Do you know any obscure 2000s PC games?

[Ashley_Pomeroy]

I haven't played it, but I remember reading good things about... a game. From the 2000s. A bit like the later Far Cry games, with open-ended gameplay, but much earlier. It was apparently full of bugs but had an unusually large scope for a low-budget game. It was called... called...

 

Boiling Point: Road to Hell, a Ukranian game published by Atari in 2005, recently re-released on Steam:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_Point:_Road_to_Hell

 

It had a 25x25km open world. It was infamous at the time for the patch notes, which included "fixed: jaguar floats across screen at treetop level" and "fixed: size of the moon". Is it any good? I have no idea, but apparently it was at the very least ambitious.

 

I've been playing The Talos Principle 2 recently, and it reminded me of an old 16-bit game called Tower of Babel, by Pete Cooke, who was one of those 8-bit programming legends who seemed to fade away in the 16-bit era. Technically it's not an obscure 2000s PC game - it came out for the ST, Amiga, and Archimedes in 1989 - but it's really obscure and I remember it fondly. I finished it! It's one of those puzzle games where you control a bunch of robots who each have a different skill, and you could program them to perform actions in sequence, like the old Big Trax toy.

 

Google throws up 49 results for "pete cooke tower babel" although I note that there is an iOS remake. But it doesn't capture the original game's nocturnal atmosphere. It came out around the same time as Captive and Archipeligos but seemed to just vanish into obscurity.

 

The third thing I can suggest is Kane and Lynch: Dog Days, which is probably more famous now as the failed sequel to a game that resulted in a reviewer being unfairly sacked, but it had an unusually bleak, downbeat tone and a really distinctive look and feel. There's nothing quite like it. The video game equivalent of, I dunno, Chris Morris' Jam.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Driving in Tehran - a weird and bizarre driving simulation game from Iran that was disguised as propaganda funded by Iran's traffic police, which was released sometime in 2004-2007. The game is quite infamous for its extremely poor quality, with both cursed no-budget ugly graphics and cursed no-budget ugly CGI cutscenes, the worst car physics and bad driving handling in any racing game.

 

Edited April 30 by Wadmodder Shalton

[ducon]

Budget, $3M? $2.9M went in the wrong pockets, I guess.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

On 4/1/2024 at 10:10 PM, ducon said:

Budget, $3M? $2.9M went in the wrong pockets, I guess.

Oh I forgot to mention this, despite the claim of being made on the "SRP National 3D Engine" which is claimed to be built from the ground up, AIRI (my abbreviation for All It Really Is) is just a simple Flash Player file for the main executable and the rest being made on the open source GLScene engine where they ripped off a vehicle driving tech demo and replaced every model with crappy Iranian cars.

 

That's only the main disc though, the second disc was appealing supposed to be about track racing, but most copies left the second disc blank, making it lost media, though according to old forum posts it was just a badly modded version of Need for Speed High Stakes from 1999 where they replaced the cars with crappy Iranian cars.

 

In otherwords, the engines that they used in this game weren't even made in Iran.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I'm not sure how obscure it was at release, but Archangel (the 2002 JoWood one, not any newer game that took the name) seems like it's rather forgotten.  Played through it somewhat recently and I thought it was rather cool, although there's definitely a thing or two one could dislike about it.  Felt like it was made by people who were fans of Quake and such in their formative years as gamers but also wanted to do something with a more "modern" (for its time) spin with more emphasis on story and RPG-ish elements.

[Artman2004]

On 2/13/2023 at 2:29 AM, MrFlibble said:

I think that one was freeware at some point, or am I mixing things up now?

As of recently, the developer has made it completely free!

https://mangledeyestudios.itch.io/dark-salvation