Really obscure games you've played

[phediuk]

This is not a "hidden gems" thread, where you post slightly-lesser-known-but-still-well-exposed games. This thread is for those games that are utterly obscure. The sort that don't have a Wikipedia article, that never got any press coverage, and never saw wide (or any) commercial distribution.  The kind of game that could have, without hyperbole, sold zero copies. The sort of stuff that someone threw together in their bedroom after school. The kind of game that was maybe on a shareware disk 25 years ago with 100 other games or was self-released on a BBS or something. The kind of game that turns up maybe 2 screenshots on Google Image Search. Maybe it was only released in a fringe market like 90s Russia or something, or it was a covertape game from a Finnish C64 mag. Plumb the deepest depths of obscurity.

My contribution is Alien Poker for DOS. It's poker, but the characters are all aliens. I actually learned the rules of poker from this game.




That is literally every image of it that turns up on Google. There are no videos of it on Youtube. It is not listed in GameFAQs' or Mobygames' databases.

Okay, your turn.

[GamerL]

Gee, I don't think I've played anything that obscure.

[Deleted]

Kurt would probably win this one with all the research he usually has to do.

[toei]

Your criterias are a little hardcore. The one example I can think of are those net yaroze games. Those were basically indie/amateur games produced using a programmable playstation. I played one that seemed inspired by landstalker, called Terra Incognita. Actually I think hg101 mentioned at some point.

[nerdybat]

Alexis: The Last Fighter - a weird beat'em up from 2002 that looks like some kind of modern Unity asset flip. I get to know this game thanks to a bootleg compilation disc with different fighting-themed games back in 2005. Too bad I eventually lost this disc somewhere, since I had the whole game on it, while nowadays it's only possible to find a shareware version (with no unlocked release being uploaded anywhere, as much as I've searched for it).




Revenge of the Mutant Camels 2 - the official sequel to an old C64 game (the original was recently reviewed on 47K Games podcast, if I remember correctly) that was so poorly made, it was removed from sales several days after, and almost removed from existence as a result.



These games were so obscure that I had to capture the footage myself (at least that's how it was in 2013), so I think they fit the criteria .u.

[phediuk]

Nice! Now that's what I'm talking about.

[ommadawnyawn2]

I guess this one? It was on school PCs in sweden. Haven't played it in 20 years or so.

[wyrdwad]

I'm not sure if anything I've played can QUITE meet the exact criteria you've outlined, but as an MSX gamer, I've played a fair share of stuff that's ALMOST that obscure, and actually just discovered one such game this past weekend that I've kind of fallen in love with.

Forgive me for copying and pasting from my Facebook, but I think I summarized it as well there as I possibly can.

I'm constantly impressed at how much weird crap there is on the MSX platform in general, but every now and again, I'm reminded that nobody out-weirds Japan. I checked out a Japanese freeware homebrew disk game from 1996 over the weekend called "Izumic Ballade," which is a turn-based RPG from the same indie devs who released a couple shmups I like on the system (Kyokugen and Pleasure Hearts, both of which are rather renowned for their ludicrously high point values, WHICH WILL BE AN IMPORTANT DETAIL IN A MOMENT), and I was... not quite expecting what I got.

See, some RPG heroes fight for love. Some fight for justice. Izumic Ballade's heroine -- a rich high school student who lives in the department store her dad runs -- fights to... let the world know the importance of the bass clarinet.

There's like, alien invasion and crap that happens too. But that's all secondary. The number one priority at all times is the bass clarinet.

All magic consists of bass clarinet songs (which you have to learn through practice sessions with the boy you like, many of which play out as rhythm minigames -- kind of a neat idea!). And your main attack is called ベークラサイ, which I eventually realized was ベークラ (short for ベース・クラリネット) + サイ = "bass clarinet sai." As in, you use your bass clarinet as a sai.

It's a very clunky and buggy game, as it appears to have been programmed entirely in MSX-BASIC, which is... shall we say, not the most optimized platform for creating a game this complex? And it's certainly not very pretty to look at, with tile sets that often stretch the boundaries of the imagination, representing objects in a somewhat... abstract fashion.

But there's just something oddly intriguing about its utter obsession with the bass clarinet... among other design decisions.

For example, in keeping with developer M-Kai's love of high numbers, this is an RPG with the single most numerically ludicrous stats I've ever seen. Like, EVER. There was a save-game on the disk image I downloaded that was located in the final dungeon, so I loaded it up just to see what the endgame looked like... and the main character was level 343, had nearly 14 billion experience, an attack value over 10,000, and was regularly striking enemies for well over 100,000 damage per hit (I even managed to critical-hit one enemy for around 650,000 damage once!). And upon completion of a random battle against one random foe (that was so weak, I one-shotted it before it could get even a single hit in on me), I received nearly FORTY-THREE MILLION EXPERIENCE POINTS, plus just a bit over forty-two million Kol (the game's currency).

I've got screenshots of this. Or rather, photographs I took of my screen as I played, because I have terrible capture equipment and was much too lazy to hook any of it up. But somehow, I think it's almost better viewing these images as photographs of a TV screen -- it's more "fitting" for the general mood of things.





Oh, and one more screenshot for good measure: your music teacher. Who is apparently all-knowing. And also seems to always be shirtless for some reason. With a creepy expression on his face. And the number "98" emblazoned on his forehead, despite this game being made in 1996 (though even if it were made in 1998, I'm not sure why the music teacher would want to advertise that fact on his forehead!).



(As you can see, this teacher -- who's just called "Teacher" -- is now my avatar on here!)

This game is just pure unfiltered madness, and I kind of love it. I do wish it weren't so buggy, though -- it regularly freezes on me during battle, which necessitates saving often... except saving your game actually costs MP (!), so saving often isn't necessarily recommended unless you're near a healer of some kind. I think I've figured out how to avoid experiencing this freeze -- it seems to only happen when I press the action button at the wrong time -- but it's still rather aggravating that I have to be so careful while playing.

...Nonetheless, it's a good game for this topic, I believe. It's obscure enough that virtually no one in the English-speaking world knows a whole lot about it (not even within the MSX community), and even in Japan, it was pretty well overshadowed by the shmups that came after it, with the game being little more than a footnote on most of the sites that DO discuss it.

Definitely a game worth remembering, though. And if you happen to play the bass clarinet, then HOO BOY, DO YOU EVER NEED TO HAVE THIS IN YOUR LIFE.

-Tom

[Arale]

You can easily find downloads of these, but several RPG Maker games I've played come to mind. "Maze" by Space Debris and many games by the dev 14. Aquor too.

There's also the Towelket series, which actually does have some Wikia and Tvtropes pages about it, but I have to imagine they're by some of the only English fans in the world since I never hear about them anywhere else, like, ever.

[Bumpyroad]

Nothing particularly noteworthy, except for maybe Wing Force, which was dumped recently by Shou. Don't know what's its status now, but it was relatively unknown about a year ago or so.

[toei]

Izumi ballad sounds cool! What does it look like outside of battle, though? Is it 1st-person? And does the soundtrack use a bunch of bass clarinet?

[wyrdwad]

Jan 17, 2018 2:29:51 GMT -5 toei said:

Izumi ballad sounds cool! What does it look like outside of battle, though? Is it 1st-person? And does the soundtrack use a bunch of bass clarinet?

No, it's pretty standard overhead-view RPG fare. There is one gameplay video of it online, though whatever's being used to play it is running super-fast, causing the encounter rate to be considerably higher than it actually is in-game, but also mitigating a lot of load times and making the world navigation a little less screen-tear-y -- so I guess it kind of balances out?

Anyway, here's what it looks like in action:



As for the soundtrack, it's OPLL FM, so there's only so close the score can get to the sound of a bass clarinet! But... honestly, I really like the game's music. For as messy and "low-rent" as the graphics in the game are, the music is genuinely quite good. I do wish the battle theme wouldn't cut out every time the menu displayed, though -- again, the game is very, very clunky.

I still am having a really good time with it, though!

-Tom

[Serah]

I used to be big into the Game Maker scene back in the early 2000s so there's actually a ton I've played that seem to be impossible to obtain anymore. There was a surprisingly fun, if hideous, flip screen platformer called Danny Runner 3 that I remember fondly. I ended up being friends with the guy who made it but we lost contact years ago. As far as I'm aware it's impossible to download the game anymore and I no longer have the file or even the PC I played it on

[JoeQ]

I played tons of janky old Finnish DOS shareware and freeware games as a kid. You can still find some of them on old Finnish game sites, but many have vanished forever and I doubt anybody outside of Finland has ever heard them. Here's a few examples:

[dsparil]

I used to play so much Alien Poker! It isn't actually that obscure. You can play it emulated on Archive.org and it is on YouTube; it's #17 for "alien poker" and #10 if you throw DOS at the end. Not picking on you or anything, but I saw "really obscure" and a game nearly everyone I knew that used DOS played at some point and had to say something.

English language shareware is actually pretty well preserved all things considered. My first thought for super obscure shareware is Die Blarney, but even that is on Archive.org. My second thought, Elfland, is also is also playable on Archive.org. You can even still buy the second episode! It even had a Windows remake with original graphics and super crappy looking Xbox 360 version!

Edit: Oddly enough, I think it's Windows freeware especially from the dialup era that's more obscure since it wasn't officially collected onto discs like shareware and its availability was more up to the whims of the creator. Stuff made in Klik N Play and it's successors in particular. When Derek Yu was making freeware as Blackeye Software, he was part of a larger freeware community that's basically lost to time. Arthur Lee as Mr. Podunkian made some games poking fun at another developer named Circy. Two of the three Circy games made by Lee are still available, but Circy 2 is lost. There's a minuscule chance that I still have it on a CD-R, but I doubt even that. Circy's actual games seem to be gone too.