The worlds worst diagram of ship controls included as an insert in a Paranoia box
All Flesh Must be Eaten
Fairy Meat
Cult of Ecstacy (for Mage the Ascension)
Did you know that according to Dragon Magazine players can participate in orgying for a number of days equal to their con SCORE?
Castles and Crusades
Tunnels and Trolls
Remember Car Wars? They did a crossover with GURPS, called GURPS Autoduel, and it is amazing.
HOL (Human Occupied Landfill)
The second publication of the HOL supplement, Buttey Wholesomeness, where the cover is printed BUTTery HOLsomeness. That one was just a pita to find I started wondering if it was just a PDF concept cover. Only took me like 8 years to find a physical copy.
Mars Attacks board game
Games:
Sim Tower
Redneck Rampage
The Diablo 1 expansion, Hellfire, that Blizzard said not to make but a division of Sierra of all companies yolod it into existence anyway.
The Neverhood
Toy Story for Gameboy
Battlezone, back in the day when you were fighting green triangles
Descent
I wasn’t going to at first but I want to throw in some of my favorite Magic the Gathering cards: Nature’s Wrath (haha, holy shit mono green, go home you’re drunk), the art of the Pride secret vault thing for Bearscape, the art for Spy Network looks like Friend Computer from Paranoia, Kudzu, Stunted Growth
My music taste is so underground you guys I’m very cool like that. There’s a surprising number of trans folk punk musicians from the Pacific Northwest. I’m getting sleepy but if anyone wants me to bombard them with folk punk artists (trans or otherwise) lmk I’ll totally hook you up
Folk punk in the PNW where at least someone in the band is trans: Pigeon Pit, Left at London, Sister Wife Sex Strike, and Porch Cat. I know I’m missing some, maybe Kimya Dawson counts (non binary, lives in PNW, but from New York and Moldy Peaches was a New York band).
If I’m just going to do top 5 folk punk in general though, hard to pick and it changes often but let’s go with: Apes of the State, Days n Daze, She/Her/Hers, Jeffrey Lewis, and Pigeon Pit (I fucking love Pigeon Pit okay)
I forgot about Redneck Rampage. For some reason I associate the feeling of that with Blood, and it looks like they’re both from 1997. I’ll have to go fire it up and see if there are any similarities
I've seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob's Ladder. That was a night well spent.
Out of the games, I've played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried -- never really made much sense out of that one though.
I don't know if it's that obscure... but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games -- do you remember the song with the lyrics "I'm just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life"?
That’s amazing nobody’s ever seen those movies! And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map. Fun game. I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.
Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)
I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself -- I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn't understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it's clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates... (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)
I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
I hadn't played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn't great when you asked this question -- but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such -- and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It's got orange and white stripes. It's scratched up a little bit, but it's still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to "improve performance"... lol)
The game opens with a short animated splash screen -- a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game's logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off -- somewhat confusingly; it wasn't immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn't find it very helpful.
The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don't really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it's not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.
There's an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.
The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don't know well enough to name -- but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going "AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!" over and over.)
I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) -- and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it's also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a "boing-a-boing-oing-oing" failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.
The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there -- or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can "build" a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn't seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).
Unfortunately I don't have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:
By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.
which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I'm running it on has a 3.7GHz processor -- obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance -- but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p
Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print -- although I haven't tried it.
I’ve been collecting rulebooks for that game for the last ten or so years. Maybe my favorite tabletop. It flows pretty smoothly if everyone is familiar with the rules but for sure even if you’ve been playing it for a decade you’ll always hit something that’s like “I have no clue how to resolve this”. And the learning cliff is for real so actually getting people interested in it enough to become that familiar with the rules is as hard as the game lol
Bubba Ho-Tep is an awesome little Bruce Campbell movie if people are looking for something to watch. I remember Fido was pretty big among B Grade / Comedy horror fans about 10-15 years ago.
Sim Tower was really fun growing up. I was expecting that when came out fallout shelter and was mad and disappointed. I feel like most people have seen screenshots or characters from The Neverhood but probably couldn’t name what it was from. I never played it but remembered it growing up and only found the name out a year ago.
My favorite video game as a kid was called Red Storm Rising, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, and played on a Commodore 64. It put you in command of a submarine facing off against the Soviet navy. Graphics were very basic, but it had a very intelligent engine that lead to needing to use real strategy to win.
I don’t remember what it was called, but one of my cousins had one that he was always playing when we would visit for Thanksgiving. I just remember the cartridge was a bright sky blue
Two movies from the 90s… “Ruben and Ed,” and “… And God Spoke.”
And God Spoke was a revelation the first dozen times i watched it, it was full of tiny little blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments. Haven’t seen it in years.
Ruben and Ed is just surreal, with at least two scenes that have stuck in my head lo these thirty years.
Anna and the appolypse, it’s a fantastic zombie musical with insanely good songs. I have never met anyone in the real world or online who have heard of it (except a few who I forced to watch with me).
I watched it and I did not like it, but it is probably that I went into it with the wrong expectations. The entire premise of “musical about a zombie apocalypse” sounded a bit goofy to me and the trailer had the same mood, so I expected a comedy, or at least something a bit tongue in cheek. Instead, the movie is a total downer.
Yeah, it’s a bit bleak at the end for sure. But I just loved how catchy the songs were, and the cast was really great. I didn’t know anything before randomly playing it on Netflix, so that didn’t give me any expectations going in
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.
Found them on metal archives and am listening through youtube.
I’m only a few seconds in, and I immediately get some early Helloween vibes from the guitar tone and playing in Queen of Desire, which is entirely a good thing. Rest of the sound so far is a lot more heavy than power metal, but it’s right up my alley for a Christmas afternoon.
Basically, just a GTA4 pirate rip and modded and sold on actual disks.
There are several, and they are hard to find online because any uploads of it probably don’t exist anywhere anymore, and were already rare due to aforementioned disks.
Some of them are so regional and probably made by one person, the only way to find one is to get a computer HDD with it installed.
Pakistani flags everywhere, reskinned character and NPCs, Pakistani songs, story characters replaced by famous IRL people, including some known mafia lol. Some original missions and reduxed interactions and updated story. Also lots of military additions.
Some were also themed after a specific city like Karachi or Lahore.
I’m sure Pakistan wasn’t the only country since I’ve heard there were hilarious and great modded bootlegs in other countries as well.
A-Train DS, or A列車で行こう DS, a Japanese game about managing trains. Basically like Transport Tycoon/OpenTTD, but focuses on Japanese train. It was actually really good, it actually made me obsessed with Japanese trains. Coolest thing about this game is, you can actually “ride” the train you built. It was like a dream come true for childhood me.
Yet, I rarely heard anyone online talks about this game. I really recommend others to play this game… If you can read Japanese as I am not sure that there is English translation for this game…
On the Internet, everything is fundamentally both obscure yet ubiquitous, or so it seems. But in real life, there are at least 2 things that seem to be obscure to the point that people don’t believe me when I mention it:
A Super Nintendo game released in the US as Super Ninja Boy. It was a follow-up to (or maybe remake of) Little Ninja Brothers on the NES. I’ve even been told that I was confused and that I’m probably thinking of Legend of the Mystical Ninja.
On the original Playstation, there used to be a series of demo discs that would have “hidden” features on them if you pressed the right button(s). One of those demo discs had the entire music video for Usher’s song “Pony” and other than randos on the internet and my friends/family who saw it with me, I’ve never met anybody that remembers it. If anybody here does remember that demo disc, I think there was another hidden music video on there, I vaguely remember a band, with various shots of the drummer wearing black athletic-type shorts with a white band around the leg but beyond that I really do not recall.
Bro I was at the thrift store and I saw a PlayStation demo disc for $2 and I laughed because I didn’t even think it should be there. But I will literally go back, take a picture, buy it and send it to you if it makes your Christmas better lol
That’s awesome and very kind of you to offer. Not to be ungrateful, but I’m sure someone else would appreciate it far more than me. I don’t have a Playstation anymore and I don’t even have a CD/DVD drive on any device that would be able to run an emulator. Merry Christmas and thanks for being so thoughful!
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).
It sounds like Christian music to me. Idk if that’s true but growing up in that religion I get that vibe from the song. Might be worthwhile to try to find some small time bands from around the years you initially found it. Good luck on your search.
It was originally labeled as Jars of Clay, and it certainly fits the genre, but the lead singer isn’t the same. There were a ton of smaller bands from those years with pretty much the exact same sound, I never managed to find a match.
At this point, I’m guessing it was an unreleased demo or something. In which case, unless the original artist finds it, I doubt we’ll ever know.
I’m still bummed that the band Splashdown was screwed over by the music industry. They were too jazz for pop fans and too pop for jazz fans but had an amazing sound and a brilliant vocalist in Melissa Kaplan. They released a couple EPs and a brief album (Stars & Garters) before their major label debut Blueshift was permanently shelved.
They posted a goodbye collection of demos & b-sides before dissolving into Universal Hall Pass, Freezepop, and Anarchy Club.
There’s also the Pine Salad Productions fan-dub of a few Dirty Pair and Macross episodes from the late-80s, I think? I had a 5th gen VHS of a few (“The Dirty Pair Does Dishes” was one). Insane dubs that were absurd and utterly unrelated to the actual plots or even characters. I thought they were hysterical when I was a young edgy person.
A friend found “remastered” versions a few years ago and…the humour has not aged well, to put it mildly. Watch at your own risk. Glad I’m no longer edgy I suppose.
I was literally thinking, splashdown would probably fit this threads theme well when I came to your post. I’m glad I’m not the only one who knows they existed.
The band is definitely greater than the sum of their (also exceptionally good) parts. I am saddened to hear about Adam’s health issues but selfishly delighted they’re back together and planning new releases.
When the band was dissolving after the Blueshift fiasco and Adam shut down the Castle Von Buhler label, I emailed him asking if there was any hope Blueshift would see the light of day. He apologised and said no. A week later, the Stars & Garters CD and a CD-R of Blueshift mysteriously landed in my mailbox. With no band, he had zero reason to pander to a fan base. He’s just a good person.
Add comment