Do you know some obscure 1990's PC games?

[Sokoro]

On 1/27/2021 at 7:47 PM, Redneckerz said:

@<<Rewind A few is 30 mins in my world of living. I left out the most obvious ones. Here it goes, spoilered:
 

  Hide contents

(Lot of games...)

 

You call Might and Magic VIII retro? I played that when I was young!

ah wait... I must be getting old.

[Redneckerz]

56 minutes ago, Sokoro said:

You call Might and Magic VIII retro? I played that when I was young!

ah wait... I must be getting old.

Out of everything listed you find that one surprising?

 

I call it retro since the Horizon/Labyrinth engines this runs on date back from 1997.

 

By 2000, the year in which Day of the Destroyer was released, its tech was positively ancient, despite having hardware acceleration like the later Lands of Lore games.

[GuyMcBrofist]

- Cyberdogs (1994)

A freeware top down shoot 'em up. Really easy to start up and get in to some action.

Spoiler

 

 

- Novastorm (1994)

An FMV based on-rails shooter.

Spoiler

 

 

- Sento (1994)

A pretty terrible 3d fighting game.

Spoiler

 

 

- Traffic Department 2192 (1994)

Another top-down shooter. A very story driven game, fun writing, and a really good soundtrack.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited November 27, 2021 by GuyMcBrofist
Got rid of my personal anecdotes. Who cares?

[Wadmodder Shalton]

7 hours ago, GuyMcBrofist said:

Sento (1994)

A pretty terrible 3d fighting game.

Creep Clash - an awful 3D Fighting game similar to Sento.

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Mario & Luigi, that unofficial platformer fan-game released on MS-DOS in 1994, to which Nintendo seems to ignore the game's existence.

Also included was the Mario Discovery series published by The Software Toolworks under license from Nintendo. These were as follows:

 

Mario is Missing! - A game that centers on Luigi as he tries to rescue Mario from Bowser by interacting with people and returning artifacts to their proper locations.

 

Mario's Early Years! Fun with Letters - A game in the Mario's Early Years! collection about literature.

 

Mario's Early Years! Fun with Numbers - A game in the Mario's Early Years! collection about numbers.

 

Mario's Early Years! Preschool Fun - A game in the Mario's Early Years! collection about basic learning.

 

Mario's Time Machine - A game that centers on Mario as he tries to return various artifacts that were stolen by Bowser by interacting with people and answering various history-related questions.

 

Mario's Early Year! CD-ROM Collection - A compilation of the first three Mario's Early Years! games for MS-DOS.

 

Other Mario PC Games released in the mid-1990s include but not limited to, and most of them were published by Interplay:

 

Mario Teaches Typing - A typing edutainment game with five skills and featuring music sampled from Super Mario World. It later spawned a sequel in 1996 titled Mario Teaches Typing 2 which included extra features.

 

Mario's FUNdamentals (AKA Mario's Game Gallery) - A compilation game where the player plays five traditional games. These were Checkers, Backgammon, Go Fish, Dominoes and "Yacht", a version of Yahtzee. It was the first game in the series to feature Charles Martinet as Mario's voice actor. Martinet has since voiced Mario in all speaking appearances in video games.

 

Super Mario Bros. & Friends: When I Grow Up - An Electric Crayon game that was Developed by Brian A. Rice, Inc. and published by Merit Software. The game is essentially a digital coloring book, containing illustrations by Rick Incrocci, with a few pages having animated sequences. The pages are themed after common careers.

 

Super Mario Bros. Print World - A Mario-themed printing program for home computers, allowing the player to print out artwork of various characters and elements from Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario Land. It was developed Codesmith, Inc. and published by Hi Tech Expressions in 1991.

 

Super Mario Collection Screen Saver - A Mario-themed program for Microsoft Windows operating systems, compatible with the Japanese releases of Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98. Released exclusively in Japan by Yutaka and Digitainment, this software included various Mario-themed screensavers, wallpapers, and other functions such as clocks and calculators with differing skins.

[Bowsertime28]

oooh, that game

i think i played it  a while ago

[Wadmodder Shalton]

After Dark Games - a collection of mini games based on the After Dark screensaver series by Berkeley Systems and published by Sierra in 1998.

Oh and speaking of After Dark, there were other releases in the series, some of which were officially licensed or unofficial products build on After Dark's technology. These were as follows:

 

The Disney Collection Screen Saver - 1990-1993

Star Trek: The Screen Saver - 1992

Marvel Comics Screen Posters - 1993

X-Men Screen Saver - 1994

The Simpsons Screen Saver - 1994

Star Trek: The Next Generation Screen Saver - 1994

Star Wars: Screen Entertainment - 1994 (unlicensed clone by LucasArts built on the After Dark software)

Looney Tunes Screen Saver - 1995

Toy Story Screensaver - 1995

Myst Screen Saver - 1995

Chex Quest Screen Saver - 1997 (unlicensed module built on the After Dark software)

 

Just wanted to mention the After Dark series of screensavers here and it's minigame collection from 1998.

Edited December 3, 2021 by Wadmodder Shalton

[TheFocus]

Half life

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

19 minutes ago, map11has2names said:

Half life

 

That Isn't obscure, it's a well known game.

[TheFocus]

4 hours ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

That Isn't obscure, it's a well known game.

i was trying to be funny

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

A to Zap, an edutainment game from 1995 by Sunburst Communications. I remember playing this back in elementary school.

Oh also the Microsoft Entertainment Pack series for Windows 3.1, released between 1990 to 1992. These were the earliest Windows games at the time as the OS didn't take off as a gaming platform until the release of Windows 95. Being 16-bit Windows applications, they can work without issues on the Windows 9x OS family, and the 32-bit versions of Windows NT, from NT 3.1 up until Windows 10. With Windows 11, NTVDM has been discontinued, meaning you need to use OTVDM to play these games.

There was also the Microsoft Entertainment Pack Puzzle Collection, but that was designed for Windows 95 and not 3.1, due to it being designed for DirectX in mind.

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Tempest 2000, one of the stand out titles for the Atari Jaguar. This game had a PC & Mac port released later on.

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Gadget Invention, Travel, & Adventure, an interactive movie released in 1993 originally on the Japanese FM Towns computer and later ported to Windows, Mac OS, PS1 and recently iOS. This game had a tie-in novel called The Third Force, written by Marc Laidlaw (yes, that Marc Laidlaw), best known for writing Half-Life's story at Valve.

Edited February 3, 2022 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Wadmodder Shalton]

The two of Delta 4's infamous games, The Town With No Name & Psycho Killer, while widely known as the worst games on the short-lived Commodore CDTV, both games did get MS-DOS releases.

 

Town With No Name is infamous for it's bad graphics and awful dialog, and the manual doesn't even have any pages, instead it's "The Instructions With No Words".

 

Psycho Killer is considered an inferior version of an interactive movie due to the video quality and lower video framerate.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

The game library of CHAMProgramming, which were shareware interpretations of classic arcade games from the 1980s.

These include but not limited to:

CHAMP Pac-Maniac - a clone of Namco's Pac-Man released in 1993.
CHAMP Asteroids - a clone of Atari's Asteroids released in 1993.
CHAMP Centipede - a clone of Atari's Centipede released in 1993.
CHAMP Ms. Pacman - a clone of Namco's Ms. Pac-Man released in 1994.
CHAMP Kong - a clone of Nintendo's Donkey Kong released in 1996.
CHAMP Ms. Pac-em - another clone of Namco's Ms. Pac-Man released in 1996.
CHAMP Pac-em - another clone of Namco's Pac-Man released in 1996.
CHAMP Galaxia - a clone of Namco's Galaxian released in 1996.
CHAMP Centiped-em - another clone of Atari's Centipede released in 1997.
CHAMP Asterocks - another clone of Atari's Asteroids released in 1997.
CHAMP Invaders - a clone of Taito's Space Invaders released in 1997.
CHAMP Galagon - a clone of Namco's Galaga released in 1997.

 

They even sold their only PC hardware offering, that of course was the CHAMP Cable, which was an Atari 2600 controller port adapter that connected to a PC Serial Port to bring an authentic retro Arcade controller experience to your PC.

CHAMProgramming also advertised these games as well, but they were never released. These include but not limited to:

CHAMP Burger Climb - a clone of Data East's BurgerTime.
CHAMP Frog-em - a clone of Konami's Frogger.

LGR did a very good video on the CHAMProgramming game library a couple of years ago, so check that out if you want to.

 

[gwain]

phantasmagoria 2 is pretty good

[BigBoy91]

On 1/27/2021 at 5:25 PM, Boaby Kenobi said:

Harvester is a brilliant game from the 90s.

 

 

You always were a kidder, Steve.

Edited February 3, 2022 by BigBoy91

[Artsmen]

if someone hasnt mentioned it, There's the Neverhood. VERY confusing puzzles but great story and very funny 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

CyberGladiators, a 2.5D fighting game with 3D models developed by Dynamix and published by Sierra in 1996. It's very barebones without any combos whatsoever, just kick, punch, attack with environmental objects, jump and dodge every so often.

 

The intro movie just screams mid-1990s, which makes me think this is "LichGladiators" than anything else.

 

Edited October 30, 2022 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Maes]

Wow, that looks kinda like a poor man's cross between Virtua Fighter/Tekken (to which the "barebones gameplay" is quite similar) and One Must Fall. I admit however that the graphics aren't half bad. It's also one of the few instances of games from that era where the intro actually has worse graphics than the actual  game.

[DannyMan]

I know Raising Dead, that one FPS game

 

[mrthejoshmon]

I once heard of an absolute trash game called "Angst Rahz's Revenge", couldn't actually believe it existed but low and behold it bloody does.

 

However, it lead me down a rabbit hole and it turns out they made another game called Carnivorous (1999) and I cannot for the life of me figure out anything about it other than the IGN article I linked (which has a "review" explaining they physically cannot get it to work). I'm just curious, has anyone ever heard of this?

[Faceman2000]

I’m not sure how obscure these were, but I played a lot of Centipede 3D (1998?) and another game where you play as a hovertank that I believe was called Combat 3D.

[7Mahonin]

Gore Galore. A PITS3D engine game. It’s basically a poorer soul’s Lethal Tender. 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Transport Tycoon, a business simulation game developed by Chris Sawyer of Rollercoaster Tycoon fame and published by MicroProse in 1994. It had an expanded version called Transport Tycoon Deluxe released in 1995.

 

It was followed up with Chris Sawyer's Locomotion released in 2004, but it wasn't a hit commercially and received mostly negative reviews.

 

Other than through the open-source games OpenTTD & Simutrans, Transport Tycoon never had a huge recognition compared with the Rollercoaster Tycoon games.

[CherryPoptartzzz]

U.R.B.A.N : The Cyborg Project

 

Unironically has one of the best soundtracks i've ever heard. The game itself might not exactly be perfect, but the soundtrack definitely is, sadly I haven't found any other projects the composer worked on

 

 

[dyshoria]

depth dwellers

[Maes]

Crystal Caliburn, of which I happened to have the registered version back in the day. Somehow, I'm not surprised it originated as a Mac game. Too bad that for all of its praise, at least the Windows 3.1 version I had was nearly unplayable due to the choppy framerate, couplied with miniscule visuals. It may have had its merits, but I cannot remember it as anything but an unplayable mess. Perhaps this should double as a porting disaster...

 

For some reason, all videos that i can find online of it also show a piss-poor frame rate regardless of version. I dunno, is it really that good that it's worth all this suffering?

 

 

Edited February 4, 2022 by Maes

[Vermil]

Here's an obscure Japanese fighting game I recently picked up:

[Wadmodder Shalton]

There were three Tetris variants made by Alexey Pajitnov, aside from Tetris, Super Tetris & Tetris Classic for MS-DOS which were the same as just standard Tetris, these variants were published by Spectrum Holobyte. These were as follows:

 

Welltris - same basic concept as Tetris but this time in a rectangular arena of a four-sided well.

Faces... Tris III - a variant where you had to match the part of various faces.

Wordtris - a variant where you had to mix and match letters to spell words. Occasionally, bombs will fall down to take out a single letter or an entire stack of them.

 

These three games (as well as the above mentioned three standard Tetris games, in addition to a prototype version) are also part of the Tetris Gold compilation released in 1993.