Obscure Games

[Version]

I could name a whole lot of niche VN's and interactive fiction, but two of the top of my head are:

Open Sorcery A neat little piece of IF that I played recently. It basically plays with the boundaries between magic and technology, as you are an "elemental firewall" who protects a network of people. You have multiple choices on how to approach each threat, and each choice impacts what skills you learn as well as your relationships with other characters. There is also a sequel, which I'm planning to check out soon.

The second I mentioned on this forum once I think, it's called Pedestal. It's a bit heavier, as it's an rpgmaker game about finding out the truth behind a suicide. It's a well built mystery, and it handles it's themes well. The title may already give you an idea as to what they are.

One month ago, Cosmos Girls' Academy student Shiori Natsume was found dead on campus.
Though rumor spreads that it was suicide, Aoi Ooe of the newspaper club wants to know if that's really true.
Accompanied by her friend Akari, she begins an investigation to uncover the truth - no matter what may come of it.

It's a bit hard to make these descriptions longer as both games are very short, and hard to describe without spoiling, but I really recommend both.

[creaturefeature]

 I remember playing a game called Crazy Drakw as a kid and it was installed in all the computers in the Study center.
i´d argue it was pretty much a copycat of of earthworm jim, except it starred a duck. Also it lacked a storyline and you could pretty much play any level of you choosing from the get-go.

[debleb]

there are definitely obscurer games but i also like dillon’s rolling western a lot! it’s an action tower defence game for the 3ds where you play as a cowboy armadillo protecting villages of animal people from strange rock monsters called the grocks.

it’s one of those kind of slightly obscure quirky 3ds eshop exclusives that cost you like 15 bucks for an actually really fun and unique game that doesn’t have a hope of getting a rerelease. it got a couple of sequels (one even got a physical release outside of america!) but all of them are pretty unheard of outside of “top 10 3ds game you haven’t heard of” lists.

[Moodle McDoodle]

There's SOOO MANY niche and obscure games that I love, but one that I don't see get nearly as much recognition as it deserves is Fur Fighters, which is a collectathon platformer featuring cartoon animals... and also a third person shooter. Think like if Banjo Kazooie also had shootouts with the enemies lmao!!

It was originally released on the dreamcast, ported to the PC (which is how I played it) and remastered on the PS2, that version being called Fur Fighters: Viggo's Revenge, which makes it sound like it's a sequel but it's the same game just in a cel shaded art style and featuring voice acting (Personally I prefer the original art style and Banjo Kazooie style noises of the original, and I would reccomend people play the PC port if they play any version of the game but that's just me). It has issues (mainly due to being Of It's Time...) but overall it's a REALLY fun and challenging action platformer with good environmental puzzle solving and a great balance of cartoon silliness and action-packed edge. It can get tedious and confusing at times, the levels are all pretty long, but you don't need to complete each level 100% to beat the game and it's still really incredible how unique each level is for how big they all are.

Overall it's one of my favourite childhood games and I wish it got talked about more!!! It's definitely not the most obscure game ever, It even got a mobile port eventually (SOMEHOW. But it's really hard to play on a touch screen!) and the ps2 port is definitely more known than the original, but still! It feels like even when talking about other weird edgy animal mascot video games that followed sonic, or collectathon style platformers or even Dreamcast games as a whole, Fur Fighters just... Never comes up unless you go searching for it, which is wild to me... It's definitely an underrated gem!

[Inkerlink]

There's SOOO MANY niche and obscure games that I love, but one that I don't see get nearly as much recognition as it deserves is Fur Fighters

Oh hey, Fur Fighters! I forgot about that game. I made a post about the Dreamcast Generator Vol.2 demo disc recently and Fur Fighters was one of the demos on it I played a lot of! I had no idea it was ported to other platforms, I'll have to check that out! Is the PC version on any storefronts, like GOG? Or is it disc only?
In other news, I've been playing my 3DS again recently since the eShop is closing soon, and I've gotten back in to playing:

It's an RPG game developed by Grezzo, which is headed by Koichi Ishii, who is mostly known for the Mana series of games at Squaresoft/Square Enix. It takes place in a vast desert land, and you take the role of a 'Seedling', a race of people who can grow an Oasis.

The game focuses on growing your Oasis by helping people out and in return they start living in your Oasis, which makes it grow bigger. You can set up shops for your residents to sell items in, and decorate your Oasis with other items as well. Residents will give you quests to complete, and there are also dungeons similar to the ones in the Zelda series you have to overcome.

The game released on the 3DS when the Switch just came out, and because of that the game sold quite poorly and faded into obscurity. It hasn't been ported yet, so it's still trapped on the 3DS. It's one of the better 3DS titles I've played. The graphics are great for the console, and the art style is cute and attractive. The music is really well done, although it would be nice if there was more than 1 dungeon theme. The combat is pretty standard action-rpg fare, it's satisfying but not very complex. The Oasis management is pretty good, again it's fairly simplistic but it's satisfying to customize which shops you have and doing quests for them to make them bigger and more profitable.

The game released both physically and digitally, so if you think you might want to get it, you don't have to worry about the eShop closing on the 27th, you can still likely find it physically for a while afterwards. If you want it digitally, you can find it here. I would say the game is definitely worth the price! There is also a demo if you want to try it before buying!

[Moodle McDoodle]

Is the PC version on any storefronts, like GOG? Or is it disc only?

It's disc only unfortunately! Lately to play it I've had to download the the ISO file from My Abandonware and use Daemon Tools to trick my laptop into running it since my current laptop unfortunately doesn't have a disc drive and I can't use the original disc. It's also possible to emulate it and if you have an actual dreamcast you might be able to find a copy somewhere? I just took a quick look on ebay and it's not expensive to get where I am at least.

I have the PS2 version as well but I've never been able to get very far in it cause I can't get used to the inverted style controls and there's no way to change it, I'd assume the Dreamcast version plays the same way? But playing it on a mouse and keyboard is actually really comfortable!! One of the few cases I prefer playing without a controller

Whichever way you play it, its a game well worth playing, especially if you enjoyed the demo version!!

(Also, Ever Oasis looks really cute, maybe I'll give it a try!)

[HunnyBon]

So in the 1990s, everyone was following Mario's footsteps. Mascot platformers alike all wanted to put a dip of that sort of formula that made Mario work. This also extended to the spinoff games that Mario touched upon, including party games and kart racers. Here's a game that I had as a kid, I'm a bit fond of it.


"What am I looking at?"
This is South Park Rally, released in the humble year of 2000 by Acclaim and Tantalus interactive. Released for the PS1, N64, Sega Dreamcast, and Microsoft Windows PCs. It's a kart racer, where you play as several South Park characters in settings from, uh...

The woman in front of you shuffles through at least several notes, all of which say the words "SOUTH PARK" in big, bold text.

... South Park.
I think I'll state my opinion right here. South park is only funny 2% of the time for me, it's a bit too edgy for my tastes, and I could probably barely stomach one episode. Even this game isn't safe from its rather crass humor. The menu sounds are wet farts, some items are basically weaponized prostitutes, and there's at least 1 very offensive caricature that you can unlock. I don't entirely know if a specimen such as this could even release today.

It's not for the plot
That's not why I like the game, though, no, I don't think racial stereotypes are even the list bit funny. I think it's the interesting way they tried to make a Kart racer that makes the game stick out in my head. There's at least 10 "Rallies" the player can play in an admirable selection of venues, like, it's actually impressive how much replay value you get out of this game. The standard races aren't what you typically see as going from A/B, either. You basically have to rely on your map and drive as quick as you can from checkpoints 1, 2, 3, and 4, which can be scattered across the maps you play on. It's a novel idea for kart racers, not gonna lie. Some levels are altered and even cut between versions, there's exclusive content for each game, so you'd have to research on which to play and what you'd get from each.
Items are separated in differently colored boxes of different categories, I get what they were trying to do, being kind of reminiscent of Lego Racers, but some of them can be detrimental! (That one item that just has a guy's face flash across YOUR screen, it's not targeted, think of it like the blooper form Mario Kart.) The physics in this game are... silly. They're so so so silly. It's about on par with SuperTuxKart but less well executed. I enjoy it though, it's just so "funni" in a bad way, it's jank, but it's a funny jank, I think.

Can I just say, too, the OST has NO right to be in a South Park game?? Please have a listen.
South Park Rally OST


If the South Park skin of the game were ripped off, I could totally see this as something I would play quite often with my friends. I've played with TheSolitaryGamer over Parsec, they can vouch for the entertainment value for a game that, at the time, got critically crunched by carnivorous critics. I would just love to see how the game ticks...
How's this for obscure?

So anyways I tried to datamine it.
This is just some technical-jibber-jabber. For the sake of not clogging the entire forum with my nonsense, I'm putting the rest of this in a folder.

Spoiler

Still here? Alright.
[Now Playing: Under South Park - South Park Rally]
The PC version of south park, there were various "vram" files, I wasn't sure what they were, but as it turns out, they're actually binary images! If you head over to https://rawpixels.net/ and set the predefined format to RGB555, you will see this image:


Interesting, it has a strange, grey Tantalus Interactive logo alongside South Park Rally's that I don't think you see in-game at all.

There's other files in the folder, "RBH" files, going into banner.rbh with a hex editor, you can see what looks like a header!



Doing a quick search, this is what I found about "PIFF":
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/media/smooth-streaming/protected-interoperable-file-format
"The Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF) specification defines a standard multimedia file format for delivery and playback of multimedia content. It includes the audio-video container, stream encryption, and metadata to support content delivery for multiple bit rate adaptive streaming, optionally using a standard encryption scheme capable of supporting multiple DRM systems."
Soooo... I can't read this file by itself, right? These files all seem to be piff encoded with the extensions ".rbh", it's very intriguing.
I then stumbled across this post on another forum, seems like I wasn't the only one interested in seeing how South Park Rally ticks. This
https://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?t=14571

Yep, all voice lines, textures, and sounds, etc, are encoded too! That's as far as I went with those in regard, because I was immediately captured by the fact that Every song is in the Impulse Tracker Format. Yes, you heard me, you could theoretically play every song in its full, raw, ORIGINAL glory compared to every other console/system of playing. But of course there's a catch.

You have every song laid out as an it file, but you also have a "SAMP" it file. What the game seems to do is that it uses the samples from the sample tracker file and uses that to play the tracks it loads. You can't load the songs themselves, you have ot somehow fenangle y our trackers into bringing in the samples properly, which is easier said than done, because I gave up after toying with OpenMPT to get South Park Remix to play properly. But, hey, we do know that the music was composed by a man named Yannis Brown, he seems to have quite the skill and portfolio under his belt!

There's also uncompressed voice lines of the announcer, lines of which go unused where she announces which character you play as. If you want to hear those, check this page out on TCRF. https://tcrf.net/South_Park_Rally_(Windows)#Unused_Sounds

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