Retro Games Where You Had Zero Idea What Was Going On

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Retro Games Where You Had Zero Idea What Was Going On

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

I want to look down on all of you for not being able to understand Nintendo games, but the first game that came to mind for me is so stupid that I can hardly claim the high ground

Dragon Lord

From what I could gather, the gameplay consists of staring at a screen with a beautiful dragon's egg and hitting every keyboard key and mouse button and having nothing ever happen and then eventually quitting to DOS

# ¿ Oct 21, 2019 22:49

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:08

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Rollersnake posted:

I rented Ultima 3 for NES when I was 6, and I actually mostly understood stuff, but I didn't understand what "saving the game" meant, because I'd never played a game that saved your progress before and didn't know this was even possible. So I started the game over with a new party every time I turned it on. I was having fun and didn't really mind.

Nice; I had the exact same experience with the exact same game, albeit on an Atari 800XL. It was my first RPG, so the idea that you could keep playing after shutting the game off had not occurred to me. I genuinely remember being really confused when I turned the game on one day and found my same characters from the previous session; I think talking Lord British saved your progress? Maybe? Anyway I had clearly never done whatever action it was previously. Mind-blowing. Love the idea of playing through Skyrim from the beginning each time you start the game

# ¿ Oct 22, 2019 01:54

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Lacey posted:

There was an Atari up at the cottage

I have fond memories of playing the Intellivision at the lodge

# ¿ Oct 22, 2019 19:55

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

King's Quest V was such a great pack-in game for my first computer that had a CD-ROM, as not only did it immediately demonstrate that even the best-looking game might completely suck, but it also taught me that sometimes it was better to acknowledge you would never play a game you owned and move on, than to try in vain over and over again to figure out how to care about (or indeed even understand what to do in) the game.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2019 01:42

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Wow, I watched this for a few minutes and now I am 100% convinced this game deserves an award for being the most unexpected insane nonsense from a Nintendo-era game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDMNEBv-4Hw

(yes I am sure that is not true, but boy, as soon as the map-to-get-to-the-arcade-in-the-next-town is interrupted by a quiz about the Olympics you know you are in for a treat)

# ¿ Oct 25, 2019 06:01

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

The idea of an adventuring party spending all their money on equipment and then just leaving it on the ground and running in terror through a fantasy realm until being instantly killed by the primary antagonist is pretty solidly hilarious, thank you

# ¿ Nov 4, 2019 05:09

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Dragomorph posted:

Magician for the NES, in which I tried to do things, kept being told I was dehydrated, keeled over and died, and couldn't figure out for the life of me WTF.

This looks so complex and still-interesting I would have assumed it was a new faux-retro game; seems like you had a good excuse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbYmg4JB2gk

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 01:50

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Nebakenezzer posted:

PPS> It is so weird to me that people would have different sound cards and they would make all music and sounds sound literally different

The worst thing about this is also that getting appropriate music-nostalgia from the Internet is nearly impossible for games from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. I had a Pro Audio Spectrum 16, and I would say 9 times out of 10 songs I look up to hear again do not actually sound like what I remember, sometimes being so different that it just makes me sad. Clouds of Xeen's title screen music was one of my favorite quiet/soothing MIDIs ever, and I can only hear it by actually getting my MS-DOS machine with my still-functional 1992 soundcard installed to boot

Also Stunt Island is a great example of a retro game where I had no idea what was going on (also where the music on my PAS16 was unique and un-findable online). Somehow I could never learn to fly well enough to actually do any of the game's "intended" missions, but on the plus side as a result I ended up becoming a decent video editor. Stunt Island was a weird game.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2019 16:50

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Dragon Noun: Noun of the Ancients

# ¿ Nov 9, 2019 13:44

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

The Big Word posted:

- my bro getting frustrated and shouting at me when I tried playing Quake and Dark Forces because for some reason I didn't like the idea of pressing more than one key on the keyboard at a time and also I refused to strafe because why would I run sideways, that's stupid, I won't be able to see where I'm going

Thanks for reminding me of when my entire friend group was still playing FPSs exclusively with the keyboard; one of our gang won a national Quake tournament in 1997 against someone using a mouse, and I still think that might be the greatest feat in gaming history.

Oh, but I remember the reasoning behind not using a mouse being similarly as inscrutable as Tesserae; something about not wanting to have to use the same hand to move and fire or something? I definitely had only ever played games where you like held down the left mouse key to walk at the time, so I basically was a caveman trying to understand a car

# ¿ Nov 11, 2019 19:57

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Yeah the short-lived Icarus Souls subgenre only had that one entry but it was a doozy.

No for real though I totally agree, I do not remember ever making it past even the second stage despite that game having so much about it I should have nominally liked.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2019 21:00

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

ManxomeBromide posted:

Raid Over Moscow. I went to check a Youtube Longplay of it to make sure I was thinking of the right game.

About a minute into the game it turns into a Zaxxon clone.

Neither I nor any of my friends ever saw those screens. As far as we were concerned this game was about crashing jet fighters into the ceiling.

It might have been even worse if you had actually figured it out; that opening scene remains one of the most frustrating gaming experiences of my life, because the number of ships you successfully get out of that hangar determines how many lives you have going forward into the next screens. And I was so bad at that part (as you can understand) that I was lucky to make it out with half of my ships total, and let me tell you how many times I probably threw my controller and screamed at my Atari as a child as a result of realizing I was not even going to get to the second stage on a particularly bad playthrough.

So yeah, the fact that the rest of the game was really fun just made it even worse how hard it was to get past that incredibly terrible opening screen.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2019 07:52

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

ManxomeBromide posted:

Anyone here ever play In Search of the Most Amazing Thing? I had misremembered it as The Adventures of Smoke Bailey, but that was the name of the novella that came with it. I read that thing to pieces as a kid but I never managed to accomplish anything outside of the home-base town, and my attempts to find walkthroughs or longplays or really even shortplays suggests that nobody else really did either.

Thank you, because yes, I am 100% there with you. Making it even more perfect in my experiences, it is a game I could only play at the local library when I reserved time on the Apple IIe and decided to take another crack at it. Another crack that, just as you have discovered, went precisely as poorly as every other failed attempt to get into the game too. "All right, I am gonna auction off this stuff and then buy all the equipment and ... they do not want Uncle Smoke's stuff at all? What am I supposed to do now? Guess I will go outside and...am I dead? Is this even outside?"

Uncle Smoke has to be one of the earliest examples of an interesting and memorable NPC though, if we are looking at what value we can wring from these memories.

I could never get anywhere in the Coveted Mirror or the Quest either in my precious library time, but I chalk that up to being too young for any of this.

_{Remake Expedition Amazon}

# ¿ Nov 18, 2019 06:35

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 10:08

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

ManxomeBromide posted:

This conversation motivated me to get it running again. This time, one evening in and I was not only navigating the Darksome Mire like a seasoned adventurer, I had collected some clues and was on my way to deliver a microwave burglar alarm to the Head Trader of the reclusive Undeflas culture. Two evenings in and I had returned in triumph with the Most Amazing Thing to Uncle Smoke.

I regret to inform you that your young self had no chance of ever making sense of this, as it is completely impractical to play this game without both having the manual for reference and also a personally controlled copy of the disk. It made use of what we would now call save slots and it only had two. If anyone else had a mind to take a crack at it while you were out, you'd either lose progress or end up possibly losing access to very important clues.

Good to hear that someone, somewhere, has beaten it. BUT DID YOU RECORD YOUR RUN

Now that you mention this, I have the vaguest memory of being convinced the game was randomly changing things on me every time I played, so clearly that is a function of me not actually understanding that, you know, someone else had probably overwritten my game between every futile effort.

ManxomeBromide posted:

Assuming you saw the little man flying around the entrance to the city of Metallica with his jetpack, and the B-Liner sitting in all its majesty right next to it, then yes. You were outside.

(And the overworld is insanely huge. Based on the material in the manual, and the measurements I made while driving the B-Liner around instead of flying like a proper airship, the overworld map for the Darksome Mire has four million screens. Each map square is 80 screens to a side, and the world map as a whole is 25x25.)

I do remember trying to catch the little man flying around the entrance as I assumed that was my next goal and I assume that is not possible, yet another of many countless things that made no sense to me there. Perfect. Also four million screens, perfect, this is going to be like the movie Cloak and Dagger where Russian state secrets are hidden in one of those screens

# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 23:14

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Retro Games Where You Had Zero Idea What Was Going On