Games You Think Only You Played

It could be because of bad marketing, it could be because other higher profile games released at the same time and overshadowed them, it could be for any number of reasons. Question is, what games did you enjoy playing that you've never really seen anyone else mention?

For me, 5 games off the top of my head:

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1. Mickey's Speedway USA (N64, Rare-produced kart racer that is both better and harder than it really has any right to be.)

2. Project Snowblind (PS2, solid futuristic fps mixing guns and occasional cyber-tech stuff. Not the best game to do this, still good.)

3. Monster Truck Madness 2 (PC, name is really self-explanatory, imo great at the time, but I could be crazy.)

4. FATE (PC, straight Diablo ripoff but more cartoony. I enjoyed it a great deal.)

5. Tube Slider (GC, I swear this is an actual game. I thought it looked like F-Zero GX and was kind of disappointed, but it was okay I guess. Emphasis on "guess".)

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Any of you play these? Any games you'd add to the "no one has heard of these, right?" category yourself?

(Thinly veiled request for obscure games to check out.)

(Totally not being a hipster.)

(Okay, maybe a little.)

Annnnd that formatting got ALL fucked up. Sorry all, I'll get better at this eventually.

I played FATE, it was pretty cool especially since at the time Diablo 3 was a fever dream at best.

My game is Gotcha Force for the Gamecube, which was apparently pretty popular in Japan but got an extremely limited run over here.

According to a forum post, this game was played by GB at one point. I don't remember that video though, and I'm sure there haven't been many others who have played this game: MegaRace.

@corruptedevil That was pretty much my take on Fate, too. Kinda like the pre-torchlight torchlight. Alternate-take Diablo.

Never played Gotcha Force, but I'm way down with the box art. That alone reminds me of custom robo, which I loved.

It was pretty similar to Custom Robo but instead of having one robot you have an entire army of them. There were ninjas, cowboys, drillbots, vampire knights and entire battleships.

Cannon Spike: Great shooter for the old Dreamcast. Nobody played it.

Space Station Silicon Valley: Fantastic game from the makers of GTA featuring robot animals and a ton of amazing levels. Apparently nobody played it. Body Harvest was less good.

Dr. Muto: Fun middle of the road platformer that I wish there was a sequel to. They don't make it like this (Or Voodoo Vince) anymore

Aggressive Inline: The Best Tony Hawk Clone Ever. Nobody talks about it or cares about it at all.

Skullmonkeys/The Neverhood: Forgotten Claymation gems.

Wild 9: Loved those brutal kills. Hate that nobody remembers it.

Trap Gunner: Meh, but nobody else seems to have played it.

Jeff mentions that game anytime Tony Hawk: Pro Skater comes up.

Jetpack

It's pretty old and I remember passing the game between a few friends in elementary school on floppy disks.

I thought Snowblind was actually kind of popular?

@corruptedevil That sounds awesome to the point I just got depressed by how much it costs on amazon. I'd buy that.

@bigsocrates Aggressive Inline was one of those games I saw repeatedly but never picked up for whatever reason. Skullmonkeys on the other hand . . . never remotely even heard of, but that sounds super intriguing.

before I knew better I would of said Suikoden . But after joining this site and talking to people I am going to say Omega Boost for PS1 and one I do not hear a lot about is Breath of Fire Series . I loved those games and wish for them to return.

@hellbound: Honestly, it probably was, I just never knew anyone else that knew what it was. Maybe that was because I knew too many PC fps fans . . .

I've had long discussions about obscure niche RPGs like Temple of Elemental Evil, even foreign stuff like the Japanese Fire Emblem titles on these forums. But not Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Which I guess is a good thing, because that game was sort of bad.

@finaldasa: Jetpack is hugely popular - especially among people that made levels for it (I remember making hundreds of levels in the editor). Also, there's a sequel that was Kickstarted that had over 500 backers.

Other than the mediocre games that I used to make, I don't think there are any games I've played that no one else has...

None. I've played every game listed here and besides there is nothing that anyone has done that someone else has not.

Even the worst movies sell more than one ticket.

And... don't feel bad about the formatting. It's been wonky since the site switched over. It's annoying sometimes. There's a wiki page I still need to fix because of it.

Shinrei Jusatsushi Taroumaru

Company that made the game went under before the full run of disks were printed. What was made was sold, supposedly 7k copies or so and maybe a complete but never released arcade rom. I paid $150 in Jan/Feb or 1997 to import a copy.

Excellent game. One of the best soundtracks I have ever heard.

I don't know if this was a big deal in Britain, but I felt like the only American to play this one. Kind of an odd post apocalyptic SRPG.

I thought I heard about that Kickstarter but never knew how it did. I remember making levels and playing the game for a night and then heading to a friend's place where everyone would try the new level. Then another person would take the game home, make new levels, and do it all over again. Needless to say it devolved into impossible levels and joke levels at some point.

Glad to know my strange memory isn't some long lost game no one ever enjoyed.

@arbitrarywater: Rare has had such a strange, hit-or-miss history. I completely forgot about that game. I think I played it once, at my cousin's house? I just remember not loving the way it played. Then again, I didn't like banjo kazooie at first either, so it might have been fine.

I used to have a bunch of Shareware disks with games for win 3.1 on them. Some were really terrible. I would be surprised if anyone played them.

@slag: I played Future Tactics. Mostly because I was a stupid kid who was obsessed with Final Fantasy Tactics at the time (still am, really), and it had "Tactics" in the title. My obscure game would have to be Brigandine, an old PS1 SRPG. Critics and consumers both generally hated it when it came out because it can be pretty unforgiving and incredibly slow. Like, paint-drying slow. It's one of my favorite games ever, though

@cornbredx: That is very true. The premise works in a broad, romanticized sense (everyone likes to feel they have experienced something unique) but ultimately, you're right. Everyone has done everything. You just have to search a little harder sometimes to find those people with similar experiences.

To be fair, I'm sure a number here have played Jericho. I've heard nothing said about Mayhem, Merchants of Brooklyn (now just known as Drug Wars) or Gangland ever, though

TOEE is not obscure, at least not if you have any love for DnD video games.

I played a lot of Evil Islands back when it came out and really enjoyed it. Haven't heard much mention of it at all, none actually.

HellNight on PSX

Its a kinda survival horror game from Konami. You discover underground society under the Tokyo subway and mutating monster is chasing you. You can only run and hide plus you can find partners like little schoolgirl.

It is a kind of Real Life Simulation a decade before The Sims.

@andorski: Haha played the shit out of Megarace! One of the first CD-ROM games as I recall and the visuals blew my mind! Also; it was playing all from the disc and if you had a single speed CD drive it would sometimes stop and load up for a second. In a racing game!!

Now I got a good one I'm sure I'm the only one who've played this beauty:

Yea CyberRace! You were racing in voxel based worlds as a human against other species. There was combat as well (you could shoot rockets at each other and crash into them), but it was still a race, so first over the finish line and you'd win. I remember the stakes being really high as well according to the story, as in; lose this race and the whole universe is fucked!
I had a blast playing this as a kid, the other characters were really cool and had a personality. You also had teammates, so you were not the only human racing against the aliens.
I also remember despite the whole cool sci-fi formula one setup, the controls sucked so bad it was sometimes near impossible to win.

@andorski: MegaRace was packaged in with my family's first computer with a CD-ROM. I thought the game sucked, but I was in it for the crazy FMV.

I bought Metal Dungeon because I wanted an RPG on the original Xbox. Never heard of anyone who played it. It was a godawful mess.

I'd still say TOEE is pretty obscure by that metric. It sold poorly, was received rather tepidly by critics and only became the game it was meant to be thanks to the efforts of a small but dedicated group of modders years later. Compare that to Neverwinter Nights, which came out around the same time and was a critical and commercial success with a huge modding scene that lasted for years, even after NWN2 came out.

Requiem: Avenging Angel. I think I would actually play this again, if it would become available in GOG, just out of curiosity.

@dagas said:

It is a kind of Real Life Simulation a decade before The Sims.

That game was simultaneously great and terrible. I really could not stand the huge-nosed mascot character in that game :|

BTW, LGR did a video on it too:

@somedelicook: Jericho still stands as one of the worst games I've ever played.

@andorski: MegaRace was pretty much the only game I had as a kid at one point. I played the hell out of that game. Don't think I ever won a single race. I have the CD for it around still.

Breakdown for the XBOX seems to be a game no one ever talks about. It was a pretty cinematic first person brawler for its time.

Until they mentioned it on a (somewhat?) recent Bombcast, I would have said Beetle Adventure Racing on the N64. No one ever seems to know what that game is.

@andorski: I loved MegaRace so much holy shit!

Hell yeah I played Fate. I was such a crafty little bastard I managed to cheat the WildTangent client using a registry edit to refresh the one hour limit and keep playing. I did the same with Puzzle Quest and have since bought both as an adult. I guess as much as I can call myself one anyway.

As for games I thought I was the only one that played it, I would put Fate on that list for sure. Since that's been mentioned I won't include it the list below. Also a special mention I'm going to say Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2 not because I assume I as the only one who played it but that game is so goddamn weird and such a product of its time I'm surprised even GB only throw out the odd mention every once in a long while. And most of those were from Dave Snider.

There are two ways I can split my list A) stuff no one played because they were so goddamn awful and I didn't have any other choice as a kid and B) stuff that may or may not include a bit of part A but I haven't looked back at them as much to know for sure. Either way the stuff I assumed only I played I can say was mostly junk or busted in some way. EDIT: Gosh, going through some of this stuff I forgot how low this shit got for me as a kid. Now there were plenty of classics alongside this filth but still, what a difference a some years can make.

@bacongames: I played Gex 3, it's fucking awful and I only played about 5 minutes of it before deciding it was trash, but I did play it.

@corruptedevil said:

I must have played it to completion at least 3 times. I wish I had the better sense then to admit to myself that no, it doesn't matter if you don't have a lot to play, fuck this garbage. But not having anything better to do I went through that thing again and again. There's nothing like the innocent childlike guilt of going with what you have and making the most out of it, shit or no.

Me and Tim Turi...

Probably not only one that played this, but I feel this game needs way more recognition.

@andorski: I played this game many times on my brand new PC 486DX33, that was great. I think that was the first PC CDROM game I've ever bought.

Chase the Express. No one ever talks about this game. I think it's called Covert Ops in the states.

Anyone here played electronic popple? To my great surprise, there's a wiki page for it here, but it's totally empty. It was a wierd DOS game I got when I was younger (though it was hilariously out of date even at the time). I've since discovered that it was Korean, but I somehow picked up European a copy from "The Works", back when they used to sell wierd PC games. (The Works is a UK chain that specialises in cheaply selling books that other high street shops/publishers want rid of).

It was a 2D beat-em-up set inside a computer, where you played as a CPU in a member of a wierd computer-component undergroud resistance trying to overthrow a wierd CPU tyrant who had brainwashed all the other components into serving him. It made even less sense thanks to nonsense translation, but I still remember the game pretty fondly.