Mine is Lady Sia for GBA. It’s just a platformer but I just love it played and completed more 20 times. Will probably speedrun it in future.
atomic runner on the Sega Genesis is pretty neat
Solomon’s Key (NES)
Finally beat it last year after trying for 35 years. Such a good game. It’s one of my favorite games of all time. Action platform puzzle game. It has two endings, and there is zero chance you’ll get the good ending without a guide. Not to beat each puzzle room, but to find all the hidden items. You see, if you miss one, all the ones after that don’t appear! So hunting for them naturally is nearly impossible. It also has a secret continue mechanic, too, without which the game is also pretty much impossible.
Gorillas.bas
Yes! And I updated the BASIC code to add cheats. I thought I was quite the leet haxor. 😆 Edit: I accidentally a letter.
Depends on how you’re defining “obscure” and “retro”.
If by “retro” you mean SNES, Genesis, NES etc… the game I was super into for a time was Xevious. A pretty simple top-down space shooter/bomber that for some reason I remember getting absolutely obsessed with completing. It wasn’t even a particularly good game. It was repetitive, and when you DID reach the end it just started all over again. But for some reason I played the absolute shit out of it.
If you move “retro” up to the PS1 era, my favourite seemingly forgotten games of all time are the Colony Wars series (Colony Wars, Colony Wars: Vengeance, Colony Wars: Red Sun) Great story lines and a super fun conceit where in the second game, you’re playing as the now-defeated enemy of the first game, rebuilding after their loss.
I put a lot of quarters into Xevious in high school. Way too many.
Disney Princess is a very underrated gba game and that’s the hill I will die on.
Is The Last Blade obscure or just old?