Either windows 95 or 98 I used to play this game my mom set up for me but doesn’t remember. Now she needs my help to plug in a USB cable but somehow has a job that uses software and procedures too complicated for me… Anyway I can remember if it was entirely this or just part of it, but the memorable part was the sliding puzzles, like the ice caves in Pokemon. The character might have had skates or something but it’s a vague memory that could be wrong.
Maybe someone here will help me find a song that I listened to with a friend (and danced a lot) during a summer in the late 90s.
It was an electronic dance song which featured a a very raspy male voice singing in Spanish and would ocasionally make the “pull snot from the throat and spit” sound.
My friend and I have been for years trying to find it to no avail… :(
I’d never met anyone but my mom who’d played Solomon’s Key prior to Nintendo straight up adding it to the NSO.
The other game I never hear about was the ID4: Independence Day floppies that came in cereal boxes or something. Don’t really remember the games that well but I do remember trying to collect them all.
Also, I once basically got gaslighted into thinking that Falling Down was just a fever dream of mine until one day I’d heard the name in a Tech N9ne song and it all clicked again.
Back in the heyday of flash videos and before youtube, there was a clerks spoof featuring marvel comics heroes that I remember as being enjoyable, clever, and ultimately just a good tribute/ripoff of the source material. I have no idea how to find that again.
The game Chex Quest, which was a total conversion of Doom for kids, used as an advertising campaign and included in cereal boxes. Incredibly well done game.
I watched a video about all these advertisement games and they missed out on the Mr. Pibb shooter that McDonald’s was giving out with kids meals in the mid 90’s, but the entire second half of the video was all about Chex Quest.
I mentioned this in another thread on CQ, but can you imagine getting brought into that kickoff meeting and just thinking “great, another soulless marketing game” and then realizing everyone including the client is on board with you making THAT.
Its not like it broke any real new ground (other than a bar for promotional give aways) but in a time when crappy doom clones were a dime a dozen… CQ went HARD.
Boffing some of the details here but: poor dude with the last name “Noid” also happened to be some kind of skitzophrenic. So unlike many people struggling with that, people really WERE talking about him… Kinda…
Poor bastard had a multimillion dollar ad campaign with radio, tv, bus stops saying “avoid the noid” which to him was “avoid this man!”. If he was receiving help, he would have heard those ads on his way home from his appointments. He would have junk mail through his slot with anti-noid propaganda.
Anyway he took a dominoes hostage. He released all the hostages I think he was the only victim. Just one of those insane things, like anyone else with that surname it would have been a material for their tight five stand up bit a decade later, but in this case it lined up with a man struggling with the exact mental disorder that made it the worst thing possible. Merry Christmas!
When I was a kid I was only allowed to play educational computer/video games. The only exceptions to that were 2 games that came with our Win95 computer (when we got the computer it came with a little case full of software/game cds). One of the games was redline racer, a game where you could race motorcycles on pretty cool (for an 8 year old) tracks. The other was G-Police, a game that took place in an outer space colony built inside domes on the moon Callisto. You played as a guy who joined the government police to find out what really happened to his dead sister. The entire game play was executing missions piloting a flying fighter craft and the story was told/discovered via radio transmissions and cut scenes every few missions. I probably put hundreds if not thousands of hours into playing that game over and over between 8 and 10 years old. I actually found redline racer a few months ago on an abandonware site and got it to run on my computer, but the only install options were French, German, and Spanish, none of which I speak. I installed the Spanish version and was surprised at the fact that I could still remember/navigate all the menus. I haven’t found G-Police anywhere or ever heard of anyone else who knows it. Part of me wishes I could find it and get it to work for nostalgia, but the other part of me knows that it’s going to look like a bunch of boxy awful graphics and I should not taint my happy memories.
G-Police was the poster child for new texture streaming effects over the AGP bus. It was one of the first games (if not the absolute first) to feature animated billboards.
There was also a Playstation version which may be easier to find.
Nanosoft… There’s a line from one of the early missions where you have to scan cargo to find something being smuggled, which I’ve always remembered for being so state the obvious enthusiastic. There are four to scan, and after unsuccessfully doing three they say “three down, one to go, it’s got to be the next one!”
Has anyone seen the 80’s animated series The Mysterious Cities of Gold? It took me forever to find it and before I did I started doubting if it even existed or if I made it all up in my head. It takes place in the 1500’s and it follows this group that is looking for the lost cities of gold. At some point early on they find an ancient aircraft that is made of solid gold, solar powered and in the shape of a giant condor.
Hand of Manos. Most likely thee worst movie ever made. I found it for a screen writing class. The assignment was watch a bad movie then present it to the class. Easiest A+ of my fucking life.
Another weird one is, there used to be a sex Tetris type game for Windows 98 or earlier. Little naked people would drop down and when you got a full line they would jump off the screen. I don’t know how that got on the family PC, but it was on it. I played it. So there’s that.
I remember coming across Mad Dog at a few arcades growing up (80’s kid). It had a great attract screen where McCree would taunt you if I recall properly. Thanks for the flashback. There was one or two other games like this. Also, the Sega holographic cube game was pretty legit looking but played like shit. It also used live video on a weird 3d plane.
I played ToA! A friend and I would wait patiently for 45 minutes whilst it loaded to a Commodore 64 via cassette drive. Only once it finished loading would we find out if it actually worked - if not, load again.
There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90’s where there’s this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.
One of the earlier games I had on a CD-ROM. Back then it wasn’t a disc tray. You eject an entire disc jewelcase-like thing and put your cd inside the case and shove it back in like a floppy disk.
Core memory unlocked: My elementary school only had one caddy, so you had to take the disk out of the jewel case, pop it in the caddy, then pop that whole contraption into the disk drive.
There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90’s where there’s this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.
The original Death Race 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine. It may have had a small comeback when the Death Race remake came out but this isn’t the kind of movie you’d see randomly on tv.
“What’s that?” “A hand grenade” best pun in cinematic history, un-toppable. I’m a huge Death Race fan, and CarWars, and the Twisted Metal game. Gun cars are just cool
Fun story, my dad met a guy who talked about a movie he had seen once, where racers ran over people to score points, my dad thought this guy was taking the piss and never considered the movie might be real. Until one day he was watching TV randomly and stumbled on the movie. But as people from the era of cable TV might remember, it was hard to know the name of the movie you just caught midway through, unless the channel showed the name of the movie you were out of luck, so I grew up knowing that this movie existed, but never knew the name. When the remake came out the plot seemed familiar enough for me that I immediately went to check what it was based on and finally put the final nail in the coffin of a long family mistery.
The 1976 arcade game called Death Race (seemingly no relation) is one of the first to ever spark controversy over violence in video games. It’s not too well known today, being almost 50 years old and fairly primitive.
And fun movie fact, Death Race 2000 is Sylvester “Sly, The Italian Stallion” Stallone’s first non-pornographic film role.
The Farmers Daughter. It was a text-based video game for the C=64 similar to Zork.
The premise was that you are a traveling lightening salesman whose car breaks down. You stop at a farmhouse to use their phone, and the beautiful daughter answers the door.
Your mission is to try to bang her. If the farmer catches you, he shoots you with his shotgun. If her brothers catch you, they’ll analy rape you to death. You need condoms but they are stuck to the shelf.
The appeal of games like this is so odd to me. They're moronic on one hand but viscerally addictive on the other. A very interesting psychological dynamic going on with this whole genre.
The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One - A D&D podcast. It’s cast should be pretty familiar if you’re into other D&D podcasts - Brennan Lee Mulligan is the DM, Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii and Lou Wilson are players - but it doesn’t seem to have many listeners.
It strikes a nice balance between scripted narrative performances and actual play. It’s edited and scored with a light touch that stops it dragging like the raw sessions of something like Critical Role, but preserving the authentic character breaking reactions as the dice takes it somewhere interesting. The players don’t seem to be in on a “script”, anymore so than the normal sort of out of session discussions you might have in a narrative heavy game at home, but the DM does a very good job of keeping it focused. It’s also thankfully not another billion player table, three is much more comfortable.
The vibe is excellent. From cozy slices of life to drama that plays on your heartstrings as three childhood friends reconnect and go on an adventure. Its trailer conveys the tone pretty well honestly: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9et3Othu4
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