games that bubble up from the depths

pasquinelli

last night, while listening to ep. 178, i recalled, for no clear reason, the game “sheep”. it’s a very silly shepherding game that i enjoyed, but i think since i played it at the same time as i played “grim fandango” it got pushed out of my memory, and the thing that made it reappear in my mind was listening to several people talk about xbox360 games for an hour, even though “sheep” came out years before even the original xbox. and if the comments on a youtube video of gameplay from “sheep” is anything to go by, many other people have had the game brought to mind inexplicably.

has anyone else had the memory of a game bubble up from the depths of their unconscious?

GigaSlime

I have a tendency to recall Wishbone’s Odyssey, an old point-and-click adventure game for the PC based on that old TV show about the dog who teaches kids about literature. Wishbone gets sucked into a computer game about Homer’s Odyssey, taking the place of Odysseus, and you have to lead him through the story so he can get out. Part of what I remember so strongly is that it was weirdly violent? At times there are choices you can make that aren’t hard pass/fails but they can get some of your men killed. Polyphemus the cyclops can just decide to chow down on some of your guys, he’ll pick up a dude, dude will scream, and you’ll hear all these crunching and smacking noises. The only part where they really censored the content of the story is the end - someone probably decided it would be a little much for Wishbone to murder all of his wife’s suitors with a bow and arrow.

pasquinelli

GigaSlime man, i haven’t thought of wishbone the dog in probably going on 20 years now…

yeso

yes the old dark castle games for mac. Probably because I watched them being played at the most brain-plastic toddler age. Was too young to really be able to actually play them, but sounds and visuals still pop into my head now and then and I go looking for screenshots or playthroughs

strong visuals + very weird sounds

Video_Game_King

I know I’ve encountered these types of games somewhat recently, but the problem is the only ones I can remember are the ones I looked up specifically so I could know what they were, which I think defeats the point of a thread like this. But just in case it doesn’t, I’ll say that one such game was Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense, a game I will always remember as “that racing game I rented a couple times back in the late 90s/early 2000s that had a giant ant in a crater somewhere.”

vegetables

One of the only games I was allowed to play on the computer as a kid was The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. I had fun with all the puzzles, but I freakin’ hated these pizza jerks.

Premise behind their section is that you have to use deduction to figure out what toppings they want on their pizzas, but they’re picky as hell and real snarky about it. I would make them shitty pizzas even when I knew what they wanted as a child’s way of getting back at them. I usually replay one of their lines in my head when I order pizza. some of that stuff is yuck!

pasquinelli

vegetables this game sounds really cool.

SuperEffective

I really can’t remember what this game was even called because I was very young when I played it on our old Macintosh, but I specifically recall playing a shoot em up where you would pilot a ketchup bottle and shoot hot dogs and other stuff coming at you. I’m not even sure if I’m remembering this correctly becuase its possible that you may have been piloting a hotdog and not a ketchup bottle. All I remember is that this “ship” would shoot either ketchup or mustard at thematically related obstacles. Anyone have any idea what game this is?

marlfuchs2

I feel like a lot of these are gonna be mac shareware games because they were weird and quirky, and usually came bundled on Mac Addict’s monthly CD

I think my favorite of these is Gridz, a realtime strategy game using cartoon robots. I played a lot of the demo

pasquinelli

marlfuchs2 now you’ve reminded me of black shades, a bodyguard fps whose demo i played a lot.

Syzygy

marlfuchs2

BooM, the Mac OS 7 Bomberman clone with a DooM skin.

MDS-02

pasquinelli massive hours playing black shades. Made me want free aim in all shooters. A later deep interest in Jurassic Park Trespasser would develop.

Kimimi

This old Atari Zorro game I used to play a lot as a kid - it has all sorts of odd little events going on that stuck in my mind and randomly pop back up at the strangest times:

Karasu

Kimimi I always think of the Zorro game alongside the similarly made Atari 800 Bruce Lee game. I don’t think they’re all that similar, they just have that ‘character platformer from the early 80s’ vibe.

hellomrkearns

I sure did play a lot of weird shareware pc games in the 90s. One that comes to mind now is H.U.R.L. I cant imagine it was any good, but I sure did play it a bunch.

rejj

hellomrkearns I sure did play a lot of weird shareware pc games in the 90s.

Same here!
There are a few that will sometimes just spring to mind for no real reason:

Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure

The Adventures of Captain Comic

..and on the non-shareware front, this will continually bubble up for me

If anyone has played Pinball Fantasies and remembers it, and remembers the music that would play as the game was loading and showing the logo splash screens and then the main title screen, I would like to present you with

goonbag

I have always vaguely remembered a game I played at school when I would have been about 6, so, mid-80s. Never been able to find proof of its existence though. It was probably a Commodore 64 game because I remember colour graphics but I’m not 100% sure about that.

Anyway, it was a lemonade stand game, but not the one that always comes up when I try to google this - it was a Disney version, I feel like maybe it was the duck nephews you played as? Disney characters anyway. I’m sure it was rubbish but it haunts me that I’ve never been able to find it.

moments later…

Unbelievable. The process of writing this post made me remember the detail about the ducks, and finally I hit upon the right combination of search terms to find the game. I could cry. This is definitely it! Not quite as I remember it but isn’t that always the way?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck%27s_Playground

Kimimi

goonbag !! I haven’t thought about this game in YEARS! It’s the coins that really stuck in my mind for some reason - I suppose I would have been getting used to the concept at the time. Thank you so much for bringing this one up!

robinhoodie

goonbag Donald Duck’s Playground and Mickey’s Space Quest are some of the first games I ever played. I really need to go back and complete both

goonbag

rejj Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure

Totally forgot about this until now!! Wow. I used to play this at a buddy’s house when we were 12. We made fun of it for being lame (but still played it)

CidNight

Alone in the Dark (1992), which I played at my older cousin’s house late at night together. You can imagine how that effected my long term psychological growth and why it occasionally emerges, fully formed in my head.

Kid Chameleon (also 1992 - must have been a formative year!) This is another game that bubbles up into my memory from time to time without any bidding. I wrote a while back somewhere on the forums about how I have a weird misremembrance of this game on the TurboGrafx16, rather than the Genesis. So this game has some strange entanglements in my mind.

-edit- hm watching some of this longplay, I wonder if it’s the obvious Splatterhouse reference in KC that my mind connects with the TG16?

pasquinelli

CidNight i only played the saturn version of “alone in the dark” and it just looks like trash compared to the dos version.

milo

I played this game a lot as a kid called Treasure Mountain. My grandpa had it on his computer and I’d play that and math blaster a bunch.

In this game you capture elves and they’d give you clues to find different treasures as you climb the mountain. I don’t remember much but it had a soundtrack with real classical songs so sometimes I’ll hear one of those songs and think of this game.

saddleblasters

milo I also played this as a kid! My memories of it are wildly different from the video. I guess it seemed like a much more complicated and rich experience at the time.

Moon

milo

I was specifically going to post this one lol. Except for me it was more of a school computer room vibe. I can still remember the music.

TheBeigeKnight

I’ve gone through and cataloged every game I’ve played I can think of on backloggd. However, from time to time, one I have forgotten bubbles up. This happened just the other day with a game that just came to mind suddenly, for no clear reason. It was a top down action-roguelike where you are dealing with derelict spaceships. It proved to be tricky to track down, as there are a lot more games that fit that description than I imagined and none of the ones I was finding were it. I posed this description to the Action Button discord though and someone nailed it pretty quickly. Turns out it was Cryptark by Alientrap. I’m very familiar with their game Apotheon and have played Capsized as well, so I was quite bemused at having forgotten this one.