In 1990, a series of CGI animation collections began release on VHS tape. The Mind’s Eye was the first experience many people (myself included) had with pure computer animation.
The best known segment from the first tape is Stanley & Stella in Breaking the Ice, which was first released in 1987. You can just watch it online now of course!
The animation style reminds me a lot of Reboot, a childhood favorite. It still amazes me how interesting this style is even today, really shows how much more artistry and vision matter than technology. I believe this is also the first public demonstration of a flocking algorithm.
My brother brought this home along with the follow-up, Beyond the Minds Eye. I recall the first one having some scenes from The Lawnmower Man. I believe the soundtrack also featured Jan Hammer.
Sure thing! My dad bought a copy of the first one from Incredible Universe, before they sold everything to FRYS. There was a stage in the middle of the store, with big screens surrounding it, playing Minds Eye on a loop.
Holy shit, I saw this as a kid around 95-98 when I was visiting a friend of my mom I think, this as playing as music in the tv, the guy had like a home theater like setup and this burned into my mind, especially the segment on beyond the minds eye where there’s a guy/robot playing a fps. This was a wild trip to recall, thank you!
That’s why my mom bought me an Amega 4000. It was a birthday present. Never got that Video Toaster and never did get into animation back then but I had Brilliance and used it allot. I cant remember for sure but I think I remember the os being more Unix like. God I loved that machine!
Ever since I saw Beyond the Minds Eye I’ve wanted to do computer animation.
In 1997 the creator of Ren & Stimpy had a (somewhat) interactive flash based comic called The God Damn George Liquor show. I have that still. It’s definitely out there strange and not constrained by cable tv Standards & Practices. Highly enjoyable for what it is.
Maybe not super obscure, but I loved BMX XXX on the original Xbox. It was overshadowed my the plethora of other games like Tony Hawk, Aggressive Inline and SSX but I still love it.
If I wanted to see toplees girls on my modded Xbox I would just load up Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball with a nude texture pack. I genuinely enjoyed the riding aspect of the BMX game.
Back in the 90s maybe into early 2000s, my family managed to acquire a lot of VHS tapes, and some of them were fairly obscure
Two that I remember particularly fondly were 2 animated movies
Epic: Days of the Dinosaur, which was about 2 kids raised by dingos, kind of a weird fantasy movie
And Return to Treasure Island, which was pretty much just a straight-up if somewhat comedic adaptation of Treasure island, which was apparently made the USSR, and the Russian version had live action sequences that didn’t appear in the English version I had.
There was an old PC game called “Dominus”. I don’t really know much about it. My dad just randomly picked it up as an xmas gift one year for me. It was pretty sweet.
You’re the lord of a kingdom that gets invaded by like eight armies. You have your own monster units you can deploy. You can deploy traps. You can cast spells. You can go down and fight hand to hand. If they make it to the throne room and kill you, it’s game over.
If you capture enemy troops, you can interrogate them. There’s a little animation where they get poked with a red hot iron poker. If you capture a leader, you can sometimes negotiate peace. If you capture an enemy mage, you can learn part of a secret spell. I never got a secret spell working, though.
It was super cool. Never met anyone who’s played it.
I remember a 3D version of Tetris on an early IBM PC clone. Very early like 8088 or 286 PC. Don't remember the name and it was only wireframe and 1color (amber or greenscreen?) but I was very impressed with it. Seemed ahead of its time.
There was this one game called calling for the wii. Since the Wii controller had a speaker, it would ring like a phone and you would answer it, then followed by game’s sound out of it as if you are talking on the phone. Plus it had a story I found interesting.
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!”
One that always stuck with me was Legend of Legaia
Never met anyone who played it and the sequel on ps2 was terrible.
Some unique things I never saw in a turn based rpg again:
Armor you could buy and equip per slot and you were able to mix and match… This meant you could look really stupid when farming money for different sets but it was exciting to get a new item and equip it and see
This was a turn based rpg but had some inspiration from arcade fighter games of the time… You would enter your attacks like up down left right x y z and then say ready and your character would do a combo… You could randomly enter combos and learn new specials and finishes etc… Also a lot of ways to learn them through exploration and such
Not unique the game has a ton of fun side quests, games and secrets as well…
The film Hey, Stop Stabbing Me! is reminiscent of early Parker & Stone or Troma, and the title basically says it all. In spite of its non-existent budget and inexperienced cast, I recall it being competently paced and downright hilarious (on purpose!), including multiple memorable quotes such as “don’t be making fun of my hoe-saw,” “dude, she’s twelve,” “comparative literature,” and naturally, the titular “hey, stop stabbing me!”
I got this. Someone, please prove me wrong. I’ll PayPal you $82.76 if you find this.
There’s a cartoon from the 80s (could be late 70snor early 90s) called Howard The Duck.
You’ll never find it, because of the wildly popular movie bearing the same name.
The “Howard the duck” I’m referring to was a cartoon movie that was about a Mallard duck who got separated from his flock while they were migrating south for the winter.
Howard finds himself in NYC for the winter, where he spends time with rats and frogs. They show him around NYC via the sewers.
There’s a scene where they’re beneath the world trade center and Howard and the frog marvel at is enormity. Then, the frog reminds Howard that “Nothing lasts forever; especially in New York.” (This is an exact quote, sparing punctuation.)
The VHS I had ended with a music video by some band with the word “dogs” (junk yard dogs? Something like that) in their band name. The music video was trippy AF. There was barking in the song. The visuals were mostly patterns of colorful circles.
Like, this sounds like a fever dream, but if you’ve seen it and can locate it, it will make sense. I swear.
My memory is shit but I’d describe the art style as watercolor. Animated watercolor. Fro the 80s. So, yeah. Sorry.
I’m usually excellent at finding shit like this and I got nothing in half an hour. I’m high as fuck rn tho so I’ll be trying again tomorrow because I’m officially invested. If I do by some miracle find it (I’m pretty convincing I won’t) send the money to a FOSS project of your choice, or your favorite Lemmy instance.
yep. 2 hours lost. can’t find a shred of evidence. some random blogs I’ve scrolled mention something about the “Other Howard the Duck”, archived content from 1986, but that could just be a mention of marvel comics. i’m officially interested though.
I will someday inherit my parents nonsense and find the VHS amongst the masses and update this post (This is a lie).
If it helps, a place the frog takes Howard is a famous theater in NYC. that’s like a quarter of the whole short film.
I know this doesn’t help, but throughout this movie the sound effect of the ducks flying is just a person breathing with a small open mouth, swiping their tongue left to right. Do it, and you’ll get it.
I gave it a fair shake. But you’re right, seems obscure enough to be lost media adjacent. Ended up scrubbing 2 DuckTales episodes, skimming the ugly duckling (1997), and watched half an episode of Charlie chalk. My strategy was to ignore the name Howard entirely. Here’s a list of animated ducks for your reference.
Furthermore, I believe this cartoon is an adaptation of a Russian story/cartoon from 1948 called Little Grey Neck. It doesn’t take place in a city, but the premise is very similar, where a young duck misses its migration and has to befriend the other winter animals to survive.
Willard Isenbaum, a lonely insurance man with wild sexual fantasies, decides to ask out the new secretary, Susie, whom he has only known for a day and to whom he has never spoken. He spends the entire morning before work fantasizing about having sex with her, but his attempts to approach her fail. His female boss sends him to investigate a claim filed by Painless Martha, an aging tattoo artist, who works in the city. Martha believes in a Ouija board message saying that she will be “killed by a bomb delivered by a wizard on Tuesday”.
When Willard tells her that the insurance company will not pay until her death, she dies of a heart attack [after an explosion noise]. Her will stipulates that her killer must take care of her duck. After the duo spend a night in jail, the duck takes Willard to a brothel. After a wild night of partying, they wind up in the desert, where the duck dresses Willard in women’s clothing in an attempt to get a ride. After several encounters with an old prospector dying of thirst, a racist police officer, a lesbian couple, and a short Mexican “bandito”, they are finally picked up by a trucker.
Back at his apartment, Willard creates a makeshift sex object, which the duck eats. Shortly after, Willard discovers that the duck is female, and has sex with her. The following morning, Willard and the duck go to Willard’s job, where Willard has sex with his female boss and quits his job shortly after. Willard and the duck leave, and the movie ends with Willard saying that the duck was a good duck after all.>
Show from the 80s that was really just a vehicle for selling toys. They had a line of fighter jet thingies that were light guns you could shoot at the tv and somehow the guns themselves could respond to the lights from the tv and cause the cockpit to eject when it was hit. Not terribly obscure I think, but it was only a thing for like a year or two.
Oh my god I loved this as a kid, and had a shitload of the toys, and from my late teens on I’ve been trying like hell to figure out what this show/line of toys was!!!
Thank you for posting this today. Gonna show my kids. This is so wild.
Kids have such a great imagination: I watch the thing as a kid, and I remembered it looked awesome, with crazy vfx and such. How disappointed I was when I found it on YouTube years later!
There were four promotional songs put together to promote the 1960’s Adam West Batman. One of them is Miranda sung by Adam West. It’s, uh, something, yeah.
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.
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