RetroGaming

I had an R-Zone when I was younger. It was an absolute piece of shit. My mom found it at a garage sale. We had a racing game that I remember and then I remember like some K-mart ass style fighting game too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-Zone

Here's a few handhelds I have that most people have never heard of: https://i.imgur.com/eYZ4yP9.jpeg

• Mega Duck
• Supervision
• Game Master
• Gamate

My neighbour had Sega Channel when I was a kid. So ahead of its time. I know it's not a system, but it was certainly obscure. I've never talked to anyone who knew what it was.

Sega was just ahead of its time for so long.

I've played Colossal Cave Adventure on an ICL 2900-series mainframe from the 1980s at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley.

I own a Virtual Boy. Not really super rare or anything but definitely obscure. Other than most people I love playing with it! Wish it had more games.

Does anyone remember the add on voice to speech and advanced sound module that chunked into the right hand side of that machine. It was black magic back then.

I had a Casio FX-795P as a kid. Not really a game system, just a calculator with a one-line text display, but it had a BASIC interpreter built in so I made some games for it (a couple of text adventures and a side-view shooter.)

My uncle convinced my parents to buy me a 3DO instead of a PlayStation.

Oh yes, I most certainly have played video games on obscure systems. How's the Gizmondo grab you? That was the handheld that looks like a Hostess fruit pie, created and supported by the Swedish mafia. It pales next to the PSP, but it really isn't as crummy as the critics claimed. Sticky Balls has its moments... just don't tell your friends you were playing a game called "Sticky Balls."

The PC-9801 and Sharp X68000 had some pretty fun hidden gems. Is the PCEngine (TurboGrafx16) considered obscure?

We had a TI-99/4A as well. Munchman was a Pac-Man clone that we loved and A-Maze-Ing which was a simple but fun maze game.

After that we had Socrates which was a cheap edutainment console thing with built in games. I don’t remember the games but it was lacking compared to the TI.

When my mates had ZX Specruns my parents bought me a Sharp MZ-80k computer. It was the dogs danglies with a built in monitor and tape deck. You even had to load basic from tape to get it started.

Used to program my own games or type them in from magazines. Lots of text based adventures, football manger type stuff, card and board games.

I had a TI-99/4A! I coded a game for it, you ran around fighting robots and you could find a blaster and a jetpack.

The TI-99/4A had a lot of techical problems which killed its performance. They released a little module that you could insert into the game slot, then you insert the game into the module - this improved the performance drastically. Unfortunately I only heard about it many years later, I didn't know about it at the time.

Somebody wrote an emulator which lets you run TI-99/4A games under windows or linux and I once tinkered with that and got my own game up and running again.