What niche media do you enjoy?

[ReeseJamPiece]

What sort of niche media do you guys enjoy? personally, I'm into old school PC, Wii and PS2 games. (Neverwinter Nights 1+2, Fallout New Vegas, Metro 2033, Swat 4, Fable, Endless Ocean, Deadly Creatures, Mario Galaxy, WoW, Warcraft III, GTA San Andreas, Black, Guitar Hero, RE4, Doom, Quake III, Unreal Tournament 99 etc)

Honestly can't get enough of those games. But what sort of niche things do you guys enjoy? I'm curious as to what you all enjoy. (Pics below are Warcraft III, Fallout: New Vegas and Neverwinter: Nights)

 

[Taurus Daggerknight]

Neverwinter Nights 2 for the win! You play on any of the PW's these days?

 

As far as old-school niche' games go, Age of Empires 2 is one of my favorites, particularly with the new Definitive Edition stuff. Icewind Dale is another favorite. 

 

Thief: The Dark Project, Thief 2: The Metal Age, and System Shock 2 as well!

[ReeseJamPiece]

11 minutes ago, Taurus Daggerknight said:

Neverwinter Nights 2 for the win! You play on any of the PW's these days?

I gave up on the game a while ago, my PC started breaking down too and I had to get most of my games on it wiped off. I still enjoy it of course, I'm planning on buying the definitive on PS4 so I can play it portable using that PS Vita exploit.

[Doominator2]

If were talking games, then pretty much any old school cRPG, Ultima 7, Daggerfall, Morrowind and anything made by Blackisle.

[Asking4Id]

They are still making and uploading Quake 3 multiplayer maps, if the latest ones from December 2019 tell me anything. Quake 3 is pretty sweet.

[Capellan]

New Vegas isn't even ten years old yet.  That's not old school!

 

I play Doom/Doom 2.  Surprise! :)

 

 

[ReeseJamPiece]

12 minutes ago, Capellan said:

New Vegas isn't even ten years old yet.  That's not old school!

To me a month is a lifetime, so maybe I outstretched the term 'old school'...

[Artman2004]

AliensRL

[haruko haruhara]

I mostly play first person shooters like most of ids games an other games by John

An 3d realms games like duke nukem and blood redneck rampage an shadow warrior an so much more from them 

Pretty much old fps games of anything tbh

[Solmyr]

Dwarf Fortress, an endless source of insanity.

 

 

[Avoozl]

I still enjoy Project Eden which is an urban exploration game with puzzle elements from 2001, it was made by the people who created the first Tomb Raider game. The graphics look quite dated but the areas are supposed to be run down and in disrepair, I feel the old graphics really add to the games charm.

Edited February 19, 2020 by Avoozl

[Boaby Kenobi]

Regarding games, I love big box PC games and I have quite a few of them but I am now looking at FPS games from the 90s only as I could easily spend many hours a day on auction sites like eBay obsessing over boxes so I decided to focus exclusively on sprite-based FPS games from the 90s. I was even thinking recently of just giving up on them all and focusing on Doom stuff only as that's the game series I am most fond of but I don't know yet.

I also have some Metal Gear stuff that I was planning on adding a couple of more things to but I was thinking of getting rid of that stuff too.

 

 

 

 

 

[SuperCupcakeTactics]

^ Awesome collection!

 

I have an odd fascination with turn-based party-based dungeon crawling RPGs such as Wizardry 8 despite hardly ever playing any of those kinds of games. I think of Doom as a dungeon crawler too so I guess I just want a more methodical, tactical, and interactive experience which shows sometimes in my maps too. I like module/tracker music so I have XMPlay set up with music from the Mod Archive. I also like late 90s anime looking stuff like PC-98 graphics and the general expressive art style/composition of that time. Can you believe it that there's a Japanese 1994 FPS dungeon crawler called Crime Crackers? What a peculiar discovery.

Spoiler

 

 

SWAT 4 and WoW were indeed great games.

Edited February 19, 2020 by SuperCupcakeTactics

[Boaby Kenobi]

I also enjoy foreign language movies, specifically French. English is my native tongue so obviously if you're from another part of the world it wont be foreign to you but it is for me.

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1029234/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4954522/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112682/?ref_=tt_sims_tt

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235166/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450188/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053459/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1242422/

[Gez]

38 minutes ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112682/?ref_=tt_sims_tt

A personal favorite.

 

I generally don't care for movies, this is one of the exceptions.

[taufan99]

I'm just going to be honest, my interest towards niche media falls more on the digital side, as I grew up with only PS2 (I did play PSX, but that belonged to one of my cousins, and my mom used to have a Famiclone before I was 5) and not enough retro stuff. Another thing to contribute to this is my financial status. Not to mention that I am from a third-world country.

Most of the time, the niche media I get my hands on is by means with rather questionable legality. I have, however, recently been aware that the creators matter as well. Hopefully I can purchase niche media from the creators directly someday.

[chungy]

13 hours ago, ReeseJamPiece said:

I'm into old school PC, Wii and PS2 games.

Wii and PS2 can be considered old school?

 

Is this real? Am I so out of touch..... no. It's the children who are wrong.

[Redneckerz]

I like way too many things, and though i have yet to visit one of them, i love the demoscene. Pushing limits on limited machines similar to the 64 KB Challenge.

Here is a visual scene that includes environment, synchronization and music all in 4 kilobytes:

 

 

This also extends to Games. Back when Doom 3's Stencil Shadowing was an impressive feat, .kkrieger existed, doing the very same thing in just a mere 96 kilobytes:
 

 

Wanna know more about the Demoscene? Moleman 2: The Art of the Algorithms is a golden standard documentary with various figures of the scene. It describes the history of the platforms and provides a fantastic introduction to a hidden artform unknown to most of daily society. Save yourself the following 100 minutes for this!
 

 

[MFG38]

I too am quite into retro games, especially those on the PC. You could call me a collector of sorts of old PC games.

 

My latest find was SiN Episodes: Emergence at a thrift store somewhat recently. It was a game I'd had my eye on for a while, so naturally, I shelled out some cash and purchased it. My specific copy also comes bundled with the original SiN, which is a plus. And there it sits on the shelf, waiting to be ripped into an ISO file and run in a WinXP VM.

[taufan99]

41 minutes ago, chungy said:

Wii and PS2 can be considered old school?

Well, PS2 was released in 2000, so yeah it sorta is.

Wii, not so much, as it was released in 2006.

[hybridial]

I feel like everything I'm into and maybe everything I was ever into was always pretty niche. 

 

For games, I have largely moved over to just having an interest in retro style for the most part. I once had a big collection of Xbox, Gamecube and PS2 games and the consoles, I sold everything because I was in a position where I really had to at the time. I've had thoughts of maybe getting some of that again but in terms of practically, cost, the space I'd need and the need for a CRT TV specifically for them, I don't think I should do it. So I'm limited to what's on the PC. But hey, one of my favourite Xbox games is getting a PC port, I made a whole topic on that. Otherwise I like the Baldur's Gate series, Thief, Shadowrun, Classic Fallout, none of that 3D shit (disclaimer, New Vegas was good but I can't play it anymore, its just too ugly), and new retrowave titles like Blazing Chrome, Valfaris, Amid Evil, Dusk etc. 

 

On movies, I enjoy some classic horror, sci fi, action and the odd 80s B movie. Nightbreed, Angel Heart, Leon, Exorcist III Legion, John Carpenter's work, etc. Nothing super obscure but you'd still call them niche. I also quite enjoyed watching the movies Dario Argento made throughout the 70s and 80s. 

 

For anime/Manga, well, one could say that's already somewhat of a niche thing to be into for someone outside of Japan, but I think even by that standard my tastes are niche. Niche within Niche, Niche-ception you might say. I'll just say I love Devilman, which was originally a 1973 manga, it had a couple of movies around 1990 which were my introduction to it and are awesome. A sequel manga which did the gender swap thing happened in 1998 and also had an anime series which has been an obsession of mine for over 15 years. Netflix had a new Devilman series made to commemorate the franchise's 35th anniversary and that was pretty successful. Whilst I didn't find it to be as strong as the prior material it was still good, brought some attention back to the series and it helped get HD remasters done for them. 

 

For music, well established in other threads, I like progressive metal, with folk, doom, classic, melodeath or spacey feel all quite welcome. 

 

Lately I've been getting into table top role playing, and whilst D&D has been the main game I wanted to run something different, and I got a game called Blades in the Dark, and its been very interesting so far. The game is in concept based very heavily on the style of setting used in games like the Thief series and Dishonoured. Its designed around playing a gang, and committing crimes and such. But there's an additional twist in the form of an option being to play as a cult, which opens up for Lovecraftian elements to creep in. 

 

And for books, I tend to really like reading pulp stuff I can find that was printed in the 70s to 90s period. I mainly do just read genre fiction. My favourite series as a whole is Harry Turtledove's Tosev Timeline, a series of 8 books set in an alternate history starting in World War 2 where the Earth is invaded by Imperialistic alien Lizards. It's an immense work, I read it all through again a year ago or so and it holds up.

 

 

 

[ReeseJamPiece]

5 hours ago, chungy said:

Wii and PS2 can be considered old school?

 

Is this real? Am I so out of touch..... no. It's the children who are wrong.

The Wii came out in 2006 and the PS2 is nearly 20 years old now, sadly it is old school now...

[seed]

There's not a lot of media I enjoy compared to others, but most of it tends to be regarded as niche, such as retro/old school shooters, extreme or "unpopular" music - well established in other topics - , and for art, the morbid/grotesque kind. For movies, it just depends on capturing my attention, as a result, it can be both "mainstream" - superhero movies for instance - , or niche, especially the older the said movies are, although they were usually popular during their time, such as Evil Dead, Exorcist, and so on.

[snapshot]

Can modding video games be considered "media" or even a "niche"? probably far from it but that's the one I'm into, I like testing out mods for different games, and even make my own occasionally, sometimes I don't even like the game itself yet I still like to mess around with the mods available for it.

 

Everything else I like I feel is fairly popular so that's about it.

[Eurisko]

I LOVE GamesMaster. Its video game TV show that ran in the UK from '92-98. It has a cult following to this day.

It captured the golden age of gaming.

For those who have no idea what I'm on about, Here's the final episode in its entirety.