5 Amazing Old Games You've Never Heard Of | Best Of Retro Gaming
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- Опубліковано 10 чер 2024
- We're diving into the world of lesser known but amazing old games that I think deserve more attention. Having been a gamer for 3 decades and particularly through the 90s, that was a Wild West of an era where anything goes and there were no rules when it came to video games. If you want to support the channel, buy games using this GOG referral link: af.gog.com/?as=1715648857 Thank you!
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Amazing Old Games & Hidden Retro Gems
Intro | 0:00
1. Biosys | 0:33
GOG Wishlist: www.gog.com/wishlist/games/bi...
2. MegaRace | 2:36
GOG Referral: af.gog.com/en/game/megarace_1...
3. Dark Colony | 3:52
GOG Wishlist: www.gog.com/wishlist/games/da...
4. Trespasser | 5:17
GOG Wishlist: www.gog.com/wishlist/games/ju...
5. Metal Fatigue | 6:48
GOG Referral: af.gog.com/en/game/metal_fati...
6. God Of Thunder | 7:22
Free on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/73...
7. Civilization 2: Test of Time | 7:54
GOG Wishlist: www.gog.com/wishlist/games/ci...
8. Heavy Gear II | 8:34
GOG Wishlist: www.gog.com/wishlist/games/he...
Gaming through the 90s, you inevitably play games that no one else has heard of. So here are my top picks of the best video games I love that people almost always don't know when I bring them up.
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If you've heard of most of these you're a master of gaming arcana. And remember, if you want to support the channel, buy games using this GOG referral link: af.gog.com/?as=1715648857 Thank you!
Nox., Freespace 2, and Kohan
..
How is it the title of this vid says 5, but you show 8?
@@EchoAlpha_x5 It's explained in the video. 3 are bonus games that I'm not sure if they fit the criteria.
As a person whom plazing since 1992 I can confirm I heard all of these games but I only plazed Trespasser, Dark Colony, Heavy Gear 2. Most of the games in this era was forgotten because a very few genres dominated and what players could get was limited. In many regions the gaming was not well estabilished and only pirated games were available or pre built games on old pcs-consoles. Depending on region of course in Eastern Europe the options was very limited to get legally games. If the gaming was estabilished in like 1970's then most of these games could have been great hits.
I could easily write a huge list of games I played and I tried at least but that list would be too long.
Just few games I liked a lot - Masters of Orion 1-2, Masters of Magic, Lands of Lore, Legends of Kyrandia, Nox, Kohan 1-2, (technically kohan 2 is early 2000' game), Elvira, Evolva, XS, Lemmings, LBA, Blackthrone, Full Thortle, Stunts, Lotus racing, Tyrian 2000, Jazz Jackrabbit 1-2, Estatica, Hearts of Darkness, Genewars.
As I said I will not make a huge list because too many games there and I played a lot of them.
Yay for Dark Colony.
Love the aesthetic of that game. Lovely animations and sounds too.
Then there is the asymmetric gameplay.
Really a gem from the past!
True. Dark colony is very underrated, and has a fantastic atmosphere. And it's a great game despite having a rather primitive engine. So many sleepless nights and nightmares as a child :D
A notable gem of the 90s: Fragile Allegiance.
It's an RTS in space. You build cities in worlds, control fleets, build and launch missiles towards enemy worlds. Diplomacy and city management delegation gave a sense of scale that was awesome!
Cannot recommend it enough!
Fragile Allegiance was a similar game like Pax Imperia and Utopia. However Utopia was more or less a city builder rts game but I somehow got a buggy version and never managed to see a growth in the city but I liked the concept, Pax Imperia was more or less similar to Fragile Allegiance as it was also a Space Rts. I liked both games and hundreds of hours was spent on each but I always went back to MOO and MOO2 because of the art style. Also there was a Microsoft founded space game but I forgot the name of that game which was more or less a better graphic asteroid game and came before the X series. I cannot recommend enough the game too and you have a good taste of games.
I hope this is/becomes a series. Many forgotten memories were uncovered. Thanks!
I'm so glad to see Trespasser on this list. That game was ridiculously ahead of its time in so many ways - graphics, physics, immersive no-HUD presentation... And while the control scheme was awkward, we do have games today that play the same way, where, instead of the bullets coming out of the center of your screen, you have to use your character's hands to manipulate and aim a gun that physically exists in the game world. Except we play them with VR headsets and motion controllers, which weren't an option in 1998. In other words, Trespasser is someone's attempt to make Half-Life: Alyx before Half-Life 1 even came out. The result stinks, but you have to respect the vision and ambition.
I did always think Trespasser would be a much better VR game.
@@GamerZakh And Terep and Terep 2. That game was made by a hungarian developer whom also used physic based game engine and the graphic was early 3d. Maybe in VR would be a better experience to destroy your car.
Ooh, seeing Knights and Merchants in the end credits is a nice reminder of that game's existence. Tried it on Steam once, game crashed.. Very unfortunate.
Another lesser-known game, at least I don't think it's well known, that I tried to play as a kid was Lords of Magic. Just restarting the game over and over for those intro lines was worth it for me ^^
Lords of Magic still have a nice dedicated modding community and when I was a kid I played a lot of it. There was few elements what I did not liked but I liked the light element.
Also Knights and Merchants was a popular game back in the day.
@@sziklamester1244 Ah, my apologies for giving an irrelevant response in the comment section then ^^
The Biosys videos and streams are my favorites from your works, they came out when I was a more active participant in the community :) Good to see you talking about it again, a very interesting and oft overlooked game
Thanks for covering old games, those really are gems of human culture. I'm so glad they run emulated so they will never really die or get lost. People in 100/200/500 years from now should see them and may it be for a good laugh only.
Calling Trespasser unknown is a bit of a stretch, but the rest fit the bill. I've never heard of Biosis before today, and I heavily kept up with PC gaming in the late 90s.
As for suggestions, there were so many games at the time that either flopped or didn't get the recognition they deserved.
Mordor / Mordor 2 that later became Demise, Warwind, Evolva, Dark reign, Pax Imperia, Escape or Die Trying, Deathtrap Dungeon, Warbreeds, Montezuma's Return, Imperialism, Defiance... the list goes on and on.
I find with age comes obscurity haha, so Trespasser is pretty unknown today. Like Megarace, it was popular 3 decades ago but there are 30 year olds who weren't even born when that released.
Trespasser is one of the most infamous FPS games from the 90s lol.
Megarace lol some form of hidden core memory for me with the cheeky narrator. Dark colony was one of my favorites with the gore and the alien trooper sounds. Tresspasser was also something I remember waiting for after seeing it in the PC magazines :)
Yeah!!! Dark Colony! Amazing... you are the first one who mention this, after so much time, thx my friend =) And of course Civ Test of Time, an amazing game!
I played a few of them back in the day, one of my fav old games is "Submarine Titans" a deep sea underwater RTS :D.
Good memories.
God of thunder demo was a gem back in the day, still remember the dying sound of Thor yelling
Yeah I had the shareware version, so could only beat Jormundgandr and then the game ended. Only finished it once I started this channel and the dev saw my videos, soon after they published it on Steam for free which was cool.
Found some real gems there.
Dark Colony is quite underrated, and as for Trespasser, it would be so great if somebody remastered it with easier controls.
I remember I got Dark Colony for FREE (full version!) with a French gaming magazine in the 90s. What a nice free gift!
I remember Byosis and Dark Colony. And I didn't know Civ2 had mods at that time. Some games I remember from the 90s: Dune, Sim Farm, Sim Ant, Dungeon Master 1 & 2 (2 is also know as Skullkeep), Stonekeep, Command&Conquer games (Red Alert was the best for me), Doom 1 and 2, Duke Nukem, Civ 1 and 2, Jurassic Park (SNES). Beyond these I have to try really hard to remember.
Yay to unit stats in textfiles! The original Dungeon Keeper did that as well - and not only the stats, the entire level scripts were also just text files. Me and my friend modded an entire new campaign this way, it was awesome. Fun fact: if you accidentally put -1 into the "add_creature_here" function where you should specify how many, the game will just overflow and fill the map with that creature up to its unit limit.
I assume you’ve heard of KeeperFX?
This is a good thing to know as I liked Dungeon Keeper aswell. I never tried to mod because my skills back was very limited and my english is not perfect to this day but at least now I can mod some games.
@@sziklamester1244 Awesome! Yeah go ahead and try it, it's really fun! There is now a full on level editor as well, so you can build maps yourself 🙂
I remember being so excited when I discovered those text files. I switch units sides, so dungeon was full of heroes XD It was so much fun!
most of my childhood subsisted on 2 demo discs that had Half-Life Uplink, Tomb Raider 3, Abe's Exoddus, Knights and Merchants, SHOGO, and Trespasser, and I played those demos to DEATH! Also who remembers Machines: Wired for War? One of the early 3D RTS titles with some pretty cool unit designs and a feature that was mindblowing for me at the time where you could control any of your units in first-person and enter buildings/shoot weapons etc. Jank as it was, many fond memories with that game.
I think I did not played this game but it reminds me some of theother early 3d rts games. I mainly played imperium galactica 1-2 in this era as rts but I tried some others aswell. It looks neat and basically with a remaster it could go well to this day.
I remember our first family PC, it came with demos for Caesar 3, USM 98, Toca 2 and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. I played C3 and Kingdoms non-stop. I wonder if Kingdoms was ever a popular game, it was amazing.
I also liked the city building in Caeser series (played all of them) and the different versions like Poseidon, Pharaoh and the expansions. Total Annihilation and TA Kingdoms also was a good game and I think the graphic of the game still look good nowadays.
One way to increase the frame rate in trespasser was to look directly down at the ground while moving. Funny enough, doing that had it's own perk :)
Loved Heavy Gear games so much!
I like this "best of retro gaming" concept. Hopefully we'll get more lists like this one!
Thank you so much for another great video! I honestly was not aware about some of these games. It is a pity most of them are not available for digital purchase on GOG or Steam at the moment. But I did my part and upvoted them on the community wishlists. The least I can do.
Adding to the GOG wishlist does help. GOG is always trying to get these old games on their store, they recently (at some point) even added WarBreeds which just last year I was listing as abandonware. Typically it's just licensing or ownership issues stopping them from getting a game on there.
Ah Dark Colony. I love it so much, and I still remember how disgusted I was when I realized the Atril was essentially throwing explosive boogers at me.
And the sound of the Reaper's autocannon going off still lives rent free in my head.
Dark Colony! I've been saying if there ever was a game that needed a remake it was Dark Colony. There was something magical about the dark alien feel of that game that I haven't seen anywhere else. I would spend all day in school drawing the units instead of doing work haha. Still have my old disc.... time to fire it up again.
Amazing old real-time-strategy and rpg game: Sacrifice.
Eh, fmv era... :) My forgotten gems to complement Heavy gear - Starsiege (play as cybrids - wont regret it) and Interstate 76
dark colony is a masterpiece!!
100% agree about child of the Who's Line Is It Anyway guys lol!
It's really surprising that I've never heard of BioSys. I can see why the other ones are forgotten but BioSys looks pretty cool.
Biosys was mindblowing when I played it. It could've easily rivalled Myst and spawned the survival genre much earlier but I have a feeling those graphics cost way too much and it just lost money.
@@GamerZakh being a flop back then was understable I think. Question is why nobody mentions it? There are hundreds of videos about PS2 "hidden gems", fan communities that fix their favourite games like Vampire Bloodlines and yet 2025 is the first time I hear of BioSys. That's actually sad. To sell badly is one thing but to spend so much on such a beautiful idea and graphics but to remain forgotten for 25 years despite not being some broken mess is just awful.
@@persona3rulez It is pretty strange, I've mentioned it a lot of times. I have a full playthrough of it on this channel. For a while it was pretty tough to get running but someone made an EXE which just runs it now. So Biosys has been fixed up, but I think it really is just that unknown.
Megarace was fabulous the 90 have so many great games like lands of lore or legend of kyrandia or king quest 5 etc there are so many
I love Dark Colony!
Fun easter egg in heavy gear ii - around christmas time the mechs would have santa hats on.
I miss things like that. I always remember Raptor Call of the Shadows had a few of those, one for the creator's birthday.
I remeber seeing a youtuber playing trespasser using fraps to record. Good times totally forgot
Heavy Gear 2 was the first mech game I ever played, loved it so much.
You should know that there is a guy who is remaking Trespasser in a modern engine. Looks beautiful!
I played Trespasser so many times when I was a child... Never moved past the first carnivorous dinosaur though... This is probably where my aversion to first-person games comes from lmao
Trespasser has been streamed a few times on Twitch!
Bittomann has done so. No VODs available sadly, but man this game is a rough gem!
DARK COLONY POG! game of my very young days
damm, ive played Dark Colony so much in the early 2000's
You have to map the Controls of Trespasser to more modern Schemes and it is much more enjoyable.
Btw. beware, if you mount the CD on one Drive or use your original, it will look everytime for that Drive Letter.
You can put the Folder of the CD into that Drive, if you do not want to reinstall it because you got a new Harddrive :>
Biosys.. omg..thanks bro.. i remember this.
Megarace.. Dude.. seriously.. thanks.. this is a free game i ger when my parent bought us a 486 pc.
Oh wow, God of Thunder. God of Thunder & Raptor: Call of the Shadows were the only 2 shareware games I had to play on my stepmothers computer when I stayed at my dads place on the weekends. In retrospect, I guess I could have done a lot worse.
I had those 2 sharewares as well, they're pretty good ones to have considering how much shareware and shovelware there was at the time.
You should check out, assuming you haven't already, Cythera from Ambrosia Software:
At its core, it's essentially Ultima. The king summons you from this world to his, and asks you to save his kingdom. But it gets... very weird very quick. The plague you are trying to stop makes everyone insane, so most NPCs are nutters. You don't even know if your guide, or even the king is sane.
You can find companions in the world, but only once you've figured out they want to go with you through conversation which is Ultima based speech with key word progression. The companions have text bubbles that pop up mid-travel, and they bicker with each other if you get two that don't get along.
You can also make your own bread from scratch, and find a ridiculous amount of spells.
Adlib wasn't really software per se. It was the most common 'gaming' sound card before sound blasters. That's why it has a very distinct recognizable sound.
Outpost 1993 is one of them.
metal fatigue: i remember a game against AI where i lost the surface but controlled the caves 100% and had ping pong in the skies. was a weird round ^^ but as I recall nothing else from the game it left an impression. i am not even sure anymore if you could have mechs in the cave systems... i think not..
You couldn't have mechs in the cave but they could fly up to the sky if they had the jetpack torso.
Pretty surprised about biosys. The other games i knew and i also played most of them back in the day. But never heared about biosys, looking very very good for that time. Shame that this game was so unknown
It's my favourite unknown game. The limited publishing killed it really.
Will never forget those times. The golden age of pc gaming.
A game I really loved was Bioforge ! Did you ever play that one? A pretty hard one but so amazing for the time.
And also all the Legacy of Kain serie.
You could add the unknown point and click nowadays like the dig, leisure suit, legend of kyrandia, ...
With that, add all the RTS like Dark Reign, Submarine Titans and all the RTS ... Dark Colony was pretty fun actually and Metal Fatigue was totally amazing !!
Trespasser was too hard to get into...The controls drove me nuts.
God of Thunder was super fun, so old too... But that game gave me a lot of fun.
Civ 2 Test of Time is just my favorite civ ever TBH !
Heavy Gear 2 was a blast but I remember finishing it so quickly... I wanted more ! Unfortunately the third one never really happened (or turned out really weird) and loved Mechwarrior 3 so much.
Amazing list, thanks Zakh :)
Good list. Bioforge was also a game that was ahead of it's time but not became too popular. Also there are a nice list of games I tried and played for a while.
@@sziklamester1244 Bioforge was definitely something special (a severed arm...) and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out many of it's puzzles as a kid (especially the weird one with colors, the rubiks cube atrocity) and trying to succeed the nightmarish reactor explosion. Many parts of the game were so hard and unforgiving !
@@mesarthim640 What I remember of the game is how I sucked in it a lot because my english back in that time was not great and a lot of things was figured by trial and error. The game had a charm and despite how difficult was I enjoyed it.
@@sziklamester1244 I speak french and played in french... Let me tell you how it didn't help me at all ! lol
Gosh it was hard and sometimes frustrating but yes, there's some charm to that game, nothing like that was ever made again unfortunately.
heavy gear 2 was great. it had easy to access sound files which led to it being the first game i ever modded.
3:09 - I didn't know Sven Winke's father appeared in MegaRace.
Nice Thanks!
Actually i am heard of thise games because of the different game magazines what i read but never played with them. What in my mind now is the BattleZone 1 and 2 for example. An another epic game from `98 and `99 that just a few ones knows. In 2018 released a remaster both of it.
Dark Colony
That guy in FMV Megarace reminds me of "Whose line is it anyway?" hahaha. Never play Dark Colony to its fullest. Civ 2 Test of Time is really gold when you have games such as Warlords I & II, and Lords of Magic. I really like Heavy Gear I & II, where mechs are a bit more flexible able to crouch or prone and snipe an enemy far away, go stealth or go wild.
Emperor of the Fading Suns & Carnivores 2.
Ohh I played Carnivores, that was a fun hunting game.
Ah, Dark Colony, Trespasser, Metal Fatigue and at the end, Knights and Merchants :D Gotta love these older games. Think I still have a pirated CD with K&M somewhere in the house :D
Think that I've actually finished Trespasser when it came out, after some tweaking, but the last mission was a huge pain in the ass, thou the limited amount of ammo and such definitely made you think a bit on what you're going to do.
Metal Fatigue was just awesome :D
The only issue I have with Dark Colony is that the maps are the same. At least that was my exp with it.
Also, one correction for the video which made me wonder. You said that Dark Colony came out in 1999, but it actually came out in 1997 which then makes the statement true that it came out before Starcraft :D
Oh good catch! I totally misspoke the year there haha. I was experimenting with a bunch of things I slipped. I'll see if I can fix it.
Heavy Gear II: Would never have a keyboard without a Numpad! But the only game totally unknown that should be a classic, is "Darklands" by Microprose, from the mid 90s.
Holy crap I had forgot about Biosys. For some reason that game creeped me out when playing it. I used to play Trespasser during uni exams...I would study with a friend for a few hours then hunt some dino's....along with playing a crapload of Might and Magic 6...
Oh no it's totally creepy. There are deceased people, genetic experiments hunting you, nightmares when you sleep, and creepy statues you have to stare at after triggering hallucinations. Every space feels like a liminal space. It's a lot to handle as a kid.
My favourite unknown game: Machines, from 1999, published by Acclaim. I tried to get it working again a few times, never with much success. I now see that they released the source code in 2020, so I might give it another shot.
Some games had very good to great reviews when they were released, yet not much talked about these days.
Maybe i'm wrong about some of these. Here's a few examples:
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Sacrifice
Starlancer
Nice list.
Giants could have been a cult classic like Beyond & Evil and that game had charm, funny characters and silly missions. Sacrifice was also a nice game about souls, summoning and taking over also it had some good humor. Starlancer is a game maybe I tried and played a little bit but my memories a bit old with that one game.
I could add to the list Evolva, XS, Quarantine, Horde, Diggers, Vectorman.
You should check out Outlive, a Brazilian game from 2001 similar to StarCraft, sadly very underrated!
MEGARACE!!!!
Populous: The Beginning. Let's have it
Jesus christ im so old i actually played all of these games..
Haha well I'm with you considering these are all games I played back in the day too.
Welp... I'm feeling old now lol
Oh, man... Knights and Merchants there, in the credits... how I hated that game...!
I had long forgotten about Dark Colony wow it was great but as a young kid I wished I had kknd instead :)
I am not sure Megarace is that unknown, back then everyone who had a new CD-ROM drive had this game :-) (together with some of the American Laser Games games (erhm)).
Unfortunately for us, 'back then' was over 3 decades ago haha. There are 30 year olds today who weren't born when Megarace released.
cool stuff
Dark Colony
I recognized Dark Colony at first glance but i only watched other people play it in internet cafe (it was years bofore i got my first PC)
me thinking of playing Fallout 4 because it's popular now.
Fallout 3/New Vegas fans- "you should play these as well"
Me- there So Old tho
alternative to megarace was DethKarz
Doom and Doom 2 but this game unfortunately are legendary but retro :)
Shin Megami Tensei 1+2, Persona 1 and 2 duology, Castlevania retro games
i suggest the unique and buggy Die By The Sword
04:30 I know.
you forgott "lands of lore"
the last awesome old-school dungeon crawler
I didn't forget it, I'm listing the ones I played here. I mention 8 games, do you know how many games I didn't mention? Haha
He does look like Colin Mochrie
ill be back 😜
What is that game in the ending credits?
That's Knights & Merchants, there's a fan remake called KAM Remake.
@@GamerZakh oh thank you!
What are you doing, stepbiosys?!
Dark Colony is 1997 not 99
Yeah I misspoke, I do also say it was before Starcraft which was 1998. I edited the video, it will be cut in a couple hours.
@@GamerZakh for that tiny mistake?, please dont bother, i just noticed thats why pointed out, not cause i want a reedit or something
Also Dark Reign from that same year looks great
i had both of those games but somehow never got to play them, now i dont know where both are im assuming the place i used to live
Anyway the first few frames that game popped into my mind instead of colony
@@everx7 Ah no don't worry, I'm just using the UA-cam editor to cut that out, the video stays where it is. I had to do the same on my Daggerfall video when I accidentally said it released in the mid-80s haha. If I don't cut it, I'll never hear the end of it.
Played all of them. Name of your video is a pure lie.
Read the pinned comment.