You Know That Show / Video Games

You Know That Show — Video Games

The purpose of this page is to allow contributors to post descriptions of half-forgotten shows, those old classics that sit on the edge of the mind, with details and images remembered but names tantalizingly forgotten. Whether to gather trope examples or just for peace of mind, post them here. Be warned that, due to necessity, all entries may contain spoilers.

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Awaiting suggestions

• When I was a kid I played games like Ski Free,Pajama Sam,Timez Attack,Pipe Dreams,Tonka Truck,Mouse,Chips,and some 2d game where you're a mountain man going thru caves and up this mountain solving math problems,and once you got to the top,you'd go in a castle and look in a chest that showed treasure that was dependent on how many questions you got right.Any help here?
  • Maybe you should use the new YKTS forum-like page, it's more frequented than this one.
• An old game for the NES where you controlled a little ninja whose shurikens were shaped like swastikas. You had to climb a mountain or something like that. I think when you died the character spun and vanished and you had to beign all over again.
• A strategy game released in the early nineties that was pretty much a Civilization clone, except your most powerful unit was a hot air balloon that dropped bombs. To build it, you had to collect the different parts at one of your cities: silk cloth for the bag, iron for the bomb casings, wicker for the basket, etc.
• It was a DOS game, probably from the early-to-mid 90s (I had this on a Russian disk of questionable legality with 200 games from that era on it, but it was in English and most likely American or English) where you went around a procedurally-generated maze and teleported between mazes where possible. Top-down, and you had an inventory (which required a lot of juggling even though it had like 20 places) and could find weapons like swords and throwing tacks and increase your skill at them. It would frequently be unwinnable if you didn't have the right items. The world was persistent in that when you died, the intro would advance a few years and mention your last character as the latest to die trying to get through the tower or whatever. Even though it was procedural, some areas were basically the same each time, like one where you were supposed to go in the right teleport (I think based on something in the manual) and the right answer was not Perth. The storyline was something about the gods building a giant tower and some sort of prize was there for anyone who could beat it. I think it might have been called "Tower of Champions" or "Maze of Destiny" or something like that but I really can't say.
• A Free FPS/Adventure game based on The Zeta Project, that had something to do with breaking into a bunker.It ran on this weird 3D engine that also had a few other games for it, including one that had something to do with a track. It may or may not have been official.
• This was a browser based, flash freeware game that I played a few years ago. It was a stick figure game. It was also a side scrolling shooter. You had a choice between a pistol, a shot gun, a sniper rifle, and a machine gun. You could switch between them at anytime. There were also grenades. Enemies dropped money which you used to reload. Hitting the down key brought up a shield. But you could unlock a beam-sword-thing that would take the place of the shield. Every 50 or so enemies you could chose to either heal or upgrade a weapon. There was a dash too. You could unlock a mode where you only have 1 hit point and another where you only have a pistol and another one where your bullets caused explosions. I think the game may have also been Japanese, but there was plenty of english text in the one I was playing.
• A bundle of about 50 Edutainment Game demos for the Windows 95. One of the games was some sort of adventure game involving an anthropomorphic raccoon, and one of the first objects you came across was a flashlight. Another one involved trippy animations with orange and purple circles flying around, and that one wasn't interactive at all as far as I recall.
  • I remember something called Kid's Wincube...
• A web game that I think closed in the early 2000s. It was a website where you could design a creature out of different parts, choose whether it's a carnivore or herbivore, and then have it interact with other player's creatures in a virtual ecosystem.
• Sega Genesis game using the six-button controller. It was a fantasy fighter with a world map of some sort (I may be wrong, but I remember it being used to make branching decisions for levels, not a fully traversable map.) There was at least one level with a mine cart.
• A game from the 90s or maybe even 80s. Basically one of those games where you're this guy going through a maze hunting for treasure, but it was puzzle format. This sounds like every other game where you just go up and down and look for everything, but that's all I have. It was for the PC, you were some sort of treasure hunter, and it got really hard (for like a 5 year old) in like the 17th level or something. It's similar to the bible games the Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed, the one where you're Moses / Joshua going around and collecting stuff. I think it was free-ware though, if that helps.
• Okay, this was from (and I know I'm dating myself here) when I was in kindergarten around 1989-1990, I seem to remember it being on an Apple I Ie, it might have been an educational game or not, in any case I played it at school. You were exploring a haunted house or something like that (no, it's not Maniac Mansion) and one thing that I remember a lot of about it was at the beginning it would always ask you 'Have you visited the attic yet (y/n)?' I don't actually recall if I ever got to the attic, but I remember getting to a room that was up a few floors in the house where it would give me some kind of failure message, and something about either falling or running outside, then I was back at the beginning again. As I said, I was in kindergarten, so it's kind of fuzzy and I probably sucked at the game in any case, but I'd appreciate any help in I Ding this one.
• It's an educational game of some sort.... I think it was about math. I barely remember it though. I know it was part of a series, and the game I'm thinking of starred these furry monster things. It took place in a Western ranch setting, and at some point one of the female characters (dressed up as a cowgirl) was singing in a saloon on a stage.
• This is edutainment too. Apple II keyboarding game vs. invading aliens. You typed the name of the enemy and shot it down. There were several types of ships, you could type parts to build a backup base.
• Possibly related to previous, Apple II game where you solved math problems in time to earn missiles, shots, and bombs for your jet to play 'capture the flag' versus helicopters, tanks, etc. There was another level/option to do the same thing for your race car (wrenches, tires, etc.)
• Related to the above, a knight who traveled the countryside, could buy food at varying prices (math WIN), had to answer the sphinx's riddle, these got me hooked on computers, I'm a tech coordinator now.
  • In Sierra's Conquests of Camelot, you do play a knight, you do spend a lot of time in the countryside, you do have a moneypurse, and you do solve riddles (though I don't remember if the Sphinx's riddle is one of them), but I don't think this is the one you mean.
    • Thanks, but this was on the Apple II in very primitive graphics. The previous three were all server-based, the Apples were diskless (The one I saved is a II GS).
• An old Atari game, I don't remember which one but it was the generation just before NES. It was a side scrolling platform/shooter, maybe a little like a primitive Mega Man game. The background changed from purple to red. Some of the enemies looked like rotating swastikas, others looked like these weird pinkish clams.
• PC game, likely dos. Was a platforming game with "liney" graphics. it had ball dispencers (i think they where blue). The background was likely white. I think it had green ladders. Platforms were thin lines. No idea if it had any sound.
• Some sort of a top-down RPG that was on the Mac, in sort of a roguelike style. I remember there were buttons you could press in each dungeon to turn on and off the generators for good and evil creatures. And there was an editor that came with it that allowed you to make your own creatures.
• There's an educational game from Keysoft or Sofkey or sdomething like that which I'm looking for. I remember someone dressed in a clown suit coming from a trap door and a clock thingie. The clock thingie had numbers you can click on which make various things happen. I remember 1 had a person with a bomb that blew up and 8 had a blonde girl who made a face and a goat noise would play.
• A very old computer videogame where you play as this (top-down view), that black thing is your pistol. Your enemies are just like that but yellow and you move around collecting ammo, health and, of course, shooting. I also recall there were explosive boxes that'd give you an instant game over if shot. Thank you in advance.
• A PC game (or perhaps it was Apple II, since I played this back in elementary school, on the same computers my classmates and I were playing Oregon Trail on). It was a bit of an adventure title, controlled entirely via text input, but with first person pictures of your current environment. The storyline involved something about you watching a game show and getting pulled into your TV, and then you had to explore various channels for some goal I never played far enough to find out about. One of the only other things I recall is that one of the channels you could explore was a constant storm of static that you had to wade through like actual snow. For reference, I was in this particular elementary school back between 89 and 94.
• An old PC game where you controlled the basic five elements; earth, wind, fire, heart. That sort of thing however they were orbs of light (much like certain energy logos). Think it was called the elementals or Elements however such searches online hardly help. OH and I remember the music from the ballet The Nutcracker playing in the background to the point where when I hear the song The Sugarplum Fairy I think of this game rather than the ballet.
• A console FPS (I'm pretty sure) (first gen, I believe, but I don't know which console; this would be around ten to eleven years ago) in which you were basically invulnerable to everything the enemy throws at you—from machine gun fire to a giant (maybe a cyclops) boss swatting you. However, the levels always took place on a platform raised maybe ten feet above the ground below. Fall off, and you die, while fairies pick up your body and fly it up slowly.
• I used to have a Spider-Man game on our computer, well over a decade ago. Probably DOS. It was a platformer where you put Spidey's skills to work moving your way around the area, avoiding baddies and such. Thing is, the only thing I can find that's even close is The Amazing Spider-Man, which for some reason seems unfamiliar. It doesn't seem to start in the same way I (vaguely) remember. The graphics seem tiny and stunted compared to what little I recall. So is there another similar Spider-Man game out there for the computer (I'm sure it wasn't just a ROM), maybe even an unofficial one, that you can think of? Screenshots would be appreciated!
• I remember one game where you played as monsters and could choose from ones you had already defeated. In addition there was a green tube tank that could be used for fusing them. I specifically remembere there being one pink blob and I played it on the Sega Channel and would have bought it if we remembered what it was called. It was a fighter and I vaguely recall an isometric battlefield.
• An old, (early?) 90s game, possibly RPG(-ish), standard fantasy setting, with topdown view and separate screens. I remember the first screen had three shops which looked like squares with pictures of what they were selling (shield/armor, sword, red cross). The next screen was up from there and split in the centre by water, which you could not cross. Some of the screens were special (I remember one of the screens was completely black and you had to navigate through a maze without seeing anything). I think you could get ships or something later on, because I seem to remember fighting water monsters or something like that.
• This is vague, but I need to know what it is. Its a 2-D One on One game (not sure if its a fighter) where stuff in the background is shooting a you. But its programed so that you can never get hit,the background stuff stops shooting if you get near the target zone. The computer can never get hit either.
• This may be a SNES game, but may also be a Super Famicom game. It was an RPG/action-adventure or similar-genre game, with a main character whose sprite looked a little like Cyan from Final Fantasy VI, but I think the main was actually a young boy. The gameplay was a flat directional map (as in Zelda: Link to the Past or the Final Fantasy Overworld map), and all I remember is a single quest where you're in a town (I seem to recall the map being mostly brown-toned, but don't hold me to that), and the top half of the town is just fine. When you walk down enough for the screen to scroll, though, the palette changes, there are grey, doom-looking clouds or haze everywhere, there are creatures similar to the blue and red worms in some of the Link to the Past dungeons, and I think the houses looked pretty beat-up. Although there are similarities to LttP, it was NOT a Zelda game. My sister's boyfriend at the time had a friend working at Nintendo who would occasionally give us games to market-test/beta, so it is entirely possible this game was never actually released outside Japan. HELP!
  • I think you're referring to Illusion Of Gaia here.
    • Not Io G (I own it and Will bears no resemblance to the main I remember), but thanks. For the record, although the scrolling system is similar, the one I remember seemed "jerkier," even as a little kid. And I have some memory of a little mini-game you could play in the okay part of the town, where if you won you got some item that would REALLY help you out later on, but don't hold me to that.
• This one is a Commodore 64 game (if I recall) where the overworld was a map screen and your character was represented by a dot, following a path to these castles/dungeons. The dungeons themselves played like Zelda dungeons, you take two hits (changing color after the first) before dying (unless you dropped into a pit, which OHK Os you), but you had a number of lives to expend. The HUD showed your currently equipped weapon/item plus three weapons in reserve slots known as "pockets." There's no music inside the dungeons but you can hear the map screen music if you're near one of the exits, and you can also faintly hear the sound effects of an enemy in the room if the enemy is one room away from you.

Questions with suggested answers

• A game I used to play on pc. It was on a cd when we(me and my friends) played it. In the game you choose to make a army of animals, but these animals were mixed together with special stats. I.e. a gasshopper elephant, etc. You had to make places to build the monsters and electricity was needed. (I remember there was some cheat with electricity in it, that is where i learned to spell electricity for we didn't want to stop for cheats, haha. But no joke.) The animals had premade teams or you could mix them yourself. There were tons of choices, elephants, grasshoppers, sharks, and tons more. And they could swim for a stat or dig or both if you mixed the right animals. Thanks for the help in advance. P.S. I keep thinking there may have been "creatures" in the name.
  • Impossible Creatures?
    • Yes that's it.
• I remember having a game for the original Xbox that had to do with mechs, the main character was (Probably) female, and all the other characters including the protagonist had holographic animals that acted as companions, and you could buy new looks for yours, starting with a bunny and ending with a wolf or a tiger, one of the stages, probably the tutorial was a city.
  • Random luck here :) I was just looking around on amazon.com and happened across a game called "Mech Assault" It is for original X-Box and was released June 15, 2006. If you want it, Amazon listed the price about 12 bucks from them, new, but sellers started, used, at about 1 cent. Hope This Helps! :)
• A game from around the year 2000 that was kind of like a cross between the street view mode of google maps and a driving simulator, sorry but that is all I know about it, please help.
  • It could be Streets of Sim City.
• An edutainment game for the Apple II where you were the owner of an automobile manufacturer and had to design and build a profitable car. You could choose what kind of engine and transmission to use, put the body together from different parts, and send it for wind tunnel and road tests before choosing a price and shipping it out to the dealerships. I vaguely recall seeing a remake for it for the IBM PC in 1992 or so.
  • Maybe Detroit? It came out For the Amiga not the Apple but otherwise sounds just like it.
• So this person that I don't even know wants to know if there's a website where "you would buy eggs, and wait for them to hatch and feed your animals. There where these duck things, and little furballs, there was also a breeding option. Most of the eggs where pale green, with a med. green dots on them."
  • Creatures?
• It's this game I remember from a translation site, I think. The plot of this game is that there's this guy who sees everything as gore and horror due to trauma. He encounters a hideous alien, who he sees as a beautiful girl. There are Multiple Endings, and one of them involves caniballism. Yeah.
  • Sounds like Saya no Uta.
• I'm pretty sure this one was available for Windows 3.1. It's a very fuzzy memory but I'm sure of the details I remember. It was a jigsaw puzzle game that used moving pictures for the puzzles. I remember two of the puzzles. One was a bunch of colorful balls rolling around. The other was a rotating impossible cube. I also remember it being part of a game pack if that helps.
  • What you describe closely resembles a DOS game called Flix Mix, by Celeris. This troper first found it on a Win 3.1 game demo CD called Cyber Mart, which was included with a Turtle Beach Monte Carlo ISA sound card. It has moving pictures for puzzles, though the pieces are smooth-edged so I'm not sure that counts as 'jigsaw'. One of the puzzles was four reflecting spheres rotating in a circle, and another puzzle was an impossible cube, seemingly made of wood, rotating against a blue background. Downloadable at Hot U: http://www.hotud.org/component/content/article/37-strategy/20107
• A mid-to-late-nineties PC game, it came as shareware or freeware on one of those "50 Win 95 Games" CDs. It was a FP RPG set on a really weird alien planet populated by cat-like people. You crashed on the planet in a space-pod-type-thing at the beginning. The colour palette was a really odd purple-pink-lime-greeny affair.
  • Albion?
  • Just to note that the purple-pink-cyan colour palette is unlikely to be a distinguishing feature; odd as it was, it was a standard colour palette in the early years of PC colour, and many, many games used it.
• Some 3D Platformer released very early in the life of the PS 2/Gamecube/Xbox generation. The theme was a sci-fi/fantasy and the basic plot was that the race of the player character was enslaved by an Evil Overlord, and he set out to save them. A trailer for it was included in the Xbox version of the Defender remake.
  • The consoles you're naming don't quite match but the plot sounds like Oddworld.
• Here's a really bizarre one: Many years ago the UK edition of PC Gamer magazine ran brief news item that read, and I quote from memory Polisman's sidekick Dirty Chirchy is trapped on the Planet Of Women. Our hero selflessly offers his body for Chirchy's freedom. Is this The End?. There was a photo of a man who looked vaugley like a young Eddie Murphy. I presume it was some kind of Ero Game but the internet offers no clues.
  • Almost certain the game is Leather Goddesses of Phobos - it's text.
    • Doesn't appear to be. Phobos would have been out for years by the time the collumn was published (mid-90's).
• A Play Station video game, I think, that was a roguelike. If you opened a certain treasure chest, ther Grim Reaper would pop out and kill you. It wasn't Chocobo'sDungeon2, cause I remember the characters being human.
  • The bit about the Grim Reaper sounds like Gauntlet. Was he only vulnerable to magic?
• Okay, when I was a little girl in the 1990s, my dad played this game on a computer- Windows, specifically. I remember one certain scene where you recieved potions from a old dude who'd take them away from you if you clicked on him too many times and say something like, "Once is one time too many." It was in a maze or something...
  • Kind of a stab in the dark, but could it be Quest For Glory 4? You could get potions (or possibly pills) from a mad scientist named Dr. Cranium, but only one of each kind per day, and there was a castle that had a maze-like design.
• A game available on Mac OS 9, with a dark ages/medieval setting. You could build a castle, as well as cede land to the church.
  • Don't know if it was availible on Mac OS 9, but that sounds like Castles 2
• An edutainment game for Windows 95 or 98. It existed in 2001. You could do things (which I can't seem to remember) with individual letters. I remember very little about it, except that it has decent graphics and it taught the words "kumquat" and "i-yi-yi" under K and I respectively.
  • This is most likely Let's Start Learning. It was a Reader Rabbit spin-off game that had several mini-games to teach certain abilities. One of which was ABC Diner, where you had to match words to letters by finding ingredients to foods. I distinctly remember "kumquat" as being the letter matched with K. Is this the game you were looking for?
• This Mac game which was a primitive 3D space shooter- I think you had to fly through rings at one point, and maybe avoid crashing into planets or something. Anyway, the one part I remember was that there was a story scroll before the game started and it said something about the "Confederation".
  • This is possibly one the games in the Escape Velocity series.
    • Not those, I've played those, and they're 2D. It was probably before that. It might have been on some kind of disk with a collection of games on it.
    • Could it be Space Rogue? (Although that had an Empire rather than a Confederation.) Do you remember if it was black and white, or color?
      • It was color. I don't remember the name Space Rogue though. I think the graphics had scanlines or something.
  • Not Escape Velocity...Terminal Velocity. Shareware from 3DRealms.
  • 3D Space Shooter? Fly through rings? Story scroll? ...o.O you're not talking about X-Wing, are you?
• There used to be a collection of CDs in the early 90s-ish called 101 Only the Best Games that basically had a lot of shareware demos that you could play. Me and my brother used to have some of them. There is one game in particular I can't remember the name of. It was an interesting sidescrolling game where you could play as superheroes. One of them could turn himself into liquid in order to squeeze under things and I believe another was some kind of squirrel girl.
  • Heros: The Sanguine Seven. It wasn't a squirrel girl, incidentally, there was a flying squirrel man and a rocketeer girl. It's freeware now; you can download it from the creator's homepage. Link at the bottom of the wikipedia article. ~savage (Yay I helped!)
• Is a Visual Novel game - a bunch of people are trapped underwater in an underwater base, and they must try living along with each other while finding a way out.
  • Ever 17?
• I played this (DOS?) game for PC when I was like 5 years old. I believe it was one you could download from AOL (lol). Basically it was a tactics/turn-based-strategy type of game where you were a wizard who fought other wizards. You chose the spells you wanted to cast, and you could summon different things. I specifically remember there being a manticore you could summon, as well as some Mirkwood trees that would hurt/kill you if you stuck around for too long. I believe the name started with an "A," but since I haven't found it after searching pretty thoroughly I might be wrong.
  • This reminds me a little of Master Of Magic.
    • If it's the game I believe it is (got it from AOL as well), I still don't know the name, but it had a world-wide order/chaos mechanic that allowed you to summon appropriately aligned spells more easily represented by a yin/yang with shrinking black/white sections, an option to either completely randomize the spellbook for everyone or have everyone use the same random spellbook, a readme that mentions that "even a red dragon can be beaten by a lucky archer", your wizard's starting square was inside a circlular room with tentacles (with possibly an eye as well), different monsters also had spellcasting (dragons got fireballs, liches got stupidly good spells, your clone got a lesser copy of your spells), there was the option of creating illusions which were 100% effective, but vulnerable to divination (which was an instakill), (and there was no point in illusioning dogs/wolves, since they're 'loyal'). At least four players could play (with A.I.s controlling extra characters if needed). Not 'Chaos'. Top-down, turn-based, no separate combat mode.
• An edutainment game where you're a SCUBA diver, and you're swimming around, and trying to find some sort of starfish. You also fight sharks, and create a rainbow after finding gems IIRC. Does anybody know what I'm talking about?
  • Treasure Cove?
• Not sure of the origin, but there was something that included "How appropriate, you fight like a..." and I'm not sure it was cow as it would be expected. Can't find the source anywhere and it bothers the shit out of me.
  • The trope namer for You Fight Like a Cow is Monkey Island. Could that be your card?
• In the early '90s, I visited my cousin's house and saw him playing a console RPG (probably not an S/NES game). My cousin kept trying to cross this one bridge, but kept being attacked by a mermaid and defeated. All 4-5 party characters appeared on the world map before crossing the bridge and entering battle. It might be a Phantasy Star entry, but I've only played two of the games and can't say for sure.
  • I don't know of any mermaid enemies in the Phantasy Star series but these may come close: http://www.pscave.com/ps1/enemies/fishman.shtml or maybe it's from Phantasy Star 3? http://www.pscave.com/ps3/enemies/monsters.shtml
• This is probably a bit of a stretch, but here goes...years ago I had an SNES fantasy RPG(?) I never got very far in. There were 4 characters in your party, and it was sort of pseudo-3D, with all your party in a very convenient horizontal line on the bottom of the screen. You travel across some generic fields and beige-colored dirt for about half a minute, at which point a monster attacks. I never got any farther than that. (...I was 5, okay?)
  • Was it Drakkhen?
• I remember a game based on RPGs and endless, automatic leveling up. You turned it on, rolled the dice to create your character, and just let it run for eternity as your character killed things and looted their stuff, gradually gaining enormous loads of satirical loot without you having to lift a finger.
  • That's definitely Progress Quest.
• This one video game I had for the original Playstation right when it first came out. It involved dinosaurs in a jungle. I forgot who I was playing as. Maybe a raptor? Possibly a Jurassic Park game, or not. May have come in a starter pack for the Playstation. Don't have it anymore, it got really scratched up.
  • Possibly Primal Rage?
    • No, it wasn't Primal Rage. It was in 3D.
    • Jurassic Park:Warpath ?
• A Flash game based on The Legend Of Zelda series. It was an Affectionate Parody of many of the usual quirks that apply to Zelda games. In particular, it was making fun of the usual Plot Coupon structure of the games, and the coupon was titled something like "The X of Pointlessness" or "The X of Uselessness" or something along those lines.
  • That would be Zelda and the Lampshade of No Real Significance.
• PC side-scroller from roughly 1997 that was Deliberately Monochrome and involved fighting werewolves. The first level was in a forest.
  • This could be Blade Warrior, released by Image Works in 1991.
  • Also sounds like Creepy Castle (aka Wolves in the Woods and Frankie's Dungeon), released in 1991 by Reactor. However, I'm pretty sure that it was only for Macintosh.
• And an adventure game from the same time period which involved, at one point, feeding baby dragons. Each of them had one statement below them such as "this one always likes chips" or "this one sometimes likes oranges". If the wrong thing was fed to them three times, they would cry and the parent dragons would attack.
  • Not the right time period, but that sounds an awful lot like Dragon World by 4mation (the guys who did Grannys Garden).
  • Actually, scratch that: it's Grannys Garden itself. You can see that bit in this Let's Play: [1].
• An ancient Edutainment Game for the Macintosh (I recall it had black-and-white graphics) featuring Frankenstein and his monster creation, which had in between the Alphabet Soup Cans action sequences like trying to escape a burning building.
  • It's Frankenstein's Helper, which is downloadable as freeware from the Info-Mac Archive. You can play it on modern computers with Mini vMac (ask at the Macintosh Garden forums if you need help.)
• Another old Edutainment Game for the Apple II (probably), a primitive RPG with a "Fantastic Voyage" Plot set within the body of someone named General Anesthesia Punny Names abounded). Though I couldn't have known at the time, it was probably a Doctor Who parody, since the main character wielded a "sonic stethoscope."
  • That's MicroAgent of the Body Guard from Scholastic's Microzine series. I couldn't find a copy online, sorry.
• Well, this is an odd one because I do know the name, I just need a link. It was this website where they posted move lists for a lot of characters for a hypothetical fighter called Capcom Vs. The World 2. Searching that gave me nothing, anyone have the link?
  • The site looks to be extinct, but you can browse /http://cvtw.batcave.net/index2.html what the Internet Archive managed to record of it.
• A PC game, from lord knows when — sometime during the mid-90's. It came with a collection of animated .gifs, midi music, and a basic paint program, and basically what you did was create "movies." There were backdrops and other things, and you'd put them together, add music, and tell little stories. It came with a default movie entitled "Slime," which began "Once up north, there lived some slime..." in a sort of vaguely British accent. Came on a "Starter Pack" PC disk, if it means anything.
  • Could it have been 3D Movie Maker? I've not actually used it, mind you - it just seems the right concept in the right time period.
    • I remember this one. It's not 3d movie maker, (it's 2d) and I've got it somewhere. I'm just not sure what it's called. I'll ask my younger brother if he remembers.
    • I've played 3D Movie Maker; it wasn't that.
  • Kid Pix?
    • Not Kid Pix either; I remember Kid Pix pretty clearly. You couldn't animate in Kid Pix. Thanks for more nostalgia, though! :P
  • I think I know this one. Did it come with Spider-Man Cartoon Maker?
• This one PC demo disc that seemed to be a spoof of first person shooters- you'd run around this area and find program icons all over the place that you could open, and there was a button to throw coins or something.
  • What demos did it include? I remember having (more like repeatedly borrowing) a demo disc like that. One game, called Captain Quazar, was a top-down shooter that featured a guy dressed in blue with a big chin. Another was an RTS called War Wind featuring several alien races (and no humans). There was also a demo for You Don't Know Jack. The disc was called Games Sampler 2 for Windows 95.
    • That was probably it then. I don't think I ever got to play any of the games though.
    • A shame! That disc had the most killer game demos on it. :D I still remember playing the Diablo demo at 11 pm with my parents asleep and the lights out, and nearly wetting myself when the Butcher went "Aah, fresh meat!" Good times, good times.
• A old PC fighting game (like windows 95 old), the only details I remember is that it may or may not have been 3D, and that it had a very VERY dark environment. One of the characters may have been a robot.
  • FX-Fighter? Did the box/manual cover feature a big green dude who turned out to be the game's Big Bad?
  • One Must Fall 2097?
• There was this SNES game that I remember pretty well, I'm just not sure of the title. I think it was basically a dinosaur themed Pacman. The later levels had cavemen.
  • Are you maybe thinking of Trog?
• A game for the old NES, it was a mix of Pictionary and tabletop game. The thing was style Hangout, with the drawings appearing and you has to guess before the drawing was complete. Anyone?
  • That would be Anticipation - briefly popular as a party game, until people realized there weren't that many pictures, and it wasn't that hard to just memorize the answers based on dot placement.
• A PC game from the early nineties, a bit after the age of Duke Nukem 2 clones. It had an overhead view of the main character, a space marine, with several guns including a machine gun and a flamethrower. Think the overhead levels of Contra 3, but with a smaller sprite. I remember it from one of those demo CDs with Over Nine Thousand games. 80% chance the word "Alien"'s on the title.
  • I would have thought that you were talking about Shadowgrounds, but that came later. Still, the game might give you some nostalgia.
  • I think that would be Alien Breed.
• A PC game from possibly the mid-90s. You play as a spaceship that drives along a stretch of road in space. The game looks and plays a lot like "3-D World Runner", in that you have to jump over gaps, the camera is behind the ship and when you land you bounce a few times. The graphics were pretty poor, and the ship looked a lot like the ship from the original "Star Fox".
  • Unfortunately it's likely to be any of a dozen or more clones of "Trail Blazer". Start searching there.
  • It sounds like a game called Slipstream 5000.
  • I immediately thought of Skyroads when I read this.
• I remember reading about a game here, back before the Great Crash. The only thing I can remember is that there's some kind of time progression mechanic, and you can find some girl and rescue her from being raped, at which point she's all cheerful and perky ... or you can let a week's time pass, and find her, and she's all mute and thousand yard stare from the trauma.
  • That might be a somewhat distorted version of Ephemeral Fantasia. One of the potential party members is a cheerful girl... who ends up overhearing the party talking about the Big Bad, who is a Villain with Good Publicity. She runs off, and is nearly abducted by some of the Big Bad's mooks. You can rescue her right then, in which case she stays cheerful and immediately joins your party... but if you miss your chance... well, I'm not sure, but I got the impression it was something like what you just described. However... Ephemeral Fantasia has more of a "Groundhog Day" Loop mechanic, so it might be something else. Just taking a stab in the dark here, in case I'm right.
  • It reminds me of Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask where, on the Second Day, you can help Romani defend the cows from being abducted by a group of alien invaders. If you visit Romani on the Third Day without defeating the aliens, she'll have amnesia. I guess the aliens abducted her too.
  • There's not time mechanics, but I can't help but think of that character from Soul Nomad and it's Demon Path.
• An old, old PC game that I know almost nothing about. I think it was a turn-based strategy game. It had an overhead view, and multiple sides, each of which had a brightly-colored robot. I think the robots were heavily customizable in the choose-different-parts sense. It looked pretty complicated, but then I was young and didn't get to see it for very long.
  • Sounds like a game I played a long time ago but can't remember the name of. Searching comes up with Robot Crusades a 1994 DOS game which you can download on this page if you scroll down a bit.
• Some old SNES game where the players were cave men and they fought dinosaurs and other cave men, and the final boss was like this giant hybrid of the two.
  • When I think of 16-bit caveman games, the first title that comes to mind is Joe & Mac (aka Caveman Ninja). If that's somehow not it, though, try Prehistorik Man.
  • Or Congo's Caper, perhaps?
  • Judging by the description, it's the arcade version of Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja. Here's a link with a review and screenshots. Surely would be very useful.
• A browser-based old-school RPG that I think was in Java. I remember that the last boss was a sorceress who turned into a dragon, and when you hit the dragon you'd be teleported away and have to go down again. The game began in a town with a well that accessed the dungeon, some shops, a place where you would train your stats, and a sign that displayed all the enemies you'd killed before.
  • Based on the first sentence, I'd suggest Dragon Court.
    • That's not it - this was a single-player game (and it didn't require registration, in case I'm wrong in my assumption from that)
• Another mid-90's PC game. This one involved a White-Haired Pretty Boy superhero (only he was more of the "Dumb Muscle" mold than the "Bishōnen" mold) and his Hyper-Competent Sidekick. You were supposed to try and create a monster that could be used to beat the bad guy's monster, I think. And the fact that cows produce lots of methane was somehow involved. Edutainment, I think...
  • Methinks you might be thinking of Hyperman. Here's a boxshot◊.
• In middle school, the computers in my science teacher's classroom had a game that I enjoyed playing whenever we were allowed free time. It was sort of like Virtual Villagers (only it came long before that one, of course) in that you had control of a handful of individuals (however, I believe the people didn't die or need to reproduce, although it was possible to increase the population over time and you could kill a person if you felt like it) and needed to have them go around gathering food (there were berries and cattle, and a boat could be built to catch fish — the boat, for some reason, was counted as a person and you could "kill" it too, which I did when there were no more fish to catch) and building houses. The setting was in medieval times or something close to it, and there were NPCs/settlements close to your location that could be friendly or hostile to your people. You could try to attack or lay seige to them, and they could do the same to you if they had a mind to. There was also some kind of points you accumulated over time (I don't remember exactly what you had to do to get them — I think they were a bit like the Tech Points in Virtual Villagers) and getting 200 of them allowed you to enter a "feudal age" of better technology and housing for your people. Any of this ring a bell with anyone out there...?
  • Could it have been one of the Settlers franchise? Alternatively, it could be Seven Kingdoms or Age Of Empires
  • Sounds EXACTLY like Age of Empires to me.
• I remember seeing a reviw in an old PC magazine for an Edutainment game that was some sort of FPS that somehow involved math equations in the gameplay. The aestetics looked like they were going for a realistic style, and I'm pretty sure (though could be wrong) that it had Doom-style graphics, with sprites in 3D enviroments rather than polygon models.
  • IM Meen?
    • No, it's not IM Meen. This one had a more realistic graphic style. If I recall the screenshot correctly, it had a text box where a woman from Mission Control was instructing the player on the current alien boss' weakpoint.
• A game I found on one of those "1700 games for ten bucks" discs. It was actually a demo. A surprisingly complex space game, with numerous suns and planets on a black map. Planets and ships were represented by outlines in the players' colors; neutral planets were gray. You started with a triangle-shaped space-craft, and used the arrow keys (or wasd) to steer. Orbital mechanics were represented; you could fall into orbit around a planet, for example. The goal was to claim planets for your side, first by landing on them Lunar Lander style (in which case they changed to your color), then by building orbital stations, then by building and upgrading AI-controlled supply ships and defensive arrays. When you landed on a new planet, your other planets would automatically construct and dispatch supply ships which turned into orbital stations when they arrived. You or the AI could fire shots, which appeared as white dots at opposing ships or planetary bases to destroy them or drive them off, so there was a bit of a video-game shooter aspect to the game, but it was mostly strategic; you wanted to start with a cluster of worlds near each other that you could claim quickly, but you also had to prevent opponents from landing on them and taking them from you before they could protect themselves. There was a complex AI, and you could set each of your opponents to different attitudes (violent, maniacal, patient, and so on). The side colors were red, blue, purple and yellow.
  • It was called "Gravity Well."
    • That's it; one problem though. I can't get it to work. Is there a version other than 5.2 available?
      • Woah, thanks. I've been trying to find that one for a while! Older version is at http://sanfords.net/Free_Games/strategy_games_1.shtml , file name is gwell35x.ZIP
• A DDR video that was a lot like an anime opening. The reason I put it here is because I'm asking for the video. I don't remember the associated song, but I remember the video had a shocked girl.
  • Was it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR7ZbJ8DKds
• There was this PC game, probably a shareware, that was included in Software of the Month Club disk-set. You controlled a scientist and his monster and roamed a huge city grid searching for weapons and parts to make a Replicator that you could use to make more of your monster. There was a lot of randomness to it (you couldn't see your opponents, buildings were bare more often than not, maps were randomly generated) and fairly poor, MS Paint quality graphics so I don't think it got a lot of play. I've always thought the name was "Replicator," but haven't found any information on it in the last ten or so years.
• When I was a kid, I played this arcade game. It involved old-timey planes, some of them bi-planes, fighting an evil dictator and his magical and technological armies. One plane had a weapon that looked like black iron balls, and some of the enemies included dinosaurs (triceratops) that shoot three-way fireballs, venus flytraps and one boss was a huge "genie" looking thing. Possibly the final boss. The dictator, if I recall, flew a bigger plane that hurled random stuff including power ups out as he laughed maniacally. A lot of people told me I was imagining it but I distinctly remember playing it. I have seen screenshots exactly once, but never the title.
  • Sounds a lot like Aero Fighters
• When I was younger, I used to watch my cousins play what I think is a rail shooter. I only remember one level. Most of the level was a car chase. At the end was a boss, a man who threw increasingly large objects at you while you shot at him. Eventually, he chucks a truck at the player. It had 3-D graphics, and was on the PC.
  • I've never played the PC port, but it sounds like Virtua Cop 2.
• An old game for the NES. It was a beat 'em up with stages. You had to fight ten opponents in some sort of dojo. One of them was a fat guy that could launch himself horizontally towards you, like Honda from Street Fighter. Possibly the later opponents were palette swaps from previous opponents.
  • This sounds a lot like Yie Ar Kung Fu, only the NES and MSX ports had only 5 opponents. The arcade version had 10, however. The fat guy who launched himself horizontally was called Buchu in the arcade game, Mu on the NES port, and Wu on the MSX port. Is that it?
    • Yes, it is, and you brought sweet memories to this troper *snif*
• A game that i must have played around 2000 or so on the computer... I assume ( i know what that does) it was DOS not only for the time period, but i also played it along with wolfenstein. It was a game that you looked at it from the side. You went around and found parts to make vehicles (i think i remember a helicopter and a car and maybe others) that you brought to a room that you then made into a vehicle and raced the computer... I think there was an alternate difficulty where there were monkeys or something like that, where you could pick up bananas and throw it at them so they got out of your way. Thanks in advanace and be sure to reply if you need anymore info and i will try to remember. Thanks again!
  • This troper played this one as a kid and I am 100% sure that you're describing Super Solvers: Gizmos & Gadgets.
    • Wow, thanks so much I never thought i would remember this ever again. I looked up a video and it perfectly matches my discription (and almost perfect with memory)Thanks so much!

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