Gaming

You mean Sim Ants my dude

I had to try and find it for the sake of this meme! I thought it was a PS1 game all these years, just found it.

Buck Bumble. An N64 game I played when I was a kid, flew around as a bee and shot down other bugs. Its was a good time, glad I was inspired to try and find it's name again!

For the engagement. I could literally google this or ask any of the half dozen AI search agents I have access to and likely get an immediate answer. I don't really care one way or the other.

But having said that....

Back in the day of the original Playstation, circa mid to late 1990s, there was a really intriguing robot battle game where you essentially implemented a visual program to run your battle robot then let it loose in a "3D" arena to run its course with the program you designed. You literally had no direct control over the real time action IIRC, the game was won or lost on how well you programmed your bot to fight.

The actual game was probably pretty shit by modern standards, but for the time it was unique and good enough to be intriguing. It was certainly not the kind of game that would have wide support, then or now. A bit nerdy, definitely complicated for the era.

My stupid fucked up brain remembers it as Armored Core, but that's definitely not the name of the game or even the right genre. I'll literally forget any correct response and likely end up asking this same question again in 10 years, so don't feel compelled to answer. Not like I'm going to fire it up again any time soon. My PS was stolen more than 2 decades ago and I'm pretty sure it was a game I rented a half dozen times but never owned anyway.

Also Merry Fucking Christmas

It took me FOREVER to find, but I was determined to find my old games. I assumed they were Sega Master System games, so I started watching videos like “best master system games” and such.

Then when I finally came across them, the memories all came rushing back like it was the 80s again! It’s so frustrating but when you finally find it, it’s such a good feeling.

I remember years ago I went looking for a game I used to play as a child where you start at a manhole cover and open it to reveal a beanstalk.

The game was called “the manhole”

I learned a lot about the internet that day.

It turned out that star wars supremacy which I had long since lost the disc for was digitally released as rebellion.

Arseholes

A puzzle game where each (2D) map spawns with lasers and corresponding targets, and sometimes mirrors etc. You get to place some mirrors, T pieces, beam splitters etc. and have to fulfill each target.

There are so many clones of this out now it's nigh impossible to find, especially as the game is literally just called Laser. This one's also a clone I think but I just love this particular one.

I did recently finally find it again after more than a decade of looking.

There's two edutainment games I remember playing on school PCs back in the early 2000s (either 2000 or 2001) and I've found nothing about them since. Asking about them on the TOMT and TOMJ subreddits got me nowhere.

One was set in a castle and had an intro where the main character crosses a moat. I remember it for a particular minigame where you operate a catapult and have to launch cabbages at people hiding in barrels, following instructions like "90 degrees clockwise", "125 degrees anticlockwise", etc. If you successfully hit all 8 targets without fail, the victory message was "You cabbage head!"

The other was more like a loose collection of minigames and several different CD collections were released. I used to own one that I found in a supermarket bargain bin. The minigame I remember on this collection involved moving a pin to pop balloons. The background music was some kind of weirdly upbeat jazz song.

Septerra core legacy of the creator, a pc turn based rpg i got in the early 2000s in some multi game pack at walmart or something. took forever for me to find it using the early internet. Its a unique title, but highly forgettable.

There was this game I swear was called Solaris but was not able to find. The whole thing is a model of a star system with a couple dozens of oddly-named planets and you need to "shoot units" at the planets you want to conquer. You basically have to estimate how many units you need to take it over or something.

I'll probably never be able to find it cause I can't even describe it so well haha

This post prompted me to finally go work out what game I've been thinking about for the past decade and I've determined it was called mini mogul!

I got you fam, it's called NewZealand Story. https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-new-zealand-story-679

Gunfright on Spectrum

For more engagement: a Doom reskin where you shot balloons at some (to child me) scary af toys that came alive and were ornery. Windows 3.1/DOS era, was part of a shareware collection.

I remember the sound effects and one level… but not the name. Classic.

There was this side scrolling space themed bullet hell adjacent game they had on the computers when I was in elementary school.

I have one of these! My memory is pretty hazy but he's everything I remember about it: I played it in about 2003-04, pc rom game, point and click style where you were either trying to help find a series of items in a house or solve a mystery in a house? This was a kids game with a lot of shades of light blue if I remember correctly... Not a scary game, was in the first person, and I don't remember being in a team of other characters. I remember renting it from my local library a hefty number of times.

I recently re-discovered Deathtrack.