What is an obscure piece of media or videogame that you think nobody else here has heard of?
What is an obscure piece of media or videogame that you think nobody else here has heard of?
It could even be a youtube video or movie that you don't think anyone reading this has heard of besides you.
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Alright let's go, I love niche things:
Movies:
- Bubba Ho-Tep
- Joe's Apartment
- Six String Samurai
- Krull
- The Greasy Strangler
- A Boy and His Dog
- Fido
- Within the Woods
- Undead or Alive
- Cemetery Man
Tabletop:
- Car Wars (maybe, depends on crowd)
- The worlds worst diagram of ship controls included as an insert in a Paranoia box
- All Flesh Must be Eaten
- Fairy Meat
- Cult of Ecstacy (for Mage the Ascension)
- Did you know that according to Dragon Magazine players can participate in orgying for a number of days equal to their con SCORE?
- Castles and Crusades
- Tunnels and Trolls
- Remember Car Wars? They did a crossover with GURPS, called GURPS Autoduel, and it is amazing.
- HOL (Human Occupied Landfill)
- The second publication of the HOL supplement, Buttey Wholesomeness, where the cover is printed BUTTery HOLsomeness. That one was just a pita to find I started wondering if it was just a PDF concept cover. Only took me like 8 years to find a physical copy.
- Mars Attacks board game
Games:
- Sim Tower
- Redneck Rampage
- The Diablo 1 expansion, Hellfire, that Blizzard said not to make but a division of Sierra of all companies yolod it into existence anyway.
- The Neverhood
- Toy Story for Gameboy
- Battlezone, back in the day when you were fighting green triangles
- Descent
- I wasn't going to at first but I want to throw in some of my favorite Magic the Gathering cards: Nature's Wrath (haha, holy shit mono green, go home you're drunk), the art of the Pride secret vault thing for Bearscape, the art for Spy Network looks like Friend Computer from Paranoia, Kudzu, Stunted Growth
My music taste is so underground you guys I'm very cool like that. There's a surprising number of trans folk punk musicians from the Pacific Northwest. I'm getting sleepy but if anyone wants me to bombard them with folk punk artists (trans or otherwise) lmk I'll totally hook you up
I wouldn't say Joe's Apartment is niche.
It's just not good and easily forgotten.
There's a new Decent game, fun times
Whaaaat? I need it in my life
That's delightful, thank you!
Car Wars! Man that one could certainly test one's patience! Not as exciting as the picture on the box. 3-4 hours of dice rolls to negotiate a u-turn...
I've been collecting rulebooks for that game for the last ten or so years. Maybe my favorite tabletop. It flows pretty smoothly if everyone is familiar with the rules but for sure even if you've been playing it for a decade you'll always hit something that's like "I have no clue how to resolve this". And the learning cliff is for real so actually getting people interested in it enough to become that familiar with the rules is as hard as the game lol
I used to love the lore of Steve Jackson Games a lot more than the actual games for this very reason.
It's like trying to code a driving/racing simulator while playing it in real time. On paper...
The MtG BearShare secret lair is the funniest fucking card they've ever made
It's an absolute gem lol. The only secret lair I've actually gotten
I don't need a bombardment but I'll certainly take a top 5 folk punk bands! (Trans or otherwise).
Folk punk in the PNW where at least someone in the band is trans: Pigeon Pit, Left at London, Sister Wife Sex Strike, and Porch Cat. I know I'm missing some, maybe Kimya Dawson counts (non binary, lives in PNW, but from New York and Moldy Peaches was a New York band).
If I'm just going to do top 5 folk punk in general though, hard to pick and it changes often but let's go with: Apes of the State, Days n Daze, She/Her/Hers, Jeffrey Lewis, and Pigeon Pit (I fucking love Pigeon Pit okay)
Awesome! I'll let you know what I think of Pigeon Pit for hors d'oeuvres and go from there 🔥
Get the chance to check them out yet?
I know now why you love Pigeon Pit, okay! They're great.
Glad you like them. There's a Taxpayers concert coming up that's supposed to have Pigeon Pit as well, if you're in the Seattle area! Mar 30 I believe
Sames!
I forgot about Redneck Rampage. For some reason I associate the feeling of that with Blood, and it looks like they're both from 1997. I'll have to go fire it up and see if there are any similarities
Same engine (Build)
I've seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob's Ladder. That was a night well spent.
Out of the games, I've played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried -- never really made much sense out of that one though.
I don't know if it's that obscure... but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games -- do you remember the song with the lyrics "I'm just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life"?
That's amazing nobody's ever seen those movies! And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn't stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map. Fun game. I haven't heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.
Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)
I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself -- I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn't understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it's clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates... (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)
I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
I hadn't played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn't great when you asked this question -- but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such -- and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It's got orange and white stripes. It's scratched up a little bit, but it's still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to "improve performance"... lol)
The game opens with a short animated splash screen -- a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game's logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off -- somewhat confusingly; it wasn't immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn't find it very helpful.
The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don't really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it's not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.
There's an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.
The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don't know well enough to name -- but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going "AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!" over and over.)
I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) -- and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it's also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a "boing-a-boing-oing-oing" failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.
The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there -- or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can "build" a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn't seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).
Unfortunately I don't have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:
By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.
which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I'm running it on has a 3.7GHz processor -- obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance -- but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p
Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print -- although I haven't tried it.
Joe’s Apartment
being niche makes me feel old..
I'll occasionally catch myself singing "welcome to Joe's toilet, plop plop plop, ahh ahh ahhh.."😂
looks like the full movie is on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Z7fSRrn2QI tried not to add too many things that are just old but previously super popular, instead of niche. Time really does add obscurity though
Tbf me and an old bf of mine would watch it a lot, but I don't know that I would call it "popular" among anyone else, so it probably does qualify.. 😂
Fido the zombie movie?
Make sure you get me a head coffin.
Fido the fuckin zombie movie! I love zombie movies the cheesier the better
Bubba Ho-Tep is an awesome little Bruce Campbell movie if people are looking for something to watch. I remember Fido was pretty big among B Grade / Comedy horror fans about 10-15 years ago.
Sim Tower was really fun growing up. I was expecting that when came out fallout shelter and was mad and disappointed. I feel like most people have seen screenshots or characters from The Neverhood but probably couldn't name what it was from. I never played it but remembered it growing up and only found the name out a year ago.
