Shadow of the Warrior. A ninja fighter flash game.
Last one I guess I might be missing was a 2d like game where the word was blocks like Minecraft but square board levels, angled like a diamond, I think it's called isometric. sorta like the q*bert games I think. Don't remember much of the goal, but walk around and collect gems I think. I believe most levels were mostly green grass and water/rivers separating areas. Main character might have been a girl.
I remember the sound effects and one level… but not the name. Classic.
And not the gameplay or the system?
I once played a 2D RPG which I got stuck in at a point, because I filled all save slots right before getting to a blocking battle, for which I ended up not having enough weapons^[I had recently bought a weapon I then got another one of, just before the battle (as a gift for the battle), but was useless, because only 1 of the player characters could equip that] and then just falling 1 or 2 hits short of managing to pass it.
I have been meaning to retry it from the start (it was a freeware, I think) but I can't recall the rather peculiar name of it. I has been ~ 20 years.
T-Rex Warrior for the Commodore Amiga.
Was probably my first introduction to 3D gaming, and because it was a hand-me-down I didn’t have any instructions on how to play it. It literally took my months to figure out how to move in that game, so in the meantime I just stood in place and spin around shooting at enemies until I died.
At some point at some friend's place I played a slightly GTA-ish game but it was all 3D stick figures and just running from the police and shooting thr stick men with guns.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/307640/Stick_RPG_2_Directors_Cut/
I think what I am looking for is a third-person shooter. Thanks for the tip anyway!
Oh ok, glhf
This is the one thing I actually use LLMs for: When I'm stuck trying to remember that one thing from a long time ago.
For me, the really hard one to find was a game called Return Fire. Awesome game.
One of my earlier memories was playing a strange game I haven't been able to find again. All I remember is: you control a car (I think it has flower decals on it?) and can drive through a desert/canyon area. You can also press a key which makes a rotor come out of the top of the car, allowing you to fly it like a helicopter.
I have no idea what the gameplay was beyond that, but I'd love to find it again.
I used to have this symbian game that had a small dragon as the main character and accidentally deleted it from the phone it was on. Never found it again :(
Yep, I have one of those. A side-scrolling scifi shooter for C64 from probably late 80s that I just remember a general vibe about. Not Nemesis, something where you fly above a sort of city. I have tried to remember its name for more than a decade probably.
One would think that there weren't that many of them but oh boy.
Dominion?
I haven't heard of that one, but no, wasn't that.
Also tried figuring this out with an AI but nope. I'm pretty sure I'm not hallucinating this game.
Can't really tell from that description but have you tried to look for it on Lemon? 🙂
https://www.lemon64.com/games/list.php?list_year=1985&list_year_max=1995&list_genre=Shoot%27em+Up&list_sub_genre=H-Scrolling
I have.
In fact, once I browsed through all the games in there and didn't find what I was looking for. It's so far ago and I was so young that I probably have a very distorted and overly positive view of what the game looked like.
There’s a game on the school computers in the late 90s where you choose between 3 numbers for how far you move, you are racing to the bottom of the screen, and some shortcut squares let you drop down.
The Guardian Legend
That's me and this robot-like C64 game. You did levels and took over robots so you could take over stronger robots.
I do remember Seven Cities of Gold, but only because the game crashed so often I saw the loading screen more than the game itself
I played that. Paradroid, right?
It is!
I just remembered Jet Slalom because of this.
I got two im thinking of : One I am sure I can recover but hey, let's shoot for some engagement here, it was a sort of worms like but with pigs, were you could promote units to archetypes The second one I couldn't find on my searches, it was a PS1 game (I think) in which you constructed your Mecha for battle royale rounds, and you could buy parts or change chassis. I remember an arena on a sort of battleship or structure in the sea, but I was unable to retrieve the name of this game.
For the first it wasn't hogs of war was it? Never played it but do remember it being in a few mags.
It was definitely this one ! I remember playing it at a friend's house and having a blast
second game might be Armored Core?
I don't think so, but it keeps coming in my searches also, I guess I will try it to see if it fits my memories !
Night Shift. A DOS game where you keep a factory cranking out toys and it gradually ramps up the difficulty by de-automating the machines that manage colour, materials, etc.
Sounds like ChatGPT. The more I'm busy in one session, the messier it gets.
I did this just yesterday, trying to find an ASCII Dracula game. Played it on a friend's PC-like in the late 80s. I remember you controlled all the characters but could lose Mina and others during the game depending on your choices.
Remember going to the asylum to chat to Renfield to find clues to where Dracula was hiding
Try clicking through Category:Video games based on Dracula to see if any are in the approximately correct era and platform, and if the description rings the bell.
Could it be the ‘Dracula (1986)’ text adventure?
I can't remember the name now, but I recently found a game In have been looking the name of for years. It's something like Pharo's. Curse or something along those lines, but I'd have to check Flashpoint Archive for the name because they have the online demo.
The concept was just that each level had a different board layout and you had to move 3 pieces of some sort of symbol or artifact or whatever to be adjacent ( possibly in a certain order horizontally ) but balls spawn if you move witjo clearing them by matching 3 or using a powerup. You could move them to any empty space so long as the path was clear.
Can't find a copy of the actual game itself from a reputable website right now, but I know it exists.
oh good are we remembering old video games
What's that one that's like spy vs spy where you fight a clone of yourself? Would've been windows 95/98 era
I think it was educational
Airborne! And Airborne 2.
It was a tower defense game before the term existed. Way back on a Macintosh back and white machine. You sat in the lower corner with a mortar and machine gun against people, tanks, helicopters, and jets trying to charge/shoot your position.
Oh! And The Dark Castle. There was a big the prevented you from finishing the game. Man I wish I could play it to completion.
Another awesome one is the tank game where you spawned on hills, then insulted each other before flinging various crazy weapon shots around (nikes, mirvs, napalm, dirt). Such fun.
I once played a first-person point-and-click adventure game featuring a player character who is a cyborg. I don't remember much about the game, but I do recall quite explicitly that it had a Hard Rock Cafe in the game. Haven't had any luck finding it.
Stay Tooned! https://classicreload.com/win3x-stay-tooned.html
For me it was Madalin Stunt Cars 2.
Played that shit all the time in the computer lab with my friends.
This was me with Return Fire on MS DOS.
For me it was Starush on Amiga. Still a great soundtrack.
I know it's name: End of the World, part 2. Was a Wolf RPG Editor game someone made and released for free.
Cant seem to find it anywhere.
I have two games.
The first one I found out was called Nanosaur and even has a free download. I played like 20 minutes of this in grade school one day and never got a chance to play it again during my childhood.
The other is insanely obscure, because I'm pretty sure I know the name of it but cannot find any trace of it. It's a fantasy themed RPG maker XP game I'm fairly certain is called "The Under" Where it starts as a training mission but your team discovers strange things going on and reality re-writing itself. It uses a real-time turn based combat (similar to final fantasy) and... ::: spoiler spoiler Everyone in the party except the kobold dies at the very end. ::: I'm also fairly certain the person making it started working on a sequel that had a small demo I played. A quick google search brought up another RPG maker game called The Under, but this isn't the game I'm talking about.
Mine was probably on a demo disc around 2000s. It was like a battle on some destroyed city, had futuristic tanks, aircrafts and anti-air. The tanks had WW1-style tracks, like they were huge and squeaky and the size of the whole side. The anti-air had Σ-symbols (faction maybe) and shot blue lasers. The closest I have come to is G-Police, but that’s not it. It was on Win98 most likely.
I still dont know the name of a c64 game i played a lot as a kid. You had to move some kind of flying submarine through a maze and if you touch the wall you die. The first few screens you had to fly downwards.
Is it Snare by any chance?
After a long search i remembered that it also could be some game of a magazine disk, then i though it also could be also some obscure german one and looked through an big list of german c64 games and there i found it. Its called Mission Transmiter! It seems to be a really obscure one, no wonder nobody knows that one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GokMOXQONMk
https://www.c64games.de/phpseiten/spieledetail.php?filnummer=4371
Sadly not :(
This sounds familiar, but I can't find anything about it online! The controls were mostly just up and down, right?
It started going downwards, but then also going left and right. It was some kind of maze. When iam back at my parents iam going to look for the disk boxes.
After a long search i remembered that it also could be some game of a magazine disk, then i though it also could be also some obscure german one and looked through an big list of german c64 games and there i found it. Its called Mission Transmiter! It seems to be a really obscure one, no wonder nobody knows that one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GokMOXQONMk
https://www.c64games.de/phpseiten/spieledetail.php?filnummer=4371
Glad you found it! Unfortunately for me, it doesn't look like the game I remember playing. That one was more of a submarine shape with sideways movement. Maybe with monochrome graphics?
I'm going to have to ask my parents what they remember from those days. All my searches are coming up empty.
The legend of Kyrandia or something