games

OOOOOOOOoooooo this is a good thread.

Ok ok ok I wanna talk about a game called Sentient by Psygnosis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(video_game)

This game is a first person RPG set on a mining space station that is headed towards disaster. I plays out in realtime and the events that occur are determined by your actions on the station.

What does this mean? Well if you do nothing the station will meet disaster. You can do whatever you want, but you might want to try and stop that.

Dialog with other station members plays out like this:

You can change your mood/manner of speaking (scale ranging from angry/aggressive to overly friendly), and everything will have different effects. How others see you is important. How others feel about you is important.

If you want you could also just fuck around with the wrong console and turn off Oxygen on the station.

It's neat.

Demo playthrough is basically spoiler free because they made a completely standalone scenario for the demo that is fully playable separate to the timeline that occurs in the actual game: https://youtu.be/rT_rbTj3weI?list=PL6dKSOjinJucRoEwU7y_dXWVNb1kS0G6d&t=33

What I like about this concept is that there's so much you can do with it. You could write stories that have whole butterfly effects based on how the player delayed the presence of one crew member at one specific event that happens later on or something like that. Just because the player took too long talking to someone and delayed their start to work or whatever. Or you could have events that kill various crewmembers essential to the operation of a station and the player's choice of delaying someone being at that even might then have knockon effects for who has what skills available for a later event. Etc etc. The kind of writing you could do with this kind of "story plays out in realtime" game has always really fascinated me.

ALSO it's really obviously influenced by Star Trek so there's that.

The Fortress of Dr. Radiaki for PC, a quite forgettable early FPS, don't think I've ever seen it discussed anywhere, played it like 2 or 3 times in a computer lab, edit: looked at a bit of a playthrough and damn this game sucks

Shufflepuck Cafe for Mac, got repetitive but could be fun for short games, the black and white graphics of the Mac version added to the atmosphere a bit

I also remember this simple PC game where you controlled a space ship and had to navigate or shoot junk coming from all directions and some (or all?) of the junk was icons/filenames/folders from your hard drive. It was on one of those shareware/demo collection discs.

Any Commander Keen heads in here?

I played a game called “hack mud” when it came out and it might be the most unique and rewarding video game I’ve ever played.

It was a text based, MMO, hacking game. You wrote, ran, and shared JavaScript in order to do basically whatever you want. It was incredible.

One user made a little app called “Haunty Mall” which was a play on the Monty Hall problem. You could run the app once a day, you picked one door, and if a little ASCII ghost was behind it payed out a bunch of money. It was probably the most run app in the game at the time.

I decided that I was going to steal that persons code but instead I changed two things. First instead of it paying out, win or lose it took money from your account and deposited into a dummy account that only I had access to. The other change I made was the name you had to type in to download and run the executable. It was a bit of social engineering. I made it one letter different so it looked identical at a quick glance, and knowing coders like to just type two or three letters and press tab to execute commands I just made sure mine came up before the real exe. It worked even better than I expected.

What I didn’t think about was the war I was committing myself to with the person good enough to have unlimited free money to give away to people.

I didn't get very far in it but I'd have to say Ironseed, a DOS space trading/combat game in the vein of Elite: Dangerous or Star Control 2 which is a much harder sci-fi take than usual on the concept. Crucially, it has no FTL travel. This has several ramifications:

• Your crew members don't have organic bodies; they're effectively chemical suspensions of brain matter linked directly into the ship's control system.
• Traveling over the vast interstellar distances slowly drives your crew insane. You have to have the ship's psychiatrist treat them to counter this (or, in desperate cases, restore their minds from backup - but this also causes them to lose any skill points accrued since the backup was made).
• There is no universal ingame currency because no civilization lasts for the thousands of years it takes to journey between stars. You have to barter for everything.
• Planets can undergo significant geological changes. You might visit your favorite trade hub only to find out that a volcanic eruption wiped out the global civilization sometime in the past few centuries.

The soundtrack is also dope as hell.

I hate that I don't have the name, but I saw a game on /r/webgames once back in like 2018 where you joined a lobby and played through many levels of a very simple game where you would aim and launch a car into a goal. What made it interesting is that it was a 3D browser game with an extremely unique surreal visual style. Every surface and the cars themselves were made of marbles with a stylized shader, purple and shiny. The skybox was a nebula. I don't know why it was multiplayer, you would just see the other ghosts launching around. It felt like a dream, a Y2K relic.

Liberal Crime Squad has got to be up there

Dilbert's Desktop Games!

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/dilbert-s-desktop-games-jol

It was surprisingly addictive, despite being universally panned at the time. It was also my first intro into the world of Dilbert, and I fell in love with characters and their catchphrases. The TV show was pretty good too.

Yeah, I know, shame about ~~Douglas Adams~~ Scott Adams (doh!)

Leiro - basically a real time worms

Clonk - kind of an ancient terraria

Creatures - a life sim/virtual pet game with genetics and some neat ai. Got a steam rerelease a few years ago

Most obscure: Hunt the Wumpus.

Weirdest (and still pretty obscure): Liberal Crime Squad

It's classic early 90s edu-tainment, but I have very fond memories of 3D Dinosaur Adventure.

There were a few weird games I played years ago that I still have on my hard drive:

Armadillo Run - a physics puzzle game https://www.armadillorun.com/

Art Sqool - a weird art project turned “game” interesting, but honestly not very fun. https://glander.itch.io/art-sqool

Windosill - an enjoyable short interact experience https://windosill.com/

Llammatron - a clone of Robotron, an OG twin stick shooter https://playclassic.games/games/arcade-dos-games-online/play-llamatron-2112-online/

Cool Cros Twins - a DOS platform puzzler https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-cool-croc-twins-1dd

Brainstorm Pro - a unique old school puzzler https://www.dosgames.com/game/brainstorm-pro/

Hexxagon - a puzzle battle game https://hexxagon.com/

Laser Light - a logic light puzzler https://www.dosgames.com/game/laser-light/

Space Rangers 2 is an absolute gem and still not very well known in the west. It's a semi-turn-based RPG with elements of RTS, text-based quests and old-school arcade

Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden remains one of my all-time favorites and the canned sequel is up there for my biggest what-ifs

Inca 1 and 2 were super obscure and weird games that I loved as a kid: https://youtu.be/5JdkbWGie-M

Imagine a game that's part space flight sim, part adventure game that's a sci-fi game about fighting space conquistadors? It's wild.

The thing that comes to mind that would probably be quite obscure to most people here is Dink Smallwood, a super edgy Zelda like from the early 2000 I think?

Other than that, every couple years I play Haven and Hearth again, an indie MMO made by two Swedes, which is probably still obscure by mmo standards

And because I probably won't have the chance to bring it up in any other thread, there was a DOS point and click game called Kronolog: The Nazi Paradox that was set in an alternate history world where the nazis won WWII, and they released a version for it in Europe (mainly the German market where you weren't allowed to have nazis in media) called Red Hell where they just made the bad guys Soviet.

There's a DOS game based on the first Terminator movie that takes place in an open world, released around 1990. You can play either as Kyle Reese or the Terminator.

In general, Terminator licensed games were in a weird place at the time, since T2 was the hottest movie around, but Ocean had the console rights and Midway had the arcade rights, so companies snatched up the license for the first movie instead.

petz horsez 2

for some fucking reason this game is a murder mystery with branching paths and multiple endings

Yume Nikki

Wrath of the Gods (1994). It's a cheesy old CD adventure game about mythical Ancient Greece with a bunch of live actors .

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=brzB9CFd1Pg

It was a fun evening, and that's about it

Aside from Kor there's a game I really liked that didn't get a ton of attention called Heart & Slash. I have fond memories of the couple weeks I spent playing it still, several years later, and I still listen to some of the OST once in a while.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summoner_(video_game) awesome party based rpg, with a huge fantasy world contained on one disk, I think it suffered from lack of promotion and janky combat system (it's basically a rhythm game, before rhythm mini games were popular so maybe it was just ahead of its time)

Gish is a platform game where you play as a ball of black tar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_(video_game)

Chrome (2003) is sort of like if Far Cry, Deus Ex and Shadow of Chernobyl had a baby. I've never seen it mentioned anywhere.