Hazily Remembered Games With Only the Vaguest Notion of What They Were

This will be a tough one. Back in the early 2000s when I had a weak computer and not a lot of money I made my rounds among the free games the internet had to offer at the time. There was one specific RPG/MMO game that I can't remember the name of. It was released around the same time period as games like Runescape and Eternal Lands, Anarchy Online, Everquest etc.

Here's all the details I can remember.

1. It was a 3d multiplayer fantasy RPG, I'd hesitate to call it an "MMO" but it had instancing and support for at least a few dozen players, I have no idea what the server cap was.
2. The place you start out in is a walled town, a pretty standard fantasy stone fort kinda thing. There was a temple to the north, a mountain range and mine to the west and a river/ruined city to the east.
3. The combat was "real time turn based". Characters locked in combat would expend action points at a set rate based on your stats and what weapon you were using. There was no player input once combat started. The only thing I can remember about this is that you had a red and blue bar that ticked down as actions were performed.
4. You could make characters of all the usual fantasy races, humans, elves, orcs, gnomes etc.
5. There was a crafting system, of which I only tried out the smithing stuff. I mined copper from the tunnels in the west and managed to craft a few basic bits. But I gave up on it because mining was incredibly low yield and I learned that all high-skill crafting is done by gnome mages because they have a racial bonus to smithing and a spell that ups their smithing skill by tens or hundreds of points. High level crafting without these spells is essentially impossible.
6. Everything on your character could be "insured" against loss when you die, however the number or ratio of equipment items you insured impacted your XP gain somehow.
7. There was one early quest where an NPC standing far north of the town asked you to find a stone boulder from the mine and lug it all the way over to him, which took ages with a heavily burdened character.
8. North of the boulder NPC was "here be dragons" land with large balrogs wandering the landscape.
9. In the ruins I mentioned earlier there was a vampire bard who would teach you music skills if you let him drink your blood.
10. The furthest I ever got from the starting town was the next trade/quest hub up way to the east over hills and rivers. It was a town with wooden buildings and one of the quests involved a woman with a cursed ring.

It was very similar to this game from 2004 but I don't believe it's the same one.

Rubies of Eventide maybe?

Yeah that's it! Wow nice detective work. I vaguely remembered that I found RoE through reading the list of games on MMORPG.com (the list was a lot shorter back then). Now that I know the name I can find the game's page on that website but they appear to have removed it from the list of games as it is now defunct.

I played for a couple of months not long before it was shut down. All I really remember is the insurance system and then grinding up a lot of skins & money to get some spiffy white leather armor made for my paladin. There wasn't too much to do at the time so we'd often group up and go after some dungeon or ruined town that had a lot of... trolls, I think?... in it; they were decent XP and dropped teeth that were worth money.

I have a game that I've been trying to remember the name of... You control a sci-fi looking jet/fighter, each level is a mission which quite often ends with you having to fly into the back of the mothership. Something that stands out is that you can upgrade your fighter by collecting gems (?) of different shapes and colours. Depending what order you collect them in your get different buffs. For example, one buff was extra boosters at the end of your wings. I think that was a complicated one; if you got something like 'red pyramid, yellow cube, red pyramid' four times you ended up with two extra boosters on either side of your jet.

I'll put everything else I can think of in spoilers:

Spoiler:

So this was a game I played on PC, possibly Windows 95 or 98. I played it about twenty years ago I'd say, but I got it second hand so I don't know when it was released. I think the cover was dark navy, possibly with a red star featuring prominently... I want to say the name is like 'Star something 2000'... but I'm probably wrong on that.

Controls were basic enough, you had 3D direction plus blasters, I think there were also boosters and maybe even missiles?

Early missions were straightforward and took place over what could be cities. Later missions were around enemy bases, you fought tanks etc and I think took out rockets on launch pads...

I think that's everything I can remember; let me know if you've any ideas!

Was it 2d or 3d? It doesn't seem to be Tyrian 2000.

AUs_TBirD wrote:

Was it 2d or 3d? It doesn't seem to be Tyrian 2000.

It was 3D; Polygons for days from what I remember. I can see why you thought of Tyrian though.

Stevintendo wrote:
AUs_TBirD wrote:

Was it 2d or 3d? It doesn't seem to be Tyrian 2000.

It was 3D; Polygons for days from what I remember. I can see why you thought of Tyrian though.

Was it Fury3 or Terminal Velocity? I recall go into something at the end of the levels to blow something up.

CatPhoenix wrote:
Stevintendo wrote:
AUs_TBirD wrote:

Was it 2d or 3d? It doesn't seem to be Tyrian 2000.

It was 3D; Polygons for days from what I remember. I can see why you thought of Tyrian though.

Was it Fury3 or Terminal Velocity? I recall go into something at the end of the levels to blow something up.

You're very close I'd say. I feel like the graphics of Terminal Velocity are better than the game I'm thinking of if that helps.

So at the end of some levels you fly back to your mothership and dock with it by flying into a black rectangle on the back of it. Thee mothership is at a high altitude and just does laps of the area.

Stevintendo wrote:
CatPhoenix wrote:
Stevintendo wrote:
AUs_TBirD wrote:

Was it 2d or 3d? It doesn't seem to be Tyrian 2000.

It was 3D; Polygons for days from what I remember. I can see why you thought of Tyrian though.

Was it Fury3 or Terminal Velocity? I recall go into something at the end of the levels to blow something up.

You're very close I'd say. I feel like the graphics of Terminal Velocity are better than the game I'm thinking of if that helps.

So at the end of some levels you fly back to your mothership and dock with it by flying into a black rectangle on the back of it. Thee mothership is at a high altitude and just does laps of the area.

Found it! Starfighter 3000

That's it! Thank you Chairman_Mao! Did you play it?

Wow, that video... I don't know where to start! I remember that even back then I noticed that the intro video was completely disconnected from the actual gameplay. For example, the ships are all different. I might look up this LP if I have the time, brings back lots of memories.

Stevintendo wrote:

That's it! Thank you Chairman_Mao! Did you play it?

Wow, that video... I don't know where to start! I remember that even back then I noticed that the intro video was completely disconnected from the actual gameplay. For example, the ships are all different. I might look up this LP if I have the time, brings back lots of memories.

Never even heard of it, I'm sorry to say. It actually looks quite fun for its time.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Never even heard of it, I'm sorry to say. It actually looks quite fun for its time.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun with it. It's a game that I played a lot of at one stage. I only ended up with it because a neighbour of my parents had it and saw I was enjoying playing it one time so he gave it to me. Pretty cool!

Mermaidpirate wrote:

A weird blobby letter collection game of some kind, there was platforming involved (or maybe it was typing?) and I remember it having a lot of stages, one had a sort of South American pueblo kind of backdrop. Others w more trees or castles.

Whatever that pueblo game was is probably lost in the mists of time. I tried searching for images and came up empty, except for Word Rescue that gave a memory tingle but I don't think it's it.

I had to come back here because a friend just mentioned playing Word Rescue back in the day and it triggered my brain enough to look it up on YouTube and sure enough, that was the one all this time.

Watching it and getting the feeling of some stuff in it coming back and other bits not being familiar was so weird. Brains and feelings are weird. I used the word 'blobby' above, and that's my mind conjuring when you put a bucket of slime on an enemy.

The game didn't hold up to how cool it seemed at the time, a kid's platformer combined with a tedious game of memory, lol.

But I'm sure it's the the first and pretty much only reason I know how to spell pueblo, it was right there on the screen as one of the later area names. I've just seen on Wikipedia that that style of house was in North America and Puebloans are Native Americans, so I stand corrected on that. (I never did play a Carmen Sandiego game, maybe I wouldn't have the geography mixed up if I did. :P)

I have been trying to find any info on a game I used to play, I am pretty sure it was DOS but I was pretty young so I had very little idea of what any of that meant. I remember that you were in some sort of house that had a hot tub in it, and they used Chopin's "Funeral March" for something, but not much more than that. This would have been late 80's early 90's. It feels like it was either a haunted house or just a very creepy house. I know that isn't much to go off of but I have my fingers crossed. Thanks!

Alone in the Dark?

That doesn't look quite right, but thanks for trying.

Hugo’s House of Horrors?

Last half of darkness looks very close. The graphics are very much what I remember them being like.

bubblesmcfly wrote:

Last half of darkness looks very close. The graphics are very much what I remember them being like.

There's a few games in the series, apparently, and every time you die the funeral march plays.

IMAGE(https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/l/last-half-of-darkness-16u/last-half-of-darkness_16.png)

Is this the hot tub maybe?

Arise, thread!

My wife is trying to find a game she barely remembers, so I thought maybe the GWJ Brain Trust could help. It's a game that came on a 3.5 floppy disk. She played it in the early 90s. There was a character named Cheetah who was human. She thinks the game might have been set in the past. She mentioned prehistoric times, but she's not sure about that.

So, anyone knows what game she's talking about?

I had that with Swords & Serpents from the intellivision

There is a subreddit called Tip of My Joystick that helps people identify games

IUMogg wrote:

There is a subreddit called Tip of My Joystick that helps people identify games

Sounds like the name of a terrible porn

Darkhaund wrote:

I had that with Swords & Serpents from the intellivision

She says it's not Swords & Serpents, but thank you!

IUMogg wrote:

There is a subreddit called Tip of My Joystick that helps people identify games

Apparently, she already knew about that subreddit, but still no answer. Thank you, though!

Is Cheetah a regular woman or an anthropomorphic cheetah?

Does she know what the gameplay was like? Side scroller, point and click adventure, etc?

Cheetah is a regular woman, and my wife does not remember the gameplay.