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Forgotten PC games
- Thread starter KORNdog
- Start date
It is my time to stop lurking.
Star Crusader by Take 2 Interactive.
www.youtube.com
This is a wing commander clone space sim. I got it combined with another game everyone forgets Slipstream 5000
which is apparently available on steam now. I bought it in some..magazine thing at a newsagency.
This game, was amazing. at least in my memory.
Some lame bits but to my young self, the story was amazing. The gameplay was wing commander-like, and I was constantly getting surprised.
Bits where you change sides and the animated base menu prior to starting mission changes to reflect the side you are on; the plot beats; and most specifically, I think there is a moment (and I can't be 100% sure if this is actually what happened) where you fly into a wormhole? purusing some..mystery and the game says something like "find out more in MILLENIA: Altered Destinies" which is an ENTIRELY different game by Take 2 Interactive and then just goes back the normal storyline.
Edit: Ok I found a video of what I recalled: https://youtu.be/M33R-K0tQ0M?list=PL6K1_LepsaN_qCJkU7Mg3gk-M3PQCxSMN&t=1802
but it says its an expansion pack that never came out.called Mystery of Grimnada. I could've sworn it said Millenia. because I don't think I knew Millenia was a real game and never played it myself, but somehow remembered the word Millenia...someone please verify this before I destroy my brain thinking about it.
Star Crusader by Take 2 Interactive.
Star Crusader gameplay (PC Game, 1994)
Introduction and gameplay for Star Crusader, Dos PC game produced by GameTek in 1994 - http://www.squakenet.com/download/star-crusader/5630/ Playing through ...
www.youtube.com
This is a wing commander clone space sim. I got it combined with another game everyone forgets Slipstream 5000
which is apparently available on steam now. I bought it in some..magazine thing at a newsagency.
This game, was amazing. at least in my memory.
Some lame bits but to my young self, the story was amazing. The gameplay was wing commander-like, and I was constantly getting surprised.
Bits where you change sides and the animated base menu prior to starting mission changes to reflect the side you are on; the plot beats; and most specifically, I think there is a moment (and I can't be 100% sure if this is actually what happened) where you fly into a wormhole? purusing some..mystery and the game says something like "find out more in MILLENIA: Altered Destinies" which is an ENTIRELY different game by Take 2 Interactive and then just goes back the normal storyline.
Edit: Ok I found a video of what I recalled: https://youtu.be/M33R-K0tQ0M?list=PL6K1_LepsaN_qCJkU7Mg3gk-M3PQCxSMN&t=1802
but it says its an expansion pack that never came out.called Mystery of Grimnada. I could've sworn it said Millenia. because I don't think I knew Millenia was a real game and never played it myself, but somehow remembered the word Millenia...someone please verify this before I destroy my brain thinking about it.
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oh my god I loved Midtown Madness as a kid! Midtown Madness 2 also had a fairly active mod scene back in the day which was cool :)
Septerra Core
Was my first foray into isometric style RPG's. Loved the game and the world though........never completed it.
Was my first foray into isometric style RPG's. Loved the game and the world though........never completed it.
Bought this thinking it was a first person melee action game. It ended up being a adventure game.
[PC] Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins
This video shows full game walkthrough of Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins for PC. Complete game walkthrough, прохождение, playthrough, gameplay and longplay w...
www.youtube.com
Me too. I played the crap out of the Wing Commander series and its spin off Privateer. RIP Origin Systems.
OP
OP
Some great suggestions, especially Wheel of Time and Shogo.
For me the first thing that springs to mind that really should get more love is Severance/Blade of Darkness (it had different names in different territories), released in 2001.
I'm all over this one. reminds me a lot of the souls games.
theres some crazy waves of nostalgia in this thread. i'm amazed anyone had even heard of 9: the last resort too. i remember picking that up for like £1 or something. alongside Dark Earth.
1997 was an incredible year for games so there are a lot of "hidden gems" that didn't get as much attention as the likes of FF7, Goldeneye, Quake II etc, and Realms of the Haunting is one of the less well known stand-outs.
ROTH uses old-school Brit coder, Tony Crowther's own proprietary first-person engine, which is interesting as a curio to compare with others from the time, such as the Build engine and Quake engine. It was only ever used in one other game, Normality, which isn't quite as good or as ambitious but probably also worthy of a play.
ROTH uses old-school Brit coder, Tony Crowther's own proprietary first-person engine, which is interesting as a curio to compare with others from the time, such as the Build engine and Quake engine. It was only ever used in one other game, Normality, which isn't quite as good or as ambitious but probably also worthy of a play.
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For a time Darwinia was THE indie game with Cave Story. If you wanted to make an impression as "the guy who know games that you can't buy ina store", those were the two names to know. Now it's almost completely forgotten.I was huge into Introversion Software games. Darwinia, Uplink. So good.
French game from 1997, it was a huge success in France but failed in the US, don't know why.
Dark Earth - Wikipedia
I would highly recommend the Freespace games, I would call them a space sim, but some people might hotly disagree. The first is pretty good, but Freespace 2 is a damn near masterpiece, fun missions, great pilot chatter, an intriguing story line that gets increasingly desperate as it goes on. You can play with a mouse and keyboard easily enough, so no need to worry about getting a joystick or that. There are downloads too to overhaul the graphics in it, but even without those overhauls the art direction is so good you probably won't mind the outdated graphics.
For when you need that racing game hit, Slipstream 5000, Big Red Racing and POD are still genuinely fun and rewarding to play.
Wow, that is really ambitious, surprised I never heard of this, or Heat.net, guess it was US-only thing. Gotta love that XBAND Rough font that was ubiquitous in the '90s.
Big Red Racing! that game was so janky but the tracks were so fun
I feel like no one talks about the Gabriel Knight trilogy, and especially Gabriel knight 3 with it's amazing freeform 3D camera that really changes point-and-click gameplay. I once visited the actual real village the game world is modelled from and it was a surreal experience.
The Quest!
Barely a game, this free promotional CD-ROM from AOL featured a series of interactive puzzles starring three extremely post-Ren & Stimpy space explorers. The part I remember best is a fully interactive Space Ghost Coast to Coast bit with original dialog and low color animation that may have been a separate included disc that I absolutely cannot find clips of.
Drakan and Crimson Skies getting love, glad to see that
Nocturne mentioned a few times but no media, so here's a trailer for it;
It got a quasi sequel in an unrelated game, Blair Witch Volume I: Rustin Parr and also launched the Bloodrayne series since she's your partner (or her forerunner is anyway) in a couple missions
Just recently grabbed a physical copy of this
Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle earth
Since it's an EA game, and WBIE owns the license, this one will basically rot in the annals of history
Lastly
Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2
A decent quake3 powered 3rd person shooter/platformer tied in with the Heavy Metal 2000 movie developed by Ritual (they of forgotten games Sin, Star Trek Elite Force 2, among others)
Nocturne mentioned a few times but no media, so here's a trailer for it;
It got a quasi sequel in an unrelated game, Blair Witch Volume I: Rustin Parr and also launched the Bloodrayne series since she's your partner (or her forerunner is anyway) in a couple missions
Just recently grabbed a physical copy of this
Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle earth
Since it's an EA game, and WBIE owns the license, this one will basically rot in the annals of history
Lastly
Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2
A decent quake3 powered 3rd person shooter/platformer tied in with the Heavy Metal 2000 movie developed by Ritual (they of forgotten games Sin, Star Trek Elite Force 2, among others)
Drakan: Order of the Flame.
PC exclusive action adventure that weirdly got a PS2 exclusive sequel.
PC exclusive action adventure that weirdly got a PS2 exclusive sequel.
I played this gem, too, Deathtrap Dungeon. It was terrible, but so fun.
Just installed this myself from Steam.
Game logic is tied to frame-rate, which is fixed at 16fps (!)
I have a real soft spot for obscure ports - did you know Jersey Devil got a PC port? Or the Saturn game Amok?
I played a downloaded version a couple of years ago, and it was so nice to have it in "high" resolution, plus with a few additions like rescuing hostages added to levels.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be infected with malware, so I had to get rid of it. I just wish somewhere like GOG could re-release it.
French game from 1997, it was a huge success in France but failed in the US, don't know why.
Dark Earth - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I bought this game around the time it came out, but never finished it. Unfortunately I don't know what happened to my original copy.
I wish it was available on GOG to play it again.
Scorched Planet
Mix of Terminal Velocity, Star fox and Choplifter
I can't found footage of the 3D accerelated version, with texture filtering and smooth framerare. Was fun.
m.youtube.com
World Rally Fever
One of my all time favourite racing game. Powerdrift on steroids. Great cd soundtrack, great character roster, fantastic tracks and fine tunned difficulty. You can disable camera tilt and configure DOSbox for extreme smooth framerate and shaders to add scanlines
youtu.be
Mix of Terminal Velocity, Star fox and Choplifter
I can't found footage of the 3D accerelated version, with texture filtering and smooth framerare. Was fun.
Scorched Planet (PC DOS) longplay
Scorched Planet was developed by Criterion Software and released in 1996 by Virgin. It's a 3D Choplifter game with additional gimmicks. I had hard time findi...
m.youtube.com
World Rally Fever
One of my all time favourite racing game. Powerdrift on steroids. Great cd soundtrack, great character roster, fantastic tracks and fine tunned difficulty. You can disable camera tilt and configure DOSbox for extreme smooth framerate and shaders to add scanlines
#YesterPlay: World Rally Fever (MS-DOS, Split, 1996)
Vom eher unbekannten belgischen Entwicklerstudio Split kam 1996 dieses Kleinod des Rennspielgenres: "World Rally Fever" mit dem Untertitel "Born On The Road"...
youtu.be
Nocturne - 3rd person action adventure fighting Vampyres, werewolves etc as the trench coat wearing, dual pistol w/laser sights weielding "Stranger".
I'm genuinely not sure if I've ever met anyone else that knew about this game, let alone played it.
Also, Messiah , anyone?
I'm genuinely not sure if I've ever met anyone else that knew about this game, let alone played it.
Also, Messiah , anyone?
Oh shit, those were the 1st games that came to my mind.Citizen Kabuto with it's humour and vistas and Sacrifice was just so different.
French game from 1997, it was a huge success in France but failed in the US, don't know why.
Dark Earth - Wikipedia
This game was the shit back in the day!
I have to bring this up again, because of a feature that never got the widespread adoption it deserved. The different unit AI settings! You could toggle different AI modes for units. They had scouting, harrassing, search and destroy modes and you could give them damage thresholds that would tell them to come back to base to repair before they would go back out on whatever job you had them doing.It's been mentioned but Dark Reign (1997) was a fantastic RTS with features ahead of its time such as waypoints, build queues, terrain types that affected units differently, highly moddable as well I spend ages creating new units etc. I spent 1000s of hours playing this game.
Scout units that roam the map at will, but retreat at the first sign of resistance. Tank packs that will follow a patrol route, will break off to take on skirmishers, but won't be dragged across the map by fleeing enemies. It was great!
Also artillery that shoots halfway across the map instead of barely across the screen.
Seriously. There's something about old PC games I find particularly fascinating. Especially RPGs and adventure games with elaborate lore and world building. I love reading through the manuals.
Are there any good YouTube channels besides DF Retro and Lazy Game Reviews that talk about old PC games? Someone with the quality/style of Jeremy Parish?
Nice one! Someone did an OpenGL port of that which runs on Windows in high res - I believe its called f2bgl.
Thanks for reminding me. Just played a match and made it to level 6. It's still great.
I've still got my CD version :)
Trivia Fact: The Nocturne engine was then used for three survival-horror Blair Witch games:
Fitting:
Do you remember the Wheel of Time PC game?
Over two decades ago, while Wheel of Time, still unfinished, was fairly popular in fantasy lit circles, a video game adaptation was made, for PC only. It was a first-person shooter. You played an Aes Sedai (a non-canon character invented for the game, IIRC) who fought Darkfriend/enemies with...www.resetera.com
Such a good game and looked so pretty at the time.
The capture the seal MP mode was amazing. Placing your own booby traps like fake stairs and spear traps was a good twist.
JFC i feel ANCIENT... i've played most of the games listed...
haven't scrolled through the whole list, i just HOPE you guys mentioned SWOTL, B17-Flying fortress, Red Baron... yes i was a flight sim junkie
...other stuff i loved, the D&D games (Eye of the Beholder, Dark Sun, Ravenloft)
OH! The Hidden & Dangerous games... chef's kiss.
haven't scrolled through the whole list, i just HOPE you guys mentioned SWOTL, B17-Flying fortress, Red Baron... yes i was a flight sim junkie
...other stuff i loved, the D&D games (Eye of the Beholder, Dark Sun, Ravenloft)
OH! The Hidden & Dangerous games... chef's kiss.
Yes! I can actually answer a question like this lol.
MandaloreGaming does a fantastic job of giving overviews of old or obscure PC games. It's awesome. Great great channel. He did a good job of covering Pathologic 1.
If this is the one I'm thinking of, he also did a good job explaining Arx Fatalis
He goes over like, patching some games that need to be patched, as well as where to find obscure fixes and mods. It's seriously wonderful.