next »

[Paint by Numbers]

This thread is for discussion of obscure indie games, specifically old ones (90s-early 2000s). I'm sure there are hundreds of interesting and fun games that got totally passed by as time wore on. Let's celebrate these games in this thread. If their websites are still around, feel free to post them!

N.I's Java games:

These games were on the old Bonus.com (Bonus was an incredibly awesome portal site that had all kinds of weird-ass games. Unfortunately it went down and apparently took most of its games, which were often obscure ones, to the grave with it.) When I finally found N.I's real page, it was like a bomb of nostalgia had gone off in my face. N.I makes charming little Java games with some appealing little quirks, like every game using the same set of sound effects.

Ara Teka:

An odd little Japanese platformer. It's short and not very difficult, with a bit of an abstract "butcher" motif going on.

Annnnd hopefully I'm not the only one who likes this sort of thing. GO!

[Aquin]

Heck, I'd love to see some of this stuff end up on the front page.  Maybe a strange monthly post that rounds up the indie releases of January 2000 and keeps going, as if the posts were a decade out of date.

Sadly, I don't really know much about the early days (outside of the old various insular communities like MZX or clickteam.)

[Derek]

Crime Fighter

cactus posted this game and I actually played it a long time ago on DOS. The title is actually a bit of a misnomer - you play the bad guy in this game and your goal is to rise in the criminal underworld by committing all manner of crimes. It's quite fun.

[speeder]

That game (crimefighter) is great!

Sometimes I play it here using DosBox.

[Blademasterbobo]

oooh shiiiit I used to play crimefighter with my siblings all the time. That game is so much fun multiplayer.

So much fun.

edit: while I'm on the subject of old split-screen multiplayer games,



JUMP N BUMP.

Also hilariously fun multiplayer. Not sure how obscure it is, but it was made around 2001. Playing this and crimefighter pretty much ruined my old laptop's keyboard.

[Bini]

http://outgun.sourceforge.net/index.html

Grabbing the description from the sourceforge page:
"Outgun is a free, cross-platform 32-player capture-the-flag (CTF) 2D action game."

I don't know exactly when it was created, but its apex was during late 2002/early 2003, where you could enjoy playing on two servers with 32 people each. Later the dedicated servers were removed for various reasons and the game was almost forgotten. Then around 2005, some swedes(iirc) named Nix and Huntta kind of revived the game, but it was still too obscure and hadn't enough people on it.

I really like this game, though it is a shame that no one plays it anymore.

[Nikica]

XONG is a free, fast-moving procedurally-generated puzzle combat game for Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, and GNU/Linux. XONG is for one player using a keyboard and mouse.

Link!

[Aquin]

Eastern Mind of Tong Nou.  It's like Myst, but on LSD.  This crazy dude made this crazy game and seriously good luck figuring out what it's about.  You might remember this guy; he's the same one that made that dreaming game on the PS1 (oh if only I could remember it's name.)

[Dragonmaw]

Eastern Mind of Tong Nou.  It's like Myst, but on LSD.  This crazy dude made this crazy game and seriously good luck figuring out what it's about.  You might remember this guy; he's the same one that made that dreaming game on the PS1 (oh if only I could remember it's name.)

LSD is the name of the dreaming game on the PS1. I think it stands for Lucid State Dreaming? IDK.

Mesh played through this game and talked to me about how surreal and inexplicable it was. I'm kind of interested.

I don't know if this counts as an indie game, but Netstorm was a great, and relatively obscure, classic. It was also the first RTS game I can remember that actually included "ranking up". (You get new structures to use by winning multiplayer games)

[Aquin]

Yeah, Mesh turned me onto both of them.  They're certainly worth playing, although I can't say that they're much fun.  I don't know WHAT they are 

Netstorm is *awesome*, by the way.  Okay back on topic.



Remember QBasic games?  Man, Wet Spot 2 (something you don't want to google image search) was a pretty fun little action puzzler.  There weren't many QB games made that I have respect for, although I guess I made a thread about this a year ago so I won't repeat any others.

[Derek]

Marshmallow Duel

I had so much fun dueling my friends in this game! Inspired my first Klik project, Sasquatch Fight.

[Dustin Smith]

Keep 'em coming guys, I loved playing old web games back in elementary school.

Bonus.com had tons of cool games, but they're defunct now. =( Anybody know where I could replay any of these titles?

[superflat]

BIP on the Amiga, around 1993. Does PC mean desktop, or PC btw?

[Dragonmaw]

Marshmallow Duel

I had so much fun dueling my friends in this game! Inspired my first Klik project, Sasquatch Fight.

Somebody related Nidhogg to Marshmallow Duel in a thread (the IGF one) and I think it's an apt comparison.

[s0]

Since I'm already talking about it in another thread:


Noctis. A DOS space exploration game with atmospheric low-poly graphics made by a single dude. The first indie game that really wowed me. Best described as Elite/Frontier minus the combat and trading but plus the atmosphere and genuine sense of discovery. The implicit "goal" of the game is to explore and map out a huge galaxy. You land on planets, explore them and then record your findings using your ship's board computer (your ship isn't just a menu, you can actually walk around in it). The point of having logs is sharing them with other people online to contribute to a general database which gets included into the game itself, so it's kind of a "massively single player" experience (even though the community isn't very active anymore).

[Paint by Numbers]

Keep 'em coming guys, I loved playing old web games back in elementary school.

Bonus.com had tons of cool games, but they're defunct now. =( Anybody know where I could replay any of these titles?

What games do you want? There really wasn't anything the Bonus games had in common; apparently the creators just trolled the internet for random games and added them. I know the location of maybe twenty of the games they had.

Come to think of it, it would be a pretty fun project to try to track down all of the Bonus games and make another portal... but I know for a fact that at least one game is almost definitely Gone Forever so

[pgil]

- Weird DOS platformer. There's also a Robomaze 3, but no Robomaze 1.

[Renton]

Man, I wish someone remade Marshmallow Duel.

[Aquin]

Noctis was pretty incredible, I gotta second that one.  Here's a game that's honestly not very good, but it was what got me HOOKED on my BBS.


http://www.bimshwel.com/renk/moraff/1bipbop2.htm

Bip Bop 2 is a kinda silly take on the old arkanoid clones.

Man, Pixel Painters, William D. Rinehart, Pickle Wars, my whole childhood is a messy collection of homebrew DOS games before the indie label officially kicked into high-gear.

Now I'll sit here and wait for someone to mention some Megazeux titles.

[Dustin Smith]

Keep 'em coming guys, I loved playing old web games back in elementary school.

Bonus.com had tons of cool games, but they're defunct now. =( Anybody know where I could replay any of these titles?

What games do you want? There really wasn't anything the Bonus games had in common; apparently the creators just trolled the internet for random games and added them. I know the location of maybe twenty of the games they had.

Come to think of it, it would be a pretty fun project to try to track down all of the Bonus games and make another portal... but I know for a fact that at least one game is almost definitely Gone Forever so

You're talking about that multiplayer tank wars game, right? That was sooo cool back in 98/99. The memorable titles were a football game, a snowboarding game, a php rpg, and a wizard game that utilized the mouse. There are tons more that escape my memory right now, but I had a blast playing all of those old titles.

I can't get Noctis to run on my Vista laptop, unfortunately. =(

Eastern Mind of Tong Nou looks pretty cool.