Everyone has that one game they once played when they were young. That weird game that no-one else seems to remember but them. What’s yours?
Mine is The Wild Bunch, a strange text adventure/cowboy thing. I played this game endlessly as a clueless kid and I only remember it in fragments. Recently this game popped into my memory and really managed to freak me out. Such a strange experience to remember something you thought you had forgotten.
I want you all to have the same experience! Search the deepest recess of your memories and let’s talk about those weird games that only you remember!
Comments
242 responses to “Tell Us Dammit: Games That Only You Remember”
Operation Eagle. Like hotline Miami but a DOS game on a 286.
All the best games were on a 286.
Yes! I played the crap out of that game, haven’t thought about that one in years.
Emperor: Battle for Dune.
Or, Mixed Up Mother Goose
You are not the only one 🙂
My sister used to play the CD version of Mixed Up Mother Goose all the time when it first came out. It was one of the first CD Rom games that we owned so it was a bit of a novelty around the house.
Mother Goose, yep, here too. My Dad had one of the first laptops on the market (some chunky thing where the screen only displayed in shades of red) and MMMG was on it.
It’s amongst my first memories of gaming – perhaps THE first.
Team Buddies, PS1 classic with the best 4 player CO-OP ever! Ahh fond nostalgic memories of bikes getting stuck…
Koi Wa Kakehiki.
it was a weird tile-sliding game on the Gameboy.
I found it on one of those 64-in-1 cartridges, and it proved rather endearing to me.
I may have even put it in as a Scribbletaku/Haitaku.
Rad Gravity on the NES. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else reference this game.
Haha I remember that game, can’t mistake that big head for anything else.
I forgot all about that game until I saw a youtube vid recently. I played the crap outta that as a kid 🙂
the Duke Nukem 3D alpha, or C-12 Final Resistance.
The Horde!
You were a farmer who put down defenses to stop waves of red monsters from destroying your farm buildings and from eating your cows.
More people need to remember The Horde. Especially since a lot of people seem to forget it existed when talking about trap games like Orcs Must Die. Weren’t you working for a king though?
None shall pass!
Aroo…Arooo….
Derng dung derng dunga derng…
I friggin loved that game, I had the magic-somethingorother card in my PC that had fullblown mpeg sequences for the cut-scenes, Kirk Cameron in full rez!
Evil Genius, though there might be 1 or 2 people that remember it.
I remember my copy was broken.
I remember mentioning that I was playing it in an interview for a games company once and being told “Don’t mention that game! The guy over there spent years pitching that game while he worked there, and then they actually made it about a year after he quit”.
I still have this installed on my PC.
Take that, pesky secret agents!
Actually, I’m pretty sure a lot of people remember it. I loved the game!
Definitely remember it – heck, you can still buy it on GOG.
My nomination: Martian Raider on the VIC-20, released on cassette tape in the early 80s.
Basically a Scramble clone (scrolling shooter, left to right, flying through caverns with various turrets and so forth on the walls); for an alternative reference, think of R-Type, but considerably more primitive.
Biker Mice from Mars
Never heard of it 😛
That was a kids cartoon as well. My brother and I loved it!
Zeliard!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeliard
Was the first game I got when the family got its first PC (a 286) in like 1990 or 91. Felt so good when I finally clcoked that sucker 😛
Still haven’t met anyone else who has played it though… anyone?
Me! Loved that game as a kid! Sucked at it though so I never finished it. Could barely make it past the first dungeon.
Frickin Love(d) Zeliard. I have the official poster that came with the game which is all the maps somewhere…
Yeah, this one http://zeliardgame.tripod.com/download/maps.jpg
Yep, me too :0
I remembe rone level I couldn’t get through wihtout numbeirng the doors on the map, so i can work out which one came out where (the forest/ tree level).
I’m pretty sure I have some very similar markings on my map. Damn, now I want to know where the hell that is. (Buried in a box with old floppy-disks somewhere in the garage most likely)
Forty Winks
Cruise for a Corpse!
Is that the game where you highlighted bits of dialogue to copy into your notebook and use in conversations later?
That was a cool mechanic, though I seemed to spend all my time getting told ‘I don’t know anything about that’
That’s the one. And extremely catchy music. 😀
Turns out that I was actually thinking of “Murder on the Mississippi”. Interesting that they both had the same mechanic, I thought it was unique 🙂
Oh, maybe I’m remembering wrong. Did have a note book that had hundreds of dialogue choices with similar responses. Maybe it was just something about that era of adventures.
Hocus Pocus, old Apogee DOS game.
Ah, the golden Apogee shareware era.
Hell yes. Was gonna say Pharaoh’s Tomb, I loved the absolute shit out of that game when I was a kid. Another from the Apogee DOS library.
I completely flipped out a few years back when finding it had just been released as freeware. There was a note in the readme from the guy behind them saying something like “I don’t think anyone will even care about any of these.” I was just like… I care! I care a lot! This is the best thing ever!
I only had the first episode (wow episodic gaming was a thing back then) though, never realised there was more until revisiting the game after coming across our old box of floppies and excavating all those childhood memories. I think I did play through the other three eps, but am still yet to crack out the sequel, Arctic Adventure.
Pharaoh’s Tomb was the bomb – OMG windy levels!
Those things were the devil.
Ufouria
Old CGA PC game “Astro tit”
I was a young boy and it made me giggle. Opened my mind to things I never knew about
Hahaha I remember disovering that on a work PC in the mid 80s.
hahaha pissa
what a weird game
I remember doing work experience and I found Wolf3D and some old golf game
Work experience become alright after that!
Does anyone remember Boss Mode .. might have been in the Sierra games?
Dark Side on the Amiga. It was a 3d fps with jetpack (as far as I can remember)! Way ahead of its time.
Also provides valuable perspective for those kids today who complain when a game runs at “only” 30 fps 😛
Damn kids, get off my lawn, etc
It was capped at 8fps for artistic effect. It more accurately reflected the zoetropes we used to huddle around for entertainment.
They did some kind of sequel / follow up to it, didn’t they? Some kind of Egyptian setting or something? Can barely remember it…
I still have a copy round somewhere.
Whenever I’m tempted to complain about frame rate I remember Arctic Fix and shut up immediately. Single digit frames per second were state of the art for 3D games back then.
When I was a kid a mate of mine had an Amstrad CPC 464 and bunch of games that a lot of people probably wouldn’t know about or remember these days.
Some of those include Super Sam (explore and collect’em up platformer) Cauldron (flying around on a broom as a witch) Jet Set Willy (platformer) and Juggernaut (top down truck driving sim). Man there were some weird games but some great ones too.
I had an amstrad and it was awesome
Falcon came installed on it. I had no instructions and it took about a week to get the plan flying. Awesome fun
Most games we had on disk but a few were on cassette. It felt like it took a week to load the game…. then it would crash or something. So we went back to the disks. Was a great machine with so many good times!
Loved that PC. Had so many Sierra games.
+1000 for Sierra games!
Had one of those. Some great games.
I once told of this game here and someone made a suggestion that wasn’t the right game. But it could have been since nostalgia is stupid.
I remember it being on the NES and the intro was a cutscene of someone walking down a road then turning into a village. A village with houses on long poles. I also remember the final dungeon requiring flying boots to reach.
and there’s another game everybody played but always forgets. Ufouria: The Saga.
That sounds so familiar, I can remember playing a game with flying boots.
Faxanadu?
Sounds like it could be Faxanadu, otherwise not sure what it could be. Some slightly frustrating controls at first but was pretty good.
Faxanadu was my first thought. its on the Wii Virtual Console.
One of my all time favourites i would play over and over is Mean Streets.
Another was STUNTS.
I know they’re not super obscure but games like Alley Cat, Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure and Jill of the Jungle were my Mario and Sonic games growing up. Spent way to long the other night trying to get Jill of the Jungle running on Windows 8.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmo%27s_Cosmic_Adventure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_of_the_Jungle
Still cannot for the life of me workout it’s name, but there was a game that I could have sworn that you would walk around with your character looking for keys, using potions and opening doors to get to new parts of the castle. I have a feeling it was a click and point adventure, everytime I ask and someone guesses a name it is never it 🙁
I played it in the 90’s on an old DOS computer at the same time as the first or second Police Quest, but I feel it will be forever be doomed to the memories of my mind.
I’m still trying to work this out for you!
Was just thinking about you as I was typing this! Hope you’ve been well and not posting too much because you’re too enthralled in Kyrat 😛
<3
I know the game, just not the name of it sorry, I also know how unhelpful this post is
This is a good start, when you remember you’ll come back to this post and you will tell me it’s name because you’re a good person. Right? 😛
I surely will, though unless kotaku archives things older than 2 years I am not hopeful
It’s not Solstice is it? I remember playing that on the NES.
Damn, I thought that was it for a minute! The art style is a little similar to this, the graphics I remember were quite good for that time though.
The game is definitely not Kings Quest though! If it helps I remember a monk that kinda looked like the villain from The Smurfs with his monk hair cut lol.
90s, keys in a castle, collecting potions, etc? Hm. Castle of the Winds is the first thing springs to mind, but it was Windows-era.
Is it one of the Kyrandia games? Or maybe a Simon the Sorceror game?
Alas it isn’t, I just had a quick look then. The art style was more SNES than it was totally pixelated 🙁 I don’t think I’ll ever find out, appreciate your suggestions though!!
Who Dares Wins I and II on the Commodore 64.
Also, Cops ‘n Robbers and The Detective Game.
Wings of Fury, World Games on Commodore 64, Action Quake 2.
Wings of Fury ! I spent so much time strafing those Japanese troops as they ran from bunker to bunker..
Anyone else play Netwars?
I don’t know if the “net” was supposed to refer to network play, I always figured it was because the graphics were 3D nets. And I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Illusion of Time (illusion of Gaia in ntsc territories). Amazing snes action rpg.
Also, Granny’s garden!!!
Granny’s garden was on our schools computer under the banner of eductaional software.
I was still scared of that witch tho 😛
Nothing like the BBC micro!!
Yeha, if that is the one I’m thinking of, it was really dumb but everyone loved it. I remember being shoved into an oven or something, it was terrifying.
Yeah ours too – wasn’t there a “faggot” of sticks to collect outside her house.. pretty sure I remember our class being terribly amused by this. Never finished it.. hmm,,
I was going to suggest Illusion of Gaia as well so I guess we’re both wrong!
I played quite a bit of Illusion of Time, and wasn’t there also a sort-of sequel or something for it? Because I played that too.
Granny’s Garden sounds familiar too, was it an old Mac game?
Illusion of Gaia is a pretty well known game actually.
Final Lap Twin on the TG-16. To this day it is the only RPG/RC racing hybrid ever made. You ran an over world map, and your random battles were races. You had to get better gear for your car to advance through the boss battles. I never managed to beat the last race 🙁
I’ve been trying to find a game that was on some ‘1000 games’ disk from when I was a kid but have had no luck.
Basically it’s a ‘slide the tiles’ around game but you have to get a taxi from the start point to the end point with as much distance as possible but without running out of fuel.
Any ideas?
Guardian’s Crusade (PS1)
There are quite a few obscure games I used to play, I had a cd set of 1001 shareware games made from any and every dos developer. A few off the top of my head, Dare to Dream, a point and click adventure game from Cliffy B and back when Epic were called Epic Megagames. God of Thunder, Peggleboz, Billy the Kid.
The cd was a treasure trove of crap games.
A couple more games, H.U.R.L, a kiddie shooter which your enemies are trying to get you dirty, Lunar BBall, just a basketball hoop shooting game where you can set the gravity and play in courts over the solar system. The Adventures of Maddog Williams, a command line game (not too sure what the genre is called). The Vinyl Goddess of Mars, pretty much a carbon copy of the Jill of the Jungle games.
Is this some sort of sneaky way for you to gather Remember This? ideas Mark?
But to the topic, some form of adventure game in Winnie the Pooh universe on the C64 we played at school, cant for the life of me remember the name.
Or Dreamweb… man I miss that game.
People probably remember it, but no one seems to talk about “Return to Zork” an awesome FMV point and click adventure
Want some rye?
That scene – and the constant replaying of it – was directly responsible for our school librarian from removing Return to Zork from the school library.
‘Course ya do.
I had a game called “How to be a Complete Bastard” on my C64 that was pretty funny. Kind of a little adventure game where you walked around doing bastardly things to people.
Also “Gargoyle’s Quest” on the Gameboy, which I really loved. A platformer/RPG hybrid.
A mate of mine often sung the praises of Gargoyle’s Quest. I tried it one day and it’s a great little game.
Never played the gameboy one, but owned the NES sequel as a kid and loved the hell out of it.
I had Gargoyles Quest for GB back in the day. Was a great game & one of only a few that I finished on that system.
Have never played the NES sequel @neon_jackal but I have been on the look out for a copy so I look forward to eventually giving that a go.
There’s also the SNES “Demon’s Crest”, which I didn’t like as much, but isn’t bad.
Thanks for the heads up. Will have to check that out too.
Both just released recently on Wii U eShop.
Sweet. I just bought an eshop card for MK8 DLC. Might pick both up on there instead of probably paying a fair bit for an original on ebay.
A game I *don’t* remember is Robin Hood: Conquests of the Longbow.
In that I only have a few brief flashes of trying to play it, but I don’t think it worked properly, didn’t like our mouse or something. And/or we were too young and dumb to be able to figure out how to play it. Still got it kicking around though, there was just so much *stuff* in there.
That was actually pretty great. So deep.
Halloween Harry! aka Alien Carnage
That game was awesome!
Yes, I had almost forgot about it! Basically 2D Duke Nukem.
Oh, man… I really hope that comment means “it’s like the 2D Duke Nukems”, not that you missed out on the pre-Duke 3D days. ‘Cause if you did, you’ve got some fun catching up to do 🙂
I actually had no idea there were 2D Dukes’ :0 Now that’s obscure.
Hmm, I’d say that there are only a few people that would remember Escape from Antcatraz for the Apple IIc. When CDs first started being a thing, we had several Shareware CDs with a huge number of games on them. I’d be pleasantly surprised if people remember things like Stryx, the Hoosier City series, Kaeon, and the Aldo’s Adventure series.
I bet Mark’s looking for new “Remember This” ideas.
Tunnels of Doom on the TI99/4a!
Also, Toonstruck on PC. Man, that was a game and a half. I don’t think I will ever get the image of a leather clad cow being dominated by a sheep while yelling “Whip my Cream!” out of my brain. IT IS THERE FOREEEEVVVEEER!!
Here’s the clip:
You’re welcome.
I still say “Balloon?” every so often. There is also not enough brain bleach to remove the bowling scene from my mind.
I want to say a game called, maybe, “Drug Runner”? It was all text, and basically just buying and dealing drugs, trying to make a profit, avoid police and muggers, and maybe something to do with prostitutes. I was like, 11 when I played it, and I knew drugs were bad (I had no idea there was anything beyond marijuana, and didn’t understand anything about the drugs in the game, except that LSD was worth more than ecstasy most of the time). I remember my mother seeing me play it, and being like, “No, don’t play that… ” but then being impressed by my trading skills.
Also, a point and click adventure where you start out in a shitty castle; I think you’re a wizard’s slave apprentice. You have to wait for him to leave, then sneak out of the basement, find a few things, and make your way down this windy crumbly road. I died SO many times falling off the effing cliff. No idea what it’s called.
The first one is Drug Lord 1, I’ll give that one to you in advance for working out what my game is
( ^ ^ )
That’s it! Druglord! Ahaha, oh man. I probably shouldn’t download that on my work computer.
http://www.pcgaming.ws/viewgame.php?game=drug_lord_2
In fact I think it’s Druglord 2.2, some of the comments on this thing are amazing. You need to pay Buddles back so you probably should download that on your work computer so you can… He’s a violent guy after all! 😉
I remember that game! suprisingly addictive. Was always so excited to get that trans am.
Oh man, thanks @highperformance! Drug Lord was frickin’ fantastic.
Hey Jane, if you liked that one, you should try Liberal Crime Fighter sometime. It was very similar only much deeper and more intricate.
The second one sounds like King’s Quest III.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_III
There’s a fan remake of it that looks pretty good.
Hocus Pocus on pc. I’m sure others played it but every time I bring it up no one knows what I’m talking about. Was a shareware title (apogee?) that we played a lot as kids.
Yeah that was awesome! Unfortunately I only ever had the the version with the first 9 levels. I should find the rest of the game sometime.
Also, the music was awesome.
Loved it when you got the power up which shot your magic attack in one deadly, continuous stream.
Such a good game.
The Lost Vikings. Probably not that unusual but twas a great game indeed. Never managed to finish it as my dexterity at such a young age was not good enough but I sure did try.
Team Buddies i loved that game and still try to find a copy every so often.
Also remember but cannot for the life of me remember the name (i was about 3 when i played it). It was a boxing game i believe on the PC the one thing i remember most is it was green and black (the pc i played it on was only green and black from memory).
and 1 other was Devil dice a game i enjoyed immensely but only ever hired it for 1 week as it completely stuffed my vision up.
Devil dice on ps1? That was quite awesome… I had a couple of levels of that on a demo disc and couldn’t get enough of it.
That is the one, I had the demo as well and eventually hired it for a week,
Lighthouse. Made me s*** bricks when I was about 10 years old.
I played this on my cousins amstrad. Very hard and i think I only ever managed to win two gunfights in a game. Very hard indeed. The wild bunch. Awesome. Red dead pre cursor???
The first game I ever played was H.E.R.O. for the Atari 2600 when I was six. You played as Roderick Hero and worked for the Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operation. You wore a wee helicopter thing on your back and had to make your way through levels by planting dynamite and blowing through walls, being careful not to touch other walls as they killed you for some reason. It was hard as shit and the only game I never beat.
Interesting factoid: It turns out the first game I ever played was actually unleashed upon the world on the very day of my birth.
Probotector on the orignal GB, side scrolling shooty robots soldier game, no one i know EVER remembers the gameboy version.
Haha, I almost completely missed the part about GB and was going to say I was obsessed with going over to my friend’s place down the road so we could play Probotector. But that was on NES 😛
There was a Zelda clone called Crystalis by SNK for the NES, loved that game too
Made famous by the webcomic 8-easy bits.
Couple of old adventure games mentioned here that I remember (Cruise for a Corpse & Conquest of the Longbow). Another one I don’t think many played was Codename: Iceman
Fire King! Made by a local studio called Micro Forte and published by another local called Strategic Studies Group. Kind of like an action RPG, but with great puzzles too.
http://www.microforte.com.au/capabilities/games_fire_king.php
http://playitagainproject.org/games/fire-king/
Had an awesome gate-fold style cover with a map and everything.
Cyberzone on the Commodore64.
Came on the Ozisoft “Power pack” disc that came with the computer
Loved it to death!
Omg thank you for this post! I totally forgot I ever played those games once upon a time. I distinctly remember thud!
Does anyone remember the name of a game on C64 where you play as a flying saucer (side scroller) and the Beverly Hills Cop music plays on a loop?
God, I just remembered Simon the Sorcerer 2. That guy was an asshole.
Guy looks like an asshole!
i’m sure i’m not the only one who played this, but it took me about 40 minutes to find this source of nostalgia – anyone else ever play tyrian 2000 on the old windows 95?
Awh hellyeah. Sadly, I didn’t get into that much as I got waaaaay caught up on the (in my opinion) superior ‘Raptor’ in the same genre at the same time.
Tyrian2000 is amazing! and free on gog 😀
I played the original Tyrian sooo much. It’s one of my favourite games ever.
I know that other people will know this but I list it because I am usually the one to bring it up first and everyone else goes “ohhhh, yeah I remember that”
Jet Force Gemini
and I feel I should put bahamut lagoon on this list too
Didn’t see this before I commented, but – Shit yeah! Jet Force Gemini!
Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures
Has anyone else played and finished this but me? Come on Kotaku. If there were ever a place…
Loved the Desktop Adventures (Yoda stories too), but I only ever had demos. They were pre-internet (or at least pre-me-having-the-internet), and I never saw them at a shop.
I remember playing those , pretty cool
Gosh…I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but reading about all these old games made me all tingly and brought a tear to my eye. Perhaps it’s my time of month…
If I might throw my nostalgic hat into the ring, one of my favourite games of old was UFouria for the NES. I got my papa to get it for me cos I loved the artwork on the box. For the longest time I was stuck after getting Freon Leon, then one day I found a new screen I had missed, and eventually was able to finish it. Go me!
Jet Force Gemini
Also Trugg
Necromancer by Bill Williams on the Atari 800.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnc3vI0fgJA
best game ever.
Popcorn – an Arkanoid style paddle game, one of the first games I ever played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o9J_5JXDDI
Probably a bunch of Amiga games – stuff like :
Magic Pockets, Gods, Hudson Hawk, SWIV, Cannon Fodder, even those very UK games like Dizzy and Viz. All I remember of Viz was insane levels of crudity and a dude getting about with his oversized testicles in a wheelbarrow.
Actually now that I say it out loud, they’re probably not that obscure.
Magic Pockets was awesome!
I’ll add one for the Amiga, Operation Stealth. It was a point n click adventure which I think was called James Bond: Operation Stealth outside of the UK. Anyway it was awesome and I was shit at it! 🙂
Amiga props. *fistbump*
I’m with you on those except I had the virtually identical Atari ST instead!
I’ll add Rick Dangerous 1/2, Impossible Mission to that list. They were all fairly popular games though.
I spent a lot of time on the ST with a public domain game called Trucker, a text-based game where you were tasked with travelling across the U.S. with a variety of cargo and had to enter your speed per turn (which was each city on the trip from East to West coast), which could result in crashing if the weather was particularly bad, but needed to managed in order to get your cargo to the destination on time.
Ty the Tasmanian Tiger.
Why has everyone forgotten about that series? Legit, best video game to ever come out of Australia.
I tried to play the first one a while back, and had to stop after about 10 minutes. I couldn’t stand all of the stereotypical Australianisms in it. Not just in the way the characters all spoke with Steve Irwin-like accents, but other stuff in the game as well, from how Ty threw a boomerang to using “dunnies” as checkpoint markers.
From memory I think it was the first Australian-made game to break the million-copies sold mark, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best Australian made game.
Haha, I played it when I was about 6 so I didn’t really care about the slang or overuse of dunnies.
I guess there’re people who laugh at that sort of thing and then those who find it corny as hell. I was somewhere in between, but the boomerang mechanics were so fun I really couldn’t care less about all that.
I finally managed to find the developers of the game at supanova the other day too. One of them runs a web-comic called Blow the Cartridge, and I got a signed book of his without even realising that he designed Ty (and also those Spyro remakes).
Nah, best Australian game is de Blob.
Someone already said Hocus Pocus, here’s a few more:
– Excelsior, top-down action RPG where you can kill whoever you want if you’re strong enough (villagers, guards, sea bass), but was impossible to finish!
– Tonk, and Tuk Goes to Town for Atari, two similar 2.5D games, awesome.
– Dallas Quest, like zork but western, and with a near-invincible rat.
Mad Dog McCree Series – Perhaps one of the original first person shooter games. Used to love that game.
Here’s one for you all.
Kung Food on the Atari Lynx.
Anyone play that badboy?
I played this yesterday, I’m not kidding.
I remember that game being insanely hard. From memory I don’t think I ever finished it. It was a fun concept though.
City Connection and Twin Bee for the NES
Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stunt Race FX for the SNES. That Dracula game was the most atmospheric terror game that console was capable of producing. Stunt Race FX is one of the biggest underrating sins of humanity.
The Dig and Jazz Jackrabbit for PC.
Jazz Jackrabbit. Totally.
No way man, *everyone* knows Stunt Race FX.
It was all over A*mazing!
I bought Stunt Race FX .. finished within like 2 hours and returned it
good game, but light on
Was City Connection that one where you’re driving a car and you jump to different platforms? It was a side-scroller.
Yes, that one!
Quarantine
Raptor – one of those top down flying shooty games. Loved that as a kid, but noone else seems to remember it.
Also, not that old at all, but I’m yet to encounter another soul who played Fahrenheit…(this might be more an issue of the people I talk to…)
I played heaps of Raptor, loved it! Dat soundtrack.
Yes! the soundtrack was the best!
With you on both counts.
Fahrenheit also went by the name Indigo Prophecy in some markets, mentioning both titles can sometimes help.
I loved Raptor! Buying upgrades was kickass.
oh man Raptor kicked ass, I think I only had the shareware version though.
Now that we’re adults we can just go and fucking buy it and play it instantly on GoG or something.
I swear, if younger-me could look into the future right now, he’d this this adulthood shit is the coolest thing ever.
Yeah, kid me’s brain would melt looking at my gog account.
I played Fahrenheit on the OG Xbox. Was really good I thought. Not much of a game but it was like playing a movie, if you could call it that. I do quite like the Quantic Dream games, just for a change of pace.
The opening section in the diner is amazing!
I loved Hearts – a top-down puzzler where you had to manipulate rocks and … other things … to collect a series of hearts within levels.
Also a devastatingly difficult top-down shooter for Gameboy called Aerostar. I remember getting up to the fourth level just once in all the many times I booted it up in the back seat… The one game I had (back then) which I was never able to finish.
Sorcery+ – mad arcade adventure. Was awesome.
Game Over – manic platform shooter.
Lost Eden – crazy human/dinosaur adventure with talking pterodactyls and an evil T. rex and a great soundtrack.
Jazz Jackrabbit
I have two:
Scaler. It’s a PS2 collect-a-thon starring a lizard-loving kid who uncovers his neighbour’s plot to rule the world with humanoid lizards from another dimension? I can’t remember the plot much, but I remember you get turned into a lizard, who can then shapeshift into other things. It was pretty fun.
Also, the voice behind Scaler (the kid) was Matthew Mercer, later known for his work as Alvin in Tales of Xillia, and Chrom in Fire Emblem: Awakening, which I thought was rad.
The other one is Enthusia Professional Racing, also for PS2. It was a Gran Turismo clone made by Konami, and while it got bashed for its weird tracks and music choices as well as its unforgiving progression, I really digged it. The tracks are cool, there’s a decent selection of cars, and I, for one, really dig the orchestrated music. Plus, you win a car almost every race, so that helped too. It’s not bad, if you’re after a racing sim for PS2.
One Must Fall – robot fighting game on PC.
Dead Ball zone on PS1- kinda like roller ball but weapon based. It seemed like my local video store was the only place that had the game, and I would hire it monthly for like 2 years. No one else I speak to has heard of it.
I just remembered one we used to love playing on the computer at school. Those good ol’ Acorn machines. It was called either Crystal, or Crystal 2 according to the desktop icon. I’ve since discovered it was actually called The Crystal Rainforest.
There was some other one too… something to do with vikings I think? I feel like it was called Vikings. You started out in an archaeological dig site, with a grid of squares you could choose to dig with. I have no idea what triggered it, but something would send you back in time or something to this dark ages village, and you went around talking to people and stuff. And trying to find artefacts I think.
Digger and Dig Dug. Played them off a giant 8″ floppy disk on a computer in 1986.
Chakan: The Forever Man for Sega Mega drive. Really fun, hard and looked good. Look it up!
Sub-terrania on Genesis. And Cyberia on PC. So good!
Get The Girl…it was…”educational”
Athena
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athena_(video_game)
Psychic 5
http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Psychic_5
A couple of golden memories:
Thexder (80s game) loved the music
Sierra Championship Boxing (80s) so many hours sunk into this
Jordan vs Bird One on One (I think it had an awesome dunk comp)
Alley Cat
As a kid I had my own PC in my bedroom .. all I did was play games late
I was skimming through here looking to see if Thexder was mentioned. I have fond and frustrating memories of that game.
very frustrating
Arctic Fox:
3-colour magenta/cyan/white/black stuff on the 286. Phenomenal tank game, first-person. Deep as hell for the time, with vector-style graphics.
Castle of the Winds:
Win95 top-down turn-based low-graphics dungeoncrawling. A rogue-like with a prettier UI. One of the handful of shareware games that I was actually compelled to buy.
Solar Winds:
Something similar, only in space and real-time. Fantastic implementation of RPG elements. Truly the predecessor to games like Space Rangers 2 and Space Pirates And Zombies.
Raptor:
Top-down near-future jetfighter bullet-hell shooter/shmup with purchasable upgrades bewteen missions and destructible environments that yielded rewards to contribute to upgrades.
Cyber-Dogs:
Syndicate Lite meets Chaos Engine. A really rough-as-guts bit of shareware with awesome hotseat co-op and ‘missions’ to complete around corporate warfare/espionage that let you upgrade your agents bodies, armour, and weapons.
Castles 1 & 2:
Build a castle! Only it takes fucking forever for your workers to build even one tiny wall SEGMENT, let alone the whole thing, plus keep. Manage your peasants, recruit soldiers, defend the in-construction building in between seasons against attacks by picts and celts. Had little RPGish sequences in the way of multiple-choice responses to ‘events’ in managing your kingdom.
Terminal Velocity:
Or Microsoft’s IDENTICAL CLONE ‘Fury3’. 3D flight-sim/arcade shooter was some of the best flying and shooting around at the time. Pickup power-ups, choose load-outs, boost yourself to stupid levels, destroy ground installations and dog-fight… but my absolute favourite activity was boosting up the afterburner and holding it down while trying to hug the terrain, just for the sensation of raw speed.
Bioforge:
A surprisingly deep 3rd-person adventure game/brawler with creepy and wrong scenarios and some very light body-horror. A cyborg monstrosity, one of the first things you do is escape your cell, encounter the severed arm of another guy who tried to escape his and got his arm chopped off by laser bars, deactivate the bars, and beat him to death with his own arm. Amazing.
Incubation: Time is Running Out:
An ‘accessible’ 3D-graphics simpler version of X-Com. Meant to be more accessible, with units who levelled up and equipped their improved and researched equipment, etc, but punishingly difficult. Red-armoured space-marines fighting greenskinned genestealer-clone ‘Scay’Ger’.
Man, I had Raptor(Shareware sadly) and full version of Terminal Velocity, even had joystick to play it with, it was so badarse.
Jackal on the nes, it was a top down shoot ’em up similar to a lot of twin stick shooters nowadays, it has awesome little puzzle sections and was hard and none of my friends seem to know it. Also “Boggy Marsh” on my ancient PC (it had a whole whopping 1mb ram and an enormous 40 mb hard drive and weighed a lot).
Ok, I might need some help on this one (mainly because I’m stuck at work and can’t google these things without pinging IT…you’ll understand in a second).
It was a chopper game, on the Megadrive/Genesis (Sega, for those of you who weren’t around when they actually made decent consoles). But you had to rescue people – and you had a team you could choose from, including some people who had quicker winching, but less accuracy, a pilot who could fly faster but had less health or something – way ahead of it’s time. You selected them in a room where some of the guys were playing pool and others were watching TV.
I had two – one set in a desert, one set in an urban environment. The urban environment one had as one of the main levels a rescue mission where you had to go and rescue civvies from the site of a blown up World Trade Centre in NYC (hence why googling that at work is a bad idea).
Anybody got any ideas as to what this might be?
Desert Strike?
OooOOohhhhhmyyyyygooooooooooooooooooddddddd
You are a legend @mickd, that’s it! There were three in the series, Desert Strike, Jungle Strike and Urban Strike.
I loved them as a kid.
Thank you so much! Internet points to you!
haha no probs – good games
from memory the Megadrive versions were superior to the SNES version
Jungle Strike, Desert Strike, Urban Strike on the SNES sound pretty similar.
Heh, jinx! The second Mickd mentioned the name it all came flooding back to me.
I gotta look those games up sometime. For…science. Yeah. Science.
They are super awesome man. I actually finished all 3 on Mega Drive about 2 months ago. I think they have aged well.
Although the later games on PS1- Soviet Strike and Nuclear Strike- weren’t such classics in my opinion. They were ok but I found them a bit frustrating for some reason. (maybe replaying whole levels because of a glitch or something)
Stunts (PC) – loved that game especially the create-a-track feature.
I remember that.
Used to crash into barriers and try to get my car to fly as high as possible.
Yeah, stunts was brilliant. It was the first “proper” 3D game I’d ever played, and building the tracks was great fun.
YES!
Particular favourite of mine was discovering that you could use a loop-the-loop to glitch the game and max out your speed. And half the time, end up driving around on your roof.
Penguin-kun Wars.
Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure. Anyone?
Yep! I was about to post this.. haha. Probably the game that got me in to PC gaming and addicted to platformers.
Anyone remember Rick Dangerous?
classic
BTW loving this thread today!!! thanks Mark
It’s a fantastic thread. I’m so going home and hitting up GoG.
God that game was hard as a kid! I remember just playing the opening section over and over again!
Nox, my first pc game and a damn good one.
Also like to add Kensiden from the master system, amazing platformer that put shinobi to shame imo.
Netstorm!
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game.
Or Stunts.
Hostage on the Commodore 64
Gateway to Apshai. We had that on cartridge for the C64 and I used to play the hell out of it.
Zap!. There’s like a single reference to it on the internet. Basically you did all these electronics based puzzles to put together a concert with a light show. It was pretty cool.
The Zoombinis!
I loved that game to death. Along with Gizmos and Gadgets.
Wouldntyaknowit, fun educational games!
Still have that game and had the feeling that someone was going to mention it, for the sake of the 90’s kids!
Ubisoft’s Zombi – Commodore Amiga 500. It was basically “inspired” by Dawn of the Dead. While it has good title music It’s genius was in it’s lack of it’s in-game music, leaving you with mostly the footsteps of the dead throughout the shopping mall.
You should check out the “update” of it – ZombiU. Great atmosphere, and great on tension too. Kept me nice and freaked out all the time.
I had a few things come to mind, and most of them have already been mentioned, but there are a couple more:
Hoosier city (took me ages to remember the name of that one)
Electro Body / Electro man – Just had to look up a video so I could hear that music and sound effects again “We have to be careful, this is an emergency area!”
Also, Epic pinball. I used to spend hours on the “Crash and burn” and “Enigma” tables, and I really wanted to bring that “Android” to life, but never quite got all the components activated.
Skull monkeys on ps1, claymation platformer and Kurushi, ps1 puzzle title, awesome!!!!!!!!
You guys just gave @markserrels a lot of games to put on a blacklist for Remember This!
Star Goose! This was one my cousin had on his computer ages ago, which ended up getting dumped at my Nanna’s place so played a lot of it there.
One that I remembered playing at a friend’s place and borrowing off him I only discovered the name of on here a couple of years ago, when an article on a random gaming peripheral just so happened to feature the game. It was called Captain Skyhawk, and it was rad. And turned out to be a Rare game, too.
Designasaurus II, another random DOS game that had you creating a hybrid dinosaur to send back in time and… I dunno, kill other dinosaurs. Then eventually die because you couldn’t find any more food and had drunk all the water that was available. It got me nice and obsessed with ankylosaurus for a while. And deinonychus was OP.
Sopwith 2 was another, white/cyan/magenta/black game where you flew a plane and made things blow up, and laughed at shooting cows which made them fall over. Then got angry at the birds that would fly out of the flock and wreck your shit.
Designasaurus was the madness. Loved it as a kid, would even print out the posters to colour in.
Zut Alors! old text adventure on the Amiga, that I used to play. Coupled with my imagination of a 10 year old it was off the chart. Was set in the french renaissance and I spent half my time trying to chat up a french hooker, what’s not to love?
Wax Works on the Amiga, all 10 disks of dungeon style horror.
Another abstract favorite was Mad Doctor on the C64. Basically some guy who stole bodies from the morgue and killed the odd villager for body parts. Only to make a Frankenstein monster who would inevitability then kill you.
The Rocketeer. I can’t remember if I liked it or not, I think I had mixed feelings about it.
Return Fire, an addictive realtime vehicular combat game with a floating camera view.
Ultrabots, an early mech game. It had a Scout (yellow), Humanoid (blue) and Scorpion (red). The Scorpion was by far the best.
Ace of Aces, the Accolade CGA PC version. A very old WW2 flight sim game where you had to shoot down enemy planes, bombers and V2 rockets.
Star Control, another Accolade game, this one was a top-down realtime spaceship duel game. The original was the best.
Kingdom of Kroz from Apogee. This was a whole series of games, but I only played a few of them.
Star Wars: Rebellion. Also known as Supremacy in some markets. I feel bad even including this on the list, but nobody seems to remember this awesome galaxy-spanning strategy game that put you in control of the entire Empire or Rebellion, and all the best characters the universe (and EU) had to offer.
I actually remember the Wild Bunch and I looked it up only a few weeks ago! Weird! My favorite game from that era that nobody else knows is Bomb Jack. Man I loved that game!
Paganitzu!
Golvellius: Valley of Doom on Sega Master System
I have no idea what it was called (on Windows mid 90s) and no NOT GTA2
You were some sort of gangster in a 2d game where you could go round buying guns and getting into Action-RPG type gunfights with police. The most significant thing I remember was that you could actually kidnap children from playgrounds and either send a ransom (sometimes paid, sometimes a trap with police) or sell them as a kitchen hand illegally. There was a whole bunch of other pretty serious stuff.
might be different here but I’ve never met anyone who played Jazz Jackrabbit
Fishing for “Remember This?” ideas?
Here are some of mine;
The Dam Busters, Aquatron, Transylvania, Rescue Raiders, Zorro!, Dino-Eggs, Chivalry,
Colony Wars – Vengence, Bust-a-Groove, Jackie Chan’s StuntMaster..
Games I fondly remember:
Chuckie Egg – BBC Model B
Twin Kingdom Valley – early 80’s C16 text adventure
Tom Thumb – C16 Platformer.
Green Beret
Paperboy
Gunship 2000
North and South (American version of the French game Blue and the Grey)
All the Janes mil sim games
Max Headroom
Richard Scarry’s Busytown for me! I grew up with that game, played it around 1998/1999.
Fragile Allegiance. Amazing strategy game. Sadly, couldn’t save a network game which would have been good – one game could take 20+ hours to play.