Ask Lemmy

Symbian, mobile Java games

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.

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.

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.

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).

Nintendo game called Solomon's Key.

It was a great early puzzle game.

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.

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

They also have a nice wiki

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.

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

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.

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.

There was a door (plugin) for The text-based *BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon called Violet's Tavern.

You could sit at the bar and buy a drink that enhanced your stats, You could go upstairs and pay for a hooker to replenish your energy or you could try to seduce the barmaid / owner and actually have kind of a sweet encounter with her.

It had a betting mechanic I don't remember if it was blackjack, dice or what but you could game it a little bit by throwing a shit ton of money at it a few times. The initial odds to win or somewhat higher than the extended odds to win so if you hit it and hit big you just walk away. Sometimes you ended up empty but more often than not it worked.

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

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.

"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

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.

Cherry Coke had a promotional game called something like The Lost Island Of Alanna they gave out in the mid 90s. There was a little attack of them in the waiting room of the principles office at my school.

It was a pretty well done short Myst-like.

When you beat it the reward was a guide to read secret messages that were hidden in the squiggles that covered the cherry coke label at the time.

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. Try and grow a city-state by strategically distributing resources. Poor distribution results in death by famine, disease or invasion. Good distribution keep state growing and eventually become king to win the game. I played it on a Commodore PET.

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.

Major Havoc.

Super cool arcade game c. 1988 featuring a simple line drawing type environment where the Major runs through hallways, a little like the original Prince of Persia. The controls were a cylindrical scroll wheel and a jump button. The really cool thing though was that there were pads on the floor that would trigger various effects, like a gun that shoots a star shaped bullet down the hall that you had to avoid. Many new and exciting challenges to face with every quarter. Ah, good times.