Obscure shooters thread

[Kurogachii]

I kinda wanted a thread for posting obscure shooters that nobody talks about, i'll start with Men of Valor, interesting shooter from the creators of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

 

 

[Smoothandz]

I'll throw in on this one. Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. Such a fun game.

[Doominator2]

Not one that I ever really played, but I remember seeing tons of copies being sold at second hand stores around 2011-2012.

[out_of_service]

 

[Swordofdanu]

Darkwatch. (vampire cowboys themed) 

[magicsofa]

Perhaps some background or story on why these games are worth mentioning/important to you would be nice... otherwise it's just a list of random titles :/

[Kurogachii]

7 minutes ago, magicsofa said:

Perhaps some background or story on why these games are worth mentioning/important to you would be nice... otherwise it's just a list of random titles :/

I mean, you can always copy the game's name and look it up on metacritic, i always do that when it comes to games i don't know about.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

 

Just what the world needed in 1999: a hunting game advertising a washed up egotistical maniac. You get to use a guitar as a machine gun. One of those games that seemed normal back then, but ends up being a surreal oddity in 2021.

 

 

Edited July 7, 2021 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[LadyMistDragon]

Body Harvest - This isn't really a game you hear about very much, despite some fairly heavy advertising at the time. Other than some quality of life issues, it's largely enjoyable, imo (though I wouldn't really suggest hunting down all the alien artifacts because reasons). Cover's kind of ugly, but anyway...

 

[Arrowhead]

Gore: Ultimate Soldier [2002] is extremely obscure. Fun little low budget shooter w/ well, gore!

 

Pyl [1998]  or Dust, as it is known in America - is an obscure Polish shooter. Definitely worth your time, if you can get a hold of a working / localized copy. I remember it looking very Quake 2-ish, so if you're into that aesthetic, you may like this one.

 

 

[Wavy]

Moon on the Nintendo DS

Played a bit of it and it's OK. It's certainly impressive for a DS game.

[Arrowhead]

1 minute ago, Wavy said:

Moon on the Nintendo DS

Played this yeaaaaaaaaaarss ago, I remember it being very moody and having a pretty oppressive atmosphere later on. Thanks for reminding me, I'll have to fire it up again!

[Boaby Kenobi]

2 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

Body Harvest - Cover's kind of ugly, but anyway...

 

The PAL cover looks much better I think.

 

 

[Chow Yun Thin]

1 hour ago, Wavy said:

Moon on the Nintendo DS

 

Man, that just jogged my memory of a similar game on the DS called Dementium II. It's about a guy who has to break out of an asylum that's been taken over by some pretty grotesque monsters. It plays out like a Metroidvania with a bit of puzzle solving, some RE text exposition and grainy video cutscenes. Every so often, you get pulled into this industrial torture room hellscape that you have to fight your way out of and get teleported to other areas. All in all, pretty impressive game for the DS.

[Tetzlaff]

11 hours ago, Arrowhead said:

Gore: Ultimate Soldier [2002] is extremely obscure. Fun little low budget shooter w/ well, gore!

 

An interesting point of Gore is that the levels of the singleplayer campaign are composed of re-worked multiplayer levels and they created a virtual reality combat simulator story around it, so it makes sense (to some degree). It's a trahsy game but I had fun with it. As far as I know, a free version was released some years ago.

[MrFlibble]

Recently I learned that Gore was originally developed with the DOS version of ACKNEX 3D GameStudio - a fairly popular German FPS maker kit that is still around (but not the DOS stuff unless you look for it). You can see an early screenshot here (leftmost in the row), it gives a kind of Quake and CHASM vibe.

 

Speaking of which, recently I dug out an incomplete demo of another ACKNEX 3D game called Tyrannizer (grab the demo here if you're interested), also trying to look Quake-ish but actually closer to the Build engine in terms of how the level layout works (oh, and if you take the health mushrooms into account, this is almost Dungeons of Kremlin outright). The curious thing is that the devs did not abandon Tyrannizer but eventually reworked it into a different game using a Windows iteration of ACKNEX, under the title Winthorp's Mansion. There are YouTube videos around and also a playable demo, but I haven't tried it.

 

From what I can tell though, Hades 2 is quite good, I think it runs on a Windows port of ACKNEX 3 (the DOS version), later revisions of the toolkit (4 and above) were already more advanced with true 3D.

[mrthejoshmon]

 

If I ever figure out how to get this thing working on modern hardware I will post the tutorial myself.

[Kurogachii]

16 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

 

If I ever figure out how to get this thing working on modern hardware I will post the tutorial myself.

You should get a windows 7 machine for old school gaming, just a cheap 2 ghz processor, 2-4 gigs of ram and a 512mb graphics card should do the trick, and if you want to play games from 2010 and lower, replace that with a 1GB card.

[IvanDobrovski]

Does this count as a shooter? I mean, you drive a taxi car but it has lots of guns, with a first-person view and option for 3rd person!

 

Spoiler

 

I know this is the 2nd game, but I like this one more than the previous.

 

[Arrowhead]

Just now, IvanDobrovski said:

Does this count as a shooter?

I'd say it counts - barely, but it counts! :)

 

Thanks for the recommend - I've never heard of that one.

[KubaloBlackMT]

This one's a a really cool Doom clone from 1996 that I remember pretty fondly. It's ahead of it's time like, look at the boxart, looks better than Toy Story's CG models by a million miles! Tbh, I might've like this game a little too much. I mean... not saying I had any sort of feeling that it gave me. The game just kind of gives you that look that makes you want to really see what it can do.

 

Anyone else remember this one. I might remember it too much.

[deus-ex]

Necrodome by Raven Software (Heretic, Hexen)

 

 

[Kurogachii]

Chicken run for the PS1 is the greatest Metal Gear Solid clone to date.

[Dubbag]

[P41R47]

2 hours ago, IvanDobrovski said:

Does this count as a shooter? I mean, you drive a taxi car but it has lots of guns, with a first-person view and option for 3rd person!

 

  Hide contents

 

I know this is the 2nd game, but I like this one more than the previous.

 

thats the shit i like!
Would love to see a sourceport of that crazy game.

[Doominator2]

3 hours ago, Kurogachii said:

Chicken run for the PS1 is the greatest Metal Gear Solid clone to date.

Holy Shit you weren't kidding. Its pretty much a MGS reskin.

[Halfblind]

Not obscure, but extremely underrated and undersold. It was in development hell for over a year because the original publisher Acclaim Entertainment went bankrupt. Microsoft took the lead and helped them find Midway as their new publisher. I don't know why Epic Games nor Microsoft didn't publish it themselves. I guess so that Midway could put in Mortal Kombat characters? I guess they wanted to focus their hype towards Gears of War and promoting the new Xbox 360. This game was released on the original Xbox a year before the Xbox 360 was released and was overshadowed by Gears of War the following year. I put it on this list because it can only be played on the original Xbox and all backward compatibility has been terminated since half way through the Xbox 360s lifecycle.

 

Minus Halo CE this was my favorite first person shooter for the Xbox. I was so excited when it was released. I put a preorder for it at GameStop. I never preorder games, ever. This is on my list of top 5 favorite arena shooters of all time. If I could go back in time I would spend a whole lot more time playing it. If I ever met a genie who grants game wishes only I would wish for this game to be ported to the PC. I loved it so much...

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Psi-Ops The Mindgate Conspiracy, a third person shooter game released in 2004 by Midway Games of Mortal Kombat fame. This game got me into the band Cold, mainly because they contributed the exclusive song "With My Mind".

 

Edited July 12, 2021 by Wadmodder Shalton

[CorianderCastor]

From a Codex thread I saw that Chill Manor has characters with variable stats, I wonder how close to Raveneque classes it gets.

[Halfblind]

 

I have been playing this game recently after finding it at myabandonware.com. Not to be confused with the mobile game with the same name. Released in 2006 by Digital Extremes 2 years after their work with Epic Games on Unreal Tournament 2k4 and 2 years prior to releasing Dark Sector. Two Games that were much better than this one. I think this is when they departed from Epic Games and started working on their own projects.

 

This game is rather short with about 20-30 maps total. The maps rather boring, because they all look the same, down to using the same theme and mapping style. UT2K4 had way more variety than this. Weapons are bulky and slow and they don't feel like they have any real impact visually. The AI is extremely stupid. They will ignore you even if you are standing right in front of them with the flag. The bots in the UT99 on easy were 20 times more intelligent. The vehicles control very well, even better than the ones in UT2K4, but the maps are too small to make them useful. Overall I give the game 3 out of 5 stars, because there is nothing that breaks the game but it still doesn't impress me at all.

 

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For more obscure first person shooter games I started this topic over 4 years ago.