Extremely Weird And Obscure Games

[Maromishi]

Many interesting responses in this thread!
A few of the games listed have even been so loved they have finally escaped onto another platform. (I really appreciate when companies up-port games that I feel many of us all missed out on; also, it means that future gamers will have an easier time accessing these awesome titles).

While I enjoyed many of the titles others have listed here (El Shaddai, Binary Domain, and Lost Dimension being some of my favorites) I think there is only one game I'd really like to see a remaster of and or another game in a similar style: The Unfinished Swan.

The Unfinished Swan, in my opinion is one of the best obscure indie games for PS3 (that also later made it onto PS4 and other platforms). It was a digital PSN title but it had a unique world in terms of gameplay/exploration and I think if you like puzzle games or narrative games (open to interpretation on author or narrator intention) that it's well worth a playthrough.

 

[Rylioli]

Eternal Sonata - improved port of the 360 game
El Shaddai - weird but awesome
Enchanted Arms - another 360 refugee
Resonance Of Fate - not exactly obscure but very forgotten
3D Dot Game Heroes - also oft forgotten
Record of Argarest War - people remember the "Very Naughty" 360 release...
Viking: Battle for Asgard - almost never mentioned
Lost Dimension - truly lost...Bah-Dum TISH!
Tears to Tiara II - so obscure I forgot I own it...
Remember Me - no, I forgot you for YEARS, then I bought you and you sat on my shelf since.

Oddly, just about every list on the internet for "Obscure/Forgotten/"Hidden Gem" PS3 games includes Folklore and Dragon's Crown. If everyone mentions these two games specifically, then are they really obscure?

lost dimension is surprisingly a solid title, was playing a bunch of furyu games when i stumbled on that one

 

[Viviana Santos]

 

[Viviana Santos]

 

[CG4R12I4N]

We lost a lot back then, The Battle Master duology were much better than the shitty Battle Assault version.

 

[RebelofDaNeonGod]

FUCKING GLOVE ON FIGHT 2, NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT, BUT I DO!!!! I'LL ALWAYS LOVE IT!!!!

One that I'm shocked didn't blow up during the Y2K craze was Slap Happy Rhythm Busters

 

[Retroviews]

The first games I ever played were fighting games, and I've developed a strong tolerance—and passion—for this genre. Recently, I've been playing the Steam versions of Blade Strangers, Chaos Code, Koihime Enbu, and Nitroplus Blasterz, along with Fighters Impact, a PS1 title.

I enjoyed all of them, but Blade Strangers stood out for its suitability for short play sessions and its delightfully bizarre cast, one of the most unique I’ve encountered. Meanwhile, Fighters Impact captivated me with its outstanding soundtrack.

I have a backlog filled with fighting games that I’m eager to explore. It’s the one genre that never fails to keep me engaged.

 

[Viviana Santos]

Post automatically merged: Jan 17, 2025

 

[hazys]

Rival Schools/Project Justice is my absolute favorite fighting game series, but I'm not sure it counts as obscure anymore. I hope the PS1 school sim game gets translated someday.

Tatsunoko vs Capcom is my favorite Versus series game, and I hope it gets ported out of Wii jail.

One that hasn't been mentioned is Capcom's Tech Romancer for Dreamcast. Badly needs a port as well.

 

[Viviana Santos]

Post automatically merged: Jan 19, 2025

 

[GeoHikari]

Even the updated versions of the third game was released officially in US, Arcana Heart 2(and his update Suggoi!) isn't well known for many fighting game enthusiasts.

The PS2 version of Suggoi! was critically harded due for the various amounts of slowdowns during the matches, but is one of the console's treasures. The game is also one of my favourites for the group of Arcade conversions to PS2.

Post automatically merged: Jan 19, 2025

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Your opinion must be praised.

I like Gouketsuji Ichizoku Matrimelee. Atlus authorized the defunct Noise Factory to produce one of best games of the series. The only worst of the game is fully the PS2 version. Like Real Bout Fatal Fury Special converted to PS1 as Real Bout Fatal Fury Special: Dominated Mind, Bonnou Kaihou it's razoable also, with few no good changes and the lack of agressive difficulty in larger levels upward to 5. And it's great to see back Angela and Kinta, who don't existis in the original Arcade version(the MVS version have Poochy again as a separate character from the kid and the four secret characters coming from Rage of The Dragons).

And I not forgot: it's bizarre and challengning the addition of a comical version of Bobby Ologun as the final boss, using his MMA atire(since at the time of the PS2 version production, he was a K1 fighter).

 

[Doomstruck]

FUCKING GLOVE ON FIGHT 2, NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT, BUT I DO!!!! I'LL ALWAYS LOVE IT!!!!

One that I'm shocked didn't blow up during the Y2K craze was Slap Happy Rhythm Busters

NO JOKE THESE 2 ARE TOP CONTENDERS FOR FAV FIGHTING GAMES, ESPECIALLY GOF2 BUT THAT MIGHT BE MY INDIE GAME BIAS

 

[spectresfrommercury]

degenki bunko fighting climax at least to me that is

 

[Taukyrie Taukyrie]

Transformers Devastation is a game I hardly hear anyone talk about, it has a lot of interesting mechanics and being developed by Platinum the soundtrack is absolutely fire

Considering this thread is the first time I've heard anyone but my older brother mention it, yeah, I would call it obscure.

Piggybacking off of this, I would probably mention War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron since I don't really see those two being mentioned much.

Oddly, just about every list on the internet for "Obscure/Forgotten/"Hidden Gem" PS3 games includes Folklore and Dragon's Crown. If everyone mentions these two games specifically, then are they really obscure?

Makes you really think tbh. I'll admit, I don't really think Dragon's Crown is obscure myself since I still see people mention it a lot.

But if we're talking obscure PS3 games, Resonance of Fate and Valkyria Chronicles first come to mind for me.

 

[hazys]

• Natural Doctrine
• Toy Home
• Rain
• Papo & Yo
• NeverDead
• Way of the Samurai 4
• From Dust
• Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters
• Datura
• Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom
• Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death
• Quantum Theory
• WET
• Aquanaut's Holiday: Hidden Memories
• Afrika
• The Saboteur
• Haze
• Hydrophobia

 

[Jotaro]

in no order

- mirror's edge
- folklore
- remember me
- asura's wrath
- nier and nier replicant
- resonance of fate
- syndicate
- blacksite area 51
- quantum theory
- starhawk
- dark sector
- x-men destiny
- dark void
- scourge outbreak
- inversion
- tales of xilia 1
- driver san francisco
- neverdead
- yakuza dead souls
- transformers devastation
- atelier: escha and logy
- fairy fencer f
- bionic commando
- blades of time
- valkyria chronicles 1
- tales of graces f
- binary domain
- the afro samurai game

 

[tigg]

 

[keysersozegr]

hey people!! this is my first post on here I love this website so much, Anyway my first question is does anyone know any odd or cool scummVM games on here? I just downloaded Grim Fandango and I wanna find other games like it.

just google exoscummVM. you can also find exo in youtube.

 

[MadHatter]

Broken Sword 1 and 2

The Dig

 

[Nidoking's icon Nidoking Nidoking]

 

[King Koopa's iconKing Koopa]

 

[lukebuskin]

The kinds of games you can find on the deeper parts of the clear net are some of the most interesting and compelling experiences you can have with a piece of media today. It's a well-established hobby at this point, with tons of insufferable Youtube top tens and iceberg narrations having touched on most of the classics, so we don't need to get into the decade-long history of Le Weird/Obscure Gaming. This thread is just meant to be a new place for general discussion of arcane, strange and wind-swept interactive software from the earliest days of the internet to now. The days of LSD Dream Emulator being a niche cult classic are far in the past; we're talking about the realer stuff: your Eastern Minds, your Garage: Bad Dream Adventures, and your Blue Sangoes.

This image Reddit stole from /vr/ is pretty dated, but it still stands as one of the earliest instances of the iceberg macro trend that's untarnished by the Web 3 crowd and can still function as a catalogue for deep internet games worth looking into, although the really good stuff only starts at Tier 6 and a lot of it has become Lost Media Wiki canon since 4chan covered it. Saint has mostly gone offline in the past few weeks and the recent history of his Youtube channel consists of a lot of unedited streams, but you can use his uploads from the past ten years to a similar effect. His friend F3l0n used to curate an IA list containing redumps of all kinds of cool weird physical software and old discs, but it seems to have been lost to time. Ultimately, the only real way to find this stuff is to go out and look for it yourself. Once Vinny Vinesauce started covering the weird indie circuit (magicdweedoo, Catamites, Arcane Kids, etc), it was only a matter of time before their development cycles ended up catering more towards that audience, which you can see with Anthology Of The Killer, so I'm not going to link them here.

The ultimate catch-22 with this kind of thing is that e-celebs covering a niche game will always cause it to reach an audience that doesn't appreciate it, which will degrade the community, demotivate the devs and stagnate interesting discussion, which is why unearthing all the weird stuff lost to the annals of the Internet Archive is so important.

Two rules:
1. No hoax games. No Petscop, no Sexdick, etc. Nothing that didn't have a development cycle before it started receiving attention.
2: No games developed in a modern engine like Unity that are meant to look old and weird but aren't, so no Haunted PS1, Ultrakill, Buckshot Roulette, etc.

 

[Deleted member 171852]

Toribash isn't really cryptic but was my absolute Jam for a long ass time, and i don't see anyone remembering it(outside of an user here on RGT), or at least playing for more than a few minutes, maybe because the skill ceiling was too absurd. Matches would take a long time so in order to grind and improve i would spend all day long playing in servers. One of the contributors to me learning english too.

Saw many people talking about this in the past along with many other Ray K games, but only because of the initial shock value of looking at the themes and the characters, but in the reality no one really plays it or talk about it online(and barely even know what the game is about really). I wasn't able to find any real guides for any stuff in the game and that kinda added to my experience because i was learning new things through experimentation, but i still wish there would be more actual discussion about the game and not just "look at how messed up this game looks lol" in a post and that's it. I was stuck many times because of simple stuff, but i enjoyed it.

 

[ObscureJigglypuff]

no Sexdick.

NO BARE BREATS!!!!?????

 

[lukebuskin]

Toribash isn't really cryptic but was my absolute Jam for a long ass time, and i don't see anyone remembering it(outside of an user here on RGT), or at least playing for more than a few minutes, maybe because the skill ceiling was too absurd. Matches would take a long time so in order to grind and improve i would spend all day long playing in servers. One of the contributors to me learning english too.

Toribash was recommended to me by an ex-friend a long time ago around the time I found out about Mugen because of my burgeoning interest in customizable/creativity-focused fighting games, but I never played it. I always assumed it was dead by now.

NO BARE BREATS!!!!?????

No Caddicarus references either!