What are some noteworthy games that aren't available through traditional/common means?

Two come to mind.

Chip's Challenge was a simple top down puzzle game that I think came pre-installed on Windows 95. I spent so much time playing that and Doom 2 when I was a kid.

Also 20 years ago one of the best space games I've ever played came out. Freelancer put you in the pilots seat and allowed you to buy different ships for different playstyles. Want to be a fighter pilot? Load your ship with as much firepower as you can. There were also mods that let you use the giant cargo ships if you wanted to earn money trading. Other mods added x-wings and other ships to the mix.

I'm shocked nobody has mentioned Black & White /Black & White 2. Peter Molyneux at his absolute most insane. Who needs a UI? Options menus? Hey! Feed this god pet a villager and they'll have gas and fart!!

It's probably never going to see the light of day again due to weird publishing rights. NoClip did an excellent documentary on it: https://youtu.be/GtNvEna6bxc

Kingdom of Loathing and DragonFable are two online web games I've had great fun with since my childhood, and they're both still being updated to this day

As for Romhacks, Pokemon Emerald Rogue is so much fun, and such a great, unique take on the games. I also enjoyed Team Rocket Edition, to scratch the itch I've had since childhood to play as them

Escape from Woomera, an extremely (at the time) controversial Half-Life mod from 2004 made in response to Australia's immigrant detention policies. It's a landmark piece - it's one of the earliest "serious games" to hit the scene and, while not the first, was certainly at least partly responsible for the explosion of games-based activism we see today. Papers Please could not exist without Escape from Woomera.

Sim Tower! I could never beat it but there was some charm that always kept me coming back. I think it was that you couldn't just build everything from the start and I always wanted to get good enough to build a theatre or a cathedral or whatever. Given how hooked I was I'm surprised it never took off, but I guess Sim City was everyone's jam and I was the only one enjoying Sim Tower.

The entire Mechwarrior series with the exception of Mechwarrior Online and Mechwarrior 5 have been unavailable for a very long time. If you expand it to Battletech it's everything but those two games and the 2018 Battletech game. In a series with video game entries going back to the late 80s.

Another awful one is the No One Lives Forever series, which is just in total copyright limbo because of the original developer and original publisher both having gone under and had their assets go through multiple owners since. People have tried to track down the current owners, and out of the two or three companies who might own the rights, none have admitted to it.

In short, this kind of thing is a great example of why copyright is supposed to last for a limited amount of time, emphasis on limited. If things still worked the way they did before 1976, we'd be at most a few years out before we either got a definitive answer as to who currently owned it, or the games went into the public domain. If copyright still worked the way it did before the 1950s, they'd already be in the public domain.

Instead, culturally and historically important works are just being left to rot because somebody owns them, and nobody is sure who it is.

Power Bomberman is a Bomberman fangame for PC that has a ton of stages, battle mode rules, characters, and other features. It mainly emulates the classic SNES/Saturn era of Bomberman games. It supports up to 12 players with online lobbies using the fangame's main server. I can confirm it also plays perfectly on Steam Deck and with a whole host of controllers for couch multiplayer.

This free to play browser port of the original Advance Wars is worth checking out too if you ever played the GBA and DS games - it's got online play with up to 16 players, custom maps, and ranked play.

A solid bit of ancient freeware that I cannot recommend enough is The Ur-Quan Masters. This is the second game in the the Star Control series for PC (this was back in the 90s). Are you familiar with Mass Effect? I'm 90% sure it drew inspiration from UQM. Anyway, the game is a space exploration/resource management/ship-to-ship dogfight venture with a fabulous story. If that sounds like a game that doesn't know what it wants to be, don't worry -- somehow, it alls blends together in a very satisfying way. The scale of the game is shockingly huge for a game from 1990 (hundreds of stars on the starmap, most of which have a system to explore). The combat is simple, yet highly nuanced (each ship has its own unique movement and weaponry). The characters are so interesting and likeable.

If that sounds like a good time, there's a solid fan remaster from 2013 called The Ur-Quan Masters HD. I'm pretty sure you can still find it on Sourceforge.

I got into romhacks a while back - I'm particularly a fan of ones which try to stay true to the original. I like these because I feel like they stay true to the original, while introducing some more modern tweaks and improvements.

• Chrono Trigger+
• Pokemon Red Full Color
• Final Fantasy VI GBA with the Color Restoration and Sound Restoration patches. There are similar patches for FFV Advanced and FFIV Advanced.
• Breath of Fire Improved
• Dragon Warrior I & II GBC, double exp - the main issue many people have with these games is how slow the leveling is, so doubling the exp and gold actually helps the game

There are also a few fan-made English translations for games which never got an English release:

• Magical Vacation
• Live a Live
• Pokemon Trading Card Game 2
• Star Ocean

There's also a bunch of random Pokemon romhacks:

• Pokemon Unbound - uses stock Pokemon and mechanics but mixes together mechanics from different generations and creates a brand new story out of them
• Pokemon Crystal Clear - open world Pokemon before Gamefreak did it
• Pokemon Prism - a large ambitious Pokemon game set in a new region
• Pokemon Team Rocket Edition - you play as a member of Team Rocket, every kid's dream

There are also a bunch of "Perfect" Pokemon romhacks which are usually games where they've made it possible to catch every Pokemon in-game somehow, without trading.

I was a part of BZPower back in the day, a forum for Lego Bionicle fans and there were a ton of fan-made Bionicle RPGs. In addition to that, there were a ton of official LEGO flash games which I played many hours of - Lego Bionicle Mata Nui Online Game (and the sequel), Lego Spybot: The Nightfall Incident, Lego Junkbot (and the sequel, Junkbot Undercover). Plus there were the old Lego games released on CDROM, like Lego Rock Raiders.

In addition to those, I was a huge fan of old RPG Maker games. I don't remember all of the good ones, but there were a ton of high quality RPGMaker 2000 and RPGMaker 2003 games that were released. The hard thing back in the day was finding a copy of the engine that worked and was in English.

• A Blurred Line - this had it all - minigames, great combat, impressive custom work. Unfortunately, even though the wiki says it's finished, the story left off on a big cliffhanger.
• The Way
• Love & War

Whoo, there's a lot there. Sorry for the rambling.

Anyway, I'd love to hear about other peoples RPGMaker recommendations!

Tradewars 2000... And "doors" games in general from the old BBS days. There are sites where they have them emulated here and there but nothing like how it was in their prime.

Four swords adventures on the GameCube with 4 Gameboy Advances is not your typical Zelda experience, but dang if it isn’t a lot of fun.

Never got to do it when I was younger, but older me with a GBA budget (along with IPS screen upgrades) is pretty happy.

I'm want to add to this list a certain type of gaming experience that isn't really replicable today. From simple clones of old school games, like tetris and snake, to full-fledge plataformer experiences, I'm talking about the games from cellphones of old. Not smartphones, but old brick phones and flip phones from late 90s early 2000s.
I had access to many a mobile back then, and I distinctly remember Nokia phones had excellent games, the most notable of those being Snake, the staple. There where many others, like one red ball plataformer, pinball-likes, arkanoids, poker... You name it. As long as it fit in a tiny 1-2 inch screen, you could play it. Then came the prominence of Java games, where Gameloft appeared as a respectable game developer.
Of course, there's a way to play and emulate those games of old: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Cellphone_emulators
However, in my opinion, the actual experience cannot be easily replicated because those games where made to be played on those underpowered, tiny devices with actual physical keyboards. Those where not expensive ergonomic gamepads, or large comfortable desktop keyboards. No, you where constrained by the response time of the physical button and the reasonably but still infuriatingly slow OS of those old school phones.
This is the nostalgia talking, but growing up I didn't have access to a Gameboy - poor guy living in Latinamerica - so when I finally got my very own phone at 15, I remember spending hours upon hours pushing away the tiny rubber - sometimes metallic - phone keypads. My happy little gamer self was pleased as hell.

Have you considered the Playdate?

It's a small retro-ish style handheld game system with a built in crank. Kina like an old Gameboy from the 80s. It has a non-back lit 1 bit screen that's really reflective. It comes with a "season" of 24 exclusive games that are delivered to the device for 12 weeks after the device is registered. Two games per week.

It also has an SDK, and an exremely active development community a fairly new store front and a lot support from the itch.io community

I own one and I enjoy the unique games that are a direct result of the crank and the systems inherent limitations. I highly reccomend pre-ordering one if you are interested in uncommon games.

Starsector

An early access game (for years) only available from a developers website with a store that screams scam. It absolutely isn't, and the the mod community and the developer have made this into one of the premier fleet management/4x (limited)/exploration space games you can find. Bonus it supports pc, mac and linux.

• Old Review
• Mods
• Store to buy

Could be the cliche answer, but Mother 3 only being available in English as a ROM hack might fit the bill here. Mother 1 was that way for a long time too of course, but it wasn't even a ROM hack, it was an unreleased official translation. Although that's since been released officially.

And on the topic of leaked unreleased Nintendo ROMs, probably a more interesting answer is the Spaceworld '97 Pokemon Gold Demo that leaked a few years back. It's a completely different game in a different region with different Pokemon that have different sprites. Until it leaked, the only people who had played it were people who went to a particular convention in 1997 and played it for a few minutes each.

Lots of folks have probably heard about these first two, but I think they count: Crimson Room and Falling Sand Game.

Crimson Room is an escape room game made in 2004, and I remember it very fondly because the rough translation from Japanese amps up the creepy factor a ton. It had a few sequels, which you can play here.

Falling Sand Game is a whole genre of...literal sandbox games, but you can play the basic one I remember best here. There are more available for download at this link but fair warning, I haven't tested them. I remember playing one around 06-07 that had things like "flesh", "organ", and "knife" as elements and let you make people to torture, but I have no clue what it was called and can't seem to dig it up.

There's a game that's just known as "kisekae" (which I think is the Japanese word for dress-up?) where you use characters from the anime K-On as bases for super customizable dolls. It's more fun and creative than it sounds (plus I'm pretty sure there's an adult version, though I can't recall what it entails). I don't know if you can play it online in a browser anymore, but it's easy to Google if you're curious.

And finally a game you really can't play in its original form: Before Crisis, a Final Fantasy VII spinoff/prequel mobile game. Though it was never released outside of Japan and seems to be completely unplayable today, there's a niche audience (VII players who are aggressive fans of the Turks, mostly) who have archived the content pretty thoroughly. There are gameplay videos with English subtitles here (it's missing a few episodes, but here you can find Reno's chapter untranslated), a translated script on this tumblr, and even a fan remake done in RPG maker: https://richterwilker.itch.io/before-crisis-remake

There's an upcoming mobile game (Ever Crisis) slated for release in the US that will supposedly remake Before Crisis or at least revisit its major plot points, but no plans to rerelease the original as far as I know.

Editing to add on one more. This is a touch strange and morbid, maybe, but one of the Columbine shooters made custom levels for Doom and Quake. As far as I know, this is a pretty trustworthy site where you can see/play some of them.

No one has mentioned Space Station 13 yet! Its an excellent multiplayer game avalible through the BYOND platform.

While there is a wild and shady history surrounding the game's eventual "open sourcing", it currently has several distinct and strong open source codebases.

SS13 is a multiplayer roleplaying game where in the far future you work on a space station and you are trying to do your job, however some of the other players might not be who they say they are! Dealing with threats ranging from a rogue AI, to nuclear commandos trying to nuke the station, to shapeshifting monsters trying to replace you, there are many threats and they are all played by real people.

Essential watching includes:

https://youtu.be/URJ_qSXruW0 - Sseth
https://youtu.be/nLAHBexJxrE - Mandalore

Uploaders to watch when you know a few things about SS13:

https://www.youtube.com/@LivrahYT
https://www.youtube.com/@MelbertSS13
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDukeofOok

At the end of the BBS era and into the early Internet I got into some pretty great MUDs. For the uninitiated, these are multiplayer text adventures which often have a full RPG underpinning the action.

Lots of great d&d inspired multiplayer goodness in smaller, tighter communities.

Decompiled console games with PC ports are so cool in general. Unsurprisingly, the Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time ports get most of the attention from that space, but I really want to highlight the OpenGOAL PC port of Jak and Daxter. It really blows me away every time I play it. Like Jak and Daxter is already a great looking game thanks to the art direction and animations, and this legitimately looks and plays like an official remaster. It also looks incredible on the Steam Deck, I've put hours into it on there.

One Must Fall: 2097

This was one of my favorite games growing up, and was eventually released as freeware after being abandonware for a while. It's a fairly straightforward Street Fighter clone, except that you control a 30 meter tall robot instead of a human fighter. OMF was the first game I saw that used pre-rendered 3D sprites. I really like its tournament mode, where you upgrade your robot or trade it in for new ones over time, as well as the numerous easter eggs that you can trigger.

DOSBox runs it perfectly once you turn down the game speed.

This might be stretching the intent of the topic a bit, but one of my favourite artificial life series is Creatures, in which you oversee the lives of furry creatures called Norns, each with simulated brains, body chemistry, and genetics.

The company behind Creatures went bust in the 2000s. Eventually the Creatures 3/Docking Station multiplayer servers went offline, and it became next to impossible to find either the games or the various paid DLC (that added new Norn breeds, etc.) The IP seems to have changed hands a couple of times and there were rumours of a true sequel at one point, but nothing really materialised.

Luckily the core games seem to be available again now, although I'm unsure of the status of multiplayer for Creatures 3/Docking Station.

• Creatures 1 and 2 (GoG) (Steam)
• Creatures 3 and Docking Station (GoG) (Steam)

Out of the series, Creatures 3 and Docking Station have probably aged the best, but they all have tonnes of charm.

I'm lucky to have them in my steam library but Alpha Protocol and Driver San Francisco. The latter has brilliant car mechanics not available elsewhere, a great self contained plot, and a classic soundtrack. The former has probably the most memorable characters in a janky spy flick.

Black Knight 2000 and, to a lesser extent, all other pinball games. I would pay $20 for an official licensed BK2K video pinball game.

Anyone else grow up playing the Super Solvers games by The Learning Company? Treasure Mountain, Midnight Rescue, and Gizmos and Gadgets were foundational gaming experiences as I was growing up. You can still find them on abandonware sites (I know of one where they offer DOSBox emulation in-browser), but it's really sad how the IP has lapsed into obscurity.

On that note, I have yet to find any reference online too a hidden secret in Treasure Mountain. I figure this either might be to obscure, or no one has thought to post it anywhere because the game is old, but I feel like I'm the only person to have ever found it. On the first level, inside the tunnel that passes through the mountain, there it a section of wall that you can walk into by pressing the UP arrow key. Inside, there's a silent stretch of tunnel with five gold coins in the wall, which you can collect by walking past them. It's only unusable once per run, but seeing as you need several dozen runs to beat the game, it works out to a sizable bonus. Am I obsessing over a 30+ year old game meant for kids learning how to read? Yes. Is getting this secret out into the open worth it. Definitely yes.

And if anyone else wants to reminisce a little about the various games by The Learning Company, I'd be happy to chat.

I've been playing OpenRCT2 and OpenTTD for several years now, and both of them are just as fun as I remember.
In terms of Romhacks, I was recently introduced to a hack of Pokemon Fire Red that is essentially the same game, but it introduces the physical/special split that started in Gen 4, along with a handful of new moves, but not too many to be overwhelming, moreso just for balance purposes. It's made it slightly more interesting, but since I'm mostly only familiar with the Gen 1 and 2 pokemon, it's been great for me at least.

Stuntman Ignition for the PS3 was an amazing game and PS3 emulation is terrible. It's technically playable on PS2 emulators, but not well and it's a clearly inferior version of the game.

Essentially you play the vehicle stuntman on a movie set. Each movie is a parody of a well know movie or trope (e.g., Dante's Peak, 007, Batman, Dukes of Hazzard). Every movie has a bunch of scenes in it where you need to drive through the movie set following all of the directors instructions (Ram through those boxes! Get close to the truck!).

If you go too slow or miss too many stunts you fail and need to start over. It's the kind of old-school game where you restart over and over and over. It does not hold your hand at all.

The best part though is when you finally "String It", you get to watch the replay of your run (blunders and all) but with the camera angles the movie would show it in.

When you finish s whole movie, you get a full trailer of the movie with your footage used for the action scenes.

It's a perfect combination of tight controlling driving game, humor, local hotseat multiplayer, and has that "one more try" addictive quality. Most importantly though, there is not a single game out there even remotely similar. So sad it appears to be an abandoned IP

Doom WADs probably count as a form of game on their own, right? I'd name that in general.

And if you want to go further, mods and custom campaigns in general as well. At the very least, some mods change the experience of the game so much that you'd be able to say you're 'playing through X mod' casually; like Enderal or Terraria's Calamity mod.

A game that comes to mind is Nerf Arena Blast. I am pretty sure it came as an extra with certain Nerf toys, and now, it's abandonware. It was a game based on Unreal Tournament that featured original maps and weapons based on Nerf, and it was genuinely a ton of fun ; probably the most kid-friendly shooter out there.

Another I'm thinking of just now: Wakfu: Les Gardiens. Wakfu is an animated show part of an universe called Krosmoz, created by Ankama, which has very little presence outside of France. It started out as an MMO, Dofus, and most games in the franchise have been MMOs in some form.

Wakfu: Les Gardiens is no exception but it's notable for being browser-based and for being directly based on the plot of the cartoon : it had you go through little missions based on each episode of the show, pretty much inserting your character into the plot. It was meant to be simpler and more approachable to appeal to the young kids watching the show on TV (like me), so it had one very simple class, the same as the show's main character. It ran from 2009 to 2011, covering the show's first season and, I assume, not being profitable enough to continue to season 2 and 3. There is a fan recreation project of it, however, called Ashes.

Many Ambrosia Software games. Spent many hours playing all the Escape Velocity(s), Avara was an awesome multiplayer mini mech 3D FPS (and you could make your own maps using that weird Apple drawing program).

Lots of freeware/shareware games from BBSs. Space Joust and some other lil jetpack dude game.

Marathon (Bungie).

The original Terminal Velocity just got removed from steam and replaced with a far inferior cash grab disaster.
Driver: San Francisco is also amazing but wrapped up in copyright hell.

both can be found rather easily on abandonware sites.

"Noteworthy is debatable but here's a few that jump to mind for me:

• Nabiscoworld Mini Golf. You heard me. Nabisco (the cookie company) used to have a browser-based minigame portal called "Nabiscoworld" where they had a bunch of different games, but by far the best were their mini golf games. They were overhead-ish-view mini golf flash games, and they had a number of them with branding for different Nabisco cookies, holiday versions, etc with different courses... and they were some of the best mini golf games you'd find online. And because mini golf is so simple, they're still fun to play today, as long as you're cool with blatant cookie advertising (although they're no longer hosted on the Nabisco website).
• Tactics Arena Online - this was a browser-based tactics game from the early 2000s. Think Ogre Battle or FFTactics, except this is about individual games played online vs other players, similar to a chess match, instead of a longer campaign-based RPG. It was really cool at the time, and I think it is hosted elsewhere online by fans since the original version was shut down.
• Chromehounds - one of many online games that have shut down, this one was an early Xbox 360 mech combat game developed by From Software. It was more arcadey than Armored Core, but less arcadey than something like MechAssault. I was obsessed with this game in summer 2006 when it came out - not only was the mech combat great, accessible fun like MechAssault was, it also had a larger 'war map' that was affected by every battle and had teams pushing/pulling territory. I think maybe there were rewards for the team that won. Kind of pointless, but it was a really cool novelty at the time. It didn't last a super long time -- I think the online servers shut down by like 2008/2009 because like most FROM Software titles pre-Dark Souls it didn't sell that well.
• Liero - a freeware game released in the late 90s - somewhat well-known at the time I think, at least among my crowd of friends. It came out at a time when Worms was very popular and kind of at its peak (Armageddon/World Party era), and Liero was basically "what if Worms, but played in real-time - a duel between two players with tons of different weapons and destructible environment, generally more focused on 'underground' areas so you'd have to dig towards your opponent. Some people might know the game Soldat, which was directly inspired by Liero, kind of like "what if Liero, but it's also Counter-Strike."
• Project GMC - a Wii Homebrew game -- it's not anything particularly amazing if you're just looking for a good game to play, it's a straightforward 2.5D run and gun platformer, but it was impressive for the time. Part of the reason it is worth mentioning is that the creator went on to create the Gunman Clive games years later, which are quite fun, and Project GMC is in some ways like a little prototype.
• honorable mention: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 on the iPhone - THPS2 was remade for the iPhone back when the newest iPhone was the 3G I believe. I had it on my iPhone 4 and it was my most-played mobile game. Why? Because it was super quick to open up, controlled great for a mobile game, looked very impressive as a 3D title at the time, and most importantly, runs were only 2 minutes long so it was the perfect game to play a round while you take a dump. Like many older iPhone/Android games this one doesn't work anymore on newer OS versions, or at least if you can get it working it's probably a pain in the ass.

had to think a bit, but something I'd absolutely recommend people give a whirl is sweet home. it's a famicom (if you don't know Japanese there's a fan translation) game that is loosely based off a movie, but it is quite possibly the first survival horror game and even in the genre it's a unique example cause it's also a turn based RPG. haven't really seen that genre mix anywhere else and it offers a lot of intrigue. A caveat though is that it isn't exactly super fun and you'll almost certainly need a guide, but it's really interesting.

Bit Trip Beat, on Wii. You controlled it by rotating your wii mote, the songs were better and more intense if you were doing well. It had multiplayer. There were other bit trip games after it, but I always liked this one the best.

I haven’t played it since college but I loved Pokémon Sienna. It felt so familiar, but was just different enough to still be a whole new adventure. I was able to play it on my laptop when I had down time at my on campus job. It helped keep me steady for a few months when I was stretched pretty thin.

But another one I just learned about this week is Caper in the Castro! It was the first video game to showcase LGBTQ+ themes and was handed out at in-person meetings and by dialup modem back in the day. The podcast “Get Played” did an episode on it for Pride month!

https://www.earwolf.com/episode/bonus-caper-in-the-castro/

There was a game called Abuse that we had on our old macOS computer. It was only the shareware version, but I played it so much as a kid. Couple years ago I went and played through the entire thing and it still holds up. It's just got a great variety of weapons and lots of secrets to explore and find.

As a kid in the early 2000s, I played a whole bunch of browser games that are probably almost inaccessible now, if they aren't just lost media. Stuff on nick, cartoon network, neopets, candy stand, etc.

In the late 2000s to early 10s, I played a bunch of free to play fps games like quake live, warsow (now known as warfork), and cube 2 sauerbraten.

Anyone ever play that old Taco Bell promotional platforming game that came on a floppy back in the day? This thread just reminded me of that.

might be stretching the rules of this thread a slight bit here. this was available on gamejolt, but it's not a web game and it is no longer available on the site.
Zineth was a unity student thesis created by arcane kids. as someone who treats the label "tech demo" as a compliment, i can easily say it's one of the coolest demos i've ever played.
you can download it and play it for yourself here, and here is a trailer for it.
if you were familiar with the underground indie scene for games in the earlier half of the '10s, you may have heard of arcane kids for creating arrogant messes like Sonic Dreams Collection or Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective, but don't worry; this isn't one of those. some developers of this demo later went on to work on games like Neon White and Wobbledogs, but before any of this, Zineth was released in 2012. in its age, it was a hit that ended up winning best student project at gdc, but it has largely faded into the obscurity of its time.
in Zineth, you skate fast. the game's central mechanic is building speed and maintaining it. the tools that you are given to do this are: a weak boost button to get you up to a base speed, jumping which leads to wallriding for building a limitless amount of speed, a gravitational push that lets you accelerate from downward slopes, and rails that gradually up the pace until they end. slamming into a wall or climbing an upward slope cause you to lose your momentum, but the game includes a merciful rewind mechanic that lets you move back to before you lost your coveted agility.
other mechanics are included, like an in-game phone which you could use to play a mobile minigame or even tweet (but only back when this game released.) the scarce npcs scattered throughout the singular level are all addicted to this mobile game, and will want to battle you in it. outside of that, the main goal of the game are a few very simple goals that you will likely achieve within an hour.
the game may be brief, but it left its mark. i revisit it every once in a while to revisit the wild mechanics. sometimes, there's even a secret or two that i find in this game's desolate singular level. maybe it could have been neat to see this idea expanded, but i think it's so much cooler in its current state as a noisy, rebellious, ramshackle proof of concept.

I've been having a lot of fun with the daily travle geography game, it's just about the one part of my work day I look forward to now, and who knew I knew so little of the many nations of Africa and the Baltic's!

As with others, I don't know if this fits the thread necessarily, but when I was younger we had this Maxwell Coffee game on PC that I presume came with the purchase; some kind of promotion.

It was a point and click adventure whereby you played as the titular jar of instant coffee inside of a haunted mansion. I want to stress that, I couldn't find any evidence of this games existence for years, and accepted that it must have just been a fever dream. However, a couple of years ago someone posted a thread on Reddit about it.

From this I can only assume it was an Ireland/UK only thing, but per one of the comments in this thread if you search the name of the game on Twitter "Maxwell's Haunted House", you'll see one of the only screenshots of the game on the internet. Furthermore, someone got access to a disc and has played through the game. The latest I've seen now revisting this thread after so long is they've passed a Google Drive link to the OP with the game files.

I'll put in a good word for Vintage Story - a very cool take on the Minecraft formula that is only available directly from the devs (at least right now).

If you've ever played the TerraFirmaCraft mod, you'll find familiarity - it's made by those devs. It takes the survival elements of MC and ramps them up. All the mechanics are deepened, but not to the point where they become un-gamelike. I find it hits a great balance in that respect. I especially enjoy how different materials use different crafting methods - for example, making stone tools requires "carving" out a shape in a sort of inverted picross, and this mechanic is also used to carving wooden statues. Farming, especially, hits a perfect mid point between fun and deep. I also like their approach to worldgen - using a Dwarf Fortress style world temperature system to figure out biome diversity, as opposed to just chunks. Makes the world feel more natural and fun to explore.

The game built in a fresh engine, allowing for the larger complexity and finer graphics of Minecraft modpacks without the framerate issues, crashes, and jankiness. VS implements a lot of the ideas from various modpacks, but in a way that feels more integrated with the game? This is a more personal thing, but I find MC mods to feel very disconnected from the base game, compared to mods from other games. I'm not sure why.

There's plenty of other very cool features (they just did an update adding underground adventure stuff I haven't dived into yet) - if you enjoy MC and want something fresh I highly recommend!

Ashes 2063 is technically, a mod for DOOM II. Really it's closer to the first person Fallout games. It's an amazing experience and pushes DOOM far from a technical aspect. It's got an inventory and trading system, dialogue, and most surprisingly to me, weapon reloads! Not used to having to press R every couple shots in DOOM, it was very good fun.

The soundtrack is also pleasantly surprising for a free mod of a 29 year old game.

I had these wacky, turn-based hot-seat, company simulation games which I used to play with my family on vacations. Was so much fun to have this internal competition going, and secretly sabotaging your siblings.

Gazillionaire (1995), Zapitalism (1997) and Profitania (1999? I think). All by LavaMind.

I used to have the Dutch translated versions on CD-ROM, but alas, I lost them somewhere along the way.

They recreated them in some form of Flash and have them on Steam, but it just not the same. I think they "updated" the internals somehow (or at least, that's how it feels to me and my family).

I’m surprised no one has mentioned AM2R yet, that standing for Another Metroid 2 Remake. I played it when it first released and thought it accomplished its goal of a modern playable Metroid 2 experience very well. Too bad about Nintendo being Nintendo, but that rant isn’t what this thread is about.

I have WAY too many answers to this question, but Starcraft: Brood War via private bnetd servers.

I ran a little ladder for my high school friends.

Currently, you can't purchase Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. It's been stuck in a lawsuit and has been pulled from anywhere to purchase.

There's also an old laserdisc arcade game Freedom Fighter from Millenium Games. There was a version that came out on the Phillips CD-i but that's about it.

https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7850
http://www.dragons-lair-project.com/games/pages/ffr.asp for more info

I mentioned eXo's Retro Learning Pack in a reply to another comment, but the whole eXoDOS Project is definitely worth a mention. Great if you're looking to revisit a huge catalog of DOS and Win3x games in a single package with a nice front-end in LaunchBox.

Naval War: Arctic Circle was a game by Paradox, is delisted from Steam, probably have to sail the high seas to get it.

Was a game about Naval Warfare in the near-future setting, kept as reasonable as to be expected (in a world before Russia was exposed to be 100% a paper tiger), it was mostly about scenarios concerning NATO countries vs Russia and naval shenanigans around Europe.

Whole game itself was quite lightweight, the UI was very lofi so it gave the atmosphere of being "in" the action room, so to speak, especially when coupled with the option to have a 1:1 timescale going on, you'd be agonizing for a good 20 minutes about whether or not your anti-missile missile volley intercepted everything or not...

Sadly, and understandably, it was quite dry, even for RTS standards, hence the low sales. But if you find it anywhere, give it a chance. I think it really does the setting justice.

Cryostasis, an Eastern Euro horror game in a similar atmospheric vein to STALKER; I recall it had incredible graphics and physics for 2007. It's also impossible to find since it was removed from Steam many years ago.

Warning Forever is a boss rush space shooter thing where the boss levels up depending on what order you destroy its parts in. It's a free game that was made for PC a long time ago and it's a good time waster.

I've enjoyed an old MS-DOS shareware game called Begin, which is a Star Trek-themed tactical fleet combat sim. You can play as Federation, Klingons, Romulans, or Orion Pirates, and each civ has several ship types to choose from. It's turn based and you type in commands for your crew or for other ships in your fleet.

I've also enjoyed EGA Trek, which is closer in concept to the classic '70s Trek game but with pretty graphics and a few new mechanics. The newest versions are no longer set in the Star Trek universe but that is the only real change.

Triple Triad Online / Questria

This is the "original" fan version of the card game from Final Fantasy VIII. It had some degree of popularity in the early 2000s (for what it was), and was a standalone Windows client, technically adware in order to pay the bills (back when the ad model tended to be frowned upon when it came to software. Had a pretty loyal fanbase and recreated the game mechanics well while adding some new features and tons of new cards.

Tetrinet

Arguably the best multiplayer Tetris that has existed. Had a good amount of popularity until its closure in 2007 at the request of the Tetris Company. Wikipedia states that there are still servers running, but sadly I can't imagine there are still any active players in 2023.

I'm not sure they are obscure other than by age, but some games I played endlessly on PC in the 90s:

• Another World
• Space Quest (there were like 6 of them)
• Police Quest even though i only got past the first call once.

Other games I remember was a cool spider man game with Mysterio, and a puzzle solving game called Hugo's House of Horrors, but I couldn't pronounce it well so my dad always laughed when I said it: Hugo's House of Whores. :)

Robosaurs Vs. The Space Bastards. I acquired it on CD through direct mail order in the late 90s in the UK.

It was a 2D platform puzzle game - in the same ballpark as Toki Tori, Creaks, and Abe's Odyssey (only mouse-controlled). The graphics were mostly prerendered sprites of 3D models - it feels quite 'of its time'. It was definitely going for a humourous approach, one that would be recognisable to anyone who read UK games magazines in that time period.

You play a robot hero who is trying to beat alien robots that wander around the levels. All the player characters were analogs of famous action stars with silly impressions of their voices - James Bond, Bruce Campbell, Van Damme etc. (sort of like Broforce).

The bad guys all have a robotty Michael Caine impression for a voice - "You were only supposed to blow my bloody arms off!".

Here's a clip of it.

It wasn't the best game in the world, but notable as an outlier for me.

N Game.

https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

There’s the games caught in licensing hell that have been delisted from digital storefronts and didn’t have physical releases. DLC for racing games and the like.

Pretty much any Mac game developed for PowerPC that wasn’t patched for Intel processors, given Rosetta 1 was removed a long time ago.

You can obviously play it via downloading, but the Xbox Live Arcade version of Goldeneye wasn’t released so there’s no strictly legal way to play it. It occupies that weird space of games that was basically done and never shipped. Star Fox 2 would have been here a few years ago also.

Lastly, these are probably obtainable now, but as a kid growing up in Australia in the Pal region, I remember local magazines (this is pre-Internet being a big thing) often running articles on Japanese or NTSC releases that looked amazing that then never shipped locally. Consoles back then were also region locked. Times have really changed in this regard, but being a PAL gamer in the 90s there was a lot of games you’d hear about and never get.

Perhaps the height of this for me was the Nintendo 64 disk drive (DD) that I was always fascinated about and only more recently found out did ship in Japan and has a small library of titles for the device that I’m sure most people have never had access to.

Firefall. Was stuck in beta for years and years, going through quite a few revamps of basically almost all the systems in the game... then it just closed down.

I had so much fun in the game. The mobility, the gameplay cycle, the gorgeous world... I loved it.

Back in 2001 there was an ARG launched called Majestic about world conspiracies and such. It had such a fantastic premise, and summer 2001 was super exciting with it when it launched. Then the terrorist attacks on September 11th happened, and within a few months the game was taken down. EA blamed low interest, but everyone knew it was actually because it would be a really weird thing to keep doing during the new era of ever-present American fear, rage, and suspicion.