Ask Lemmy

I used to have this game for the NES called Xexyz. It was this really strange game that tried to be several different genres in one, and I actually had a ton of fun with as a kid. I don't think I've ever met anybody else who has ever heard of this game, let alone played or enjoyed it. I'm not even super sure how I came to owning it in the first place; I think it was in a box of random games my aunt got from a flea market at one point, maybe.

If any of you are sitting on an NES emulator with an archive of every official ROM and haven't tried this game, it's definitely worth checking out. Weird little gem that nobody seems to know about, it seems.

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

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

This song I downloaded from a file sharing application in the early 2000s. I've been searching for the artist for about two decades, nothing (the forum posts that come up when you search for it are also me).

Toomba 2: The evil swine return is a piece of nostalgia I can never share

Symbian, mobile Java games

Captain goodnight. Still one of the best games I've ever played. First game I saw that allowed piloting planes, helicopter, jeeps, tanks and run around killing enemies all with a solid story.

There was this old game called Twistingo that my grandma had on her computer. Made by a long defunct company called eGames, it was basically like if Zuma and Bingo had a child. There were balls with numbers that'd slowly advance down a track, and you had one or more bingo cards. If the ball had a matching number on your card, you'd click on the number and the ball would vanish. If the balls reached the end, you lost. Really fun game, I still have the old disc for it.

Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret.

Given the amount of videos on these games you'd think they were super popular and well known, but when they were brand new nobody knew about 'em. To this day, I rarely find anyone who actually played them when they were first launched on an actual DOS computer and not through GOG and DOSBox.

Even today, it's rare that I run into people who know how awesome they are. They had it all; bitchin' graphics, insane action, amazing FMV with actual acting and costumes... Other than the controls, they still hold up today.

Nintendo game called Solomon's Key.

It was a great early puzzle game.

Has anyone seen the 80's animated series The Mysterious Cities of Gold? It took me forever to find it and before I did I started doubting if it even existed or if I made it all up in my head. It takes place in the 1500's and it follows this group that is looking for the lost cities of gold. At some point early on they find an ancient aircraft that is made of solid gold, solar powered and in the shape of a giant condor.

Alter Aeon is a fun MUD with multiclassing. I love my wizard / cleric / thief

They also have a nice wiki

The video game Star Goose that came on a floppy disk.

Right offhand, Rita Pfeiffer. There have been times where I was her only Spotify listener. Probably also nobody has heard of Knife the Puppets but me and my wife. My favorite musician at the moment is probably Ashley Virginia, a little known folk singer out of North Carolina. I've been obsessed with the Hushabyes since Lindsey Verril of Little Mazarn introduced them to the world. I'm getting a cassette player mostly for New New Sincerity, Lindsey's label, but there are some cassettes I want from the Spinster Sounds collection.

I'm sure I've seen some ultra rare movies, but I watch so much weird old trash that I have no idea how well known any of it is. I've seen Tales from the QuadeaD Zone twice. I follow Blood Tea and Red String on Instagram. I excited for the sequel. One of my all time favorite movies is a 1977 X-rated version of Cinderella with full song and dance numbers (a few of them genuinely fantastic!) and Sy Richardson as the fairy godmother.

EDIT: I forgot the real crown gem! We own a copy of the original cut of a movie called Freedom Deep! It's basically a feature length music video for a band called Goya's Child. The version of Freedom Deep you can find online is the new cut. It has lots of obnoxious narration over the music and nonsense 9/11 content thrown in. The rare DVD version is still not a great movie, but it's a painfully fun ultra long grunge music video! Oh I need to make some people I work with watch Freedom Deep.

"Mail Order Monsters," which came out in the 8-bit era (mine was C64). Basically, you started out with a "base monster," like plant, insect, reptile, etc. Then you battled someone else's. The winner got some money, which could be used to upgrade your monster with abilities, extra limbs, and so on. You could save your monster on a floppy disk and battle on someone else's system.

My love affair ended when a friend figured out how to hack that data file on the floppy and make an invincible monster

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. It was a tex based strategy game on the TRS 80 written in basic. You played a feudal lord and tried to grow your empire. Each turn was a year. It was a text only game, but I'm pretty sure they had a graphics version at one point. When I say graphics, it was the upper half of the ASCII character set mapped over to block characters. This was in the 70's.

Operation Sandman, amazing movie with Ron perlman and also the adventures of Pete and Pete

There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90's where there's this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.

One of the earlier games I had on a CD-ROM. Back then it wasn't a disc tray. You eject an entire disc jewelcase-like thing and put your cd inside the case and shove it back in like a floppy disk.

When I was a kid I saw this stop motion animation on tv about a little kid afraid to go to bed. This crescent-moon headed bird man comes and steals his eyes. It ends with the boy, blind, stumbling around in the dark.

It was awesome.

I had this game I swear was Atlantis related, but involved you flying a tri-plane, shooting down other planes. It was very cool.

Most obscure videogames I ever played:

1. A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don't remember its name and I've never seen it since.

2. A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.

Back in the heyday of flash videos and before youtube, there was a clerks spoof featuring marvel comics heroes that I remember as being enjoyable, clever, and ultimately just a good tribute/ripoff of the source material. I have no idea how to find that again.

A solar powdered handheld called something like Keep the devil rising.