We all love our “Doom”," Command & Conquer", “Commander Keen” etc.
But what is a game that you love that no one seems to know and/or like? What is that one gem that makes you type your “C:>cd games” just that little tiny bit faster?
I’ll go first. My pick is Normality from 1996 by Gremlin Interactive. A 3D first person point and click adventure with FMV Cutscenes. It’s goofy and weird but perfectly playable. I highly recommended anyone who loves point and click adventures to try this one out. It’s basically Doom Point 'n Click
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- One must fall
- Monster Bash
- Jazz Jackrabbit
- Ultima Underworld
Epic Mega games was the shit those days!
Never played Monster bash, but I usually like apogee platformers so I’ll check it out!
Nice, another OMF and Jazz fan!
It’s a pity OMF is so underrated. Whenever someone claims they’re a fan of fighting games, and I ask them which games they’ve played, not a single one of them has replied with “OMF” so far. :(
OMF also got me more into understanding PC networking. I made my own null modem cable once (by splicing up a spare RS232 cable), connected my friends PC to it and we played OMF against each other, on our own PCs! No more having to share our keyboard! (gosh, I nearly forgot that shared keyboard multiplayer was a thing…) Those were exciting times.
OMF is by far the best fighting game I’ve ever played. Absolutely unmatched.
I chatted with Kenny Chou/cccatch on IRC once (the guy who wrote the soundtrack to OMF) and he told me about the technology stack they used for music in that game, which I found pretty interesting. He wrote the music in MultiTracker Module Editor and they had some proprietary software that would convert .MTM files into the music engine’s native format and package them up. The clever thing is that all the songs were saved together in one package, which means that if he reused the same samples in all of the songs (which he had to do), then the tool would be clever enough to have each sample on disk/in memory only once, so samples only had to be loaded when you started the game. Then when the game switched songs, only the pattern data (notes) had to be freed/loaded.
Very cool. Jealous that you got to talk to Kenny Chou. Him, Josh Jensen, and the Elam family are all my heros - I’ve read the OMF manual so many times that I still remember all their names, nearly three decades later. I wonder how their baby, Bethany Kay Elam is doing these days, and if she’s still chewing on joysticks and slobbering over keyboards…
I vividly recall the distinct humor and light-heartedness of the manual, which instructed me to print it out, give it to my friends and even put it in my bird cage. I couldn’t do the latter since I didn’t have a bird cage… but I did I print out several copies and gave it to my friends. My first manual was printed on a dot matrix printer. Later down the line, I managed to upgrade to an inkjet version - and even printed out a few pages in color (because color printouts were a precious thing back then), put it in a nice folder and made fancy borders and stuff around it.
The manual really struck a chord with me for some reason. Maybe because it went so detailed into the back stories of all the pilots, or maybe it’s was the down-to-earth language of it and the candid descriptions of the developers that made me feel like I got to know them personally… there was just something different about it, compared to all other game manuals at the time. Till date, I’ve never come across any official manual for a game with this sort of character to it. If Ryan Elam is still around, I’d love to meet him sometime and have a few beers with him.
I used to love Midwinter. First-person role-playing set in a future nuclear winter. 16 colour 3D graphics on an 8086 blew my mind. Was really excited to play it in VGA when my dad bought a 486, but it was too fast to be playable :'(
I used to play Midwinter on my Atari ST. In the manual it tells you that you’ll need to travel around the game area and recruit various characters and vehicles, and that you’d never make it by just heading straight for the enemy base. I played the game so many times like that and never made any progress. So eventually I just said screw it and headed straight for the enemy base. And wouldn’t you know it, I won.
Looks amazing! Finally a reason to use the turbo button on the 486 though!
I think my dad may have bought the only 486 on the market that did not have the fabled “turbo” button. It was a source of annoyance for sure.
Wouldn’t call Descent unknown or unliked. But it is an awesome pick either way!
Warlords
Warlords was on a demo cd I had as a kid. You were limited to 40 turns and playing as the elves. But by god I learned how to win in 40 turns. I did eventually get the second one, it’s one I still find ways to play.
Hi octane.
Best way to loose a few hours blowing stuff up.
Bedlam was also a blast
Yes! I was contemplating using Hi-Octane as my pick, but went with normality instead. Great game. A little easy once you’ve got the hang of the controls though.
Never heard of bedlam, I’ll check it out!
The first Dune by Cryo Entertainment.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/dune
A unique mix of real-time grand strategy over the planet, with a point-and-click adventure component which unlocks more of the game as you progress through it. It works well and is enjoyable to me.
The art style is wonderful, that gorgeous French Cryo feel with some visuals taken from David Lynch’s Dune film.
One of the ScummVM developers is currently reverse engineering all the animations on Mastodon and it’s fascinating to see.
https://mastodon.social/@madmoose/110844905171293166
I got into casually speedrunning the game when the Upper Memory Block podcast covered it all those years ago. I managed under 100 game days, another podcast listener got under 50 days, and someone on YouTube has something like a 24 day completion.
The music is also great. Remi Herbulot’s HERAD music system used parts of Yamaha’s OPL synth which literally nobody else did, it is easily the most advanced FM synthesis engine for DOS, and composer Stephane Picq took advantage of it to make a beautiful soundtrack.
Stephane released a CD quality album version called Dune: Spice Opera which is my favourite album of all time, of many musician ever, and is one of my most prized possessions.
Always nice to see love for the original Dune game.
There’s nothing casual about speedrunning though. That’s commitment! Even if you weren’t on top of the ladders.
Not sure about underrated, but definitely mostly unknown anymore, would have to be Star Control 2.
The exploration, combat, and humor are all just so involving. I can pick it up now and enjoy it as much as I did decades ago.
Add to it, Marble Drop and Full Tilt from Maxis. Marble Drop was a fun puzzle game with marbles in intricate machines, and Full Tilt was three Pinball games, one of which was the original Space Cadet Windows later used with XP. The other two tables were pirate and dragon slaying based, but equally as engaging for me
Not sure about underrated, but definitely mostly unknown anymore, would have to be Star Control 2.
Melee mode was great. As was the music.
Sword of the Samurai : and it had top down live wars and hand combat in the fields and diplomacy and swordfights and playthrough lasted for generations. looks like its on steam now. https://store.steampowered.com/app/327950/Sword_of_the_Samurai/?l=dutch
Cool! I’ll check it out!
- Dangerous Dave, John Romero’s first “popular” game, predating Keen/Wolf/Doom. Three decades later, and I still haven’t managed to beat this game (without using cheats or save states that is).
- Bio Menace, An action platformer by Apogee, made using the same engine as Keen. You are Snake Logan, a CIA operative who needs to save Metro City, which has been invaded by mutants. A very fun game with good controls and smooth movements.
- The Skunny series, A bunch of platformers featuring Skunny the squirrel, made by Copysoft. Save our Pizzas in particular was pretty memorable, where Skunny travels back in time to ancient Rome because an evil chef wants to destroy the invention of pizza so that he can make his own imitation. Very whacky and cartoony, kid me loved this game.
- SkyRoads, A fun space runner. Think Temple Run, except you’re in a spaceship that’s… not flying and is on a road, in space, and it can also hop! In hindsight, it sounds weird, but trust me, it’s fun.
These are all gold! I forgot about skyroads!
And Xmas SkyRoads!
Superfly
It’s a game where you swat flies such that swatted flies get in your way, so it’s very strategic.
Oh! I remember this one! Never got into it as a kid though.
Albion - sci-fi, somewhat like avatar (the movies), one of a kind and basically open world before that was a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion_(video_game)
Cool! Always nice having another RPG in the backlog!
Albion has been statically recompiled, so you can also play on another OS, if for some weird reason you don’t like DOS.
As an example, you can get it for Open Pandora, which runs linux on an ARM cpu.
Supersolvers Outnumbered. Your character (my mom would call him Joe Cool) goes to a TV broadcasting station to stop the bad guy. You get clues as to his whereabouts by solving math questions like “song A was requests 10 times but song B got 27 requests. How many more times was song B requested?”. Once you get all the clues you have to deduce which room the bad guy is hiding in. Initially figuring it out is easy but it gets harder. It still holds up in my opinion.
Is this like an edutainment title?
Edit: yes it is! Interesting pick. I’ll check it out!
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They are pretty famous, though fame is subjective.
Cool picks!
Loom
Space quest series
Monkey island 1 and 2
zzt
