My dad brought home “Xexyz” for NES one year. I have never heard anyone ever reference this game in any nostalgia reviews and had to actually go look up the name myself after vaguely remembering it as that side-scroling NES game that started with an x.
There was a text based game sample pack on Apple II C that I can’t remember the name of.
If you typed in a command too simple, it would give a preprogrammed response, apparently offended that you took the game for an idiot. You could look around, pick up items that it described, open and close drawers, go up and down stairs, unlock doors if you find the key, dig in the ground if you find a shovel, all through typing in actions and reading the text that came up in response.
There were at least 3 samples on the floppy disk, one an adventure on a crashed spaceship, one finding a buried treasure in a desert, and one centered around a white house (not the White House, but a house that was white.) All the samples ended just when it got interesting and advertised where to get the full games.
Edit: the whole idea of gaming on an Apple 2c seems foreign to every single person I have ever mentioned it to. Someone must have done it, because my family found 2 different computers at garage sales in the 90s that each came with stacks of games on 3 inch floppy disks. Some where educational games, I learned to type properly with one of those. Some were bootleg versions of popular games with handwritten labels. The original Maria Bros comes to mind as one of those, it was on a disk with Joust. Some were the original floppy disk from the publisher. Oregon Trail was one we spent countless hours on, and I especially liked Wings of Fury.
When I was little my parents had an Amiga 500 computer. My mother was never into gaming except for one. It was a boulder-dash clone called “Emerald Mine” (in which you collected emeralds, not diamonds) made my an obscure German studio. I think it was never widely spread and mostly stayed within Western Eu, but who knows, I might be wrong.
I used to have this game for the NES called Xexyz. It was this really strange game that tried to be several different genres in one, and I actually had a ton of fun with as a kid. I don't think I've ever met anybody else who has ever heard of this game, let alone played or enjoyed it. I'm not even super sure how I came to owning it in the first place; I think it was in a box of random games my aunt got from a flea market at one point, maybe.
If any of you are sitting on an NES emulator with an archive of every official ROM and haven't tried this game, it's definitely worth checking out. Weird little gem that nobody seems to know about, it seems.
There was a door (plugin) for The text-based *BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon called Violet’s Tavern.
You could sit at the bar and buy a drink that enhanced your stats, You could go upstairs and pay for a hooker to replenish your energy or you could try to seduce the barmaid / owner and actually have kind of a sweet encounter with her.
It had a betting mechanic I don’t remember if it was blackjack, dice or what but you could game it a little bit by throwing a shit ton of money at it a few times. The initial odds to win or somewhat higher than the extended odds to win so if you hit it and hit big you just walk away. Sometimes you ended up empty but more often than not it worked.
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.
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.
Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. It was a tex based strategy game on the TRS 80 written in basic. You played a feudal lord and tried to grow your empire. Each turn was a year. It was a text only game, but I’m pretty sure they had a graphics version at one point. When I say graphics, it was the upper half of the ASCII character set mapped over to block characters. This was in the 70’s.
A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don’t remember its name and I’ve never seen it since.
A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.
Sorry, I missed one more critical detail there… This game was in space! Played on a 2D, wraparound surface, with a top-down perspective, but it was definitely in space.
The fighters were fast and cheap but weak and could only shoot lasers.
The bombers were slower but tougher and could fire missiles. (Missiles could also be scripted, come to think of it. And if you made them stop, they turned into mines)
The fleet ships could manufacture other ships. You only have a single fleet ship at the start, but as time goes on, you can build more. …if you haven’t spent all your resources on building fighters and bombers.
Captain goodnight. Still one of the best games I’ve ever played. First game I saw that allowed piloting planes, helicopter, jeeps, tanks and run around killing enemies all with a solid story.
There was this old game called Twistingo that my grandma had on her computer. Made by a long defunct company called eGames, it was basically like if Zuma and Bingo had a child. There were balls with numbers that’d slowly advance down a track, and you had one or more bingo cards. If the ball had a matching number on your card, you’d click on the number and the ball would vanish. If the balls reached the end, you lost. Really fun game, I still have the old disc for it.
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