I’m looking for strange/interesting/obscure PC games. Could be anything from Windows, DOS, Mac OS (old school), PC-98, Amiga, or whatever else I’m missing there. Let’s hear ‘em!

  • batsforpeace [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    The Fortress of Dr. Radiaki for PC, a quite forgettable early FPS, don’t think I’ve ever seen it discussed anywhere, played it like 2 or 3 times in a computer lab

    Shufflepuck Cafe for Mac, got repetitive but could be fun for short games, the black and white graphics of the Mac version added to the atmosphere a bit

    I also remember this simple PC game where you controlled a space ship and had to navigate or shoot junk coming from all directions and some (or all?) of the junk was icons/filenames/folders from your hard drive. It was on one of those shareware/demo collection discs.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    2 days ago

    OOOOOOOOoooooo this is a good thread.

    Ok ok ok I wanna talk about a game called Sentient by Psygnosis.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(video_game)

    This game is a first person RPG set on a mining space station that is headed towards disaster. I plays out in realtime and the events that occur are determined by your actions on the station.

    What does this mean? Well if you do nothing the station will meet disaster. You can do whatever you want, but you might want to try and stop that.

    Dialog with other station members plays out like this:

    You can change your mood/manner of speaking (scale ranging from angry/aggressive to overly friendly), and everything will have different effects. How others see you is important. How others feel about you is important.

    If you want you could also just fuck around with the wrong console and turn off Oxygen on the station.

    It’s neat.

    Demo playthrough is basically spoiler free because they made a completely standalone scenario for the demo that is fully playable separate to the timeline that occurs in the actual game: https://youtu.be/rT_rbTj3weI?list=PL6dKSOjinJucRoEwU7y_dXWVNb1kS0G6d&t=33

    What I like about this concept is that there’s so much you can do with it. You could write stories that have whole butterfly effects based on how the player delayed the presence of one crew member at one specific event that happens later on or something like that. Just because the player took too long talking to someone and delayed their start to work or whatever. Or you could have events that kill various crewmembers essential to the operation of a station and the player’s choice of delaying someone being at that even might then have knockon effects for who has what skills available for a later event. Etc etc. The kind of writing you could do with this kind of “story plays out in realtime” game has always really fascinated me.

    ALSO it’s really obviously influenced by Star Trek so there’s that.

  • Stolen_Stolen_Valor [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    2 days ago

    I played a game called “hack mud” when it came out and it might be the most unique and rewarding video game I’ve ever played.

    It was a text based, MMO, hacking game. You wrote, ran, and shared JavaScript in order to do basically whatever you want. It was incredible.

    One user made a little app called “Haunty Mall” which was a play on the Monty Hall problem. You could run the app once a day, you picked one door, and if a little ASCII ghost was behind it payed out a bunch of money. It was probably the most run app in the game at the time.

    I decided that I was going to steal that persons code but instead I changed two things. First instead of it paying out, win or lose it took money from your account and deposited into a dummy account that only I had access to. The other change I made was the name you had to type in to download and run the executable. It was a bit of social engineering. I made it one letter different so it looked identical at a quick glance, knowing coders like to just type two or three letters and press tab to execute commands I just made sure mine came up before the real exe. It worked even better than I expected.

    What I didn’t think about was the war I was committing myself to with the person good enough to have unlimited free money to give away to people.

    • CupcakeOfSpice [she/her, fae/faer]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      20 hours ago

      hackmud is still around. I play it off-and-on, but I have a hard time as it feels like everything’s been done already. There are lock crackers available for free, people just willing to give away free money. It doesn’t feel like I have anything to contribute, which is sad for a coding game.

    • kleeon [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      This reminded me of another weird game - Else Heart.Break(). It’s an adventure game with non-linear story telling. The twist is that most entities in the game(doors, lamps, radios etc) are programmable by the player. It was kinda fun to mess with NPCs by reprogramming their doors to lead to nowhere or making their items explode. I also programmed a soda can that would crack all password-locked items in the level when my character drinks from it. There is a ton of other weird stuff to discover in the game that I won’t spoil. Beware that it can be a bit janky

      • Stolen_Stolen_Valor [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        I’ve played it. Tbh I’ve tried just about every coding game there is trying to chase the high from hack mud.

        I think the core issue with these types of games is once people figure out how to use the code to escape it kinda just breaks everything.

        • kleeon [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          10·
          2 days ago

          Yeah, that was my problem too. Programming starts to feel like cheating once you know enough about the game world - you can get infinite money, you can teleport anywhere instantly and so on

          • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            9·
            2 days ago

            That’s solved by making all the things that can affect the game state be gated behind an API that has certain limits on how the player may use it, or by only allowing the player to code an agent with limited actions. e.g. computercraft turtles cost fuel for every action they do and they need to go up to the blocks/entity they will interact with, so using them to automate something requires some engineering.

            • Stolen_Stolen_Valor [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              8·
              2 days ago

              they must of done this with hackmud at some point. I stopped playing back in the day because some omega JavaScript nerd figured out the games code was also written in JavaScript so it was relatively easy to escape and took the whole thing down by accident I think. I think it’s still playable now tho

              I have an extremely loose understanding of coding but I think JavaScript it’s pretty flimsy and easy to break

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    I didn’t get very far in it but I’d have to say Ironseed, a DOS space trading/combat game in the vein of Elite: Dangerous or Star Control 2 which is a much harder sci-fi take than usual on the concept. Crucially, it has no FTL travel. This has several ramifications:

    • Your crew members don’t have organic bodies; they’re effectively chemical suspensions of brain matter linked directly into the ship’s control system.
    • Traveling over the vast interstellar distances slowly drives your crew insane. You have to have the ship’s psychiatrist treat them to counter this (or, in desperate cases, restore their minds from backup - but this also causes them to lose any skill points accrued since the backup was made).
    • There is no universal ingame currency because no civilization lasts for the thousands of years it takes to journey between stars. You have to barter for everything.
    • Planets can undergo significant geological changes. You might visit your favorite trade hub only to find out that a volcanic eruption wiped out the global civilization sometime in the past few centuries.

    The soundtrack is also dope as hell.

  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    I hate that I don’t have the name, but I saw a game on /r/webgames once back in like 2018 where you joined a lobby and played through many levels of a very simple game where you would aim and launch a car into a goal. What made it interesting is that it was a 3D browser game with an extremely unique surreal visual style. Every surface and the cars themselves were made of marbles with a stylized shader, purple and shiny. The skybox was a nebula. I don’t know why it was multiplayer, you would just see the other ghosts launching around. It felt like a dream, a Y2K relic.

  • Wisp [fae/faer, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Leiro - basically a real time worms

    Clonk - kind of an ancient terraria

    Creatures - a life sim/virtual pet game with genetics and some neat ai. Got a steam rerelease a few years ago