It's Critter Time!

NovaSquirrel wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 4:20 am Evil Zone for PlayStation 1 is a game I played a lot as a kid that I don't think I've seen anyone else talk about.

"Ihadulca is a being capable of existing in multiple dimensions at once"

I love Evil Zone. I love how bad it is. I love that Paul Eiding does the narrator voice over. I'm so glad someone else remembers this.

Weasel wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 12:07 pm

XerShadowTail wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 4:07 am Wild Metal Country! Made by the same people who made Grand Theft Auto, who are now known only as the makers of GTA. This is a nice and slow tank game where you collect rainbow cores and return them.

Oh, I really love Wild Metal Country, it falls into the genre of Games Where Hard Controls Are The Gameplay.

The controls do make sense though and can get you out of places! I do like how everything is slow paced and you take your time.

JarylGaren wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 11:15 am god, I remember spending an embarrassing amount of time in Shining Soul II for the GBA

fuck YESSSSSSSS i went into this topic like "oh i'm gonna post that one" AND THEN I SEE YOUR POST :3

Cayman wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 11:12 am

HakariSquish wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 11:09 am Okay, whenever someone asks me "What is a niche game you obsess over?"
this, does anyone remember this masterpiece omfg.

Elebits was great! I'm still a boom blox fan when it comes to wii gimmicks. Steven Spielberg's finest work. :3

Oh man, Elebits and Boom Blox, that's a blast from the past! Didn't really play a whole lot of either, but did give 'em both a whirl. About the only thing I remember, unfortunately, is Elebits being weirdly frustrating for everyone in my family who tried it. Maybe we were just all bad at it?

xwildwhirlx wrote: Mon Jul 14, 2025 2:24 am DRAWN TO LIFE SERIES INSTANTLY POPPED INTO MY HEAD

Hidden text.

ITS REALLY FUN AND YOU GET TO DRAW STUFF AND THE STORY IS INTERESTING

ignore the newest game btw… Drawn To Life: Two Realms isn’t real and can’t hurt u… *is in denial*

I REMEMBER THIS AAAAAA
I loved this game when I had my DS, the music was so charming and that damn forest theme is still stuck in my head years later. I loved the idea of drawing your own characters and tools and such because I had an active imagination and loved doing fun stuff instead of just "haha penis" (which is also valid don't get me wrong)

Cayman wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 8:50 am Now I'm wondering if I should try to get Baten Kaitos on my gamecube emulator...or if that's one that's best left in the past.

hey baten kaitos. i have attempted to finish this game 4 times and had weird issues every time preventing me from doing it. but also: i love this game!!

the remaster came out on Steam but they took out the voice acting (why???). luckily someone immediately released a patch restoring the voice acting: https://www.nexusmods.com/batenkaitos1a ... ter/mods/3

the remaster is pretty damn good imo, and baten kaitos is one of the most beautiful games of all time. they did a pretty good job upscaling it!

Cania wrote: Wed Jul 16, 2025 11:15 pm the remaster came out on Steam but they took out the voice acting (why???)

my guess would be they were probably too cheap to renegotiate the contracts for the voice work, so it was easier to just cut it out.

the stated reason was something about how it didn't match the tone of the game, which tracks with the endless amounts of complaints contemporaneously about how bad the voice acting was. but it's the best part of the game, to me.

i've never seen another game cut voice acting for this reason though, only music/imagery (like crazy taxi cutting KFC). i don't think voice acting licensing works like that tbh. i could be wrong though, i am no insider!

The GBA Frogger games, but namely The Forgotten Relic. I thought that game was so cool as a kid. It's basically if Zelda were a top-down platformer, and it's pretty solid to my recollection

Mefurbëtas wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 8:19 pm Scourge Hive is a game I have never seen ANYONE talk about, and this is coming from a Trauma Center/Team fan (Awesome DS/Wii series BTW,I do recommend playing through all the games)

It's been awhile since I played but I think it was a timed action adventure game that played like an isometric Metroid game, horror themings included.

I wanted to like this game, and I should really look into the DS version but I had to stop playing the GBA version due to the strobing present on one of the abilities which was a lot to manage while streaming.

JarylGaren wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 11:15 am god, I remember spending an embarrassing amount of time in Shining Soul II for the GBA

Both Shining Soul games are such a fun time, and you can really see their design influence in the later Akira Ueda DS game Contact!

My choice here has to be The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road for DS.



This is a weird one! A full-fledged 3D RPG developed by Media.Vision (the folks behind the Wild Arms and Digimon Story titles) controlled via a touch-screen trackball with a unique take on typical Dragon Quest combat.

Honorable mentions include Odama (GCN) and Aero Porter (3DS). Yoot Saito makes games for sickos named Proxy.

ProxyGlitchcat wrote: Thu Jul 17, 2025 2:06 am

Mefurbëtas wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 8:19 pm Scourge Hive is a game I have never seen ANYONE talk about, and this is coming from a Trauma Center/Team fan (Awesome DS/Wii series BTW,I do recommend playing through all the games)

It's been awhile since I played but I think it was a timed action adventure game that played like an isometric Metroid game, horror themings included.

I wanted to like this game, and I should really look into the DS version but I had to stop playing the GBA version due to the strobing present on one of the abilities which was a lot to manage while streaming.

JarylGaren wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 11:15 am god, I remember spending an embarrassing amount of time in Shining Soul II for the GBA

Both Shining Soul games are such a fun time, and you can really see their design influence in the later Akira Ueda DS game Contact!

My choice here has to be The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road for DS.



This is a weird one! A full-fledged 3D RPG developed by Media.Vision (the folks behind the Wild Arms and Digimon Story titles) controlled via a touch-screen trackball with a unique take on typical Dragon Quest combat.

Honorable mentions include Odama (GCN) and Aero Porter (3DS). Yoot Saito makes games for sickos named Proxy.

I'll always remember that DS Wizard of Oz game for having the nonsense name in Japan of Riz-Zoawd

Back when I was 13, I was somewhat obsessed by a game called Dr. Lunatic: Supreme With Cheese. One of several sequels to a franchise that started in 1993, the best way I could describe the game is an exceedingly strange Gauntlet clone. I'm not sure if I could call it a great game, but the thing about it is that I generally can't think of any other game with as much hand-made content as this, even to this day. The thing has probably about a thousand levels, no hyperbole. A big reason for that is that it's mostly fan-made content, to be fair, and a lot of the levels go from 'interesting' to 'made by literal small children'.

The game whiplashes from concept to concept so you'll have no idea what you'll get next. Forced stealth sections! Quizzes where getting a wrong answer is instant death! Levels that are nothing but giant empty spaces with the game's bosses slapped around at random! An entire world full of levels with buttons that do nothing but play poorly sourced sound clips from various movies and TV shows!

As you play these levels, you earn coins that go towards the utterly massive mall that serves as the in-game store. Buy even more worlds on top of the ones you haven't already finished yet! Hope you come across vital abilities in the shop before you run out of money! Check out the monster database, describing the developer's thought process and trivia on every single enemy in the game!

Despite everything, I still kinda love it, because it's a game that exudes charm and just a sheer love for the fanbase that made it. Supreme With Cheese literally wouldn't exist if it weren't for the fanbase that created it, and you can feel that in the levels you play, the fan art you can unlock by getting certain achievements, or the quiz questions you'll answer about their 2003-era forums. (I used to be part of those, too, back in the elden times.)



Oh yeah it's on Steam now too

It's always heartening to see old games get revived and put on Steam by their creators, the one that surprised me was randomly coming across DX Ball (weirdly with new DLC even), my younger self used to play that game religiously, because I loved Arkanoid clones and this was one of the best.

Weasel wrote: Thu Jul 17, 2025 8:56 am It's always heartening to see old games get revived and put on Steam by their creators, the one that surprised me was randomly coming across DX Ball (weirdly with new DLC even), my younger self used to play that game religiously, because I loved Arkanoid clones and this was one of the best.

HOLY SHIT DX BALL IS ON STEAM???

I have an entry:


I loved this game to bits as a kid. It was just the right kind of arcadey platformey shooter that tickled (and still tickles, frankly) my brain just right. It wasn't until much later that I learned this game was an "alternate universe" port of Turrican 3 for the Amiga/various home computer systems. Its Sega counterpart, Mega Turrican, is apparently more faithful to the Amiga game but I found the alternate take of the SNES to be a much more fun game. Though by the time I got a chance to try it out, the nostalgia bias had already taken root, hahaha.

Also, the music slaps hard. Chris Hülsbeck's music is amazingly rendered on the SNES sound chip. Waves of serotonin just start flooding my brain the moment I hear that 1-1 theme boot up.


Alas, nobody else I know seems to know about it, or are constantly comparing it to Metroid, despite the two having different styles of gameplay. Though I will admit that on the surface level, the similarities are a bit suspicious. Upgradeable weapons that change your shot type? Sidescrolling shooter with a space-suited protagonist? The ability to curl into a ball and roll around? I get it, but the games play nothing alike, lmao.

Fun Fact:
Fun Fact 2: So as you can see, this is a game that is near and dear to my autistic little heart.

nobody knows about The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang on the super nintendo. you play as a vampire kid who spins and tosses his hat. it's like an RPG but it's really short, has flaws, and is kinda grindy, and it isn't the best game by any means, but you can beat it in an afternoon and it's a neat time hehe

oh i HAVE heard of that before but never actually seen any of it! sounds fun X3 i'm all for a nice little grindy rpg

Has anyone played Arkista's Ring? It's a top down little action rpg-lite game where you're an elf named Christine and you're killing baddies to power up and fight the Evil Shogun. I did a little zine for it inspired by the magazines in Retro Game Challenge on the DS (the GameCenter CX game). It's one of my favorite NES games and I forgot to mention it before because my memory is really bad lol.

Here's the zine.

My "I've never heard anyone else talk about it" is usually Icebreaker, an abstract DOS/3DO shooter about pyramids.



Real simple game-you are a little white pyramid on its side breaking other pyramids based on color. Red ones need to be shot and will kill you on touch, blues need to be smashed through physically, greens need you to lure ze aggressive pyramids chasing you into breaking them. It has roughly a billion levels (well, 150, but zhat's a pretty big select screen!) and adds a couple extra things to deal with here and zhere.

Pyramids change color every now and zhen, randomly, and it's a huge pain to have a blue pyramid turn into a red one and kill you right as you were approaching it-which is honestly ze game's biggest drawback, since zhere's no mid-level checkpoints or anything-but otherwise I've always kinda loved it. Had a demo via PC Gamer as a kid and got a 3DO emulator working almost exclusively to play ze full version years later.

SCALER, like no one I ever met knows about it and I really wish that it had more attention on it. Scaler was awesome. I should get it again and play it

StarlightNecromancer wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 6:00 am SCALER

Ah yes, the furry tf game. I haven't played much of it but it's on the list of games I need to really dig in to.

THE DOG Island by Yuke's for the PlayStation 2 and Wii.

Based on the...I don't know what kind of brand to call THE DOG but the people that photoshopped puppers real good. It's an action/adventure kind of deal that's definitely more meant for younger players but is still quaint and enjoyable even as an adult. You play as a pup who has to go on an adventure to save your sister from the anime disease and in the process, help some goobers in a village solve their problems. It's very cute and got some real bops in it. You can also dress up your dog in it.





Weirdly enough, there's also a game for the PS2/Wii in the Petz franchise Ubisoft also published that came out at almost the exact same time that's also developed by Yuke's that's almost identical to this but not as long.

Hello all. Figured I would start out in this thread, since this sort of stuff is extremely my jam, even if a chunk of it is admittedly obscure post-Steam era indies. Already saw Galapagos get mentioned here, something I don't think I'd have ever expected to se mentioned in the wild, but am glad to see remembered.

Not sure if it's still considered forgotten or under-the-radar, but probably the most stand-out example to me of this sort of game is Star Control II (1992), for DOS and 3DO.



There is just, so much to it. Exploration of a whole galaxy, pseudo-newtonian ship combat, the ability to converse and interact with myriad distinct alien characters, as well as plenty of secrets for the curious player to discover. Incredibly in-depth, and with superb pixel art, and a memorable (fan-submitted!) soundtrack. Even though the game itself might be relatively obscure, the impact it had and inspiration it provided to other game developers can be seen across several more recent, such as Mass Effect.

Best of all, it was open-sourced years ago, and can be freely downloaded, either from the original sourceforge page, or from the more recent Steam page! (though as a caveat, some of the music had to be removed from the steam version due to a licensing dispute.)

Strongly recommend folks check it out, whether just watching a bit of the playthrough, or downloading and playing the game for yourself. And! As an added bonus, after over 30 years of waiting, and several false starts, Star Control II is getting an actual sequel, being spearheaded by the original creators. No idea how it'll turn out, but I'm still excited to see how it goes.

I will shamefully admit that 90% of my time with Star Control 2 was playing its head-to-head multiplayer against my sister. I didn't even realise it had a single player portion until later!

Oh neat! I admittedly was never super good with the combat in the game, but it was fun to sometimes just do a few rounds of Super Melee when bored. It was interesting hearing how the devs designed each ship, focusing more on balance through fleet composition, rather than with regards to each individual ship.