Ask Lemmy

The Belgian 80's metal band Ostrogoth.

Their website doesn't exist anymore and the only band-run social media page is on Facebook.

If you're a fan of retro heavy metal, give them a listen! They still tour, though you won't be finding much about it online.

Chakan the Forever Man on my Sega GameGear. I played it SO many times.

25+ years ago there was a release on some Warez sites called “beer police”.

From what I remember, It was a game set in some future sci-fi world with flying cars with a 5th element vibe.

Only ever saw it for a few hours at a mates house, so my memory is sketchy, but I’ve never found any other mention of it.

I have never met anybody else who played the Wall-E game for Wii.

An old MS-DOS game from the 90s called Solar Winds, by Epic Megagames. It was top down and you flew around battling spaceships and doing missions in space. I absolutely loved it as a kid. Pretty sure you can get it for free now.

Actually yes hereit is https://www.playdosgames.com/online/solar-winds/

Eternal Champions. An old fighting game for Sega. I've never met anybody in real life who has heard of it. It was so awesome. Xavier was the shit.

Beltain - Wild In The West

My grandparents knew the guy that produced this music video for a local band. I'm pretty sure the VHS copy they had was one of few in existence. It's been on YouTube for over a decade and only has 122 views, but it's a gem.

Arx Fatalis for og Xbox. I have it and haven't played it, but nobody I know has ever heard about it.

Nerve Damage, a game that was I think made on a random gamejam, and the whole premise is to make a game that's actively trying to be as uncomfortable as possible to play, while also getting you into the flow and actually makes you enjoy it.

Unfortunately, I didn't find how to play it, and it didn't release as far as I know. I've heard about it on some kind of GDC presentation about Innovative/Obscure game design.

While that actually means that someone has indeed heard of, I've never met anyone else who got to play it. Or heard about it.

The movie Tampopo, about ramen. Great film.

Decades ago, my dad bought a PC that came with a free CD for a game called Retribution. The box art looked unlike anything I'd ever seen before (basically 3D graphics at a time when the Mega Drive reigned supreme). Sadly, the disc didn't work, but I've tried to get my hands on a copy, to no avail.

Looking at the graphics now, they weren't even that good...but for the mid-nineties for a small child, absolutely amazing.

The Wii U failed with few units sold. Star Fox Zero released for the Wii U sold much worse than any other Wii U game. But it's really good - Motion controls are amazing plus the two player co-op where one flys and the other guns is very fun

Starsiege. No, not tribes. Starsiege, third game in the earthsiege series. Tribes was actually a spin off in the same universe that got much more popular (with good reason, tribes was awesome).

Starsiege was a pc game that came in a bigass box, complete with multiple books filled with lore from the game's universe. It wasn't as well received as mech warrior (another mech sim), so it didn't have a big community. But those of us that played it loved it to death. I think you can still get the game running if you don't mind fucking with a bunch of sketchy third party patches.

I recently worked my way through the old games library on archive.org and found some gems I used to play.
The game that got me looking there in the first place was Lost Dutchman Mine (still holds up!), but then I just kept scrolling and have bookmarked dozens of games. I won't list them all, but some favourites I grew up playing (and still occasionally revisit) that I don't think were massively (or at least still would be) well known:
Xonix - the first pc game I ever played, back when monitors only had 2 colours lol
Jones in the Fast Lane The Sims if it was a board game
Mario is Missing Yes, the Mario. I was the only person I know to own and play this game
Home alone and Home Alone 2 both on 5¼-inch floppy
Goblins I never got far in this game as a kid, and I have resorted to digging up the walkthrough even today to progress lol

Not a game, there is also Jerry Springer the Opera, a satire which I feel went far too low under the radar, and more people should watch (I think most people assume that the first act - a mock up JS episode, is all it is, but it really isn't). I've listened to it so many times I can literally sing you the whole thing from beginning to end (OST is much better quality than the live recording, and is on YT too). 😂(CW: contains some outdated and offensive terms and slurs)
E: here's a no-spoiler taste, the ad break
Edit again (I'm now re-watching it and this part just came up and reminded me lol): some folks here might be familiar with I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance, which is from the opera!

There are probably many more, but I've just woken up, so that's all that comes to mind rn..

I am looking for a sci-fi story that I read in the 80's. It was a story about the future and I am sorry but the only vivid detail I remember was that parents had actually gone to a store to purchase a gift (a bicycle I believe), and the person at the store thought it was strange to have people actually come to the store, but let them in to shop.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/50126/what-short-story-has-a-future-bicycle-shop-owner-surprised-when-two-parents-actu

Hand of Manos. Most likely thee worst movie ever made. I found it for a screen writing class. The assignment was watch a bad movie then present it to the class. Easiest A+ of my fucking life.

Another weird one is, there used to be a sex Tetris type game for Windows 98 or earlier. Little naked people would drop down and when you got a full line they would jump off the screen. I don't know how that got on the family PC, but it was on it. I played it. So there's that.

All from the early 90's...

Life and Death II: The Brain - An old DOS medical game

Deadlock: Planetary Conquest- a competitive SimCity-like game

The Dagger of Amon Ra - A point and click mystery adventure game

Edit: added subtitle to Deadlock and video links

When I was a kid I went to a Primus show and they were playing music before the acts came on. One was “Smoke On The Water” covered by Tom Jones and I’ve never been able to find it or even any information about it. I know it was this song and artist as I asked the engineer, it was a great rendition and I wish I could find a copy

Ok so I don't know the name of it. But it was a sidescroller shooter game for the Sega Genesis. You played as like a kid and blasted enemies and there were upgrades. I think it had gun in the name.

Edit: I was right it did have gun in the name

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes

My girlfriend in high school introduced me to Fishing with John and it's comedy gold. Way before Tim and Eric and all the other absurdist comedy shows. I highly recommend it!

Oh man, every time someone asks a question along these lines I always think of the movie Hank and Mike. I found it in a discount bin at a grocery store probably a decade ago so I took a little time to actually look into it more this time. I knew it was Canadian and unlikely a big hit, but apparently it was just so poorly received. It made less than $17,000 of the $2M it cost, and it's real tough to find anyone even reviewing it. I even struggled to find the music from it. (The one song is badass). And it's got a couple B-tier actors that I remember doing a great job, and I think Joe Mantegna really went for it in his role as the god Pan. Chris Klein kills it in this song.

The crude humor kinda puts people off I think but the satirical aspects cut a little deeper than the movie needed to. And probably when I discovered it I was depressed and had a drinking problem and the overall mood of it really felt at home to me at the time so I was able to just live in those aspects of the film and really absorb the more subtle message. It's definitely absurd in many points but there's a lot of heart in it.

The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One - A D&D podcast. It's cast should be pretty familiar if you're into other D&D podcasts - Brennan Lee Mulligan is the DM, Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii and Lou Wilson are players - but it doesn't seem to have many listeners.

It strikes a nice balance between scripted narrative performances and actual play. It's edited and scored with a light touch that stops it dragging like the raw sessions of something like Critical Role, but preserving the authentic character breaking reactions as the dice takes it somewhere interesting. The players don't seem to be in on a "script", anymore so than the normal sort of out of session discussions you might have in a narrative heavy game at home, but the DM does a very good job of keeping it focused. It's also thankfully not another billion player table, three is much more comfortable.

The vibe is excellent. From cozy slices of life to drama that plays on your heartstrings as three childhood friends reconnect and go on an adventure. Its trailer conveys the tone pretty well honestly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9et3Othu4

There was a door (plugin) for The text-based *BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon called Violet's Tavern.

You could sit at the bar and buy a drink that enhanced your stats, You could go upstairs and pay for a hooker to replenish your energy or you could try to seduce the barmaid / owner and actually have kind of a sweet encounter with her.

It had a betting mechanic I don't remember if it was blackjack, dice or what but you could game it a little bit by throwing a shit ton of money at it a few times. The initial odds to win or somewhat higher than the extended odds to win so if you hit it and hit big you just walk away. Sometimes you ended up empty but more often than not it worked.

These religious NES games. The one I remember was called Exodus. It was basically a ripoff of an existing game, but Moses themed.

The band "scruffy the cat"

I've never met anyone else that knows they existed

Temple of Apshai

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apshai

You've never heard of it, and modern RPGs wouldn't exist without it.

I recorded a film off the tv channel Sy-Fy a few years backcalled AfterDeath (not the 2023 film that comes up in a search). It's possibly not that obscure, but I believe it was a low budget film so maybe not at all well known. Anyhow, it didn't record all the film for some reason so I have never seen the end (last 15min or so), but despite the clear lack of quality it had an interesting premise (a group of young people who wake up in a beach cabin but apparently in the middle of some quasi-nowhere). I was intrigued as to how the approach to playing out the scenario would end but maybe I enjoyed it more for not having been able to see the ending if it was z bad one!

There was a text based game sample pack on Apple II C that I can't remember the name of.

If you typed in a command too simple, it would give a preprogrammed response, apparently offended that you took the game for an idiot. You could look around, pick up items that it described, open and close drawers, go up and down stairs, unlock doors if you find the key, dig in the ground if you find a shovel, all through typing in actions and reading the text that came up in response.

There were at least 3 samples on the floppy disk, one an adventure on a crashed spaceship, one finding a buried treasure in a desert, and one centered around a white house (not the White House, but a house that was white.) All the samples ended just when it got interesting and advertised where to get the full games.

Edit: the whole idea of gaming on an Apple 2c seems foreign to every single person I have ever mentioned it to. Someone must have done it, because my family found 2 different computers at garage sales in the 90s that each came with stacks of games on 3 inch floppy disks. Some where educational games, I learned to type properly with one of those. Some were bootleg versions of popular games with handwritten labels. The original Maria Bros comes to mind as one of those, it was on a disk with Joust. Some were the original floppy disk from the publisher. Oregon Trail was one we spent countless hours on, and I especially liked Wings of Fury.

When I was little my parents had an Amiga 500 computer. My mother was never into gaming except for one. It was a boulder-dash clone called "Emerald Mine" (in which you collected emeralds, not diamonds) made my an obscure German studio. I think it was never widely spread and mostly stayed within Western Eu, but who knows, I might be wrong.

Two movies from the 90s... "Ruben and Ed," and "... And God Spoke."

And God Spoke was a revelation the first dozen times i watched it, it was full of tiny little blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments. Haven't seen it in years.

Ruben and Ed is just surreal, with at least two scenes that have stuck in my head lo these thirty years.

My dad brought home "Xexyz" for NES one year. I have never heard anyone ever reference this game in any nostalgia reviews and had to actually go look up the name myself after vaguely remembering it as that side-scroling NES game that started with an x.

I saw Repo! The Genetic Opera when it came out in 2008. It's an opera, very little dialouge, if any, I haven't watched it in a while. Paris Hilton has a main role.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/14353-repo-the-genetic-opera

There was a game I played on my grandma's TurboGrafx 16 many years ago. I cannot remember the name, and searching over the years still has me befuddled.

It was a racing game, but with an RPG element where you had to continually upgrade your car and take on local race champs. I loved it and cannot for the life of me find the damn thing.

Edit: holy shit I think I found it. Final Lap Twin