Re-elect JFK (1994) You’ve survived the assasination attempt and must try and solve your own attempted murder.
I put a lot of money in extra guards and did everything someone with a 1994 sensibility would think to do to throw the election. I shit on civil rights as much as I could and ramped up Vietnam as much as possible. No shocker now but…I won re-election. But never solved the assassination attempt.
You have your Planetfall (1983) and your Stationfall (1987). If it’s from the last 20 years, there are many games that might fit the description, since text adventures are considered cool again. Eg Hadean Lands takes place on a crashed ship.
Here is a list of those compilation disk games; do you recognize any? But the sci-fi games I mentioned, and a couple more whose name I cannot immediately recall, do not seem to be there.
Ascendancy – a 4x space strategy game from the late 90s. The game play was just okay, from my memory, but the artistic elements of the game – most notably the design of the aliens, spaceships, and the music – were absolutely phenomenal.
Back in the 90s, there was a game called Harry the Handsome Executive. You scooted around a cubicle-farm office in a swivel chair (you could go faster in reverse than forward) shooting enemies with a stapler and throwing free AOL disks at them. But I never played much of it.
Another one that I played the heck out of was a logic game called Sherlock. It was a computerized version of those puzzles like “The person who owns the cat lives next door to the blue house”, and could generate endless random puzzles.
I had that Sherlock one, so perhaps it was not that obscure.
Speaking of puzzle games, I asked about Return of the Obra Dinn on this forum and nobody replied, but it turns out there is an entire Steam discussion group devoted to it, so evidently I was not the only one to play it.
Shadow President, a political simulation which starts in 1991, with the Iraqis invading Kuwait. You are the US President and your job is to get re-elected in 1992.
I was in my “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” phase so I created Libertopia - slashed taxes, cut the hell out of govt spending, increased infrastructure spending*. The economy started booming but people were pissed about losing their social security, so I usually ended up getting assassinated. I didn’t have much of an interest in playing the Iraqi storyline, so I kind of ignored it, which I’m sure didn’t help.
*Yeah, I know - not very Libertarian. But I had to do something with the money, so I did what I could.
My sister and I used to play the crap out of Rambo and Penguin Land on the Master System. Loved those games so much. But it’s not like the Master System brought a lot of friends to our house, nawmean?
I had Rambo and played the Rambo 3 light gun game …. I miss the 3d glasses I for the master system had … it was the only time 3d worked because of my eye sight ……
My first thought was the old arcade games “Leprechaun” and “Make Trax”…but they have wiki pages, and I didn’t make them, so someone else must have played them.
Here’s a console one: Secret of Evermore, for the SNES. It’s a weird case, because I know lots of people must have played it–it was a SquareSoft release on a popular console, and it got good (though not stellar) ratings. I’ve just never met anyone else who played it, or remembers it. Everyone just assumes I’m talking about Secret of Mana when I mention it. (It has similar mechanics to SoM, but a much more oddball story, with a lot of quirky humor that appealed to me.)
My first thought is Strike Squad (1993). Doesn’t even get a Wikipedia page, though the prequel I’ve never played gets one. I enjoyed it for a bit, then some computer upgrade or another made it so I could never get it running again.
It’s not super rare, but Daggerfall isn’t as well known as its sequels as Skyrim especially was mega popular. So among that cohort it’s rare.
I’ve played the Secret of Evermore. I don’t think I ever finished it though, got to the medieval world maybe. It got a bad rep for not being Secret of Mana, and it’s not as good, but I liked the uniqueness of the alchemy-based magic. I also enjoyed Seiken Densetsu 3/“Secret of Mana 2,” though my first attempt at a playthrough didn’t work as I neglected to get a healing character.