Sno

Wherein half-remembered games are identified

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I just spent my evening trying to track down and identify several old games i could only remember vague details about. I succeeded in doing this and felt pretty awesome about my little bit of internet detective work.

This would make for a fun thread, wouldn't it? I mean, everybody has a few games they can only just barely remember, with the title probably not among those details.

So provide the information you can, be as specific as you can, and see if somebody else reading this either knows what it is or is able to figure out what it is.

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A sort of an educational game where a dog or a fox or a wolf or some other animal taught you various things. In one mini-game you had to arrange segments of notes to correspond to the song the creature (in a baroque wig) played. I remember some of the challenges being quite hard, at least for two kids who didn't know English at all back then. The game wasn't complete shit unlike most of the educational games at the time (and still?) and as I recall it actually looked quite good.

I will probably delete the last part immediately after seeing the screenshots.

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I'm pretty sure this was the first game I ever played:

I was about to have an eye operation and while the anaesthetic kicked in they gave me a Gameboy to play with. Probably 1993 give or take a year.

As I remember it, dinosaurs would appear on the screen and you had to select an edge of the screen where a boulder would come out to try and crush the dinosaurs.

Another:

My primary school had an Acorn computer in around 1997. We had Zool for it, but there was also an educational adventure game about Victorian England which seems oddly sophisticated in my memory of it. I remember an overhead view of a town, you could go into the various buildings (can only remember a clockmaker shop) and you were able to do some kind of time travel.

Edited by Raff

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Raff's Acorn game reminds me of my own lost Acorn educational game memory. It was just identified on the computer as "Romans" and unsurprisingly involved the ancient Roman empire. You would have to complete various minigames regarding things that happened in Roman life, for example I remember one of them was performing the traditional ablutions in the correct order - putting oil on the body and scraping it off with a special Roman scraping thing, and so on.

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There may well have been a series of them for different eras. I've found a couple of mentions via google about something called Betsi (possibly a dog character) - a Victorian game and a Tudors game. Edutainment doesn't seem to be very widely recorded.

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This one's really obscure and has been bugging me for ages.

Late 90s early 00s freeware point-and-click adventure game. Might have been made in AGS. Purported to be the first part in a multi-part series. Plot involved you dying on a spaceship, being turned into a ghost, and trying to find your way to an earth-like planet. The only specific thing I remember about it was there was a really cheesy joke about a camera pan that turned the screen upside down. My memory tells me it was made by a developer called Trapezoid (same as Neil Cicerega/Lemon Demon?), although I'm not sure I entirely trust it.

Edit: Whoa. Lemon Demon was a member of BigBlueCup back in the day. I guess I should trust my mind more. Not sure the name or where I can actually find any of his old games nowadays. Definitely not geocities. :sad:

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This is an impossible and fun thread.

Here's one I have never been able to find. It was game I played on the MSX2 early 90s. You played a pretty small guy going through a castle filled with obstacles and monsters. There were distinct rooms. Let me help you by stating that it wasn't Vampire Killer (Castlevania) or Knightmare 2. It wasn't kiddy either, it was pretty dark.

Please help me, Idle Thumbs.

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I actually just used the SA forums to find something I've been asking people on the internet about for years. Turns out it was an MMO called "10six" with hoverboards, base building and PVP.

It's good to know that game wasn't some kind of fever dream and actually happened.

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I wish I could find this one side view space shmup called Keon or Zeon or something. It was a shareware version with a bunch of cycling gradients and ended with a jungle level that I think had an alien head.

There were also a lot of weird add-ons for your ship you could get when killing enemies that would drop power-ups.

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Rodi, the game wasn't Master of Darkness was it?

Good guess, but it wasn't. The game I mean is much dinkier than that, it's an old, clunky MSX platformer. I'd be VERY surprised if someone suddenly knew :)

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I actually just used the SA forums to find something I've been asking people on the internet about for years. Turns out it was an MMO called "10six" with hoverboards, base building and PVP.

It's good to know that game wasn't some kind of fever dream and actually happened.

A sega-published PC MMO from 2000, pretty mad. Never been aware of that before.

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There was this game where you play as an American soldier fighting in the Middle East. You view the action through the eyes of this solder, and you can see the selected weapon in front of you as you traverse the environments. I don't quite remember the story details, but the whole thing was pretty tightly scripted. There were a number of different missions. At one point you manned the turret of a tank, and I also remember having to grab a rocket launcher to take out some incoming enemy vehicles. Oh, and there's a section where a grenade blast knocks you so unconscious the screen gets all blurry and your squad mates have to pull you to safety.

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I couldn't remember Grasshopper Manufacture the other day or any of their games, so I went to metacritic and scrolled down their list of highest-rated Wii games until I registered No More Heroes as familiar.

The first and last time in the history of ever that metacritic has been used for good instead of evil.

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This is an impossible and fun thread.

Here's one I have never been able to find. It was game I played on the MSX2 early 90s. You played a pretty small guy going through a castle filled with obstacles and monsters. There were distinct rooms. Let me help you by stating that it wasn't Vampire Killer (Castlevania) or Knightmare 2. It wasn't kiddy either, it was pretty dark.

Please help me, Idle Thumbs.

Was that Dark Castle, maybe?

There was this game where you play as an American soldier fighting in the Middle East. You view the action through the eyes of this solder, and you can see the selected weapon in front of you as you traverse the environments. I don't quite remember the story details, but the whole thing was pretty tightly scripted. There were a number of different missions. At one point you manned the turret of a tank, and I also remember having to grab a rocket launcher to take out some incoming enemy vehicles. Oh, and there's a section where a grenade blast knocks you so unconscious the screen gets all blurry and your squad mates have to pull you to safety.

Oh you. :kiss:

I have a game of my own that I actually once identified and then forgot the name of again. YET I STILL WONDER. I played it on DOS, but that's not where it was released on originally. You played some sort of transformer type thing, where you could go from mecha mode into like jet mode. It had nothing to do with Macross or something like that.

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Late 90s early 00s freeware point-and-click adventure game. Might have been made in AGS. Purported to be the first part in a multi-part series. Plot involved you dying on a spaceship, being turned into a ghost, and trying to find your way to an earth-like planet. The only specific thing I remember about it was there was a really cheesy joke about a camera pan that turned the screen upside down.

It probably isn't Rob Blanc (by Yahtzee)? Or 7 Days a Skeptic (also by Yahtzee)? Those are the only spaceship AGS games I remember. I also remember that screen being turned upside down thing, but don't remember the game (not sure if it's one of the two above)

[edit] there's also this http://www.bigbluecup.com/games.php?action=detail&id=1019 but that's probably not it either and it's newer

Edited by Erkki

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I wish I could find this one side view space shmup called Keon or Zeon or something. It was a shareware version with a bunch of cycling gradients and ended with a jungle level that I think had an alien head.

There were also a lot of weird add-ons for your ship you could get when killing enemies that would drop power-ups.

Side-scrolling, top-down? What year? What platform? (DOS, i would assume. Shareware and all.)

Remember anything else identifiable? What kind of weapons?

I have a game of my own that I actually once identified and then forgot the name of again. YET I STILL WONDER. I played it on DOS, but that's not where it was released on originally. You played some sort of transformer type thing, where you could go from mecha mode into like jet mode. It had nothing to do with Macross or something like that.

?

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It probably isn't Rob Blanc (by Yahtzee)? Or 7 Days a Skeptic (also by Yahtzee)? Those are the only spaceship AGS games I remember. I also remember that screen being turned upside down thing, but don't remember the game (not sure if it's one of the two above)

[edit] there's also this http://www.bigbluecup.com/games.php?action=detail&id=1019 but that's probably not it either and it's newer

Definitely not 7 Days. The one I'm thinking of was squarely a comedy game.

It's been ages since I've played the Rob Blanc series, so it could be one of them? I'll give them another shot.

Update on the Lemon Demon end, Neil tweeted back with links to his games: https://twitter.com/#!/neilyourself/status/82159028888801281

Neither of them is what I remembered, but amusing nonetheless.

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Side-scrolling, top-down? What year? What platform? (DOS, i would assume. Shareware and all.)

Remember anything else identifiable? What kind of weapons?

It's side-scrolling, I guess I accidentally left that part out. Haha I've sorry there's not a ton I remember about the weapons besides you would have extra rocket type guns added to the top and bottom of your ship, increasing the ammo you shot simultaneously.

There was also another short part where you fly about and around a large battleship shooting its turrets.

It's a possibly '90-'92 and in DOS. It had 256 colors.

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It goddamn is!! Thanks! :tup::grin:

There's a sequel/remake/something on XBLA called Thexder NEO, just so you know. If you're feeling nostalgic, you may want to try the demo.

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Good god, that looks awful.

Indeed. I remember playing it in the first grade or so, at which point it probably didn't seem awful because I didn't know better.

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Here's one I have never been able to find. It was game I played on the MSX2 early 90s. You played a pretty small guy going through a castle filled with obstacles and monsters. There were distinct rooms. Let me help you by stating that it wasn't Vampire Killer (Castlevania) or Knightmare 2. It wasn't kiddy either, it was pretty dark.

Was that Dark Castle, maybe?

Well was it, damn it? :grin:

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