Adventure Gamers - Forums

lakerz - 04 February 2017 07:26 PM

You should make a saved game for right after the arcade part, for now you may have piqued others interest in playing this game.

Unfortunately, there is no way that I noticed to save or restore games. That means the arcade game may prevent some from finishing it as it is absolutely necessary to beat it. If you ignore all the educational stuff, the game is really short though. I finished it yesterday.

Here’s another obscure game I’ve played:

Necronomicon: The Book of the Damned (1996) (Windows)

This is a Spanish language hybrid trivia/adventure game about horror movies. It features Freddy Krueger as your nemesis and you have a limited time to destroy the Necronomicon, and by limited time I mean that the entire game is timed as you can see in the screenshots below. If you run out, it’s game over. You actually have more than enough time to do what needs to be done, but the problem is that every time you make a mistake you get a time penalty and they can add up quick.

Fortunately, you can save before every puzzle/trivia game and simply reload to avoid said penalties after you figure out the answers and save yourself the trouble. Other than trivia it features inventory puzzles and logic puzzles. It’s a very short game though.

Title/Menu:

This guy looks familiar:

Cemetery entrance and first puzzle:

A Family crypt:

Match the photos to the names:

Is anyone home?

More Graves:

Guess the movie quote:

zobraks - 06 February 2017 03:38 AM

I can’t do it without Google/Wikipedophilia, because I’m only sure how Roger Corman, Ed Wood and David Lynch look(ed) like.

I didn’t know all those either. While I’m familiar with all the names, I don’t really know what they all look like, particularly the ones that were making movies before my parents were born.

The quote in the last shot by the way is from The Exorcist. It’s from the head turning scene when the demon says: Do you know what she did, your cunting daughter?

Monster Castle: A Skull Club Adventure (1999) (Windows)

This is a horror themed game in the Catalan language in which you play a group of youngsters on an adventure in a castle full of stereotypical horror movie monsters. It’s somewhat similar to games like TKKG and Famous Five and has some educational content as well about horror literature, movies and myths. It also features the Necronomicon, making that three games in a row now that I have shown that feature Lovecraft in some way.

The shots:

Title Screen:

The path to the castle is a little dangerous:

The room you’ll be staying in:

One of the castle’s denizens:

Introducing cosmic horror to children:

Say hello to Igor:

The castle foyer:

A vampire reading the Necronomicon:

Now here’s an obscure game I really enjoyed:

Pink Gear Collection (1997) (Windows / Macintosh)

This is a Japanese language game, but you don’t really need to understand the language to play and finish it. Probably the best way to explain this game is to say that it is like a Japanese version of 9: The Last Resort. They’re both music-oriented, first person slideshow games in bizarre and surreal worlds.

In this game your goal is to find six musical fragments that are scattered about the game world in instrument themed areas (guitar, drums, piano, etc.) and use them to lower a drawbridge that gives access to the final area that unveils the game’s mysteries. The game has multiple endings, of which I have seen three, but the difference is purely cosmetic and hence it’s unnecessary to see them all.

The game does, of course, have several sound puzzles. You’ll need to hear both a 5 note and an 8 note melody in one part of the world and play them back on a piano in another for instance so the game might be difficult for those without a good ear.

The negatives to the game are that you can only save from a specific game location so you’ll have to backtrack to save until the teleporters are working, and you cannot save after you get the last fragment piece. These are extremely minor issues, but when coupled with the fact that the game was unstable in Windows 7 x64 and in a Win98SE virtual machine for me, it got to be a little annoying when the game would crash and I would lose progress. This forced me to play on an actual Win98SE PC where it ran perfectly.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite obscure games. It’s playing games like this that make wading through all the crap games worth it. That said, I’m a surrealism loving, first person, logic puzzle fanboy, so I’m definitely biased towards games like this. If you’re one of those third person, narrative based, inventory puzzle people who dislike Myst, then this game is probably not for you.

The shots:

Title Screen:

This little guy is actually your inventory box (Ctrl-b to access him):

The game’s “Menu” location:

Time to make some music:

Nice hair:

Part of a music machine:

A character from the “casino”:

You can’t say this game isn’t colorful:

Send in the clowns:

A door in the piano world:

A hard to find area of the game:

D - 09 February 2017 12:02 PM

Now here’s an obscure game I really enjoyed:

Pink Gear Collection (1997) (Windows / Macintosh)

This is a Japanese language game, but you don’t really need to understand the language to play and finish it. Probably the best way to explain this game is to say that it is like a Japanese version of 9: The Last Resort. They’re both music-oriented, first person slideshow games in bizarre and surreal worlds.

It looks like a lot of fun.
Any idea where to get it?

crabapple - 09 February 2017 12:27 PM

D - 09 February 2017 12:02 PM

Now here’s an obscure game I really enjoyed:

Pink Gear Collection (1997) (Windows / Macintosh)

This is a Japanese language game, but you don’t really need to understand the language to play and finish it. Probably the best way to explain this game is to say that it is like a Japanese version of 9: The Last Resort. They’re both music-oriented, first person slideshow games in bizarre and surreal worlds.

It looks like a lot of fun.
Any idea where to get it?

There are two copies for sale on Amazon.co.jp right now. One of them is the “Mix” version which is a box set that contains the game’s sequel as well. If the seller doesn’t ship internationally, you can use a proxy buying service to purchase it for you.

That’s all I’m going to say though as it isn’t actually in my best interest to create competition for acquiring obscure games. The more people that know how to jump through the hoops to buy such things, the more expensive and rare games like these become.

Morbid (1997) (DOS)

This is a Korean game but there are only a couple of written sentences in the entire game that are in Korean and they aren’t important for anything I could tell. Maybe they were hints or something. I can’t read Korean and besides company names and places I don’t know a single word of the language, not even how to say hello, so that’s a good thing for me. There is also no dialogue in the game, so there isn’t even a barrier to the story on this one, though it’s obviously very vague.

The game is first person, inventory puzzle based, very short, very easy, and certainly doesn’t live up to its name. It’s not even a horror game in my opinion. It’s perhaps a psychological thriller but without any real thrills or interesting psychology. Normally this would just be a bad game to simply pretend didn’t exist, but this game makes such bizarre mistakes in its implementation that it was actually interesting in a train wreck sort of way.

The most bizarre decision in its development were the choices of the camera angles to give the player. A lot of the time you are just staring at a blank wall, a door or something hardly more interesting. The actual graphics in the rooms are mostly only visible in the movement transitions and those transitions can be rather quick, meaning that you don’t even get a good look at the locations in the game. It felt like the game world itself was Slenderman and for your own protection you couldn’t look at it for long.

Another failing that was both annoying and humorous in its incompetence was moving about the world.  Unlike most games where you can turn around either to the left or right, this game mostly restricts you to only one and it’s completely random. Walking down a hallway with doors on the left and you want to turn left to open a door? Sorry! You have to turn right three times instead. Other times left will be a choice. And good luck guessing where you are actually going to go sometimes when you click a direction.

The default cursor is also a magnifying glass, except you can’t actually examine anything with it. If you can interact with something, it turns into a hand. It’s almost like the game was developed by someone who had never played a game before. I obviously wouldn’t recommend this game. You’d be better off with a random freeware AGS game.

The pot shots:

Can’t they see it’s why my brain says rage?

She told me to walk this way:

School’s out forever:

I ain’t afraid of no ghost:

Math suks:

I got the skills to pay the bills, ya’ll:

I cry out for magic:

I’m too sexy for my cat:

Private Eye was a decent ‘game’ experience I agree.

That ‘Pink Gear’ game does look cool.  I think I will try to hunt down a copy, even though I do not currently possess a working Win98SE machine.  I may have to hunt down a cheap laptop or something.  I am one of the few who legitimately appreciated the 9: Last Resort game.  I really liked the wackiness of it and the puzzles.  So Pink Gear looks like more of the same, thanks for showcasing it!

Now Morbid on the other hand, well, LOL.  Your screen captions made me laugh.  This is one of those games I might watch a ‘Let’s play’ of instead of going through the trouble of doing so myself.

Keep them coming D!  You are doing a kind favor in showcasing the very obscure games out there.  You may want to consider making it an official AdventureGamers article series. 

Refixion (1991) (Macintosh)

This is another one from Japan but everything is in English. Even the instructions are available in English, though it is completely unnecessary to read them. It’s a moot point though as this isn’t a game. There is no story, no puzzles and what passes for exploration basically consists of clicking to move forward through a tiny world that will take you maybe two or three minutes to get through. This is basically just an audio CD with some enhanced content to go along with the music. It’s a complete waste of time for gamers. It’s just one of those things that doesn’t fit anywhere else so it gets shoved in with adventure games, where it doesn’t belong either. Unless you like the music, stay away.

The King of Chicago (1987)

With Al Capone out of the picture, Chicago’s prohibition-era profit is up for grabs. Are you merciless and cunning enough to gain it by whatever means are required? Every action you take has complex long-term consequences which are not always obvious at the time.

You must keep your people on your side, watching what you say and do, knowing that an overthrow could be hatched at any moment. Look after your woman as well - who’s going to respect a single mobster? The money has to be juggled in these ways, not forgetting to reach an ‘understanding’ with the Mayor to avoid any negative attentions.

It seems this has recently been rereleased on Android, which is surprising for such a little known game.

King of Chicago was Cinemaware, right? So though not as well known as Defender of the Crown or Rocket Ranger, it was still a pretty major release at the time (and maybe the rights came as part of a bundle with better-known games).