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!
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when I got to stay home from school, I remember that around 11am the local PBS channel would air short videos from regional public service stations around the country, or low-budget cartoon shorts with an experimental vibe to them, who knows where they were made or by whom.
One example was of a short fella who sang the same “Ey yey-yey-yey” refrain over and over again, those around him got increasingly annoyed but he wouldn’t stop. At the end, a mob slowly converges around the character, encircling him… and he just keeps on cluelessly singing the “Ey yey-yey-yey” refrain.
The mob covers the guy, there’s a quick collective roar, then it recedes to show a tombstone. The last shot is of the “Ey yey-yey-yey” echoing as we see the image of the grave, frozen on the screen.
Another one, which I vaguely remember was filmed by a North Carolina public television station, a live action short of a kid that gets bullied at school, at the end the bully or bullies have some sort of accident in the woods, the kid is witness to this, and the shot freezes on the kid looking straight at the camera, with a voiceover along the lines of “What would YOU do in this situation?”… and it ends, right there, not with a resolution but with a cliffhanger and a moral question.
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.
It was a game for PC around the year 2000, I don’t even know the name of it. I’ve been searching for it for years. It’s a point and click adventure game.
The premise is your spaceship breaks down on an alien planet. If you try to repair the ship immediately a giant alien spider will come and kill you.
After searching for a while you end up making friends with one of the aliens and sneak around one of the villages looking for parts.
I never made it past that point.
I highly doubt anyone will know what this is, I’ve tried multiple times on that reddit sub for games people can’t remember.
This sounds like Space Quest. Have a look at this excerpt from a walkthrough and see if it sounds familiar:
“After escaping the Arcada before its destruction you crash land on the planet Kerona. Before you do anything “take off seatbelt”. Look at the pod and “take kit”. This is your survival kit. Look kit and you will find an Xenon army knife and dehydrated water.
“Get out” and walk to the front of the pod. “Take glass”. This is reflective glass that we’ll need later on.
Walk to the right three screens and then take the path that leads up. Follow the path all the way around over a bridge that will crack as you walk on it. A spider droid will drop to the ground at some stage. Just ignore it for now. There are two pillars at the end of the path. Stand between them and you’ll be lowered into the earth by a secret elevator.”
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.
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.
Strings (2004) movie. It’s a trope-ish fantasy movie, but all of the characters are marionettes. The strings go up to the heavens and are taken into consideration with things like architecture having no roofs, and gates are arches that rise up out of the ground to prevent travel beneath them. Someone gets injured by the string on their arm getting cut, and their arm flops around lifelessly afterwards.
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
there is this film from the late 80s called miracle mile about a guy who answers an incoming call at a payphone outside a diner in los angeles, and its a panicked military officer who dialed the wrong phone number who says he just launched americas nukes and that a nuclear retaliation will hit american soil in about an hour. a lot of the film is spent without being fully convinced of the authenticity of the phone call and the film has a slightly dreamlike pacing which makes it feel pretty tense, and theres a scene that stuck with me where the main character has a nosebleed in the diner after the phone call. i feel like even as far as cult films go this one is a little under the radar and, even though its not a life altering film, probably deserves a little more credit than it gets.
Moraff’s Escapade for early Windows, or more specifically, the glitch levels in it.
If you spam the “next level” cheat button (which if I remember correctly is F8) enough times you’ll go past the levels that were intentionally designed and start exploring the game’s RAM.
Interesting!! I’ll have to check that one out. I was a big fan of Moraff’s World and i played a lot of Steve Moraff’s other shareware games back in the day. Never heard of that one though!
There was a curious video game I played for a week straight in the early 90’s before my copy got stolen at a party.
It was called Scrongjhul and featured a fish with legs who had extra big knees with spikes. It was sort of a platform game but then part mystery story and part choose-your-own-adventure.
I think you had to get to the top of a mountain for something special. If you did it enough times and collected codes the game would generate then you could send off for some special prize.
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!”
It was a very cool spiritual successor to the older Ultima Underworld games, which are surprisingly interactive for their time. In many (many) ways they are the precursors to the immersive sim genre, and Arx is an interesting if isolated branch on that family tree.
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.
Nerve Damage, a game that was I think made on a random gamejam, and the whole premise is to make a game that’s actively trying to be as uncomfortable as possible to play, while also getting you into the flow and actually makes you enjoy it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find how to play it, and it didn’t release as far as I know. I’ve heard about it on some kind of GDC presentation about Innovative/Obscure game design.
While that actually means that someone has indeed heard of, I’ve never met anyone else who got to play it. Or heard about it.
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