Ask Lemmy

Back in the heyday of flash videos and before youtube, there was a clerks spoof featuring marvel comics heroes that I remember as being enjoyable, clever, and ultimately just a good tribute/ripoff of the source material. I have no idea how to find that again.

Captain goodnight. Still one of the best games I've ever played. First game I saw that allowed piloting planes, helicopter, jeeps, tanks and run around killing enemies all with a solid story.

This song I downloaded from a file sharing application in the early 2000s. I've been searching for the artist for about two decades, nothing (the forum posts that come up when you search for it are also me).

Has anyone seen the 80's animated series The Mysterious Cities of Gold? It took me forever to find it and before I did I started doubting if it even existed or if I made it all up in my head. It takes place in the 1500's and it follows this group that is looking for the lost cities of gold. At some point early on they find an ancient aircraft that is made of solid gold, solar powered and in the shape of a giant condor.

Most obscure videogames I ever played:

1. A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don't remember its name and I've never seen it since.

2. A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.

Operation Sandman, amazing movie with Ron perlman and also the adventures of Pete and Pete

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. It was a tex based strategy game on the TRS 80 written in basic. You played a feudal lord and tried to grow your empire. Each turn was a year. It was a text only game, but I'm pretty sure they had a graphics version at one point. When I say graphics, it was the upper half of the ASCII character set mapped over to block characters. This was in the 70's.

Nintendo game called Solomon's Key.

It was a great early puzzle game.

There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90's where there's this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.

One of the earlier games I had on a CD-ROM. Back then it wasn't a disc tray. You eject an entire disc jewelcase-like thing and put your cd inside the case and shove it back in like a floppy disk.

When I was a kid I saw this stop motion animation on tv about a little kid afraid to go to bed. This crescent-moon headed bird man comes and steals his eyes. It ends with the boy, blind, stumbling around in the dark.

It was awesome.

Toomba 2: The evil swine return is a piece of nostalgia I can never share

Alter Aeon is a fun MUD with multiclassing. I love my wizard / cleric / thief

They also have a nice wiki

There was this old game called Twistingo that my grandma had on her computer. Made by a long defunct company called eGames, it was basically like if Zuma and Bingo had a child. There were balls with numbers that'd slowly advance down a track, and you had one or more bingo cards. If the ball had a matching number on your card, you'd click on the number and the ball would vanish. If the balls reached the end, you lost. Really fun game, I still have the old disc for it.

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.

"Mail Order Monsters," which came out in the 8-bit era (mine was C64). Basically, you started out with a "base monster," like plant, insect, reptile, etc. Then you battled someone else's. The winner got some money, which could be used to upgrade your monster with abilities, extra limbs, and so on. You could save your monster on a floppy disk and battle on someone else's system.

My love affair ended when a friend figured out how to hack that data file on the floppy and make an invincible monster

The video game Star Goose that came on a floppy disk.

Right offhand, Rita Pfeiffer. There have been times where I was her only Spotify listener. Probably also nobody has heard of Knife the Puppets but me and my wife. My favorite musician at the moment is probably Ashley Virginia, a little known folk singer out of North Carolina. I've been obsessed with the Hushabyes since Lindsey Verril of Little Mazarn introduced them to the world. I'm getting a cassette player mostly for New New Sincerity, Lindsey's label, but there are some cassettes I want from the Spinster Sounds collection.

I'm sure I've seen some ultra rare movies, but I watch so much weird old trash that I have no idea how well known any of it is. I've seen Tales from the QuadeaD Zone twice. I follow Blood Tea and Red String on Instagram. I excited for the sequel. One of my all time favorite movies is a 1977 X-rated version of Cinderella with full song and dance numbers (a few of them genuinely fantastic!) and Sy Richardson as the fairy godmother.

EDIT: I forgot the real crown gem! We own a copy of the original cut of a movie called Freedom Deep! It's basically a feature length music video for a band called Goya's Child. The version of Freedom Deep you can find online is the new cut. It has lots of obnoxious narration over the music and nonsense 9/11 content thrown in. The rare DVD version is still not a great movie, but it's a painfully fun ultra long grunge music video! Oh I need to make some people I work with watch Freedom Deep.

Elroy Goes Bugzerk and Elroy Hits the Pavement.

Man I want another Elroy game!

How about Wally Gubbins? A series of silly skydiving videos. My father has a ton of them on VHS. I loved it as a kid. I just looked, you can even find them on YouTube. So maybe not that obscure.

In terms of software I remember having several ad games. So, games that are basically just an ad. I had a Bifi game. Some weird game about colours where I don't remember what it was for. And a "game" about Chesterfield Cigarettes. I remember that I had to install QuickTime Player to run it. It was basically like Google Streetview when you walked into buildings with a few interactive elements put in. No idea where I got it. Might even still have the CD somewhere.

Edit: I found the Chesterfield thing: https://archive.org/details/see_you

Piratenmassaker

In the 70s we had a cassette tape kids story about a wizard who lived in a mountain and kept all the winds in a box.

The story was about someone who went in and retrieved the winds.

It involved blowing up sections of passageways (the narrator talked of lighting the blue touchpaper), and the wizard woke up and chased the hero.

He had a walking stick so his steps were reproduced including that, and he was calling, "My wind! Somebody's stolen my wind!".

I think it was probably on the front of a magazine or something. I don't know if it's a traditional story or something written for that production but I thought it was brilliant at the time.

OK, I'll go all-in on this:

2000 AD Comics' Nexus, The computer game.

Made for the Commodore C128 computer (which oddly ran Microsoft Basic), it was a simple single-screen platform shooter with the twist that you could pile up the bodies of your enemies and use them as platforms.

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. Try and grow a city-state by strategically distributing resources. Poor distribution results in death by famine, disease or invasion. Good distribution keep state growing and eventually become king to win the game. I played it on a Commodore PET.

My brothers and I had a handheld game in the 80s that was basically a star wars knock off. It even started each attack sequence with a fast version of a star wars theme. The enemies were all Tie Fighters (all digital pieces that lit up when active been off when not), and you shot them with lasers Galaga-style. If you died, it played part of Jupiter from The Planets by Gustav Holst.

It was called ASTRO Thunder.