Your Guilty Treasure?

I don't know how popular this arcade game was pre-internet, but I have a fondness for the 1990 Aliens arcade game by Konami that I played every Sunday after church. I particularly enjoyed how the aliens burned when using the flamethrower and how it featured set pieces from the movie. It was one of the first roms I downloaded when I discovered MAME because it was never ported. In hindsight, the game is pretty basic as it's pretty much the last level of any Contra game, plus it was overshadowed by the Alien vs Predator game that had better gameplay.

Entered this thread to say Team Buddies. Was such a cool concept, haven't really seen anything like it since then.

I played a lot of Hohokum. I understand why it was never incredibly popular, but it's a very cool game nonetheless.

@aera: ROLLCAGE STAGE 2 was so good, but the puzzle mode drove (no pun intended) me totally nuts. I love that game! I thought it was well known tbh.

I had to try really hard, and these two weird games came to mind.

One is "UFOs" (also known as GNAP) and it was a point and click adventure that was weird and funny for my 12-year brain at the time. The story involves Gnap (the alien) crashing down on earth and going through 5 stages to repair its ship. It befriends a platypus along the way. The animation and humor is something out of the likes of the Ren and Stimpy show and similar toon shows. I have a really weird memory stuck in my brain related to this game. Every time GNAP or Platypus grabs a key item, there's a soundbite that changes according to the level. On the second level, set in an old motorcycle bar, the soundbyte is basically a heavy metal riff.

The other one is "ArA NGC 6397" (yes, that's the name), a weird experiment with 3 levels, the first and the last being an on-rails shooter, and the middle chapter being a point-and-click adventure where the main character has to escape a prison facility and retrieve his suit and gun.

Again, I have this weird memory stuck in my brain, when the main character retrieves his spacesuit in chapter 2, he says in the most John McLane voice possible... "I feel like Cinderella.... Dressed to Kill".|

I actually had a lot of fun with Carnage Heart.

Carnage Heart(; i.e. the mecha-building, turn-based strategy game, where the player takes the role of a commander in a war fought by robots. they research and produce The robots, called Overkill Engines (OKEs), are never directly controlled in battle; they are programmed beforehand to behave in a certain way under certain conditions using a flow-diagram system.

This IS a game that should come back utilizing the more modern 'modular programming" with blocks like Scratch or Blocky! The programming the game does use even for mid-1990s is actually good and a bit like that but it lack the two panels a person might see today that demonstrates the code.

I'd have to go with Paragon Software's "The Punisher" from 1990 for MS/PC DOS. I remember buying it as part of a 3 pack which included Dr Doom's Revenge and X-Men. None of the games were particularly good though the VGA graphics at the time were impressive. They all came with their own introductory comic book which was pretty cool. At the time I didn't really know anything about X-Men or the Punisher, but was into Spider-man hence why I bought the thing in the first place.

Anyway, after discovering the two side-scrollers really sucked, I tried out the Punisher game. It took a while to get into since the driving and scuba sections were terrible. I soon realized I could skip both entirely which made the experience so much better. What really got me into the game was the bread and butter top-down on foot shooting section. It had some cool clockwork interactivity like a really basic immersive sim and top down ultra-violent shooter action like you would see much later in games like Hotline Miami. The in-game sound was bad and incredibly grating. Also, it had this odd effect where it would very briefly pause everything the game was doing until the sound completed. Pro-tip use the silenced pistol whenever possible. Visually it was totally fine. The character portraits when searching bodies or talking were cool.

This game definitely wasn't great, but I really did enjoy it with quite a few caveats.

Edit: Found an image of the original box

My hidden treasure is the second Firaxis game in this thread! I love Sid Meier's SimGolf! Somehow they got to collaborate with EA's Maxis at the time to build this game. Sadly you can't really find the game anywhere anymore and it seems stuck within EA's bowels.

I'm not a golf fan by any means, but I really enjoyed the simplicity of designing golf courses and tweaking them over and over so the sims of all skills can enjoy them. I think the system is quite elegant and I always love a good isometric game with sprites.

You can even watch @Ryan play and interview Sid Meier.

PS2 favorite of mine, Eternal Ring.

@tzarscream said:

This game rules, it's such a bizarre concept, I love it.

Wow, I've never even heard of that one!

My guilty treasure is Pocket Bomberman -- a single-player 2D platformer for gameboy color, I still occasionally listen to a rip of the soundtrack.

@silentman0: I loved that game! You are not alone!

Robot Alchemic Drive for PS2

amazing game, would love to see a remake or improved next gen version where they stylize the graphics to look more like 1960s kaiju movies or other era of kaiju.

https://www.giantbomb.com/robot-alchemic-drive/3030-18060/

I've been thinking about this and I finally have mine!

DreamWeb !

This is a game I actually played and beat and have a decent memory of the initial levels. I recall being super young when I asked my parents to get it for me at COSTCO and was terrified the cashier would look at the big Mature rating on the box and tell my parents they can't get it for me.

Robowarrior, a weird action/puzzle game for the NES. I hardly ever hear anyone talk about it, but I played a stupid amount of it growing up.

You have to bomb your way through the obstacles in a level to get to the exit. Bombs are a limited resource that you can replenish by defeating enemies or finding them on the map.

Every few levels there's a boss fight. You can find an impressive amount of power-ups and other tools to help you through. Some of these are random rewards from destroying obstacles, and some are always in the same place. There are secret passages scattered throughout each level that can act as shortcuts or might give you what you more resources.

It's something I haven't seen done since.

Lots of killer guilty treasures in this thread, and some stuff I haven't heard of!

I'm defining guilty pleasure as a game I've played a lot of, that I feel like I know a lot about, and that's under the radar enough that I've never actually met another person who played the game.

For me, that is indisputably Freedom Fighters. I first played it on GameCube, still have my disc for the PC version, and now I'm working through the Steam release.

I just think it did squad tactics so well, in an era where squad games were trying all kinds of different things. Around that same time, maybe 1 or 2 years later, there were games like Battalion Wars that made it just a little too messy (though that game is somewhere on my guilty treasures top 20). Or you had games like Star Wars: Republic Commando, which had much more directed and segmented squad tactics (bomb guy goes to bomb points on the map, hacker guy goes to hacker points, etc.). Not to dunk on Republic Commando, but it didn't do squad tactics with quite the same liberty as Freedom Fighters.

Freedom Fighters set up a lot of open spaces for you to get on a high platform and direct your troops to different cover points, make flanking maneuvers, or rush an enemy point full force. On higher difficulties you really had to utilize your squads since you died in a couple of hits. There were also cool interconnected maps where you'd blow up train tracks or a helipad on one part of the level, then take the sewers to another part of the level where suddenly there were no more helicopters or reinforcements. Obviously, it suffers from the limitations of 2003 but I think a modern iteration of that concept would be so good.

It's an IO game so they're probably knee deep in Hitman stuff at the moment. I do remember hearing something about the Freedom Fighters rights changing hands somewhere when IO became an independent shop, but I've lost track of it.

Anyway, if that ends up being somebody's guilty treasure on the show I will be very delighted.

Mine would definitely be Who Framed Roger Rabbit? for the NES. I played that game so much as a kid and could never beat it. My mom hated it because I would get to the end fight and have no idea what to do and just end up crying. I didn't know the mechanic of spamming the punch button to knock out Doom. I knocked him off as a kid after about a half hour but could never figure out that you could grab the dip sprayer from the truck to finish it. I beat the game after about 20 years thanks to looking it up.

Gosh, I don't feel like any game that I love is obscure at all. Is Ristar obscure? Or Rocket Knight Adventures? How about Beyond Oasis? Landstalker is probably the most obscure game that I've played and adored, and I never even beat it so I'm not any sort of an expert on it.

It's probably Gargoyle's Quest for me, the Ghost 'n Goblins spinoff on Game Boy. I remember going on vacation, long car rides to France, my screen only illuminated by the street lanterns (yes like that one comic), trying to guide Firebrand though an action RPG the likes of which I had never seen before.

The music is super haunting, the protagonist is very cool, and the combination of side scrolling dungeon crawling with top-down world map and town traversal just hit all the right buttons for kid-Sunie.

This and StarTropics are my childhood, but I think StarTropics is better known.