It could even be a youtube video or movie that you don’t think anyone reading this has heard of besides you.
The Farmers Daughter. It was a text-based video game for the C=64 similar to Zork.
The premise was that you are a traveling lightening salesman whose car breaks down. You stop at a farmhouse to use their phone, and the beautiful daughter answers the door.
Your mission is to try to bang her. If the farmer catches you, he shoots you with his shotgun. If her brothers catch you, they’ll analy rape you to death. You need condoms but they are stuck to the shelf.
The appeal of games like this is so odd to me. They’re moronic on one hand but viscerally addictive on the other. A very interesting psychological dynamic going on with this whole genre.
It’s no mystery if you consider the world at the time and the target audience.
Home computers were only a couple of years past where you had to solder the chips on yourself and still in nerdy kid domain.
There was a big overlap with the Dungeons and Dragans crowd. Puzzles and imagining yourself as some character were a huge appeal.
Now factor in that the underwear section of the Sears catalog was still the closest thing to porn as most 12 year olds could get their hands on.
Any tips on how to avoid getting buttfucked until dawn?
Relax and push back against it, your partner will be done long before sunrise.
The Illusion of Gaia for SNES. I don’t know anyone who has heard of it.
I still have the T-shirt that came with the box set!
It was a weird game, honestly.
I think the other two games in that series (Terranigma) didn’t get official English versions, but there are fanslations if you want to play them.
Terranigma is one of my favorite SNES games! It is a truly awesome adventure and so underrated!
I played through a lot of fan translations and obscure games when I first discovered emulation. E.V.O Search for Eden is another weird, unique RPG from that era, which I highly recommend!
All 3 games got official English translations. Soul Blazer and Gaia were released in the US and Europe, but Terranigma for whatever reason was only released in Europe. I’m so glad emulation came around and opened up access to so many region-locked games.
I don’t believe I played it, but I remember that box art. They probably had it on the shelves of my local blockbuster video. I think it might have also been a cover feature in Nintendo power.
That’s how I played originally was renting it. The box art was awesome.
Yep, know about it. But I was more of a ‘Secret of Mana’ and ‘Secret of Evermore’ person myself.
Rented Illusion of Gaia so many times!
One of my cool older cousins was playing this one christmas when we went to his house! I was vaguely disappointed when we went back the next year and he was like “oh yeah that was fun but i beat it and don’t play it anymore.” Little kid brain assumed the game just went on for much longer than it does. Playing it together (ie: taking turns) is a fond childhood memory for me, though.
My mind went straight to the SNES too, but with Chaos Seed, the feng shui dungeon building oddity. I have a feeling people might be familiar with SNESdrunk around here, though.
I replay that game every couple of years, one of my all time favorites. My brother still had the cartridge.
Now I’m gonna need to play when I get back home, thanks stranger!
I had it as a kid. I remember really liking it.
I think I might’ve seen a copy of that at a retro used game store near me here recently.
Interesting in Pal regions it is called Illusion of Time.
I also found a fan remake on itch.ioWow. I watch YouTubers who talk about the SNES, and it gets brought up all the time in those circles!
The original Death Race 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine. It may have had a small comeback when the Death Race remake came out but this isn’t the kind of movie you’d see randomly on tv.
Fun story, my dad met a guy who talked about a movie he had seen once, where racers ran over people to score points, my dad thought this guy was taking the piss and never considered the movie might be real. Until one day he was watching TV randomly and stumbled on the movie. But as people from the era of cable TV might remember, it was hard to know the name of the movie you just caught midway through, unless the channel showed the name of the movie you were out of luck, so I grew up knowing that this movie existed, but never knew the name. When the remake came out the plot seemed familiar enough for me that I immediately went to check what it was based on and finally put the final nail in the coffin of a long family mistery.
What was the movie called?
Nevermind I’m high
I edited the nudity out of that so we could screen it at work. There’s a LOT of titties in that movie.
The 1976 arcade game called Death Race (seemingly no relation) is one of the first to ever spark controversy over violence in video games. It’s not too well known today, being almost 50 years old and fairly primitive.
And fun movie fact, Death Race 2000 is Sylvester “Sly, The Italian Stallion” Stallone’s first non-pornographic film role.
My parents love this movie, I saw it many times growing up. Every time they drive past someone in a wheelchair that movie gets mentioned.
Just saw the trailer. I thought 2000 was the year it came out but it came out in 1975.
Yes! This is a movie my parents let me watch when I was like ten or eleven and it definitely stuck with me.
“What’s that?” “A hand grenade” best pun in cinematic history, un-toppable. I’m a huge Death Race fan, and CarWars, and the Twisted Metal game. Gun cars are just cool
In 1990, a series of CGI animation collections began release on VHS tape. The Mind’s Eye was the first experience many people (myself included) had with pure computer animation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind's_Eye_(film_series)
The best known segment from the first tape is Stanley & Stella in Breaking the Ice, which was first released in 1987. You can just watch it online now of course!
https://youtu.be/3bTqWsVqyzE?si=28YJchoAQSqfZY0P
The animation style reminds me a lot of Reboot, a childhood favorite. It still amazes me how interesting this style is even today, really shows how much more artistry and vision matter than technology. I believe this is also the first public demonstration of a flocking algorithm.
That’s why my mom bought me an Amega 4000. It was a birthday present. Never got that Video Toaster and never did get into animation back then but I had Brilliance and used it allot. I cant remember for sure but I think I remember the os being more Unix like. God I loved that machine!
Ever since I saw Beyond the Minds Eye I’ve wanted to do computer animation.
My brother brought this home along with the follow-up, Beyond the Minds Eye. I recall the first one having some scenes from The Lawnmower Man. I believe the soundtrack also featured Jan Hammer.
Too far, take it easy! (It’s alright) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yuyXloX_uNw
That was some serious nostalgia. Thanks for the dopamine hit!
Sure thing! My dad bought a copy of the first one from Incredible Universe, before they sold everything to FRYS. There was a stage in the middle of the store, with big screens surrounding it, playing Minds Eye on a loop.
Holy shit, I saw this as a kid around 95-98 when I was visiting a friend of my mom I think, this as playing as music in the tv, the guy had like a home theater like setup and this burned into my mind, especially the segment on beyond the minds eye where there’s a guy/robot playing a fps. This was a wild trip to recall, thank you!
Alright let’s go, I love niche things:
Movies:
- Bubba Ho-Tep
- Joe’s Apartment
- Six String Samurai
- Krull
- The Greasy Strangler
- A Boy and His Dog
- Fido
- Within the Woods
- Undead or Alive
- Cemetery Man
Tabletop:
- Car Wars (maybe, depends on crowd)
- The worlds worst diagram of ship controls included as an insert in a Paranoia box
- All Flesh Must be Eaten
- Fairy Meat
- Cult of Ecstacy (for Mage the Ascension)
- Did you know that according to Dragon Magazine players can participate in orgying for a number of days equal to their con SCORE?
- Castles and Crusades
- Tunnels and Trolls
- Remember Car Wars? They did a crossover with GURPS, called GURPS Autoduel, and it is amazing.
- HOL (Human Occupied Landfill)
- The second publication of the HOL supplement, Buttey Wholesomeness, where the cover is printed BUTTery HOLsomeness. That one was just a pita to find I started wondering if it was just a PDF concept cover. Only took me like 8 years to find a physical copy.
- Mars Attacks board game
Games:
- Sim Tower
- Redneck Rampage
- The Diablo 1 expansion, Hellfire, that Blizzard said not to make but a division of Sierra of all companies yolod it into existence anyway.
- The Neverhood
- Toy Story for Gameboy
- Battlezone, back in the day when you were fighting green triangles
- Descent
- I wasn’t going to at first but I want to throw in some of my favorite Magic the Gathering cards: Nature’s Wrath (haha, holy shit mono green, go home you’re drunk), the art of the Pride secret vault thing for Bearscape, the art for Spy Network looks like Friend Computer from Paranoia, Kudzu, Stunted Growth
My music taste is so underground you guys I’m very cool like that. There’s a surprising number of trans folk punk musicians from the Pacific Northwest. I’m getting sleepy but if anyone wants me to bombard them with folk punk artists (trans or otherwise) lmk I’ll totally hook you up
I wouldn’t say Joe’s Apartment is niche.
It’s just not good and easily forgotten.
There’s a new Decent game, fun times
Whaaaat? I need it in my life
That’s delightful, thank you!
Car Wars! Man that one could certainly test one’s patience! Not as exciting as the picture on the box. 3-4 hours of dice rolls to negotiate a u-turn…
I’ve been collecting rulebooks for that game for the last ten or so years. Maybe my favorite tabletop. It flows pretty smoothly if everyone is familiar with the rules but for sure even if you’ve been playing it for a decade you’ll always hit something that’s like “I have no clue how to resolve this”. And the learning cliff is for real so actually getting people interested in it enough to become that familiar with the rules is as hard as the game lol
I used to love the lore of Steve Jackson Games a lot more than the actual games for this very reason.
It’s like trying to code a driving/racing simulator while playing it in real time. On paper…
The MtG BearShare secret lair is the funniest fucking card they’ve ever made
It’s an absolute gem lol. The only secret lair I’ve actually gotten
I don’t need a bombardment but I’ll certainly take a top 5 folk punk bands! (Trans or otherwise).
Folk punk in the PNW where at least someone in the band is trans: Pigeon Pit, Left at London, Sister Wife Sex Strike, and Porch Cat. I know I’m missing some, maybe Kimya Dawson counts (non binary, lives in PNW, but from New York and Moldy Peaches was a New York band).
If I’m just going to do top 5 folk punk in general though, hard to pick and it changes often but let’s go with: Apes of the State, Days n Daze, She/Her/Hers, Jeffrey Lewis, and Pigeon Pit (I fucking love Pigeon Pit okay)
Awesome! I’ll let you know what I think of Pigeon Pit for hors d’oeuvres and go from there 🔥
Get the chance to check them out yet?
I know now why you love Pigeon Pit, okay! They’re great.
Glad you like them. There’s a Taxpayers concert coming up that’s supposed to have Pigeon Pit as well, if you’re in the Seattle area! Mar 30 I believe
Sames!
I’ve seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob’s Ladder. That was a night well spent.
Out of the games, I’ve played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried – never really made much sense out of that one though.
I don’t know if it’s that obscure… but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games – do you remember the song with the lyrics “I’m just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life”?
That’s amazing nobody’s ever seen those movies! And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map. Fun game. I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.
Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)
I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself – I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn’t understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it’s clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates… (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)
I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
I hadn’t played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn’t great when you asked this question – but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such – and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It’s got orange and white stripes. It’s scratched up a little bit, but it’s still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to “improve performance”… lol)
The game opens with a short animated splash screen – a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game’s logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off – somewhat confusingly; it wasn’t immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn’t find it very helpful.
The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don’t really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it’s not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.
There’s an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.
The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don’t know well enough to name – but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going “AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!” over and over.)
I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) – and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it’s also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a “boing-a-boing-oing-oing” failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.
The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there – or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can “build” a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn’t seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).
Unfortunately I don’t have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:
By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.
which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I’m running it on has a 3.7GHz processor – obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance – but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p
Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print – although I haven’t tried it.
Bubba Ho-Tep is an awesome little Bruce Campbell movie if people are looking for something to watch. I remember Fido was pretty big among B Grade / Comedy horror fans about 10-15 years ago.
Sim Tower was really fun growing up. I was expecting that when came out fallout shelter and was mad and disappointed. I feel like most people have seen screenshots or characters from The Neverhood but probably couldn’t name what it was from. I never played it but remembered it growing up and only found the name out a year ago.
I forgot about Redneck Rampage. For some reason I associate the feeling of that with Blood, and it looks like they’re both from 1997. I’ll have to go fire it up and see if there are any similarities
Same engine (Build)
Joe’s Apartment
being niche makes me feel old…
I’ll occasionally catch myself singing "welcome to Joe’s toilet, plop plop plop, ahh ahh ahhh…"😂
looks like the full movie is on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Z7fSRrn2QI tried not to add too many things that are just old but previously super popular, instead of niche. Time really does add obscurity though
Tbf me and an old bf of mine would watch it a lot, but I don’t know that I would call it “popular” among anyone else, so it probably does qualify… 😂
Fido the zombie movie?
Make sure you get me a head coffin.
Fido the fuckin zombie movie! I love zombie movies the cheesier the better
Several years back I watched a Japanese film called Fish Story. It’s a pretty weird movie, and the first time I watched it, I hated it, and almost turned it off. It was just kind of boring, and it was really confusing because it kept jumping between different stories, and it was not in chronological order. Then, right at the very end, a short segment tied everything together so incredibly. It blew my mind and I immediately wanted to watch the movie again. I have never experienced anything like that before or since. I don’t know anyone else who’s ever heard of this movie.
That seems interesting, you’ve probably already watched it, but in case you haven’t Memento is another movie that’s told in not-chronological order and ties together at the end.
Is it bad I thought this was a Japanese version of finding Nemo before I searched it?
Just looked it up. I like quirky movies and I like the sound of this - it’s going on my list to watch later. Thanks! :)
I really enjoyed Fish Story too! I sought out other films by the same director/writer, Yoshihiro Nakamura, and found a few others i really enjoyed. I can’t claim they’ll have the same wow factor or impact as Fish Story but i love these films for similar reasons i love Fish Story.
Golden Slumbers was crazy, weird, beautiful, and fun. Awesome ending! Highly recommend. Much different from Fish Story but with a similar sort of quirkiness. Another one i found around the same time was The Foreign Duck, the Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker. That’s a really weird one, but again with beautiful scenery and a sort of mysterious air. Another one i caught more recently and really enjoyed was called A Boy and his Samurai. I wasn’t initially that interested in watching it but gave it a chance and I’m really glad i did. Such a sweet and charming film.
There was an old PC game called “Dominus”. I don’t really know much about it. My dad just randomly picked it up as an xmas gift one year for me. It was pretty sweet.
You’re the lord of a kingdom that gets invaded by like eight armies. You have your own monster units you can deploy. You can deploy traps. You can cast spells. You can go down and fight hand to hand. If they make it to the throne room and kill you, it’s game over.
If you capture enemy troops, you can interrogate them. There’s a little animation where they get poked with a red hot iron poker. If you capture a leader, you can sometimes negotiate peace. If you capture an enemy mage, you can learn part of a secret spell. I never got a secret spell working, though.
It was super cool. Never met anyone who’s played it.
I’ve never seen a video on this, but surely someone else has heard of it.
Back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, I got a CD in a cereal box with a PC game on it. the game was I think some kind of gamified flight sim, and the interesting part is that there was a decal of a plane on top of the CD surface. On the other side of the CD, there was another game (maybe a racing game?) And it had a corresponding decal, so the CD had decals on both sides and could be inserted both ways in your player to play each game. I’ve never seen that anywhere else (2 -sided CD or CD readable surface with decals) and I remember the game actually being somewhat fun, but promotional games of the era are very often lost media.
I did a little digging and found that Nestle added CDs to their cereals! There were quite a few different titles with different labels. Maybe these links well help you find your games?
There’s a bunch more content here:
It was this one https://archive.org/details/nestle_game
But in french instead of Portuguese. Thanks for the throwback!
Mad Dog McCree. A literal “video” game. Live action first person pointy shooty thing.
There was a local band where I am 20+ years ago called Naucet. With songs such as “This is Not a Convenient Time to be Stabbed”. I have absolutely no idea what happened to the band, where they went, what they did. I can find no reference to them anywhere online whatsoever. I have a musician friend who was friends with them(maybe just one of them, I forget at this point) and has copies of their music on an old hard drive somewhere in a closet. Been a number of years since I’ve seen/heard from said friend, so I can only assume whether or not he still has that old hard drive. If he does, then for all I know, that might be the only place in existence that you can find that music.
Movies:
-
Kubo and the Two Strings. Some of the story elements are a bit too obvious, but the overall story is charming and the art style (stop motion with puppet-like characters) is just plain cool.
-
Kirikou and the Sorceress. Wonderfully weird with an interesting story
-
Triplets of Belleville. The entire movie is “told” without words, except for a single sentence right at the start and one right at the end.
Games:
-
Terranigma (SNES). Main characters revives / creates an entire world that was doomed ages ago. It’s kind of bittersweet when you’re done reviving the continents, plants and animals and then the humans start f*cking stuff up. Great music and visuals too, despite being 16-Bit style
-
Ōkami. One of my all-time favorites but due to minimal marketing, not many people are aware that this game even exists. Charming art style and interesting gameplay concept.
-
Everyone knows Oregon trail and Amazon trail, but I don’t see Yukon trail mentioned as much. Similar game but up the coast of Canada.
Also we had a game called Power Pete that came with this old powermac we had.
And a game called Stay Tooned! Where you get sucked into a cartoon hotel. Each room had cool puzzles and you had to escape
The game Chex Quest, which was a total conversion of Doom for kids, used as an advertising campaign and included in cereal boxes. Incredibly well done game.
It was recently released on steam for free
I played that. Free game that came in the cereal box, and way better than I expected for an advertisement
I also had the NES Yo’ Noid game that Domino’s put out
You’ve heard the insane trivia about the “noid” promotion right? About the guy with the same name?
I vaguely remember that shit happening, but I was a teen so I wasn’t really paying attention.
You’ve heard the insane trivia about the “noid” promotion right? About the guy with the same name?
It was a game for PC around the year 2000, I don’t even know the name of it. I’ve been searching for it for years. It’s a point and click adventure game.
The premise is your spaceship breaks down on an alien planet. If you try to repair the ship immediately a giant alien spider will come and kill you.
After searching for a while you end up making friends with one of the aliens and sneak around one of the villages looking for parts.
I never made it past that point.
I highly doubt anyone will know what this is, I’ve tried multiple times on that reddit sub for games people can’t remember.
My favorite video game as a kid was called Red Storm Rising, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, and played on a Commodore 64. It put you in command of a submarine facing off against the Soviet navy. Graphics were very basic, but it had a very intelligent engine that lead to needing to use real strategy to win.
Almost no one else has ever heard of it.
