It could even be a youtube video or movie that you don’t think anyone reading this has heard of besides you.
I swear I’m the only person in the world who has heard of the game “Threads of Fate” for the PlayStation 1. It’s the most underrated game I’ve ever played and deserves more love than it has ever gotten.
I got this. Someone, please prove me wrong. I’ll PayPal you $82.76 if you find this.
There’s a cartoon from the 80s (could be late 70snor early 90s) called Howard The Duck.
You’ll never find it, because of the wildly popular movie bearing the same name.
The “Howard the duck” I’m referring to was a cartoon movie that was about a Mallard duck who got separated from his flock while they were migrating south for the winter.
Howard finds himself in NYC for the winter, where he spends time with rats and frogs. They show him around NYC via the sewers.
There’s a scene where they’re beneath the world trade center and Howard and the frog marvel at is enormity. Then, the frog reminds Howard that “Nothing lasts forever; especially in New York.” (This is an exact quote, sparing punctuation.)
The VHS I had ended with a music video by some band with the word “dogs” (junk yard dogs? Something like that) in their band name. The music video was trippy AF. There was barking in the song. The visuals were mostly patterns of colorful circles.
Like, this sounds like a fever dream, but if you’ve seen it and can locate it, it will make sense. I swear.
My memory is shit but I’d describe the art style as watercolor. Animated watercolor. Fro the 80s. So, yeah. Sorry.
Fuck it. $20.
Fuckit 2: 4 payments of $20.69
Found it! New Friends 1981
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3352786/
After a few attempts, the successful Google string was:
“howard” “duck” “frog” -comic “new york”
Edit: By few, I mean my whole morning. Fun puzzle 😉
Edit 2: My work here is done. https://youtu.be/06kfHOvZdbs
Edit 3: Donate the money to charity, or use it to buy gifts for kids for the holidays!
The Farmers Daughter. It was a text-based video game for the C=64 similar to Zork.
The premise was that you are a traveling lightening salesman whose car breaks down. You stop at a farmhouse to use their phone, and the beautiful daughter answers the door.
Your mission is to try to bang her. If the farmer catches you, he shoots you with his shotgun. If her brothers catch you, they’ll analy rape you to death. You need condoms but they are stuck to the shelf.
This absolutely terrible in the most hilarious ways B movie that may or may not have ever actually been released called The Astrologer. It was filmed in 1975 and apparently lost until just recently. A local theater got a copy and did a showing of it. Fortunately, it’s now preserved on the internet archive! https://archive.org/details/the-astrologer-1975-previously-lost-film
This is actually a different movie with the same name from almost the same time, strangely enough
Crazy. What are the odds?
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
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.
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
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.
It was a game for PC around the year 2000, I don’t even know the name of it. I’ve been searching for it for years. It’s a point and click adventure game.
The premise is your spaceship breaks down on an alien planet. If you try to repair the ship immediately a giant alien spider will come and kill you.
After searching for a while you end up making friends with one of the aliens and sneak around one of the villages looking for parts.
I never made it past that point.
I highly doubt anyone will know what this is, I’ve tried multiple times on that reddit sub for games people can’t remember.
This sounds like Space Quest. Have a look at this excerpt from a walkthrough and see if it sounds familiar:
"After escaping the Arcada before its destruction you crash land on the planet Kerona. Before you do anything “take off seatbelt”. Look at the pod and “take kit”. This is your survival kit. Look kit and you will find an Xenon army knife and dehydrated water.
“Get out” and walk to the front of the pod. “Take glass”. This is reflective glass that we’ll need later on.
Walk to the right three screens and then take the path that leads up. Follow the path all the way around over a bridge that will crack as you walk on it. A spider droid will drop to the ground at some stage. Just ignore it for now. There are two pillars at the end of the path. Stand between them and you’ll be lowered into the earth by a secret elevator."
Check out some screenshots along w/ the rest of the walkthrough here: http://gamerwalkthroughs.com/space-quest-1-walkthrough-the-sarien-encounter/
Anna and the appolypse, it’s a fantastic zombie musical with insanely good songs. I have never met anyone in the real world or online who have heard of it (except a few who I forced to watch with me).
I watched it and I did not like it, but it is probably that I went into it with the wrong expectations. The entire premise of “musical about a zombie apocalypse” sounded a bit goofy to me and the trailer had the same mood, so I expected a comedy, or at least something a bit tongue in cheek. Instead, the movie is a total downer.
Either windows 95 or 98 I used to play this game my mom set up for me but doesn’t remember. Now she needs my help to plug in a USB cable but somehow has a job that uses software and procedures too complicated for me… Anyway I can remember if it was entirely this or just part of it, but the memorable part was the sliding puzzles, like the ice caves in Pokemon. The character might have had skates or something but it’s a vague memory that could be wrong.
Were you playing an ice level of Chip’s Challenge?
Several years back I watched a Japanese film called Fish Story. It’s a pretty weird movie, and the first time I watched it, I hated it, and almost turned it off. It was just kind of boring, and it was really confusing because it kept jumping between different stories, and it was not in chronological order. Then, right at the very end, a short segment tied everything together so incredibly. It blew my mind and I immediately wanted to watch the movie again. I have never experienced anything like that before or since. I don’t know anyone else who’s ever heard of this movie.
Just looked it up. I like quirky movies and I like the sound of this - it’s going on my list to watch later. Thanks! :)
