Ok maybe Lemmy can help me. Does anyone remember a cartoon that used a key. A magic key. To draw a door and open to a new dimension? I have been looking for this show for decades and I can’t remember it. It had like care bare characters and children.
Final Fantasy Unlimited ?
I remember that in Beetlejuice, and there was a cartoon version of that.
A magic key to draw a door? It’s not the kid with the purple crayon cartoon?
No. Much older. Like lat 80’s early 90’s. I remember a friendly funny dragon with the characters.
I only know Pans Labyrinth but it’s certainly not a comic
Nah. Think lte 80’s and early 90’s. I wonder if I dreamed this shit up.
Syndicate, by bullfrog
R.I.P. Bullfrog…
The Dungeon Keeper games will forever be among my top 10.
Magic Carpet and Genewars were such weird games.
That was my favorite game as a kid. Too bad the only remake is a stupid FPS.
Yeah the remake totally misunderstood what the game was about.
‘Satellite Reign’ is the spiritual successor, released in 2015 and started by the producer and lead programmer for ‘Syndicate Wars’.
/cc @TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
I’ll check it out, thanks.
I played it for couple of hours and it seems pretty good. Thank you again.
I loved that game. Only for to play for a few weeks in Germany back in 1995.
Ran into it again years later somewhere and finally made it much further through the missions. Great game.
I never beat the final mission.
They got frakin’ hard! Especially the mechanics of the trains and when the baddies started shooting further. Tracking where the action was got tough when you had to split the team.
Yeah I had figure I out a strategy using the persuedatron, where it would get stronger the more people you persueded. If you started with civilians and got a bunch, you could then do security guards, then the police, then other syndicate agents. I still think this is the only way to beat that final level, but there are nothing but agents on that level.
For me it was two Mac games.
Dinopark Tycoon (I went back to play it and I somehow did worse than my elementary school self, loool)
The other game I never found but it was on the same computer. It was a point and click puzzler where you played a character that looks very similar to the character in the modern game Braid. You start, stranded on a beach and worked your way inland. It had a creepy vibe due to the aesthetics.
I’ve found LLMs quite good for identifying things like this sometimes … I also know how frustrating it is to remember and not be able to find the games!
I used to have this symbian game that had a small dragon as the main character and accidentally deleted it from the phone it was on. Never found it again :(
There’s a game on the school computers in the late 90s where you choose between 3 numbers for how far you move, you are racing to the bottom of the screen, and some shortcut squares let you drop down.
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.
Miner VGA, I still fire it up every now and then.
May the hair on your toes never fall off
It’s Freddy fish
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.
Chex Quest? I remember the cereal had a Doom reskin and it scared me too much. I feel like if they had just changed the worldspace default color from black to white it would’ve been less scary.
Bad Toys?
Edit: You know what I don’t think this was what I’m thinking about BUT I did play this and may be mixing the memory with another shooter in the same collection.
It was zool and commander keen for me. Hard to describe and find the answer on Google for odd candy mountain game and game with trees with weird ass eyes. Anyways, found it eventually lol
I grew up playing a very specific Minecraft trial world. You spawn on a beach with a single tree. Immediately inland was a large plains biome, but about 100 blocks to the side was an oak forest. In there (still visible from spawn), was a single large hill with a small cave in it which poked though it and made for a good base.
I am rather confident it was a Minecraft trial edition world. I believe I reset that map several times over before discovering how to make the trial last forever. However the trial seed on the wiki does not match for any game version. (It does match a different world I remember playing at least.)
I’ve probably spent about 10 hours over the last couple years periodically going on the hunt for it, and at this point I’ll give out a small bounty for information.
what platform? pc/ console?
I know pcgamer had a demo on pc but not sure if that sounds like your description
It was PC. I’ve tried the PC gamer demo and the “North Carolina” seed for all probable game versions (1.3 to 1.6), and the base world generation just doesn’t match. There is a hill nearby which could be close, but the biomes are all wrong.
There is a chance, albeit not very high, that it was a cracked version of the game using a seed I simply forgot with time, but it would be quite difficult to brute force that since I would then need to figure out both the version and seed. Given I am fairly certain I generated the same world a few times, it’s possible I might be able to guess it.
I once played a first-person point-and-click adventure game featuring a player character who is a cyborg. I don’t remember much about the game, but I do recall quite explicitly that it had a Hard Rock Cafe in the game. Haven’t had any luck finding it.
For me it was a golf game but it was probably ASCII only, played on a green monitor, sometime in the late 70s. I loved that game. Either that or my memory is playing tricks with me.
Is it Focal Golf?
Would look something like this, but… green, of course.


You could also check out this post on Atari Archive, this video by them too, and this collection of software you could search through using Ctrl + F and then “Golf”. There’s a lot of possible matches there.
There doesn’t really seem to be a lot of actual playable options or even recordings of a lot of them, though.
Awesome thanks. I don’t think it’s Focal. It was a computer my friend’s dad brought home from work and I don’t think it was on tape.
There’s a non-zero chance it was a game someone he worked with just made. My dad used to work with a guy that would program playable text based games during his down time (this was in the 90s), he ultimately went on to work at an actual game company from what I remember.
3d third person shooter with a female protagonist. Late 90 or early 2000s. Think something like Tomb Raider, but I am pretty sure it was not Tomb Raider. I don’t remember much, aside from the tutorial level being in some kind of Portal chamber / Aperture Science like sterile tiled floor and walls with various lights. If I remember correctly, the first real level was in an old big multi store warehouse or club house.
After having looked for this game for two decades and asked here, I realized perhaps I should ask ChatGPT. I gave it the same description and it came up with Oni (2001). And I am pretty sure that’s it!
This is my guess as well. I still remember the tutorial.
Fear Effect maybe?
Ah, that one cutscene in Fear Effect 2 jumpstarted my puberty.
Stealth game? There was a nice PS2 stealth/hacking fame with a female protagonist
I don’t recall stealth, but I also only watched someone else play it for an hour or so.
What platform? PC, Playstation?
PC
It sounds like Perfect Dark, but that didn’t get a PC port until recently.
Sounds like Oni. https://www.mobygames.com/game/3242/oni/
Mine was a flash game, I think on miniclip. Sort of like a tower defense game but it also had a point and shoot cannon you’d use. Sort of near future kind of vibe. I think it had a green background due to being on a field. Top down. Main cannon was a big white one and you would build auto turrets to help defend.










