Ask Lemmy

On the Internet, everything is fundamentally both obscure yet ubiquitous, or so it seems. But in real life, there are at least 2 things that seem to be obscure to the point that people don't believe me when I mention it:

1. A Super Nintendo game released in the US as Super Ninja Boy. It was a follow-up to (or maybe remake of) Little Ninja Brothers on the NES. I've even been told that I was confused and that I'm probably thinking of Legend of the Mystical Ninja.

2. On the original Playstation, there used to be a series of demo discs that would have "hidden" features on them if you pressed the right button(s). One of those demo discs had the entire music video for Usher's song "Pony" and other than randos on the internet and my friends/family who saw it with me, I've never met anybody that remembers it. If anybody here does remember that demo disc, I think there was another hidden music video on there, I vaguely remember a band, with various shots of the drummer wearing black athletic-type shorts with a white band around the leg but beyond that I really do not recall.

Major Havoc.

Super cool arcade game c. 1988 featuring a simple line drawing type environment where the Major runs through hallways, a little like the original Prince of Persia. The controls were a cylindrical scroll wheel and a jump button. The really cool thing though was that there were pads on the floor that would trigger various effects, like a gun that shoots a star shaped bullet down the hall that you had to avoid. Many new and exciting challenges to face with every quarter. Ah, good times.

"Mail Order Monsters," which came out in the 8-bit era (mine was C64). Basically, you started out with a "base monster," like plant, insect, reptile, etc. Then you battled someone else's. The winner got some money, which could be used to upgrade your monster with abilities, extra limbs, and so on. You could save your monster on a floppy disk and battle on someone else's system.

My love affair ended when a friend figured out how to hack that data file on the floppy and make an invincible monster

In honor of Xmas, I found this video a decade ago, and it is the version I hear in my head every year.

Last Xmas - Slugabed ruined it

Elroy Goes Bugzerk and Elroy Hits the Pavement.

Man I want another Elroy game!

My "Learn to Play Didgeridoo With Gram Doe" CD.

Cherry Coke had a promotional game called something like The Lost Island Of Alanna they gave out in the mid 90s. There was a little attack of them in the waiting room of the principles office at my school.

It was a pretty well done short Myst-like.

When you beat it the reward was a guide to read secret messages that were hidden in the squiggles that covered the cherry coke label at the time.

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. Try and grow a city-state by strategically distributing resources. Poor distribution results in death by famine, disease or invasion. Good distribution keep state growing and eventually become king to win the game. I played it on a Commodore PET.

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.

beyond ynth

Back in the 90s maybe into early 2000s, my family managed to acquire a lot of VHS tapes, and some of them were fairly obscure

Two that I remember particularly fondly were 2 animated movies

Epic: Days of the Dinosaur, which was about 2 kids raised by dingos, kind of a weird fantasy movie

And Return to Treasure Island, which was pretty much just a straight-up if somewhat comedic adaptation of Treasure island, which was apparently made the USSR, and the Russian version had live action sequences that didn't appear in the English version I had.

Maybe not super obscure, but I loved BMX XXX on the original Xbox. It was overshadowed my the plethora of other games like Tony Hawk, Aggressive Inline and SSX but I still love it.

Movie: Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man

Music: Buggie Techinica by Polysics