I remember a top down game from the late '80s or very early '90s where you drive a car along a highway and try to defend yourself against other cars using different weapons and tire-slashing spikes mounted to your wheels.
You’d start inside a semi-truck, drive out of it backwards, and at the end of the level, the truck would re-appear and you have to drive into it again.

I keep trying to find this old educational game that was creepy. I don’t remember much else about it and it is frustrating to know I’ll likely never figure this out. I don’t even remember what kind of educational content it was like math or reading or what.

T-Rex Warrior for the Commodore Amiga.

Was probably my first introduction to 3D gaming, and because it was a hand-me-down I didn’t have any instructions on how to play it. It literally took my months to figure out how to move in that game, so in the meantime I just stood in place and spin around shooting at enemies until I died.

This is the one thing I actually use LLMs for: When I’m stuck trying to remember that one thing from a long time ago.

For me, the really hard one to find was a game called Return Fire. Awesome game.

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 :(

One of my earlier memories was playing a strange game I haven’t been able to find again. All I remember is: you control a car (I think it has flower decals on it?) and can drive through a desert/canyon area. You can also press a key which makes a rotor come out of the top of the car, allowing you to fly it like a helicopter.

I have no idea what the gameplay was beyond that, but I’d love to find it again.

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.

This is me with SHMUPS. Oh, sure, I can find databases of the ones that were popular, but in the early to late 2000s there were so many PC SHMUPS with mouse controls that came on demo CDs or you could get from the front page of any demo shareware website…

Now all forgotten.

Some of them I used to play a lot and want to play again, but can’t for the life of me find back.

ants.

Fore it is a ski racing game that lookslike about 2005 or 2009 type of game and has a sort of athletic/olympic winter games type of vibe.

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.

There was this game I swear was called Solaris but was not able to find. The whole thing is a model of a star system with a couple dozens of oddly-named planets and you need to “shoot units” at the planets you want to conquer. You basically have to estimate how many units you need to take it over or something.

I’ll probably never be able to find it cause I can’t even describe it so well haha

I can’t remember if it was C-64 or DOS, but there was a sidescroll game where your character was on a quest in a forest where there were tree houses. They were called the “Grund” or something. Can’t find it anywhere.

Edit: I may have found it: “Below The Root” Gotta see if I can find it abandonware somewhere and try it again.

It took me FOREVER to find, but I was determined to find my old games. I assumed they were Sega Master System games, so I started watching videos like “best master system games” and such.

Then when I finally came across them, the memories all came rushing back like it was the 80s again! It’s so frustrating but when you finally find it, it’s such a good feeling.

I’m still looking for a mobile game where I played as a necromancer in a castle fighting off the stickman armies of king Otto through spells and by flicking them into the air. It culminated with the necromancer standing upon a pile of corpses topped by the king himself. I really liked that game but it honestly could be lost media.