Obscure Games

[B7R]

There are plenty of games out there that have been played over time & forgotten about or they exist in some sort of form but there is little evidence of it available online. I assume the reason I created this topic is I want to know what obscure games other forum members on here have in their possession that isn't really talked about or there isn't much information available on it.   Games can range from anywhere from the Atari 2600 for example to the latest generation and PC games. 

 

One game I'd like to kick this topic off is with a game called "TV Giant", now I haven't played this game in over 13 years but it is still in my possession, It was developed by Limbic Entertainment & published by Nobilis Group in 2006 but my copy has a copyright date of 2007, information for this game is really obscure as if you just put "TV giant" into google you may get a few small results for this game alongside other unrelated results, TV Giant itself is an economic strategy game, dealing with establishing a television company and gaining a monopoly in the given sphere of business. This time the developers decided to enter the world of television - the user, starting as a young entrepreneur, gets a chance to become a magnate of this industry. Italic quote taken from gamepressure.com. 

 

Finding physical copies of the game is a little bit of a difficult task, possibly because of how obscure this game has become, some can be found on eEay for as low as $10 in the local currency but once these sell out, it'll be much more difficult to find this game in the wild. There is very little videos of this game on Youtube and I haven't really seen it talked about elsewhere in the past couple of years.  I purchased mine off of Ebay back in the day and it has a sticker on the front for retailer CEX so I'd assume in the past someone had this game, traded it to CEX, someone then purchased it from CEX, sold it on Ebay and then I purchased it. I do not remember the year I purchased the game. 

 

Covert art for TV Giant

  (Think this is the Spanish cover art, the PAL version includes a very much similar cover art but it also features people on the cover art like a director, camera man, actor etc) 

 

Release date: Unknown, possibly 2006 or 2007

Released Platforms: PC CD ROM 

 

Car wash Tycoon 

 

While CWT may not be as obscure as TV Giant, I don't really see it talked about much and that is possibly because it is a PS2 title and released in such a small market. The game basically sees you managing a car wash and... that is pretty much it. You'll get the choice to wash some cars, hire employees, charge how much you want for cars to be washed and advertising media but other than that there isn't too much to this game. The game was developed by a company called Aqua Pacific and published by Phoenix Games, yes the same Phoenix Games that is behind all those nasty knock offs of other games & media. 

 

The game was released in 2006 only on the PS2 and PC with the PC edition release (if it even exists) being extremely rare & obscure, I have tried searching for a physical PC release but can't find any relatable results. As far as I'm aware of as for the release region it was only released in Europe / UK and Australia. When I purchased my copy of the game, I got it form Kmart Australia when they use to sell games for $9.00 

  (Australian Cover Art) 

 

Release date: 2006 (Exact Month Unknown) 

Released Platforms: PS2, PC (PC Being Extremely obscure) 

 

 

[Presidential]

Yeah, so the first one on my list takes me back to childhood at my granny's. My cousins and I all would take spend all hours of the night, taking turns playing through this simple skate game that has eluded us since the fall of her PC some time around 04/05. My brother has looked for it, my cousin has looked for it and I finally found it earlier this year on Archive.org. Interestingly enough, I wasn't even looking for it at the time but just flicking through a collection of DOS games and instantly recognized the screen I posted below. I'm glad it wasn't a picture of the cover, if the game even had a cover. All I know is, a friend of my uncle's brought it over on a floppy and installed it some time in the late 90s. I've got a 4tb hard drive with a growing collection of older games now and I can't explain how happy I am to have this one in it. Between this and my PS2 collection plus Parsec, we've been having fun playing these older games since no one's really been going out and doing anything. Anyway, back to the point of the thread!

 

Name: Skate Boarding

Release date: 1998 by Apoky! Software

Released Platforms: PC/Floppy Disk

 

Name: Icy Tower

Release date: December 22, 2001

Released Platforms: PC not sure

 

This is another game I keep around just for something quick to jump into and waste some time in between an update or something. I actually lost this along with a drive a while ago and again had to go through all kinds of hoops to find the actual Icy Tower I remember playing and not some weird updated one or from some shady site I didn't trust downloading from.

 

This is all I can think of off the top of my head. I may edit/throw up a new post after I dig through my drives and see if anything else is in my collection. I was going to throw up Celebrity Deathmatch but can't tell for sure if that's obscure or not seeing as how I've met a good bit of people who have played it/owned it.

[kobeni]

 

Hong Kong Massacre

 

In other words, it's Hotline Miami meets John Woo.

 

The story is average at best, but the particle effects, lighting, ragdoll physics and the destructible environments are awesome.

[Bloodytears1666]

Ironically Obscure games has been forgotten and deserved to be mentioned in this thread... Pretty decent survival horror games, and if I had a chance, would definitely replay them.

 

 

 

@Presidential Icy Tower, I remember back in the day, this game was in every computer club in my area. Probably gone with all old computer clubs:).

Edited July 14, 2020 by Bloodytears1666

[HamwithCheese]

Not that obscure, but pretty overlooked. Wish more people were into Armored Core. Daemon X Machina is a pretty good successor, albeit on the wrong console

Edited July 14, 2020 by HamwithCheese

[trip]

Just now I was looking for a screen shot of "remote control airplane" (from the 1980s Apple computer) for an example in my post in the MS Flight Sim thread on this very page.  Nothing.  I found nothing.  That's pretty obscure if you ask me.  

 

Game was great by the way...in all it's vector line graphics glory.  Not joking.

[B Dawg]

On 7/8/2020 at 9:10 AM, Presidential said:

Name: Icy Tower

If I didn't see this image, I probably would have never remembered it. It's been so long.

[Rhoda]

The first thing that popped into my head was a PC game from back in 1997 called Total Annihilation but I'm not too sure on how well known it is. Obviously anybody remotely interested in this genre of game would probably recognise it, but I don't see it discussed or referenced too much. The basic idea is you control one of two sides, "Arm" or "Core" and you have two sources on which to build weaponry and robots - one being energy and the other being metal. Both can be mined from the environment but some maps are more generous than others. There's some tactics behind it but honestly once you get the hang of it and develop a strategy there's not too much of a challenge. I used to play it a lot on my grandfather's crappy PC and looking back I'm surprised his machine could even handle it because the graphics were fairly good for the time and there was potential for a lot to be going on at once - enemies exploding en masse, fires breaking out, bullets and rockets flying all over the place, things like that. There was literally no difference between the sides other than how they looked. Each side had access to the same caliber of equipment and machinery, they just looked different. I even grabbed a copy for my MacBook a couple of years back, and it was still fun to play more than 20 years later.