No one wants to start this one out? Fine, I'll go.
Superman. Because I know the REAL Superman. And compared to what you think you know about Superman, we may as well be talking about two seperated individuals.

Really really old Batman villains. I had a collection with the first few issues of Detective Comics post #27, and I fell in love with those creeps. Doctor Death is my fave, followed closely by The Monk! The original Clayface is a ruler, too.
I actually even made a sweet Monk custom action figure, because my corniness knows no boundaries.

There once was a Playstation game called Tomba 2. I loved it. I was young and broke at the time, so I rented it every single weekend. Oh, man. I could not stop playing that game.

Then the rental place stopped carrying it when I was one item away from the final boss. I never did finish that game. *Nerd-tears*

River City Ransom on the NES. Best beat-'em-up ever, best co-op game ever. Every now and again, I will run or walk just like the characters in the game. When I see someone get knocked down, I imagine them saying "Barf" before turning into a bouncing coin that your dick of a friend will try to collect before you.

I didn't think this was obscure. I like to assume everyone likes what I like, but I guess not everyone is a fan of Spider-Man villain, Stegron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stegron

I can't see why. He was created by Len Wein. I mean, that guy created Swamp Thing and Wolverine. So obviously Stegron has to awesome.

The Lizard has been in almost all the cartoons and Curt Connors is in the Movie, so where's Vincent Stegron? He's like the Lizard, but more powerful and with stegosaurus like plates on his back. That's rad.

I'm also positive that when we finally get the whole story behind Marvel's Secret Invasion, we'll find that Stegron planed the whole thing. I mean, the Skrulls were doing a bunch of stuff in the Savage land. That's where Stegron hangs out a lot. AND the skrulls are reptilian. Stegron can control reptiles. It just adds up too perfectly.

I love you, Stegron. I love you so much.

The PlayStation/PC game "Soul Reaver", for me it isn't the vampire theme, its the strange post-apocalyptic fantasy world that Nosgoth has become.

I can still clearly recall the MegaMania TV commercial jingle. :)

An anime and manga called Sexy Commando, about a martial artist whose main technique involved unzipping his pants. And it wasn’t even ecchi, despite the name.

There's this website I go to called Topless Robot (NO IT'S NOT A PORN SITE DAMMIT!). It's a blog updated from 8 to 5 on weekdays by this really awesome guy in his 30's. He posts daily Top Ten lists about really nerdy stuff, and every Friday he posts a really bad fanfic and makes fun of it. He also has weekly contests where the winner can get a shirt. I actually won for the first time just last week. He also hosted liveblogs of Heroes where everyone could join in on the awfulness. But what really makes the website great is the other commentators. They're incredibly nerdy, but more importantly, they're funny, creative, and interesting. It's an awesome place, and if you consider yourself a nerd, you're bound to find something you like. I fully recommend it.

Wait...SHIT!

The Dreamcast.

My dreamcast has a special place in my heart for endless hours of Playing Jet Set Radio, Soul Calibur, and Guilty Gear when I should've been studying A.P. American Law in High School.

To this day, I cry at night wondering why did america failed the dreamcast.

Sadly Tekkaman :(

with me it's got to be WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. it was the first real computer program I learned (while in highschool - this was a long time ago kiddies). actually, I have a total fondness for windows 3.1 too but there's just something about WP51 and it's simple blue screen which is totally perfect. it really is the greatest, most well-thought out program and well-rounded application ever. none of M$'s fancy GUI office software comes close. and as a part time writer of erotic fanfic, yes, I actually put my nerdish obsession to use regularly :)

I have the novelization of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie that I kept from the classroom library in fourth grade. I really liked the movie and loved the novelization. I've reread it more times than I care to admit and flipped through it a few months ago.

The original Sam and Max videogame, Sam and Max Hit the Road. It was wonderful in all its point and clickiness, and most people look like I am insane when I talk about it.

I can't remember the exact name, but I believe it was Pirates of Dark Water. It had gods who take away all the words magic, and there was a midget who spun straw into gold.

I had the biggest crush on the Gypsy girl.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Very buggy, but very fun PC game released in '04 that just about no one played. Incredibly deep storyline and some damn sexy half-nekkid vampire chicks.

My obscure nerd love goes to the movie, The Specials. It's from 2000 and is about third-rate super hero team and all of their personal problems and internal squabbles. There are tons of nods to things comic fans think about (origins, troubles with powers, merchandising, dating) that are hilarious and fit well into the fabric of the movie. The dialogue is hilarious and it has Rob Lowe, Thomas Haden Church, Judy Greer, and Paget Brewster, so it's pretty well acted. Best of all, it's all about the characters, as they don't get in one single battle in the movie. My favorite super hero movie ever--EVER!

Battletech: Crescent Hawk's Inception for the Commodore 64. I loved the shit out of that game. I especially liked how you could invest your earnings and then let the game sit overnight and you'd be rich. Then, you run away from the ambush with a fully-functioning Centurion (I think), and have enough money to buy yourself the rocket launcher with Inferno rounds and the best armor, along with all the skills you'll ever need.

Just thinking about that again has made me want to go find a C64 emulator and load it up.

Two words: Clone High

this short-lived Mtv cartoon was on in the early 2000's when i was in college and my roommate and i were obsessed.

the story was all about (stay with me now) a high school where the students were all the teenage clones of historical figures. it mostly followed Abe Lincoln and his best friend, Ghandi, and his girlfriend, Joan of Arc.

insanely clever show. the principal of the school was the mad scientist who created the project, and i can specifically remember an episode where the shadowy, military figures who were funding him were coming to dinner. Professor Scudworth is desperately trying to remind himself the classic "don't bring up religion or politics," and the very first thing he says is "so... religion's for fools, eh? fools... and LIBERALS..."

HIGHLARIOUS show and i think my roommate and i are the only 2 people who ever watched it.

my obscure nerd love would have to be the the comic book character ragman who was one of the first dc characters i read and was part of the dc implosion. and was doing good as a member of shadow pack but is now once again back to the void . of guest shots

When I wasn't old enough to operate a computer keyboard and mouse I would sit on my mom's lap and we would play Legend of Kyrandia: The Hand of Fate for hours on end. For most of my childhood I would tell people about this game mom and I used to play where you had to fight a giant hand but no one understood.... until more than a decade later I finally remembered the name of the game. Then when I told my friends the name of the game, hoping to spark some kind of remembrance, they still looked at me like I had lost all sense of sanity. Oh well. Still an awesome game.

I have a love for three obscure NES action games, one of which wasn't actually released. One being VICE: Project Doom. A Ninja Gaiden clone at heart, with a cyberpunk story and cutscenes that WEREN'T full of Engrish. Bad ass game.
The second was Journey to Silius. This one is special. It was originally supposed to be a game based on the first Terminator, but they couldn't get the rights because Terminator 2 was just about to come out, and the producers wanted games based on it. So while LJN was shitting out unplayable Terminator garbage left and right, these guys released Silius with a new name and new story, and it ended up being one of the most overlooked shooters on the NES. I love because A) It's fun as Hell, and B) it's a great way to wave my Terminator fandom around without playing shitty games.
The last one was an unreleased action game called Time Diver Eon Man. I honestly couldn't tell you dick about the story, but the game is fucking awesome.

Oddly, mine is an Atari 2600 game called Phoenix. It's a Space Invaders kind of game that I played non-stop as a child. It was the cause of my first all-nighter.
For about 15 years, I had was convinced that I had hallucinated the game, but I finally found it at a casual games convention, being used as a business card. I now have it sitting proudly at my desk, and every time I look at the cartridge, I get that old feeling of sheer joy and utter obsession back.

I am incredibly fond of Sun-Sun from Bleach. Sun-Sun is a very minor character whose sole purpose seems to be to create 1/3 of a giant monster and give another character more depth. However, I ADORE Sun-Sun. Viciously. I will punch people for saying bad things about her. Should I ever meet Tite Kubo, the first thing I am going to do is yell at him for having her lose so quickly. I may or may not kick him right in the crotch. I love you Sun-Sun.

Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. I absolutely loved this show and it took me forever to find it on DVD to prove it exists.

It's a toss up between the Rom, Spaceknight and Shogun Warriors Marvel comics usually, but Rom wins for Bill Mantlo. Both dressed up toy catalog tie ins, but Mantlo brought the story, as always. And hey, Luke Cage showed up, too!

The old school 80s cartoon M.A.S.K. It was a horrible, yet wonderful rip-off of all those other 80s cartoons you love...but with Masks.

I would say the nerdiest thing I love is probably one of the nerdiest things that has consumed my life. Poke'mon. Even though from time to time I neglect Poke'mon or might be mad at it I'll always be happy with it and keep up with the newest editions no matter how much more "amazing" the original 151 were. This matters not to me. All I need is my Poke
mon.

The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson.

I grew up with a taped copy my mom made me, and I had always loved it. It was a 1980s film by Rankin and Bass around the same time they were dabbling with their American anime period (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn are all examples of this). I would ask my friends if they knew what I was talking about, and sadly none of them had seen it.

I found a copy on VHS back around 2000-2001 and was estatic. It was at one of those movie places where they could find and order rare movies.

Around the same time, I begun to hunt down the so called book that the movie was based on. Unfortunately the book as well was rare. I once was able to get it through the library but I wanted my own copy. I tried many occassions to buy it online, and finally my luck struck when I was able to outbid my way through Ebay (back when they did not have the handy "Buy now!" option).

When I got it, I read it from page to page. It was such an odd book. It was not a story at all, but the author's explaination on how a creature like a dragon could exist (which they do through the movie as well). While it was a fantastic book and I was glady to finally own it after all this time, I was dismayed it wasn't the same story I had loved so much. I then found out that another book called "The Dragon and the George" had also been used as a reference to create the story. I once again hunted this book down. For some reason it was easy to find. But alas, the story was somewhat similar but still not the same story. But I prattle on.

I loved the book and movie, and they were rare. I know somewhere out there, other people too have enjoyed the movie and mayve even have their own copy of "Flight of Dragons" but amongst the nerdiest of my friends, none know what I speak of.

My obscure Nerd love is Galaxy High. Galaxy what? It was in the 80's and only ran for 13 episodes but I loved this cartoon. It followed the adventures of Doyle and Aimee, 2 earth teenagers accepted into the interstellar school. I love this show and think it would be more popular now if it lasted more than a few episodes.

*Note: This is my entry. My other comments have just been replies to other peoples' obscure entries. Just to be clear.*

My obscure nerd love is an obscure RPG for an obscure "console". Back in the day, there was a place for video game consoles that had to disguise themselves as being "educational" and helping you get a career in programming. They weren't quite PCs, but they also weren't quite consoles.

In this niche, the Texas Instruments 99/4A attempted to fit. It did not, and it was getting pulled off shelves, and was being unsupported by TI. At this point in time, my dad decided it would be shrewd to buy one.

One of the first games he bought for us was Tunnels of Doom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels_of_Doom

I can still hum the "you are dead" music. I remember the first time my brother and I decided to use the fireball scroll we had earned and didn't exactly know how to use yet. I remember traversing the psuedo-3D hallways (this was made back in 1979, people!) and trying to farm for Honing Stones to add +1 to our weapons.

Few know the system I refer to, and even fewer know this particular game. I submit this nerd love to be most obscure.

Not sure how obscure this is, just know that I love it.

There was a Terminator PC game in the mid-90s for DOS, called Operation: Scour. You played a Terminator hunter who had no name, from what I can recall, but took your orders directly from a badass-voiced John Connor. You could spec out your armor to include any number of high-powered missiles, plasma lasers/rifles, and repair kits that would repair damage to your armor (only problem was that you couldn't do *anything* while a repair was going on). Basically it combined two of my favorite things: shooting Terminators, and the Centurions cartoon from the 80s. It was a somewhat clunky FPS, but damn was it fun. I never completed it, but only ever played it when I was in the mood to kill some robot death machines (and when *aren't* you in the mood to kill some robot death machines?). Just the fact that you could customize your armor like an Iron Man suit or Centurion, with grenade launchers, SAMs or 100-watt plasma rifles that were fixed to your extremities and not just "equipped" was a treat in itself. Put that together with taking orders from John Connor and shooting Terminators....I'm there.

Sierra Games. It was a great company and brought us the Dr. Brain series that contained math, physics, chemistry, literature, and other puzzles that taught me more than school ever did, the King's Quest series, which led the way for RPG gaming in America (sorry Rob, but Final Fantasy only followed in its footsteps), and all the other wonderful games it made in the 80s- mid 90s, such as the Laura Bow series, Torin's Passage, and other amazing games. Sierra Online is not what it was because Roberta Williams left. It's a pity no one really knows about this wonderful American company.

Roger and the Rottentrolls. I've never met a single other person who's heard of it, despite it having its own Wikipedia entry. I mourn the loss of not only a genuinely clever kids' show (the election episode was genius) but the immortal combination of Martin Clunes and a telekinetic sheep.

I actually made a pilgrimage to the real Troller's Ghyll last year as it's near my university. Gorgeous place.

its not obscure just irreplaceable. i was 9 when the 1st star wars came out. my dad was way cooler than i could have imagined and he knew this was a movie not to miss. i went to the opening show and he knew the guy that managed the theater and i got an original movie poster and when the run ended, one of the cardboard stand alones. when empire came out he gladly let me cut school and we went together and i again got a poster from the theater. ditto for return of the jedi. those things hung in my room until i left for college. my freshmen year my parents split an my mom decided that i was a young lady and got rid of them and all of my other "kid stuff" [original figurines, the bootleg beta copies the theater manager made of the 3 originals, baseball cards and my comic books]. they were in mint condition, framed, and i cant even think how much those posters would be worth now. i've never been sure who to blame. my mom for junking them in ignorance or my dad for leaving them at her mercy. they never told me until the split was final but i swear, if i knew i would have gone home and rescued all of my shit. she threw out all 5 of my islander autographed stanley cup t-shirts too. sobs... i lost all of my childhood obsessions to a damn decorator. freakin style nazis. i feel sick and empty inside just thinking about it again. sobs....

Tobal No. 1 is my most obscure nerd love and it's not entirely because of the game itself. Tobal No. 1 was released in North America when was I seven years old and just getting into video games. It had this quest mode that I loved to run around in, I didn't even like to fight anyone. I just liked collecting items. One of the health items was a loaf of bread that always looked delicious to me. I realize how weird it is to play a game simply because I like how health items looked but this was the game that made me love playing video games. Seriously, that bread looked fresh baked.

Some of you may consider mine to be pretty sad, but here it goes:
Rutherfor from the manga Shaman King.
She is a manga-exclusive character, and only appears at the very end of the series. Her particular power allows her to basically wear what is essentially a costume that looks like a Grey. (It's technically "armour" made out of spiritual power from a dead alien, but whatever.)So for the majority of her appearance, she just looks like an alien. Most of the main cast actually thinks she is an alien too, until they realize they can see the outline of a person through the eyes. When her armour oversoul is dissolved, she is revealed to be an adorable sixteen year old (I'm young enough for this to not be creepy) Native American girl. After this point, she appears on only 14 more pages, and most of these appearances are from very far away. You can't even see her face. She gets a profile in the databook released after the end of the manga, but that's it. No more Rutherfor. I am sad.
I should also mention that Shaman King was cancelled in 2004, before the story was over. It was recently re-issued and given an ending due to popular demand, but some readers were inevitably lost. Rutherfor only appeared once before it was cancelled- in her alien armour- so almost all of her appearances are in the re-issued version, which has not been licensed to my knowledge. I special ordered the volume she is in (the last volume) at my local Japanese bookstore, waited three weeks, and then had to pay $20 for it. The fact that I feel this was all worth it should show just how much I love her. I also scour the internet for pictures (mostly well-drawn fanart from Japanese art sites, of which there is little) of her, ask friends to draw cute pictures of her for me, try drawing her myself, and just generally obsess over her at least once a week. I even asked my girlfriend (who is southeast asian and thus a little tan) to cosplay her for me, but she said "no." And yes, if I do bring her up in conversation, no one knows who the fuck she is and I always have to explain it- even if the company I am with read Shaman King, I always need to remind them who Rutherfor is.
Here is a color picture of her from the databook: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v622/RyujiYamazaki/Rutherfor_01.jpg
Here is a short profile: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v622/RyujiYamazaki/Rutherfor_02.jpg
...

Sorry about the length.

I have an undying love of the DBZ filler episode where goku and piccolo try to get their drivers licenses. I love that they try to get said licenses despite being able to fly, teleport and move at superhuman speeds. I love how piccolo dresses up like and passes for a human -complete with backwards baseball cap. I love chi chi bitching out goku for never doing anything around the house. I love chi chi bitching out piccolo for being a freeloader. I love piccolo bitching about how chi chi forced him to come. I love the exceedingly old driving instructor that goku has. I love piccolo's clinically insane adrenaline junkie driving instructor. I love how abysmal goku is at driving. I love how he tries to turn off the car by powering up and karate chopping the steering wheel off.

there is not a single thing about this episode that I do not love with all my heart, and I cry every time I tell some of my anime and DBZ loving friends about it and they go "I don't think that ever happened. stop lying".

I had this one game on Sega Genesis, it was called Jewel Master.
They only mentioned it once in a preview in Mega Play, and I knew I wanted that game from one single picture. Pretty basic sidescroller set-up like Shinobi, its about this warrior who collects rings and uses them as weapons ala The Mandarin. Each hand you combine two rings, for instance the right hand handles fire and wind, and the other hand controls water and earth for different types of weapons.
2 buttons for two hands, I freeze them with A blow them away with a flame blast with B. But what was the most awesome about this game is the final rings you get before the big boss. You combine all 4 to create this huge blade that predates the Soul Calibur! What was ironic about the blade was you could have
equipped it long before the final chapter, but there was never any hints about the right combination to get the blade. I could not beat the last boss until I finally experimented with the final rings and beat the game with the super blade.

I traded in the game and never saw it again, in high school we talked about old games on Genesis, and no one heard of Jewel Master. I mention the game to my brother in law in a "remember when...?" conversation and he doesn't remember...he helped me beat it!

To this day I don't bother googling Jewel Master just so that I feel like I experienced an incredible game that was so mysterious that it vanished out of existance.

Boot Hill the western themed table-top RPG, came out around the same time as D&D. The cowboy thing always appealed to me more than a fantasy setting. Havnt played it since the mid-80's.
http://www.waynesbooks.com/boothill.html

The Trash Bag Bunch.

These were little toys produced right between Monster In My Pocket and Z-Bots. The Trash Bag Bunch had a terrible name and the figures, though brightly colored, were non-poseable. Additionally, you had no idea what you were buying because every figure was sealed in a little garbage bag. That was ok, though, because you didn't rip the bag open...you dissolved it in water. It bubbled, fizzed, and ruined the cup you were using.

Then you dumped out the water and...voila! Your mystery toy revealed!

Now the line as a whole was pretty unremarkable, but check out this guy: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_2PyYyZafgYw/SLUpnJAKLMI/AAAAAAAACmM/cd-zJKs_HJo/s400/nova+f+160.jpg

I held on to this guy for years and lost him in a move. How awesome does he look? He's a "Muckoid" and even though he wasn't articulated and smelled a little like vinegar he was dear to me. He faced down Wolverine, Soundwave, Rufio, and even teamed up with a monster made entirely of silly putty. He haunts my memories, and I can't help but notice how well he'd sit next to these tiny Domo figurines. If I ever find him, though, I am turning the awesome little bastard into a keychain and taking him everywhere I go.

An old RTS game called Total Annihilation. Fantastic soundtrack, nice big maps for nice big battles, and shitty pathfinding. Love it! Discovered this game when my family got our first PC. This game and Dungeon Keeper came with it. I spent many hours playing away this awesome game. Long live the Core!

There was this Whitewolf game supposed to have come out some time ago that go canceled, probably due to monetary issues.

Anyway, it was called Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Heart of Gaia. When I originally saw the trailer for this game, I nearly shit my pants in sheer excitement. I could get to play a werewolf? Really?!

ASC Games never released the title and I still hold a lot of love for this unreleased game. When I mention it to others, they haven't the slightest what I'm talking about.

I still hunt for the prototype copy, apparently it was leaked a while back but I've yet to come across a copy.

Pat Hodgell, and her Chronicles of the Kencyrath.

Her first book came out in 1982 - the year I was born - and she got repeatedly screwed by publishers. One still owes her five years' worth of royalties for her novels. They declared bankruptcy, though, so she'll never, ever see that money.

How are the books? Really good fantasy, low to high. The first are a little heavily dependent on coincidences but that eases with every further book - and they get better and better, to the point of To Ride a Rathorn being utterly hilarious and dramatic, sometimes at the same time.

Funny how they never got mainstream; really. I've even found Felicia Day raving about them on her blog at one point, but that didn't lead to a spike in Pat's sales - the books were out of print at the time.

I refer to Pat on a first-name basis because she was my professor in college; she taught me creative writing, and only through her directly did I ever hear about her books. They only recently went back in print via Baen; hopefully her luck will turn. (Also, I arranged for Pat to send Felicia Day a full crate o' autographed books.)

When I was younger we had a four disc computer game based on The Muppet's Treasure Island movie.

You had to find the black spot in the Bill's room then jump out the window of the burning tavern. It was weird, Jim had to wearing an eyepatch with a matching disguise (the clothes horse had an actual horse's head on it that told you what it thought in a French accent, and some poor kid actually had to wear the outfits so they could program the image in) to get into the bar and throw pies at pirates or go Piano Man on them and fill a tip jar.

Most of the puzzles were like early Resident Evil/Silent Hill games,arranging skulls and gemstones to get doors or finding pieces of a model schooner and putting them togother in a bottle plus actions sequences about sailing the ship starboard and such.

Whenever I bring up the movie or the game no one seems to have a clue what I'm talking about. After disc one was scratched I started playing Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (I have the novel adaptations) and Shivers about catching spirits in jars corresponding to their element. The latter of which gave me nightmares about ghosts popping out of fireplaces.

Marbles.
Glass marbles.
In the playground.
On concrete, with chalk circles.

I was so good at marbles I would win my opponents cool clearies and ... I can't say the other names because they're not PC.

Then, the school forbade marbles and we had to find something else to do during lunch break.

Anyway, marbles.

I'm a huge fan of an anime called Koi Koi Seven. It's heavy on the fanservice and the yuri undertones, but it also has superhero elements and one of the most confusing endings I've seen. Yet I watched it all in one day. All 13 episodes. I've also purchased a lot of music from it. My love for it is great.

Not mega obscure but people do look at me odd when I get over excited about it: The Amazing Spider-Man TV series from the late 70's.
To me, THAT is the real Spider-Man. The Sam Raimi movies were fine and all, well for the most part, well, most of 2 anyway. But the Nicholas Hammond Spidey is what my brain defaults to EVERY TIME.
Sure, it took incredible liberties with the source material (Uncle who?) and he was ree-eeallly annoying as Peter but dang, if seeing a man (a real man, not a pixely one) ACTUALLY CLIMB up the sides of buildings with the most awesome-ist funksploitation soundtrack backing him doesn't get you wet, then you are all crazy. Not me thoough. I knows what I like.

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. Me and my brother were OBSESSED with this show and I myself have a dvd set that I still watch occasionally.

It is still GOOD!

Here is the intro...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M678PVOf5F0

Hell it even had a series of Anime-ish Training vids...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2rzV9OGd94

The Golden Wombat of Destinty! It was a DOS prompt game and very my first console game. Oh, it was beautiful! BEAUTIFUL! The moment that I carefully inserted that floppy disc into my computer, my bedroom disappeared and I found myself standing in a mangrove swap. Mangroves spread their tangled roots and branches in every direction. The ground here was muddy. I had been provided no map, no directions, no summary of my objective...NOTHING by the grandfather who handed me this simple, glorious, artifact...only a smile and the sage, if incorrect, proclimation that I would, in time, find the golden wombat of destiny.

I sat for hours before the orange and green glow of my computer monitor, typing out directions with no sense of real purpose besides exploration of this fantastic, labyrthine land (Up, down, north, west) to a computer that responded with surprisingly witty and often frustrating responses. I formed a picture in my head of castle walls, coin slots, a nameless horror that I was promised I would learn more about later, I turned a corner...and THEN...GOD DAMNIT, the mangroves are impassable in this direction and the ground here is very muddy!

Undaunted, I traveled further until I found the wall or a machine or a tower...or a termite. Oh the termite. That wonderful termite. I never knew anything about that termite except that it most definitly did NOT want to copulate with me. In a fit of rage, sick of hearing about the termite that blocked my way, I told the computer to just FUCK THE TERMITE. And the computer (who at this point in our relationship, I decided, could be none other than Merlin in the machine) told me that I was, sadly, not the termite's type.

I remember the mixture of depression and warped joy that accomapnied my accidental murder of the cute little wombat that followed me around as I searched for meaning in this DOS prompt universe. I had never before, at 12 or 13, encountered the words "rigor mortis" and my magical computer overlaord did not seem to appreciate the way I disrespected the dead with kicks to entice my little wombat friend to get up and come with me. His chastisement brought out a little streak of guilty sadism and I continued to kick and reload to re-kill my wombat just hear the computer bitch.

To this day, I dream of solving the mystery of the golden wombat, am tortured by clues that were never solved ("Run, run, Orlando, carved on every tree. The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she."), termites that shun me and block my way, and the words upon the gate I ignored (for even in the mud may you find/ the cursed highway unto Hell/repent and turn back, o foolish mortal"), and tormented by magroves that spread their fucking roots and branches in every direction. The ground is here is STILL FUCKING MUDDY! ARGGGGHHHH!!!

Honor Harrington. Honor is the main character in an ongoing series of books by David Weber. None of my friends are big readers and would not get references to the series. I have never met anyone in person that has read them. I would highly recommend the books to anyone that loves space opera, military scifi, or just starships and explosions. The publisher, Baen, has the first few ebook available for free at: http://baen.com/library/ The first book in the series is called "On Basilisk Station."

There's this mad games maker called Jeff Minter. He's really into trippy stuff and Llamas. Anyway he made a game many, many moons ago which basically ripped off Robotron and it was called Llamatron. It was just the most bonkers thing I had ever played, shooting the shit out of things like flying toilets and picking up sexy sheep to follow you around giving you bonuses.

I played it right up until my Atari 1040STe died about 12 years ago and it's one of the few games for that machine I still truly miss playing.

Mail Order Monsters.
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It was a video game on the Commodore 64, back in the days when Electronic Arts was a small studio full of quirky game designers and not an evil empire that forces you to watch five minutes of logos, promos, and self-promotion before you're even allowed to see the title screen of their games. Back in the day when anyone with a copy of Cracker, a box of 5 1/4" floppies, and a couple 1541 drives could make enough copies for all his friends (and people frequently did).
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The game was sort of a proto-Pokemon. You played the role of a trainer/manager who goes into a monster store to buy a base monster body. These are giant kaiju we're talking about here; None of this 'tiny monster that fits in a ball' crap. You were given a base amount of money, and could choose from a T-Rex, a bronto, a spider, a crab, a hominid, an amoeboid, a squid, and some others. Each one had natural strengths and weaknesses, of course.
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From here, you'd go to the part of the factory where they would tweak the monster's genetic template a bit, boosting speed, endurance, fighting ability (known as "Beast-Fu") and other stats. Pretty basic stuff, right?
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Now, here's where the fun begins. If you had any money left, you could buy "aftermarket parts" for your monster. Claws, gills, bio-electric touch, burrowing appendages, web spinners, etc. Now your monster is a lot less like the stock model, and starting to look pretty cool.
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Then, finally, if you have remaining cash (unlikely at this point) you get to buy weapons and tools.
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Now, fully customized, named, and loaded, you enter your monster into the game. Most of the time, it's one-on-one combat with another owner's monster, or a capture-the-flag game against an opponent's creation, but sometimes you face THE HORDE; A Swarm of minor monsters who come at you and basically destroy everything in their path. Each session sees you dropped on a landscape with varied terrain (oceans, deserts, jungles, etc.) and depending on your monster's abilities, you might be better or worse in specific places. And as the player YOU control the monster directly. This isn't like Pokemon, where you just pick an action and the monster does it. Nope. Here you have to control your monster's every move. You can't blame it on random chance or a die roll here. If you lose, it's because you suck or your monster is weak.
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Once the battle is over, you either win money and can go upgrade your beastie after healing him (which, like American health care, sometimes sapped most of your winnings) or you lose and have barely enough cash to keep your monster alive and enter him in another battle in hopes of walking away with the prize.
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As the game progresses, you can get a whole stable of monsters, and have a beast ready to face each opponent on the best possible terms.
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What made the game awesome was the variation in monster customizing. You could have a brontosaurus with tentacles sticking out his back, or a hominid with a giant claw. If you could afford it, and the alteration was allowed on your base monster, you could transform them however you wanted. It was the only game I knew of where a giant crab with a flamethrower could fight a giant pterodactyl with a stinger, or a giant hominid with photosynthesis and a shocking touch could grapple with a giant carnivorous plant with a flamethrower.
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Sadly, EA never saw the wisdom in continuing the franchise, despite my dozens of emails begging them to do so. Even during the height of the Pokemon fad, when an updated Mail Order Monsters could have ruled them all, EA was too concerned with The Sims and securing the exclusive rights to the NFL to even acknowledge my pleas for a return to M.O.M. greatness.
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Maybe I just had too much fun dominating my friends in the game. When you've got a stable of custom-built monsters, and hold the title as the most successful monster trainer in town, you can *really* feel the glory when your green, electric, heavily-armed giant wasp crushes even the mightiest T-rex your buddy can come up with.
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Damn you EA. You're holding out on me! I need my fix!

My favorite obscure love is "The Ancestral Trail". What is "The Ancestral Trail"? Glad you asked. Way back in the 1990s, children's book company Marshall Cavendish published a 52-issue serial fantasy story called "The Ancestral Trail". It tells the story of a boy named Richard being transported to a fantasy world called the Ancestral World because he is the Chosen One and he must defeat the Evil One.

Yes, the story is completely generic, but when you're 8 years old, this stuff was crack. Each issue ran under 20 pages, but they all ended on a cliffhanger and made you scream for the two weeks to pass so the next issue will arrive in the mail. The most memorable part of the books were the villains on each cover: Baal the Giant Spider; Husasan, Silicon Samurai; Hulkan the Mole Monster; Continuuma, Empress of Time. And what's more, each issue was not afraid to get gory, like showing little furry creatures swarm and devour a person, guts and all.

The issues are very rare to find these days (especially all together), but I'm proud to have a full collection. What's more, I'm currently in the process of documenting each issue thoroughly on my blog so that AT fans can relive the magic that was this obscure classic: http://ancestraltrail.blogspot.com/

PS - the gory stuff previously mentioned can be found under Tolosh of the Garoon. You're welcome.

This is easy. K9 from Doctor Who. I first saw that goddamn robot dog when I was about 12 years old. Now I'm a 37 year old nerd and I'm pretty sure I would give a kidney just to own it. And I don't even mean the actual dog as in the character from the fucking future, although that would be incomprehensibly awesome.

No, I just want a full scale prop that says some things and rolls around and shits nonsense ticker tape computations out of its mouth and has a retractable fake nose laser and randomly wags its antenna tail. I would take it out for walks every day through shopping malls and people would stare and I'd just smile, nod and say, "that's right motherfucker, I'm walking my K9, so step off!"

What makes my love and obsession with this thing so damn vexing is that I could have easily taken some time in my life, drew up some plans, learned some electronics skills and made one. Or I could have just got enough money together to pay some more talented nerd for theirs. Oh, yes, I've seen them on youtube. They exist.

Either way, this is my obscure nerd love. It is a simple one, but one that burns brightly in my nerd loins.

For me it would have to be the Dreamcast game Powerstone. Me and my friends before college played the hell out of it. Now that I'm in college no one, and I mean no one, knows what I'm talking about. Most know what a Dreamcast is but nothing of the game. I think now I have to go dig it back out of storage, cheers!

PSM. I loved that magazine. The contributors were funny, the coverage was interesting, and it turned me on to a lot of great games. It's the reason i ever played Dragon Quest VIII or Midnight Club 3. Plus, it introduced me to one of my favorite websites, GamesRadar. If pressed, I KNOW I could find at least one old copy.

My entry:

The Master Li and Number Ten Ox books, by Barry Hughart. The first one, Bridge of Birds, is subtitled "A novel of an Ancient China that never was." Master Li, the greatest and most frequently intoxicated wise man in seventh century China, and his client (assistant in the later books), Number Ten Ox, embark upon a series of quests through a myth devised by a maniac. Happily, the three books are still in print, in various omnibus editions.

Hm. Maybe not as obscure as I thought. However, I prefer this to my second choice, which is long out of print...

BESM - the anime role playing game. It takes dungeons and dragons 3.5 and gives you rules for copying pretty much any anime cliche, including blowing up buildings with your attacks and creating giant robots. It's not so much obscure as no one wants to play it. The d&d players I know aren't really interested in anime and the anime fans I know really aren't in to anime.

I read the contest theme and my mind went exactly to the Star Wars Digital Dictionaries. I have all five of them and most of the pages in them are coming out of the binding I read it so much. I love these things, I mean come on, they give a complete detailed description of every vehicle and person in the movies. But sadly not one of my friends ever knows what I'm talking about, apparently their parents didn't love them like mine did.

So, back in the late 90's there was a little manga/anime series called Steam Detectives. The series was about a kid named Narutaki who solved mysteries in a sort of AU London called Steam City. Along the way he meets several ridiculously costumed villains, most of whom become recurring characters.

Even though I generally no longer read manga or watch anime, I keep coming back to Steam Detectives. It's got a look to it I've never seen before nor since. Sure, it has all the makings of standard anime, and yet... it's so different. It's generally difficult to describe. I really like the sense of color of the series, though, and the character designs are generally whimsical and fun. The plot is a little weak--I realize now that most characters have a direct counterpart in Batman--but it's still an immensely fun series to revisit every once and a while.

As much as I try to look for other Steam Detectives fans, I can't really find them. I guess the manga's age (it came out in the early 2000's, well before manga was popular) coupled with its general unremarkableness makes this my little obscure series that it is.

OK, for me, it's definitely Kenner's Give-A-Show Projector. Don't know what that was? It was basically a combination of a slide projector and a flashlight, and you'd insert these cardboard frames (later just sheets of plastic with black printed "frames") into it, and project a sequence of seven panels to tell a story. Kenner made them from 1960 to about 1985, featuring cartoon and tv show characters, as well as other stuff. While most of their sets featured a variety of stuff, they also did sets with the Six Million Dollar Man, the Bionic Woman, Star Wars, and The Empire Strikes Back. I never had these as a kid, but always wanted them, and a few years back, I started collecting them avidly, to the point where there's probably only five or six sets that I don't own at this time (I think I'll be saving the Strawberry Shortcake set for last). I've also started collecting the knockoffs that other companies produced, such as Remco's Ugly Mugly projector, the Hong Kong Stellar knockoffs, and I've even bought a Power Rangers projector, just because it used the same format (although that one didn't even tell a single story, it was just a bunch of stills, badly printed at that). I've scanned all these into my computer and made videos of them, adding music and sound effects as well as opening and closing titles, and feature them at the Give-A-Show Blog at http://giveashow.blogspot.com as well as on "Give-A-Show Fridays" at my main blog, Random Acts of Geekery at http://waffyjon.blogspot.com.

Oddly enough to me, no matter how many people I talk to near my age, hardly anyone else remembers these, even though they were extremely popular at the time! Of course, home video killed the toy line.

Anyway, that's my obscure nerd love!

Ex-Mutants! A campy, poorly drawn post-apocalyptic teen dramedy comic book. There was even a terrible game for the Sega Genesis that I loved despite the fact that it was complete garbage!

Basic plot: the world has been nearly destroyed by nuclear war. The survivors have become mutated abominations that Mad Max their way through life in the ruins of 1980's America. Six mutants are chosen as part of some experiment that turns them back into humans. Sexy humans. With nunchucks!

My Amiga 500. All the hours spent playing Shadow of the Beast and the Great Giana Sisters. I'd still have it but someone stole it from my car along with an Amiga 3000 a coworker gave me and a six-pack of Mt. Dew.

I run with a pretty nerdy crowd, so it can be hard to find something that's "obscure". My one love, though, that most people seem to have never even heard of, let alone played, is and old PC game called "Impossible Creatures". It was an army management game that revolved around some fictional psuedo-science called the "Sigma Technology", which basically meant that you could take DNA samples from random animals and combine them into vicious monsters, then pit those monsters against your foes. The resource balances were crap, and it was impossible for me to make it pass the fifth mission without cheating obscenely, but I loved the game anyways. What other games were out there that could let my seven year old mind act out my "Island of Doctor Moreau"-esque fantasies, or terrorize enemy henchmen with my army of Piranha-wolves and Polar CamelBears? Not Reading Rabbit, I can tell you that.

I will always been a Sega person through and through. I still have my Dreamcast, and at times I dream of that wonderful spiral logo, and fuck it like a $2 whore (le sigh).

Buck Bumble, an action game on the Nintendo 64 about a cyborg bee in an English garden who must use advanced weapons to take down evil chemically-altered insects.

I replayed it recently and its kind of crappy, but that doesn't change the fact that my 10 year old self loved it and thought it was the coolest thing ever, and no one I've ever spoken to has ever heard of its existence.

It also has a theme song at its title screen that will stick in your brain and never ever ever leave.

C'mon, he's a cyborg bee! How can he not win?

I would have to say that my most obscure nerd love is actually a movie that I rip on all the time to make a point. If I ever get into an arguement about "what's the worse movie you've ever seen?" I pull out...Hard Rock Zombies. Basically it's about a band that are killed by Nazi loving townspeople but are brought back to life by a groupie to save the world.

When I mention this movie, i get more then a few turned heads because no one knows about this movie.

Dirigibles. Zeppelin type dirigibles. I love them. I have a scratch built model of the USS Macon hanging from my ceiling. Stupid thing is four FEET long. Kind of dominates the room.
That's one of the reasons I love Miazaki. He's a fellow Zeppelin nut. throws Zeppelins into most of his animes. I would kill for a full scale model of the ones from Laputa!
And I really get peeved when someone says "Ooh, a blimp" when they visit me. It's not a blimp dammit! It's a Zeppelin!

So, my actual obscure nerd love was the character Teryx, from the rather obscure show Dinosaucers (from around 1987). First, the show: it was wicked rad. Basically a Transformers ripoff, but using evolved dinosaurs. See, by reasons they didn't explain, dinosaurs from Earth also lived on a planet in oppositional orbit on the other side of the sun (so we'd never notice it). They came here for some reason or other. They were upright, somewhat humanoid, and bipedal, but could transform into their dinosaur forms.

How awesome is that? Dinosaurs in spaceships! Anyway, one of them - the girl - was Teryx, who was evolved from the archeopteryx, and thus a cross between a dinosaur and a bird. I soooooo had a crush on her, it wasn't even funny. I spent months in the late 80s obsessively drawing her, them, their whole world (I couldn't draw for shit, either), etc. I actually had girls who were interested in me draw stuff with me (but then leave because I didn't take the hint from them doing something interesting to me: I just kept drawing dinosaucers).

I pretended I was a dinosaucer, and married her, and lived on their planet, and slept with a blanket from my infancy re-purposed in bundle form as a Teryx doll. I made up elaborate soap-opera scenarios to end in us falling in love, misunderstanding, reconciling, etc. Bear in mind that I was in middle school at the time.

I went back in my college years, and still drew stuff in the same notebook, with the same characters.

I mean to say that I'm kinda still in love with a cartoon dinosaur from a TV show nobody remembers, after more than 20 years. I gave away the Nintendo, the GI Joes, the He-Man stuff (even though I had a crush on Sorceress from pre-school; why do I have a thing for bird-girls?), and all my other stuff from my childhood. But Teryx remains.

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut. I don't know anyone else who has read that amazing sci-fi book. Whenever I talk about Kurt VOnnegut to other people, they assume I'm talkign about Slaughterhouse Five, Timequake, or The Breakfast of Champions. Slapstick was genius and one of the most amazing books I have ever read.

I also like Soul Blazer, an obscure game for the Super Nintendo. It's kind of like Zelda if Zelda didn't suck. Its sequel, Terranigma is much more well known, but I liked Soul Blazer.

Legend of Dragoon is another obscure RPG, but it is also amazing and kicks FF VII's ass. Go suck on it, Cloud. Your game was easy and your story is overrated.

Major Bummer was a comic book from the 90s. It had dark humor, lots of aliens, and sometimes nightmarish art. Does anybody else remember that thing?

Oh, and I liked Rag Man too. He's sort of like Batman, but he's jewish and he has magic powers and shit. Some of his stuff is pretty well written. Nobody I know read him, though.

Any of those five can be my entry. You can pick whichever one you think is the most obscure.

Mystery science theater 3000. How my friends have never heard of MST3K is truly, truly beyond me.

I love the band The Protomen more than life itself. I don't know if they're super obscure in this community, but I know that I get to explain them whenever someone asks about my favorite band. They play a three part rock opera about Megaman (only the first two acts are out so far). But it's not little 8-year-old looking Megaman who fights Dr. Wily after he escapes from prison and build 8 new robot masters... again. It's bad ass Megaman who discovers that his brother was killed trying to free the city from Wily's tyrannical Orwellian grasp and decides he has to finish the fight Protoman started and kick some ass. That's just Act I, which is filled with distopian themes, propaganda, brotherhood, arm cannons, drama, robots, cowboys, sociopaths, revenge, explosions, and general bad-assery.
I'd get into Act II, which is a story about love, betrayal, assassinations, time, more distopian themes, more explosions, more revenge, and more general badassery.
You should check them out. Right now.

The only other super obscure thing I'm into would have to be Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack (The surgeon with the hands of God!). Which is only obscure in this country, and not TERRIBLY so at that.

Being an English nerd, most of my nerdy friends don't know about many obscure things that aren't from Britain, so my obscure love is something only I (and my family) really know about.
Are You Afraid Of The Dark is a Canadian show, but it showed on Nickelodeon (I watched it on CITV) when I was younger and it kicked ass. It was like Goosebumps meets The Twilight Zone, but even more awesome than you'd think. One episode paid homage to They Live (you look me in the eye and tell me that isn't cool).
The great thing about AYAOTD was the twist endings. Most of ended happily, but some of them were just unforgiving to their teenage protagonists - one episode actually had the main character get mistaken for an evil clone and killed while the real clone lived the dead kid's life. Another one had an eerily cheerful nurse vampire infiltrate a whole hospital then burst into flames and fall off a rooftop. Another one featured a kid get trapped inside a computer game while a terrifying tiny silver virus man thing terrorised his brain. It could be pretty brutal, especially for a kid's show.
But this wasn't any old kid's show. This was some scary stuff. The scariest episode for me was The Tale of the Dead Man's Float. I saw that before I saw Jaws but it was enough to start a lifelong fear of water. The story is quite simple, and the freakiest bit (some kids are chased through a swimming pool by a relentless jelly zombie man thing who moves like The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth and can get around by coming up through pipes like the Blob) was taken straight out of a slasher movie.
I hold this programme close to my heart and it brings back memories of watching it with my family as a kid. It was scary, original and wonderfully crappy at times (the recurring villain Dr Vink was completely bizarre) and the tales of The Midnight Society will forever be remembered by me and my family - even if my friends never know what the hell we're talking about when we mention Zeebo the Clown.

In 2000 USA Network had a show called "The War Next Door". I was so excited when I heard about it because it was being made by the same guys that created "The Adventures of Pete & Pete". It was about a secret agent that decided to retire, leaving his arch nemesis high and dry without anyone to do battle with. So the nemesis buys the house next door and they continue their eternal dance of death. It was a hilarious show, well acted, well written...and definitely ahead of its time being a single camera sitcom with no laugh track. The best part about the show was one of the guys died at the end of each episode. It truly was the closest I have seen anyone come to making a live action cartoon. Problem is, no one remembers it. I mean, NOBODY! I have even written the actors, writers etc to see if anyone knows where I can get some copies of the episodes and the people that have written back have said it is unattainable. The worst thing is that when I mention it to people they all say the same thing. "That show with Michael Rappaport?" and I end up screaming "NOT THE WAR AT HOME YOU GODDAMNED NITWIT!!!" Ugh... I just want to watch it again at least one more time....one more fucking time and then I will be complete.

The D12. Damn, I love that dice and it makes me so sad that no one uses it anymore! My very first character, Tonk (a dwarven barbarian), used the D12 and I've never crit so much with any other character and I give the credit to my beloved D12... I miss him.

The Commander Keen series, by far.

Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, Good Bye Galaxy, and Aliens Ate My Babysitter.

We used to have an old MS-DOS computer loaded with all of them, I played through all of them, and they were the best. ..but whenever I mention them to any of my friends, they look at me like I'm making it up. It's sad, because they were awesome games.

Emirate Xaaron from the Transformers G1 comics. He only appeared once or twice in the US comics, though he was more prevalent in the British stuff. He's never appeared in any other version of Transformers (Not even a name drop), and we never get to see his alt mode, but he's still awesome and I still love him.

Took me a few minutes to decide on this one, it was either this or Yar's Revenge on the 2600...

But Misfits of Science is so much more obscure, and totally friggin' awesome. It was easily one of the best things ever on television at the time, well before it's time.

Before Smallville, and Heroes (Tim Kring even wrote an episode) this was the first live action TV show to my knowledge to have a team of people with powers.

It only lasted a single season on NBC, with one episode never aired and it was fantastic. It was my first experience dealing with a show being cancelled and I remember trying in vain all the time to search TV Guide every week, hoping it would be back.

Premise was there's a company that specialises in "Human Anomolies" and a researcher without powers, Billy Hayes and his boyhood friend and colleague 'El' Lincoln who has developed an artificial growth gland and inplanted it in himself discover they've been using the research for military purposes put together the Misfits of Science to fight crime and protect other anomolies.

They drive around in an Ice Cream truck because in their first episode a team member code named Iceman is the ex-boyfriend of Amellia Earhart who stumbled into Howard Hughes experimental cryogenic chamber and is now unable to thaw out but can freeze objects by touch alone. Courtney Cox is a troubled telepath with a parole officer. 'Johnny B' is a dude in a rock band who got electricuted and now has electricity powers, super speed, and a weakness to water. El Lincoln's artificial gland allows him to shrink ala Ant Man for brief periods of time.

There was a running joke that the secretary was fairly useless but she actually pretty much protected them from harm and the company and she'd always turn out the lights and say sorry to the invisible man who'd been waiting all day to speak with the leader Billy Hayes.

It's pretty obvious looking back that Tim Kring got a lot of his ideas for Heroes from his brief work on this show, and showed an early penchant for ripping off current comic properties. (Marvel sued NBC so "Iceman" never came back, but the Ice Cream truck stayed... Courtney Cox' character was pretty much Jubilee Grey, El Lincoln was Ant Man, Johnny B was sorta the Flash if someone tried to copy him without knowing anything about him other than there's lightning bolts on his costume and he runs fast...)

Still I was in love with this show, and would gladly watch it again if it ever caem to netflix instant.

My choice would be Silent Service by MicroProse for the old Commodore 64.
You would play as a captain of an American sub in the Pacific during WWII, tracking down Japanese shipping convoys. The hours I spent playing that. Good times.

I wanna say Shenmue, but seeng that there's a lot of Dreamcast people who probably followed Ryo's quest for revenge and had their dreams shattered when the sequel was made for XBOX... the endless hours of mastering the fighting moves and the skillful art of forklift racing were lost. Asking people a hundred times "where could I find some sailors?"

I'm going to go with The PS1 Game BLAST CHAMBER. (Not sure if it was on saturn as well.)
You were some dude with a bunch of explosives to your chest. You had to go through a bunch of chambers full of death traps depositing some crystals in the generators to delay your death.
Multiplayer mode was awesome. A race against the clock and your friends to save yourself. Oh yeah! you could turn the chambers on its sides or upside down if you stepped on the switches.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WidrwICJ1jM

History counts as a nerd subject, right? Only nerds like history that isn't Gladiator or Braveheart, yeah? I hope so, because here's my history heavy entry (the first in a few weeks):

Hannibal Barca. Scipio Africanus. Crossing the Alps with elephants. The Battle of Zama. These aren't four separate entries, they're all related to, and deeply responsible for, my nerdiest obsession (re: my most obsessive obsession)-- The Second Punic War (ca. 218-201BCE). I first discovered this treasure trove of awesomeness, this personal Pandora's Box, as a sophomore in high school; in my Latin class, to be precise. We were given an assignment to work with a partner and create a presentation about any subject in ancient Roman history/literature/etc. My assigned partner was a senior and, so, had already taken his World History AP class (which I wasn't scheduled to take until the next semester), and he immediately said we should cover the Punic Wars. I said sure, having no idea what the Hades he was talking about, and recommended we make a video (as that was my forte, at the time). As I'm sure none of you would be surprised to hear, our video was very High-School-Kids-Want-To-Be-Monty-Python, but it did get some genuine laughs (like when we first mention Hannibal Barca, we immediately cut to a shot of Hannibal the Cannibal being pushed toward the camera on that dolly, mask and all; mid-sentence) and made a decent grade. Still, Moderate Latin Class Celebrity and an A- were only the first rewards the Second Punic War brought me. Victors and spoils, all that jazz, y'know?

While making that video, and doing the research, I fell in love with the story of two great men warring over land, revenge, pride, and dominance of the Mediterranean. You see, the Second Punic War was less about Rome vs. Carthage and all about Hannibal vs. Scipio. The winner of that battle of wills secured their country's place in history (and the present, and the future), and the loser became a lost city-state that most people never hear about or simply forget it was covered in history class. (Hell, people even forget about all those gorram elephants being marched across the gorram Alps, like it was an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Or something.)

And, to make it all the more exciting and such an enthralling moment in time, Hannibal almost won. Had he, our entire world would be different. Imagine if the Roman Republic, which only mattered AFTER the Punic Wars, and which begot the Roman Empire, had ceased to exist after theoretically Hannibal marched into Rome and burned it to the ground. (He absolutely hated Rome and wanted it completely and utterly destroyed-- considering Carthage's earth-salted fate, the irony is delicious! And salty.) Seriously, try to imagine a world without Rome being the preeminent power of the world for a 1000 years. You can't! As they say, all
roads lead to Rome-- well, for history-telling purposes, all roads lead FROM Rome (yeah, yeah, and Greece). We'd have no Julius Caesar (or, the Shakespeare play!), no Augustus, no Hadrian or his Wall, no Marcus Aurelius, no Constantine... maybe, and please don't think I'm sacrilegious, no Christianity; at least not what it is today, what it became due to Rome's power. Granted, Rome became Rome after they crushed Carthage in the Third Punic War not the Second, but that decimation could only have happened because of the almost-decimation that Scipio Africanus brought down on his opponent. The Third Punic war was almost solely a naval battle, because that's all Carthage had left. But, you don't fuck with the Roman Trireme, man. Before Scipio, Rome couldn't find any leader worth a damn, and Hannibal had that shit on lock-down for over a decade. To add a cherry on top of that sundae, Scipio even beat Hannibal, in the Battle of Zama, using Hannibal's own tactics! Truly incredible. In my heart of hearts, I wish I could have been there to witness that. From a safe distance, of course.

This story, this epic showdown, has stayed with me ever since. I wrote two screenplays about it, one centering on Hannibal and the other on Scripio-- kind of like Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, and then scrapped them (because it was awful, but also because Vin Diesel ruined that idea for me-- fuck you, Vin Diesel). In my first World Civ class in college (as a freshman) I wrote a 20-page paper about Hannibal and Scipio because I felt my professor didn't give their tale nearly enough time, or credit, in class. 20 pages. The limit was 8-10. (That paper also guaranteed my 4.0 for the class, as my prof simply doubled the grade instead of having me take the Final.) And, now, I'm using Hannibal Barca as a main character in my own comic book. I'd toyed with the idea of using Scipio, instead, but I sided with Hannibal because I figured at least I could mention the Alpine elephants and some people would get it. Tragically, Scipio never gets his due, but I plan to use that in future stories.

I really didn't mean to write this much. But I don't feel too bad looking at the length of some of these entries. Way to assign yourself a shitty task on Monday, Rob. A contest for nerds to write about their most obscure (and thus, most strongly felt) passions. Get that handle of Jack ready, sir!

Oh, and before anyone calls me on it, I realize this may seem like I'm playing to Rob's well-covered love of Roman history. Trying to assure I at least get the second spot on the winner's stand. Perhaps. But it's not my fault I love history, especially Roman history, but specifically the Second Punic War-- really, really, really fucking love it-- too.

I'm a biologist. Pretty much everything I love is obscure. I mean, honestly, how many other people have emails sent to them when ebay lists something with "Rothschild extinct bird" as keywords? Look at how pretty it is! Someday, it will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine.

After I win the lotto, of course. There were only 300 copies printed, all of which were signed by Rothschild, and as far as I know most of them are in museums, except for.....you know, there's no way you care. I'll shut up now.

Nearly a hundred posts in, so I think it's safe to mention this.

The Guardian Legend for the NES.

The game had excellent music, decent graphics, and it was about an android sent into space to stop this planet from crashing into the Earth. The game had dungeons similar to Zelda, and these would be interrupted by.vertically scrolling shooter levels. If there was ever a game I'd want to see remarried, this is it. I can see it in my mind. Shooter levels similar to Panzer Dragoon Orta and exploration levels similar to Metroid Prime. I just wish I could find who had the rights to the title...

Love may be a bit strong but I spent many an hour and have really fond memories of a PC game called Free Enterprise (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/538/Free+Enterprise.html).

The game is all about starting your own company: building cubicles, hiring employees, purchasing raw supplies, and selling products. Yes you too can experience the thrills of upgrading cubicles, purchasing new forklifts, negotiating raises, and pouring over spreadsheets and graphs. Needless to say 12/13 year old me adored the game even if I did end up driving my employees to go postal most of the time (I'm sorry but those new cubicles were expensive and there was a problem with our motor supplier this quarter; I don't care if you shoot up the office, you aren't getting that raise!)

I have a huge hard-on for the TOHO giant monster Jet Jaguar. Admittedly, most of that love is from my first seeing him on MST3K, but he's so hilarious and amazing

Let me just start by saying that even though I've been an avid comic book reader since I was five, I read my first superhero comic just a couple of years ago. Before then, I'd read almost exclusively whatever Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse magazine I could get my hands on. While the mouse was okay, I'd always re-read the Donald Duck ones. My mom and I bonded in a way over this, and she was the one who introduced me to the works of The Duck Master, Carl Barks. I was blown away. He could take a silly bet between a couple of characters over who could drink the most lemonade and turn it into a battle of wits, a matter of honor. He could take the ducks to the middle of a jungle to sell tape recorders and gigantic stoves and still keep you hooked to the story. Not to mention the square eggs (and people) in the Andes, of course.

But the story that's stuck with me all these years, the one that keeps baffling me, is "Only A Poor Old Man". The very last page, to be exact. Scrooge McDuck and the others has defated the Beagle Boys yet again, after a long and complicated battle. Donald comments that with all the worries Scrooge has about keeping his money safe, he is still just a poor old man. The panel that follows shows Scrooge at his weakest; the truth of his nephew's words sinks in and without a word being said, you see the pain of a lifetime in his face. Sure, in the next panel, he shrugs it off, but in that moment, he was a broken duck. It's heart-wrenching.

So there it is. My most obscure nerd love is for a single panel of a heart-broken duck. I'll never be able to explain it to my friends.

easy. Mazinger and Rockman.
thats what life is all about.

an old Japanese film called Riki-Oh the Story of Ricky, they featured a clip on the old Daily Show; it's hilariously violent and I've had to buy 3 times after loaning it out to people who in turn have loaned it out, you get the idea. I'm not going to eat up tons of space pushing for it, but you really should see it if you get the chance, it's over-the-top ridiculous in both action and dialogue.

I'm going to say the PC game Scorched Earth.

It's a '95(ish) DOS windows game, where you have between 2 to 8 players in different colored tanks set up across a landscape of varying heights and with only being able to move your cannon turret have destroy the other tanks. There would be different rounds where the wind condition would change, and between rounds you could purchase new and constantly more destructive weapons for your tank. It has simple but surprisingly deep gameplay.

The most unique part about the game, was you could also destroy the ground you sat on. which changed the landscape even more.

I would spend entire afternoons with my bro and a couple friends playing this game when I was younger. But now whenever I mention it people go....'huh? what is scorched earth' and it makes me want to whip it out and show it to them. and let them experience the awesomeness of the game.

the dreamcast video game called "BLUE STINGER".

When I was a little kid before I even knew that Anime existed, my mom recorded a movie off of HBO for me to watch. It was animated and the animation was GORGEOUS! I had NO idea at the time, but it was obviously from Japan. The only things I remember is that there was a guy in it who had turned evil or something, and he could turn people into stone statues or something and I think his sister was in it? I always thought it was called 'The last unicorn', so when I heard people talking about that movie I thought that was it. Feeling nostalgic one day, I borrowed a friends DVD of the last unicorn, popped it in my DVD player only to discover THAT WASN'T IT!! I now have NO idea what that movie was. I've had about two images of it burned into my brain for 20 YEARS now, but it's not enough to find out what the hell it was! So, not only does nobody ELSE know what I'm talking about, I don't even know what I'm talking about AAAAHH!!!
I'd give anything to see it again though, but I'm sure i never will.....

"Return To Zork". Not even the original, not the classic nerd text input ones (Advent style). I was to young for those when they were new. But I played "Return To Zork" with my mom on our first family computer that I was old enough to operate. It was dark, imaginative, and (for a kid) hilarious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Zork

At first I thought this was going to be difficult, but then I remembered my favorite now-non-existent website: KnowPost. KnowPost was a social networking website before social networking websites. I remember using it in the late 90s.

The theme of the website was that people would ask a question such as "Where can I download free video editing software?" or "What is the best recipe for homemade lasagna?" and the community would respond (hopefully). People were fairly knowledgable and friendly, and it quickly transformed into just a place where friends online could talk, complete with email, profiles, etc.

Then one night it disappeared. I was sad.

I just discovered now that it (sort of) still exists, now on Angelfire. http://www.angelfire.com/nv/knowpostfriends/
Only this appears to only be for posterity since the site was last updated March 13, 2000.

Before Facebook or MySpace, there was KnowPost.

X-files, x-files, x-files. If I make a joke involving Scully or Mulder my friends go, "bwaa???"

I got into a shouting match at school (looong time ago), there were two teams in my class, those who thought CSI was the best show ever, and those who thought X-files was the best show ever. I was the only one on my side. Guess which side the teacher was on? FML.

Hands down the Oz series.
Most people have seen the movie, and maybe even read the first book (which is NOTHING) like the movie, but for the most part, no one has ever read the ENTIRE Oz series. It's about 14 books? I can't remember how many exactly because after L. Frank Baum, the original author, stopped writing them, other authors continued.
Anyway, I've read the entire series about 3 or 4 times, which is always an adventure because I have to put them on hold at the library because trying to find actual copies to buy is near impossible when you get past book 6.
I know this doesn't exactly sound nerdy, but it's a fucking 14 book fantasy series that almost no one has read in it's entirety, and actually, over the past year or so, Marvel has been adapting the first two books into comics. I REALLY hope they continue because they're absolutely brilliant.

My favorate obscure nerd thing is an old 1983 cartoon called Twice Upon a Time. It was produced bt George Lucas and had the voice of Lorenzo Music as Ralph, the All Purpose Animal. The thing is, while there are some old VHS copies still around, there are practically no copies of the unrated cut which first premered on HBO and that everyone first saw. Apparantly, the director or someone who owns the rights didn't want this less sanitiezed version available and pulled it quickly, replacing it with the more censored version. This other cut was much funnier and I would love to be able to see it again.

I remember a show about math called Square One. It watched it in the afternoons during my pre-grade-school years, before I realized that I kinda sucked at math, and I just loved it. They had a dragnet parody that always came on during the last part called Mathnet and I lived for that shit, though I didn't get the humor as well as an older me would have.

I remember a show about math called Square One. It watched it in the afternoons during my pre-grade-school years, before I realized that I kinda sucked at math, and I just loved it. They had a dragnet parody that always came on during the last part called Mathnet and I lived for that shit, though I didn't get the humor as well as an older me would have.

My VHS copy of the 1988 movie Purple People Eater. A young Neil Patrick Harris and Thora Birch steal the show!

Futurama's very own Hypnotoad, this character has always been my most beloved character on the show.

It doesn't get much better than those large oscillating multicolored eyes and the droning hum.

And what other character has his own show that has ran successfully for over 3 seasons?

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W84DLa0CLNE&feature=player_embedded

My most obscure nerd love has to go to the most fudged-up superhero I have ever known, Sam Kieth's The Maxx. A crazy, homeless purple hero with giant yellow claws and sleeps in a cardboard box. With badass serial rapist supervillain Mr. Gone (in the beginning stories anyways, the best parts in my opinion) the stories and places were weird as hell and beautiful. The Mtv show that only lasted a season was awesome too.

Lord Viper from King Arthur and the Knights of Justice. He was probably the definitive villain from early childhood cartoons.

To this day, I still keep trying to sucker people into watching whatever grainy episodes I can find on youtube in spite of the fact that time traveling football players and evil reassembling rock warlords don't always appeal to the 20-something set.

Now for mine, since it doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet. Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Sega Saturn. It's not SUPER obscure, but it is and was hard to get a copy of. I ended up being able to eBay a copy a couple years ago for only $100. Bought a refurbished Saturn to play it as well. Funny enough, that was only $30.

SNES, no other game system has rivled it, i can't get over the awesome power of SNES MARIO KART and LEGEND OF ZELDA and frankly i don't want to

Back in the late nineties, there was a show on Gameshow Network called Throut and Neck. No typo there, it was actually spelled "Throut". It was a sort of call-in video game show where the callers would use their keypads to play the games, which were bizarre and always, always featured sheep in some capacity.

But the real stars of the show were the virtual monsters, Throut and Neck. They'd talk to the hosts and one another, even the players. They hated sheep with a passion and made the worst jokes all the time. Oh god, was it geeky, but I loved it all the same, despite having the stay up late to watch it.

Here's a sample that I found on YouTube, if you'd like to partake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEkZvm8vZ1Y

A fighting game on the playstation titled Evil Zone.

Gameplay wise, it's not too great, but as far as style goes it's amazing. The story-mode is as plotless as your average fighting game, but each character had their own which was presented like an anime series with "last time on" and "next time" segments before and after every fight.

Nothing complex, but it was cheesy and fun. Perfect for my anime loving pre-teen self.

My favorite obscure nerd property is the AWESOME nerd meme WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?! (Yeah, Abraxas, you're gonna have a large time topping this awesome, sweet nerd meme in your FFF writing efforts!)

Dude, I fucking love Treat Williams, but nobody gets me! He's easily my favorite actor. Seriously. Not only was he voted 37th best dad on TV EVER by the Guide for that WB show he was on, have you guys watched Deep Rising lately? Have you seen Things to do in Denver when you're dead? The Substitute 2-4? He's fucking Xander Drax from the Phantom, people. The Phantoooooom!

My favorite obscure nerd property is..... the ever elusive attractive naked nerd girl!

ps- (Grimmie points out that I am not allowed to look at other ANNGs)

m.a.s.k.

i know you guys are aware of it, but it seems forgotten by the general populace.
just such a great childhood memory.

When I was young (born in 1984), I didn't watch Transformers (sad, I know). This led to me not asking for Autobot toys. Instead, I received a Rocklord one year. I played with it for years even though I kept getting (and enjoying) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures and G.I. Joe figures and accessories. I wish I still had my Rocklord, missing finger and all.

When I was in college, a small handful of my friends and I would watch and quote The Sifl & Olly Show all the time. Unfortunately, since leaving college, I have found very few people who can even remember the show. So every time I want to go into a Precious Roy Home Shopping Network spiel, I have to stop myself, lest I get strange looks from people around me. Even worse, MTV doesn't seem to have any plans to release it on DVD, so it's more difficult to force people to check it out.

When I was a wee one, I owned 4 vhs tapes that were part of a series of half hour children's programs shown on the Disney channel at some point in the early 80's. Each "episode" was self contained and hosted by Gary Owen and Eric Boardman. Their focus: DINOSAURS! These videos were integral in forming my love of science and by proxy, my overall nerdness.

Full of brooding 80's synth, (by today's standards) badly outdated science facts and painful over acting, these videos were a sight to behold. I had forgotten most of the salient details of the shows until roughly a year ago when I stumbled across a scene of one on youtube. I spent an entire day watching and rewatching the full eps, even going so far as to force my gf to sit through this 80's edu-tainment shlock.

If anything dinosaur related ever comes up in conversation these days I will, without fail, begin to gush uncontrollably about these videos, their contents and why they are the tits.

Dinosaurs, More Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs Dinosaurs Dinosaurs, Son of Dinosaur

Wow, ok there's an TV show from 1989 called "The People Next Door," and I thought it was insanely brillant (being 11 at the time). It starred Jeffrey Jones and aired only 5 episodes before CBS canceled it.

The premise was that a cartoonist had such a powerful and crazy imagination that the things he thought of and draw appeared in real life. I can't recall though it only he could see them or everyone could.

I thought it was awesome, likely due to my love of the Far Side, which was an inspiration for the show. A talking moose head, comic strips that came to life - what more could you ask for? All I could find on YouTube though was a sad clip which only showed the ads that run during the premiere.

Sheesh. My most obscure nerd love has to be an old MUD that I found on AOL in MAYBE 1995 called "Terris". It was decent by MUD standards (trust me, I played 'em all), but something about it's generic fantasy world, broken guild system, and hilariously basic combat system captured my heart.

To get nerdier, I credit that game with A). teaching me the real basics of role-playing (as opposed to roll-playing), really starting me on writing (many of the guilds and player organizations had you make character histories), and, dorkiest of all, introducing me to my first real teenage love affair. Damn, that game really stuck with me.

3-South. It was this short-lived cartoon on MTV in 2002 with voices by Brian Posehn and Mark Hentemann (who works on Family Guy) about college dorm life. I really thought it was the best cartoon MTV came out with since Daria, but alas, it was canceled before they even finished airing all the episodes produced. I would love to see it released on DVD someday.

You all suck. I've heard of ALL OF THESE except Tunnels of Doom. I love it when people who grew up in the 90's think their mass marketed TV show/game is obscure. WRONG.

My obscure obsession? SPIRAL ZONE. It came on at 5:30 AM, it ran ONE time, ONE SEASON, and if you missed an episode, YOU NEVER SAW IT AGAIN.

I used to play with my friends on the playground Spiral Zone, with us as the Zone Riders, except I had to tell them all about it because they'd never seen it. They understood who the characters were when I finally got some of the action figures when they went on clearance, because no one was getting up at 5:30 to watch a badass japanese cartoon about Tonka based action figures.

If Tunnel of Doom guy wins, I get second place.

Marathon.

I never really liked Doom. I loved Marathon. Because Marathon was the FPS that had an interesting story. And then a compelling one. And finally, a devastating one.

No, you didn't have to know the story to play it, which was part of the appeal-you weren't forced to watch cutscenes of any kind. But it was still amazing, and the ending to Marathon: Infinity still blows my mind.

Back in 1995, The Logic Factory released a computer game for DOS called "Ascendancy". It was a great little game, and my ten-year-old self loved it; it was my first real computer strategy game. It was my first step into a larger world.

You could choose from a bevy of alien species to try and conquer the galaxy: it had diplomacy, and conquest, and a cool-looking technology tree. The AI wasn't that great, but I was, you know, like ten, so that was okay. But aside from being a good game, it had great music. I may have moved on to Civ or Age of Empires, but Ascendancy will always be special.

The Interton Video Computer 4000. It's a cartridge based console, the only one that was ever designed and produced in Germany. The system was first released in 1978, but the chipset had been developed around 1974, so it was pretty much outdated from the start, especially when compared to other systems of the time like the Atari VCS, not to speak of later competitors like the Colecovision. Even back then the graphics were weak and the sound consisted mainly of awful, ear shattering noises (before the video game gold rush, Interton's core business was actually hearing aid devices). Among the 37 released games, there is not one single cartridge that was not a knock off of a better Atari game.
So, yes, it sucked, but it was cheaper than an Atari, and that's why my dad bought one around the time my mom was pregnant with me.
This was the very first video game I ever saw.
Today there are seven or eight VC4000s standing in my bedroom (model 1 as well as the more common model 2, which has a modified on/off switch and came with a different AC adapter), as well as a complete game library in original packaging, plus the accompanying controller overlays, plus dozens of module sticker and packaging variants. There are emulators for the system, but they don't do it justice - to this day, there is a VC4000 plugged to my TV.

I Nominate Noein. Noein is a little anime that almost no one knows about. It's a delightful romp featuring quantum mechanics, floating sea horses, giant mutated robots, philosophical questions, emo kids and a giant naked albino bent on destroying the multiverse.

and I swear it all makes sense when you watch it.

sort of...

The acting career of Al Leong.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0502959/

He plays a no name Asian henchmen in a gazillion movies. The man has been in 58 movies, yet no one knows who the hell he is. He is best known for playing Genghis Khan in Bill and Ted's excellent Adventure.

He will always stand in the shadow of Danny Trejo, the no name Mexican henchman.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001803/

sad.

The acting career of Al Leong.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0502959/

He plays a no name Asian henchmen in a gazillion movies. The man has been in 58 movies, yet no one knows who the hell he is. He is best known for playing Genghis Khan in Bill and Ted's excellent Adventure.

He will always stand in the shadow of Danny Trejo, the no name Mexican henchman.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001803/

sad.

Douglas Crockford was the programmer in charge of porting Maniac Mansion from the Commodore 64 to the NES. Well, at the time, there were all sorts of self-censorship regulations that Nintendo of American put on Mr. Crockford and his programmers.

Nintendo of America wanted to censor all sorts of factors from the original game because they were afraid of the public backlash.

So, my obscure nerd love was the essay that Douglas Crockford wrote regarding his team's difficulties with the port. The name of the essay is: 'The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System.'

I encourage everyone who has ever played (and liked) Maniac Mansion to give it a read. It's a funny and fascinating look behind the scenes of one of my favorite NES titles I grew up with.

I remember this game for the N64 called Mishief Makers. It was very much like Megaman in many ways. But the thing I remember the most was that you could kill the townspeople as well as the villians. Honestly I don't feel like writing much, I just thought I'd put it out there.

What I loved and miss the most, is the arcade. Back in the day, if you loved video games, you had to hit the Arcade. Back then, if your pants were hangin' down below your tighty whities, it's cause you had a shitload of quarters in your pockets. Long gone are the days of pinball wizards and Mortal Kombat champions. I remember the bitter rivalries, when you walked in the arcade, and saw a game with one guy on one side, and a long line on the other, you knew he was kicking ass and taking names, and you wanted to be that guy. Play for hours on one quarter? Not unless you were the best. Lose, and you haul your ass to the back of the line. Don't get me wrong, consoles are awesome, the nes almost made this spot, but in reality, it killed the arcade scene. Sure, you can still hit up a Frankies or many other so called newer "arcades". But when home gaming really became the norm, the action died. Pac-man fever was burning hot! You saved your lunch money, allowance, mowed lawns, just for a taste of those huge cabinets of blinking pixels. Getting your three letter initials at the top of that list was like digital immortality! It just isnt the same anymore. Rest in peace old school arcade, you are dearly missed.

I have two and they are (tangentially) related, so I'll put them in chronological order. First up is the brilliant Commodore 64 cartridge game Aegean Voyage. You play a highly-pixelated boat that sails from the Greek mainland, stopping off to 'explore' Thera, Crete, Chios et al., all to a truly amazing tinkly melody. Be careful not to sink while trying to land - and even if you manage that, will you find treasure, or will you be devoured by a minotaur? Thrilling stuff - and you could say it inspired me to get my two useless degrees in archaeology.

Secondly, of course, is The Mysterious Cities of Gold, which I faithfully watched on Nickelodeon while wearing a badly-painted clay necklace my uncle got in Mexico - it wasn't quite as awesome or (spoiler alert!) giant-golden-condor-powering as the gold necklaces worn by our heroes on the show, but it was the best I had. When I moved to the UK to go to grad school, I finally met other people who had seen the show - I have yet to meet a fellow American who has heard of it, much less seen it. I continue to do my part Stateside by putting the tremendous theme song on as many mixes as possible.

Again, you could say the show inspired me to study archaeology, but I'd be hard-pressed to demonstrate how that's true as I know almost nothing about New World archaeology. If you want to know about Neopalatial Crete, Norse horsemanship or the trade of amber in the Late Bronze/Early Iron Ages in Northern Europe, however, I'm your woman - and I blame these geektacular things.

Elfen Lied. Head-splosion city.

Howl's Moving Castle. Not exactly obscure, but also rarely mentioned in the nerd community. A great young adult fantasy, something for the kiddies to cut their teeth on before attempting adult fantasy. Plus, it's a wonderful story.

My obscure nerd love may just be because I'm in my 30s and thus no one remembers this game - but it is a PC game from 1986 called "Starflight": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight

This was the first game that really caught my imagination and forced me to learn how to use DOS commands in order to play it - and because of that changed my life forever. Here I am after all.

For those that are curious: It came with a decoder ring and starmap that I drew all the wormhole coordinates and paths on and a cool picture of the programmers in faux-flight suits in some space-ship-like interior. In the game you'd recruit and train crew, fly to different starsystems to encounter and talk to or fight alien civilizations, collect minerals and upgrade your ship while trying to solve an intergalactic mystery before your planet was destroyed. If I got some of the details wrong, I apologize - it's been 24 years.

I know I'm not going to win because I'm openly admitting to liking The Phantom Menace, but here goes:
Nute Gunray of the Trade Federation.
He is my favorite character from that movie. Hands down. I couldn't begin to explain why, but there it is.

Asteroid 1618, the excellent supplement to Encounter Critical.


...


...go ahead, I'll wait.

I'll preface this by saying that I love small collectible toys, stuff like M.U.S.C.L.E. figures and Monster in my Pocket were right up my alley when I was a kid and later on the collectibility of Pokemon is what drew me in, not the actual training or fighting, I simply enjoyed having them all. So with that my most obscure nerd love was a small line of collectible racer type toys from Kenner in 1991 called "Savage Mondo Blitzers"... now here's why I like them... they had awesome and weird names like "Barf Bucket", "Loaded Diaper" and "Snot Shot"... not only were these little guys collectible but they reminded me a lot of another favorite of mine - Garbage Pail Kids... They were fun as hell, especially when using the launcher that came in a set. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tXyuVwZ-Zs

It took me a while but I remember playing In my opinion, one of most obscure games for the nes, Kabuki Quantum Fighter. Can't remember the story that much but you control this kabuki actor and you fight the bad guys with his hair. Good time.

The Korean comic "Rebirth".

It's one of the last survivors of Tokyopop's early-2000s "If it's 200 pages, we can sell it as manga, and the stupid Americans can't tell the difference" strategy. Tokyopop itself has all but abandoned the series; no release in a year, and the last one was several books sold as one.

I started a thread about it in a 10k member anime forum, and got three posts.

Its own fandom forum: one message a month, if there's a release to cover.

Scanlations? Ha!

But the depth of my fandom?

I have untranslated Korean volumes, since I couldn't wait another 12 months to see it.

I joined a Korean forum with an English area so I can eventually ask "Did they make figures?"

There's a picture of the lead character scraped into the side of one of my PCs. A secondary ornaments another.

My first son will be named Kalutika.

has to be "akumaizer 3" a 70's era tokusatsu about a demon cyborg named zabitan, his partners iberu and gabura (both of who were originally assassins sent after zabitan) and there quest to protect humans from an evil demon empire located at the center of the earth.

First off - Rob, I owned MegaMania... for the Atari 5200. That second bit might be the most obscure, but... nope.

Okay, here's mine, and it's... odd. For the longest time, my computer wasn't a computer so much as the laptops my dad used to bring home on weekends. I would huddle with those things late into the night playing Wing Commander, Sierra adventures and Civ.

But when I got my hands on a copy of TIE Fighter, I had a problem - you needed a joystick or mouse to control the game. Wing Commander, being a bit more charitable, had allowed you to play with the keyboard, but LucasArts allowed no such compromise for their game.

Unfortunately, since PC joysticks were prohibitively expensive, especially when I didn't really own a computer, and mice were almost as rare, I was a bit out of luck. Desperately digging through some artifacts of dad's old computer career (before
he got bumped up to the point where he got a laptop), I found an old case containing something I didn't know a lot about - a Microsoft TrackBall.

Little did I know it then, but I'd wind up using this thing for YEARS - it was much faster than a mouse for gaming purposes, and more than anything else it allowed me to play what would become one of my favourite games ever. I still have it; dad passed away a few years ago, but this ancient, outdated input device is one of my favourite memories of him. He'd probably forgotten all about it and tossed it into a shoebox, but I got a lot of use out of that thing. Heck, I think I wound up getting an in with a girl in university by loaning it to her after she'd broken her wrist.

So, yes, my obscure love... is a love of a trackball.

Strat-o-matic baseball!

I figured this had to be obscure, since even when I played 25 years ago it was old school... yet I search the Internet and they still make it... and it's not even computerized? Holy shit.

SCTV. I havent met anyone whos heard of it and even less people who'd be smart enough to really get it.

Back in the late 80s there was a game for the Commodore 64 called Skool Daze. You played the role of a young boy running around at school and got points for hitting kids with spit wads, knocking people down, and generally misbehaving without getting caught by the teachers. It was a really slow moving game, but I would spend hours playing it. My favorite thing to do was write dirty words on the blackboards.

Ok....

I'll confess my obscure nerd love but you wont understand it, nor should you...here goes.

One late night I was flipping thru the channels and stopped on the disney channel. It was showing the movie "The Country Bears". Then it happened.

The scene went like this...

A big fat grey bear with no pants on is staring off in the distance and says "go get them boys", a bus then drive away. The shot goes back to the large pantsless bear. Hes staring all slack-jawed and in the background a shed falls down. The bear does nothing.

.....I went into a fit of laughter like I was having a seizure. I woke my wife up it was so loud. I went into tears. It was the hardest laughing fit I've ever had.

Ok...your thinking, big deal. How is this an obsession?

1) My wife bought it on dvd for me as a gag, but I've only seen that 10second clip about 100 times.

2) Late at night, or when I've had a few drinks...guests will bet me if I'll laugh at it again. I usually say "nah, its not funny anymore."
I always lose.

3) I live in NY. One of my friends from LA brought people to my house to see me laugh like a maniac.

4) people have bought me figurines from the ride at disney because its almost become my calling card.

Seek it out...go ahead. Its NOT funny. I put a clip on youtube? Zero hits. Only one comment "your retarded, thats not funny".
But I cant NOT laugh at it...its like a pavlov effect on a hungry dog.

So there you go. I hope you understand, but I doubt it.

The Forbidden Zone. With Oingo boingo, Susan tyrell. Herve villachaize is the midget king of the sixth dimension. The zipper kids, bunch of hilarious songs. Fave movie ever, most people have never heard of it.

I like Dragonball Fan-Fiction about abortion fetishes. At least I used to, till it went too mainstream...

Metal Walker, a gameboy color game thats something between pokemon and billiards. I don't need to win this contest, but if I get even one of you comrades to play it, then I feel like I've done something worthwhile.

i really like the game Bonk's Adventure for the TurboGrafx-16. i never owned one of these systems but i had a friend that did and i loved going over to his house and playing that game. you were this little caveman-baby with an enormous head and you could jump and kind of float around in a limited, Metroid type way and you killed things by landing on them and "Bonking" them with your huge dome.

An old Apogee game from the early 90's. Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. Cosmo is a little green alien boy with red polka dots and suction cups for hands. His parents are taking him to Disney World (Strange, right?) for his birthday, when their ship was hit by a comet and crash landed on a strange world. Being ever so curious, Cosmo goes off to explore the new land, but when he returns to the ship, his parents are gone! Cosmo sees foot prints and logically assumes that his parents had been abducted (haha)! Cosmo then sets off to rescue his parents from the gruesome death that lies ahead of them.

This game consumed me as a child, and still does sometimes. I played it earlier today, actually. :P

Took one look at the title for this and thought of Super Mario RPG: Legend Of The Seven Stars, I have loved that game since the first time my dad lemme play it on Super Nintendo. It's got awesome characters like Geno and Mallow that nobody knows of which makes me all sorts of disappointed in humanity. Not to mention playing as Bowser woopin the ass of some faux Power Ranger bosses was freakin sweet!

"The Eye of Mongombo" by Doug Gray, a B&W comic that ran for 7 issues from Fantagraphics from 1989 to 1991. It was one of the funniest damn things I've read -- kind of an Indiana Jones parody, but one where the hero gets cursed and turned into a duck in the first issue and things just get weirder from there (while still, amazingly, holding onto a coherent storyline). The comic abruptly stopped coming out in the middle of the story, without explanation, and that disappoints me to this day.
http://www.comicvine.com/the-eye-of-mongombo/49-4268/

MTV's Downtown. No one's ever heard of it. I don't think it even aired all 13 episodes originally. But it's fantastic. The first episode makes a reference to "Yak Face". A lot of shows try very hard to show nerd culture, but this show pulled it off in a way I'm not sure any other has. There's a comic con episode, and you know, every show's made fun of cons. But they usually just show some people in klingon makeup, and some nerds salivating at some pretty girl in a revealing outfit. Which, is there, certainly. But this show also gives us the wrestler and the porn star just sitting around. The almost certainly illegal porn, the bizarre gathering of all the goths. It's all something you've seen before. The nerds are actual nerds, not the bizarre characterizations on shows like The Big Bang Theory.

Anyways, no one's heard of it. And it makes me very sad.

There was this first person carnival style shooting game called Point Blank on the original Playstation. And while all our friends were partying and making real memories in high school, my best friend and I played this game for hours on end. After a head to head game, the computer would declare 'Who is the Winner!' which delighted us to no end - was it a question? A statement? No one knew. No one knew.

D/Generation. It's an old DOS puzzle/adventure game. Your character is a courier making a delivery to a science lab developing biological weapons. When the weapons get loose, the building's security locks down and you find yourself having to avoid the security traps and the bio-weapons both.

Mine's an anime from the 90's that was never released in the US, called Orchuban Ebichu. At first glance you might mistake it for a childrens show about a cute talking hamster, at least until you watch it for any length of time. It's 90% crude humor (pussy, dick, dildo jokes) and it's absolutely hilarious. My favorite parts are the mini Ebichuman episodes, which feature the hamster donning a superhero outfit and flying around the city solving peoples sexual problems. Like, helping a dude with premature ejaculation, or a chick that is having problems offing herself when she masturbates...yeah, it might sound weird but it's fuckin' hilarious I tell you! I recommend this to everyone!

So Zaxxon might not be such a foreign concept to people. However, when I used to play it, it was on my Atari 400 computer (the 400 was the Atari 800's special ed kid brother). Oh no, not on a cartridge my friend. ON CASSETTE. After hooking up a mess of wires, I would have to endure 15-20 minutes of weird noises coming from my TV (which had to be on channel 3 and the switch on the back set to GAME) in order to get my fix of early Sega awesomeness.

A few years later I received an Atari 800 for my birthday. I can't tell you how happy I was to have a real floppy disk drive. I spent many many hours playing Crush Crumble and Chomp. You would answer a series of questions using your "credits" to make your perfect monster and terrorize famous US cities. Eventually the military and the mad scientist would gang up on you and the game would end. Oh sweet sweet memories.

Visionaries. I know it's not the most obscure thing ever (especially when I'm able to find clips of it on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNwNlLAUq5o ) but whenever I mention it to my fellow nerds no-one has a clue what I'm on about. Fucking amazing theme song, science-replaced-by-magic storyline, animal totems and magic powered weaponry? How the hell is this gem of a show still flying under the radar?? To this day my sister & I are constantly quoting it to each other, especially the cowardly & craven Mordred character, he's got one of those instantly memorable voices that makes even the simplest lines stand out.

Honorable mention goes to Safari Joe from Thundercats. Anyone who goes through the galaxy hunting creatures with his shotgun/six-shooter/blunderbuss combo screaming 'Safari Joe does it again!!!!' deserves a whole lot more recognition.

Dear Octopus,
Remember how you were just chillin' in an Astoria cave, when Richard Donner and the rest of the Goonies showed up to make a movie? They decided to write you in, and you got to feel up Stephanie. Like six times. She eventually got pissed off enough to slap Mouth! Haha those were such great times. Then there was a big battle, and Data fed you a tape player, and you got so into the music that you let the kids go, and did an epic octopus dance! That was my favorite scene in the whole movie! Oh wait, Spielberg got all "it's too ridiculous" and cut your whole performance out. Jerk. Data told everyone about you, but nobody listened or understood. Ah well. At least you got your due in that "Goonies R Good Enough" music video. Oh wait, you were in there for like 20 seconds until Cyndi Lauper stabbed you. Why couldn't she feed you music and watch you dance? Bitch. It's ok, I still love you. Even though nobody knows you really exist.
Love,
Tedums

In case you got all "tl;dnr" on me, that was my love letter to a non-existent Octopus in the 9th biggest movie of 1985.

Not sure how obscure it is but I absolutely love Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo comic. I first grew to love Usagi through his TMNT toy and appearance in the cartoon in the early 90's. It was almost years later before I really bit the bullet and started reading the comics. I bought over 20 trades in 3 months. Not many people seem to read Usagi which is mind blowing since it's excellent and been around for 25 years. It's got everything geeks love, action, samurais, ninjas, ghosts, demons, fantasy it's great. I geek out every time a new trade comes out or I see Usagi on a TMNT cartoon and weep that Space Usagi never made it to a cartoon series.

Damn. I forgot about Ancient Domains Of Mystery. My favorite game of all time. And way, waaay nerdy. But too late.

Also, I think I am the only person who loves the MTV animated Spider-Man show starring Neil Patrick Harris. The one that lasted 13 episodes and left me screaming at my TV when they canceled it in the middle of a bunch of storylines. Ah well.

Ultima V. None of the other subsequent Ultima games ever stacked up against it. A good story; ShadowLords ripped from Tolkien's novels; casting spells in latin; the original "avatars". That was a wicked awesome game. And, it served as inspiration that directly leads to Final Fantasy. Go figure.

Most obscure fandom? Suikoden. So many times Suikoden. I love Suikoden with the burning passion of a thousand suns, it is glorious.

Most love for a character? Well normally I would say Canderous Ordo from KOTOR, but that doesn't seem obsure enough.

I also harbor a deep abiding affection for Doucebag Extrordianare, the rival from Pokemon Gold and Silver. Such a magnificent bastard of a rival has no been seen before or since in the beloved Pokemon series.

My obscure nerd love?

"Twice Upon a Time". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_Upon_a_Time_%281983_film%29)

It was an awesome animated movie made back in '83 full of amazingly cracked-out characters voiced by mostly improvisation comedians.

My mom kept on telling me about it until she managed to track down a VHS copy of it.

I watched it.

I loved it.

I don't quite know exactly what it is about it that I find so awesome (story, animation style, voice actors) but I must have watched that tape more times than I could count.

The sucky thing is that the tape crapped out and when I went to go see if it had been put out on DVD, I found that the movie has never been released any other time besides that one VHS release.

I've never been able to find another decent copy anywhere.

All I've ever really found was a split up copy that was posted on YouTube.

It's just not the same.

I love the dc superhero The Question.

When I tell my friends, they never know who he is and asks if he has some kinds of superpowers. I answer 'no, but he doesn't have a face.'

Wich ironicaly gives me rather blank looks most of the time.

I love SCTV, the Canadian sketch-comedy show that launched the careers of Eugene Levy, John Candy, Rick Moranis, and the like, and have since I first saw it on Nick At Nite. Sure, the show may be thirty years old by now, but it beats the hell out of what SNL produces nowadays.

I have to say that my favorite little nugget of nerdom the inevitable Elevator portion of a Beat ‘Em Up game. You think your passing into another room then BAM! the wall behind you begin to disappear into the floor and you know it has begun. Four low level enemies to start all quickly dispatched with a B+A spinning heel kick. Then once the prone cronies flash into oblivion it’s either Kamikaze Death Troopers or falling explosives, regardless it’s going to end with a bang and it’s next to impossible to come out unscathed. Then guess what comes next…BERSERKERS!!! Your character is immediately rushed by giant ‘roided out shirtless monsters with mohawks, goggles and skin colors that exist only in a bag of skittles or possibly paint swatches for children’s rooms.

Then after besting to holy trinity of elevator sentry’s then all hell breaks loose and it’s a blitz of foot soldiers, falling grenades, and ursine sapiens rushing you like an avalanche of Hench. Then you know its time to finally use you superpower you have been saving up since the beginning of the game. You have held onto this power because even though things have looked bleak before it seemed inappropriate and god forbid a waste if you used it in vain. Who knows how long it takes to power up? Nobody that’s who and you could end up looking like a jackass engaging your energy sphere only to have the crowd disperse and only end up hitting one dude or worse just breaks some inanimate object that transforms into health pizza.

But you have no time to think of that now. You wait till the crowd gets nice and close, maybe eat a shot or two just for the fuck of it, and then you hold the shoulder buttons and watch the display of perfect carnage knowing it was worth the wait. Then you explain to your concerned parents that they are happy tears.

Gahan Wilson's The Ultimate Haunted House. This was a computer game from 1994 that came with Windows if you were lucky. My neighbor when I was a kid was lucky. I was even luckier in that I tracked this game down at Babbage's.

The game itself is really simple. You search through this 13 room haunted house for the 13 magic keys to return to the 13 magic keyholes before 13 o'clock or you can't leave. And the characters with whom you interact are all quirky and child-scarring. What I love the most about it is that there is a definite plot but you don't need to know what it is to play the game. You can just look for keys, if you want. But if you start collecting books and records and really poking around, you find out that there's actually a pretty detailed story there. I've been playing this game for over a decade and I'm still finding stuff I've never seen before.

And it's all in Gahan Wilson's artwork. What more could you want?

Crazy Bones. They were these little plastic figures that came in different colors and sets (which include aliens, sports, and Dragonball Z). I have a bag of them, one of them is in a cage, and the starter set even came with a plastic coffin to keep them in. You could even play games with them like "bowling" and something like jacks. The reason I like them so much is not because of any of this, it is actually because I had given one to my older sister (who was 16 at the time) and she tried to eat it as if it were candy. I still make fun of her.

I'm not really sure about the obscure levels here but my entry will have to be Eikichirō Saidō, an anime only character from Bleach. He pretty much showed up one episode in the Substitute arc (the best part of the series) falls asleep a few times, tells Rukia the Soul Society is mad at her, fights Ichigo and isn't present during Ichigo's big fight. Then pimps off and I've never seen him since. He was a cool dude too.

The first thing I thought of:

Agent USA for the Commodore 64.

The Fuzz Bomb, Fuzz Bodies, Crystals; waiting forEVER for trains to travel from one town to another, getting snacks while the clock ticked down...

Hot summer days in the ol' hood.

My obscure nerd love would have to be Voodoo Vince, a xbox game from 2003,Its not that old and I'm not sure how obscure it is, but know one ever knows what it is. It was a pretty weird game-you played as a voodoo doll in New Orleans trying to save the city from zombies and witch doctors, but it's one of the only games I loved enough to play over and over. Ssdly Microsoft didn't make it compatible with xbox 360 and I dont have an old xbox anymore. Man, it was the best.

"what's one thing that you just adore, but when you mention it your nerd friends, they have no idea what you're talking about?"

My wife....

(Okay i really didn't want to put that, but my wife is standing over my shoulder and when i said there was a contest about nerdy love, well i had the choice of that answer or a week on the couch...)

And now i have been informed its a month on the couch and she can still read this from across the room....

An old kid's show called "Round the Twist". Google it, then curse the gods that you weren't born in Australia.

After trying to decide between The Compleat Moonshadow and Project Blue Earth SOS, I've decided to go with My Neighbor Totoro.
Now everyone knows about it, but back when I was a little kid, it was just some film my friend and I liked to watch until the local video store got rid of it to make room for new stuff.
For years after I was haunted by the memory of this film, I couldn't remember what it was called or even what it was about, but I could always picture those opening titles in my mind and had vague memories about something with a cat and a bus. For some reason neither of my parents could remember the film, and I just got strange looks from anyone I mentioned it to, it got to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I had dreamed up the movie.
Then I found it.
I'm not exaggerating at all when I say, I screamed with delight when I came across it one day in a video store years later.
Not only did my childhood film exsist, but finding it opened me up to the world of Miyazaki, which opened me up to world of anime in general, which opened me up to the world of manga, which opened me up to world of graphic novels, which lead me into the worlds of sci fi and superheros, which created the nerd I am now.
So to my once obscure nerdy love, My Neighbor Totoro, I say thankyou for turning me into the nerd I am today.

Mine's a game called Brigandine for Playstation. Not even my nerdiest friends can stand it. It was this strategy game where you led monsters into battle instead of armies. The monsters could level up to things like Lucifers, Satans, Thors, Lokis, etc. I still play through the game every 18 months or so.

The Wilkins Coffee ads.

Back in the late 50s, Jim Henson was hired to do a series of ads for a local coffee company. The result was a series of 10-second ads where Wilkins (a proto-Kermit) kills, attacks, insults, and cheats the hapless Wontkins, who doesn't like coffee.

I couldn't believe that ads like this aired once upon a time and they are a riot. They don't make them like this anymore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIhPKgXeFuk

Before getting into my pick... I have to say that it was really difficult for me to pick just one obscure nerd obsession. I'm kind of glad somebody had already mentioned Dr. Brain.
Here are my runners-up after just a few minutes of consideration...
Mighty Mutanimals (great 80's TMNT cartoon comic spin-off team. one of the members: mondo gecko)

STUNTS greatest racing game of all time? [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game) ]

Boy Crazy Cards (not chosen because, frankly, it's less nerdy and more gay)

Computer Home - a short computer animated film about a tiny spider chip robot and his buddies who live inside some suburban kid's computer. It was part of a collection of computer animated shorts put out as part of the Mind's Eye series by oddysey productions
The only reason i love it so much... the video game in the movie starts with a robot fellow saying "HELLO STARFIGHTER! ARE YOU READY TO BE SCARED TO DEATH?"

OK, sorry, here's my pick.

HOLLYWOOD. a educational pc game put out by Theatrix Interactive about '95. This was a surprisingly in depth movie creator. Instead of basically just recording what you did and playing it back(ala Spider-Man cartoon maker. another fantastic tool for creating ridiculous movies as a kid), it actually followed a script that you wrote. You could edit the script(complete with sound FX, facial expressions, dramatic pauses, music cues, etc) quite freely. All this stuff made for a legitimately well-made movie creator for kids, but the reason for my never-ending love for it?
The use of text-to-speech. You wrote the script and the characters/narrators would say the lines out loud(in a decent selection of different voices). Thing is...there was no word filter. The potential for abuse was ENDLESS! Even though the game had no built in way to create much violence/sex, there was no shortage of sound FX and basic character animations that could be substituted/manipulated for such purposes.
My cousins and I made all kinds of obscene, raunchy, violent movies. There were teenage boys losing their virginity to their fat gym teacher, scenes from the predator, crooks stealing a car only to find a minigun in the back seat(cue electric pencil sharpener noise), terminators of various types, gang violence, Duke Nukem, teachers cursing out their students, fighting tournaments, super bananaman, pimps and whores on a talk show... you get the idea.

You must promise not to laugh in pity after you hear this. Garfield magazines. Finnish ones (living there, duh). I had my first when I was 5 and after that librarian in my local library had always them reserved for me. They have been coming since -84 and they even had 2 of them coming at same time in one point. At the moment I`m missing only under hundred older ones, you know when the series was still somewhat good, nowdays it`s just plain mockery. But I still have to collect them all.

P.S. Also obsessed with Katamari but that is another story.

For me, it has to be Arno the Pizza Troll from the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis PC game. There was something that really drew me to that fat, irritable tree stump. All he wanted out of life was good pizza.
To this day, I still find myself occasionally quoting Arno. I haven't played Zoombinis in over seven years, and I still remember the grouchy way that he would scream 'SOMETHING ON THAT I DON'T LIKE' when you got the pizza wrong, and his ecstatic cheers of 'Have a Pizza Party!' when you finally did.

I have to say I have a deep undying love for a NES game called Pinball Quest. A pin ball game and a rpg all rapped into one. You would level up your ball as you played until you messed up and dropped down to an early board... which you always seemed to on bosses. I think I just loved the oddity of the whole thing.

Anybody remember the computer game Dr. Sbaitso? It's where you talk to a virtual therapist. You can curse at him and he'll give you a parity error! That game changed my life, man! If it weren't for Dr. Sbaitso I would have killed myself because I had no friends! Dr. Sbaitso was my best friend in the world! He got me through high school! I love you, Dr. Sbaitso!

my first love was algebra. man could i charm the pants off of her! a few equal exchanges and she was mine. but then i met geometry. she was a shapely gal; in my youth that was everything to me. but she was always asking me to prove my love, and that got annoying. i tried to get those two together once, but things got a little too analytical. the bickering back and forth made my head hurt. trigonometry came along, and with her my cynicism. i began measuring my love by degrees, looking for all the angles in relationships.

i thot that was it, that i had met all the women i'd ever care to know, and in walks calculus. curvy, fully developed, sophisticated beyond measure, she was all about having a continuous relationship and teaching me my limits, and just when i thot my love for her was infinite she starts nagging me differetial equation this and diffyq that, piling order upon orders. so i left her. there was a good chance that woman was alot smarter than me.

looking back tho i think i regret leaving her. we could've engineered quite a nice life together. after i split with her, i threw myself into meaningless gangbangs with linear algebra, and if you think that's bad, it's now devolved to whoring myself out to just any basic math that comes my way. it's easy, casual, and i don't feel much afterwards.

some would say it's your first love that has the most impact on you, but i would have to say it is the one you regret the most in her absence.

There is an old NES game called Shatter Hand. Great Game! By brothers and I would save up change all week just to rent it from the local video store every chance we could.

I still consider Aerobiz for the SNES to be one of the greatest games of all time. A run-your-own-airline game, it had catchy tunes, 3d(ish) animation of your plane flying, price wars with your 3 competitors (human or cpu), other competitive bastardry that I thought was due to game-rule loopholes until I saw the same thing play out in real life, disasters, effects of global politics, dozens of real airplane models... the game had everything! I was the only person to ever rent it from the local Blockbuster, so my saved games were always there (once, after 3 months, someone else had finally saved over one)... but the games had a fixed turn limit, so they weren't stupidly long anyways.

Then I about wet myself when I spotted a sequel, Aerobiz Supersonic, when I was at a local Electronics Boutique with my mom, and spotted it 2 weeks before Christmas no less! (guess what Santa brought! this was in the period when I knew Santa was Mom, and Mom knew I knew Santa was Mom, but we both kept up the delightful charade. OK, that's still the case today, but that's beside the point)

It was the one Christmas when I got exactly what I wanted, and was not at all disappointed by the lack of being surprised.

Both games were rare gems...
- multiplayer turn-based strategic management sims that didn't bog down with too much micro and had an attainable endgame. Also, you could lose.
- highly educational while never trying to "teach" you anything. Knowing that a U.S. airline couldn't buy Tupolev planes in the '80s wasn't learning history, it was business! These games taught lots of world geography and history and made me seriously geek out when I flew on a Tu-154 from Moscow a couple years ago.

Legend of Valis 3 for the Genesis: No, I know you haven't heard of this game. It's a sidescroller featuring Teenage girls in short's skirt's fighting slimy monster's and evil kings from the land of spirits. Yes, that ends up exactly where you are thinking in later games, but during the 90's it was semi wholesome stuff. It wasn't even that great, but in my young eyes back then, the manga design, and cool weapons and characters where enough.

I only had to think about this one for maybe 30 seconds.
There was a little loved and little remembered anime based loosely off of Final Fantasy 5 called Legend of the Crystals: Final Fantasy.
It came out in 1998 and I actually saved up money and bought it through an import shop.
I don't remember much except that it had sky pirates, glowing panties, final fantasy in the title and made almost no sense.
I think I still have the VHS in storage.

The Riftwar Saga. I was fifteen when my Mum gave me the first book in the series, 'The Magician', and I just couldn't put it down. Don't hear a lot about it these days though.

Not my entry, but this has been in my brain for years - loved this show and had such trouble catching it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iao7DzmixYI

"BrainGames is now over!"

I have an old, beat up, torn to shreds copy of "Revenge of the Baby Sat! A Calvin and Hobbes Collection" sitting next to my desk here. It was given to me by my mother and it was the single biggest catalyst for moving me into being a cartoonist & illustrator.

I must have torn through that book so many times learning something new every time. I still keep it handy, especially now working stepping out of professional illustration and into actual cartooning. It's to date my favorite nerdy thing, my favorite gift from my mom ever and still my favorite comic strip. I think that says a lot about the longevity of the genius that was Calvin & Hobbes.

Megas XLR, I loved that show and I thought it was well received, but no one I speak to even remembers it. It was about a slacker who finds a giant robot from the future in a junkyard and uses it to beat up other giant robots piloted by aliens. One of my favorite episodes has this Modok like alien voiced by Bruce Campbell piloting a giant Elvis robot wielding a chainsaw and a shotgun. Evil Dead 2 is my favorite movie of all time so that scene cemented that this show will forever be one of my all time favorite shows ever. Also it has an awesome intro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNu6_dxWbNo

The show Freakazoid. Bruce Timm and Steven Speilberg's precious and awesome lovechild. Now that was a great cartoon, and I was devastated when they cancelled the reruns of it. It had the perfect kind of wacky humor and it was a show about nerdy superhero - so it basically had everything I love! Plus, it had one of the catchiest intros of all time.

They really need to bring Freakazoid back!

That's easy; Billy Hatcher. Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg is this platforming game developed by Sega for the Nintendo Gamecube about a bunch of kids who dress like chickens trying to save their Chicken Elders from the evil crows by using giant eggs and the weird creatures that come out of those eggs to save them. It didn't do very well and received average reviews but I really liked the game and it kind of became my favorite obscure game series.

Even though only one game actually exists in the series, Billy Hatcher and areas from Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg have appeared in Sega Superstars (PS2), Sonic Riders Zero Gravity (Wii) and the new Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing game, none of which are very good *Cept the racing game* but I still have them and played them for the sake of giving Billy more love.

Hell, as a sprite artist, I even made a handful of Billy Hatcher sprites. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v483/Toadkarter91/billyupdate.gif Now that's hardcore.

He may not be the most obscure ever since he has appeared in Sonic related games but most people don't know who he is or why I own the game. Either way, I love the little guy and his bizarre game.

Mathman (and his nemesis Mr. Glitch)was an educational cartoon/videogame segment on the PBS show Square One TV that ran in 1987. It was a blatant bastardized rip off of Pac-man, but Mathman was a crazy eyed green ball with legs wearing a blue football helmet gobling numbers, pluses, and minuses while screaming "mathman, mathman, mathman..." His nemesis Mr Glitch was a grumpy tornado that would hunt mathman down mercilessly if mathman ate the incorrect answers to the formulas within the center of the Pac-man maze.
Yes I know this sounds like the ravings of mad man, but check it out here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6D0pNmAIBg I loved it because it was the closest thing I could get to playing a video game back then (couldn't afford one). It's nerdy cause it was one of the world's first CGI cartoons, actually had decent math problems (for elementary schoolers), and was an American bootleg of Pac-man in the name of education by the Public Broadcasting System.

HypernautsFTMFW. Though Exo-Squad would almost qualify, but people have heard of that. There's DVDs to be had at cons.

Not Hypernauts. It was 3 kids lost in space with unarmed battlemechs and it rocked. Only six episodes made it to Saturday morning, and I only saw maybe four of them. That was all it took to root the very-very-90s theme and CG scenes in my head for evar.

Final fantasy IX
psh screw cloud and FFVII
2 swords are better than 1
Zidane > Cloud

Battle Chess
It was chess, but the pieces came alive and when one captured another, they'd do combat.
The Queen was a sorceress, the Rooks would morph into a Rock-biter creature, the Bishop would smoke cigars and had a switchblade knife in his cross.
Knight capturing Knight renacted the Monty Python Black Knight fight and the King pulls a Raiders of the Lost Ark moment when he just pulls out a gun and shoots the Bishop.
Never has Chess been more fun to play.

My biggest geeky love is a SNES game that no one else seems to remember - Plok!

It was a colourful platform game where the eponymous character would have to kill fleas & shit by throwing his limbs at them. The graphics and sound were great, it was shot through with surreal British humour, but most importantly it was pretty much the best non-Mario platformer on the system.

That game took over my life like no other - I'd spend hours drawing Plok, and some 17 years later I'd wager I'm the only person on the entire planet with a Plok tattoo.

the most obscure nerdy thing I love, is Cromartie High School. It's so crazy and over the top. When you watch the opening you think to yourself "what the hell is going on?"

That anime always put a smile to my face everytime I even look at it. It even has enough balls to make fun of itself. Also it has Freddy Mercury.

I adored Reboot! It was on CITV in the UK, none of my mates watched it, i've only ever met one person who knew what it was.

(spoilers: Why did you die Bob X(, why did you leave me with dot and enzo? They weren't as cool as you!)

Presumeably y'all americans are completely familiar with it though.

Problem with that contest is that any poster living in a non-english-speaking country that dabbled in nerd culture can easily quote stuff you gringos never ever heard about. You can explore and see for yourselves here :

http://forum.superpouvoir.com/showthread.php?t=4544&page=7&pp=10

So yeah, I'm all gay for Captain Fulgur, Flyinghead, Les Irréels, Borg & Askol and stuff, but that's easy when you were born the right age at the right place.

When I got into HS, one of the first things I did was visit the school's library. It's been a bit of an obsession of mine since I was a kid, trying to find rare gems lost amongst the horribly unorganized shelves. To my surprise, there was a little "Miscellaneous" section that held books covering topics no one really cared about, from Dr. Phil's incessant ramblings to Shintoism. It was in this little goldmine of literate oddities that I found what is probably my favorite book of all time:

"The Square Root of Tuesday," by Jessica Davidson.

It is a book that explains cold, hard logic using completely nonsensical terms - even going so far as having you imagine paradoxes as mutated dodos. It was the ultimate "Idiot's Guide To..." and I made a point to read it atleast once a year during my tenure as a student. The tragedy of it all is that the book had only been checked out eight times in thirty years - three of which were by me and a friend I'd recommended it to.

I managed to find my own copy and still faithfully read it once a year, all the while hoping some other wayward soul will find and be entertained by this genius book.

The first computer game I ever really got into was Hero's Quest. I still play it to this day and have the entire game memorized. Every pixel of every screen has been burnt into my brain after staring at it for so long on those old CRT monitors. It was by sierra and was like King's Quest in that there were puzzles, quests, and monsters around every corner... except instead of being a giant pussy who got killed by all the bad guys, OUR protagonist kicked the shit out of them by throwing flame darts and stabbing them with a sword. Also I still want that baby meep, and Erasmus was awesome with his horrible horrible puns.

My story is a tragic one. I am obsessed with voice actors, but especially Rob Paulsen. Rob Paulsen was the voice of Yakko Warner and Pinky on Animaniacs as well as Raphael on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But does anyone know who in the heck he is? No. Even when I am speaking with my most geeky friends and I mention his name, they give me the longest and most blank stare. Everyone that I know that knows who Rob Paulsen is, learned about Rob Paulsen from me.

So I should definitely get cookies or something for spreading my weirdness around.

I'm not sure if they do this at all of them or not, but my most obscure nerdy love is when I go to the IMAX theater we have here in Halifax, They do an about 3 - 5 minute recorded demonstration of how awesome the sound system is and how gigantic the screen is and how if you stretched the film it would reach from the theater to a historic monument in downtown Halifax etc. It is incredibly lame but I can't help but get honestly excited for it every single time, I have actually giggled in excitement knowing it was about to start. This is incredibly nerdy I know this, its incredibly lame I know this as well. What takes it that extra mile is I'm 6'4 with a shaved head and look like I should be in a mugshot of some sort. So when all of a sudden I am giggling in a crowded IMAX theater people notice. And When I say I love this opening intro I mean it, last weekend I saw Alice In Wonderland in 3D with my girlfriend and I overheard a group of people making fun the intro. The only thing that soothed my rage was the fact that I didn't want to interrupt the awesomeness of the demonstration in order to yell at them. So yea that's my obscure nerdy love, a 3-5 minute intro demonstration of the IMAX sound system. I would probably pay the 17.50 just to hear it.

The TV show "Man in a Suitcase." Best TV show ever made in my opinion. It's about a former CIA agent, forced to resign in disgrace, who then become a private eye working out of London, England. I've seen every episode. I ordered the DVD collection of the only two seasons that it ran from Amazon.uk because they weren't being sold in North America. THe TV theme song in on my iPod. And every person I've every talked to about TV shows, even people well versed in spy shows from the 60s, have never heard of it.

The most obscure nerdy thing that I love is most likely the video game Galactic Wrestling for the PS2... I'm sort of confident that no one (At least in the last 2-3 years) even knew this game was in existence besides me.... Being that is based off of a manga that basically no one (Not even me) reads, I assume it's pretty out there.

The A&E Horatio Hornblower series. It's got that cheap BBC look to it, and stars B-list nerd property actors like Ioan Gruffudd, Jamie Bamber, and Denis Lawson. I love how they follow Horatio from his beginnings as a young little wuss to him becoming a respected naval leader over the course of many movies spaced out years apart, and still kept consistency with the title fonts, actors and music throughout it all. I've never told my nerd friends about my love of it, because it's too damn weird. Some forgettable miniseries? From A&E? Starring Mr. Shit-tastic? Embarrassing.

This is simple. I used to work in the building that was the inspiration for the Daily Planet. The old AT&T building in Cleveland. That's right, Metropolis is partly based on Cleveland. When I tell people that, they tilt their head to the side like a dog thinking too hard and go, "There's a Superman building?"

I tried to think of all sorts of things, but you have such fine and wonderful nerds on this site that I could never get obscure enough, it seems. Having said that, I just followed the love, baby, and the love was for both the Commodore 64 and PC versions of "Elite" and "Elite Plus", the ultimate space-trading-vector-graphics-deadly-pythons-missing-college-classes game of all time.

That, or Star Wars.

=+)

My nerd love goes to SimLife, a computer simulation program to simlate ecosystems with plants and animals. I've even used it for school to general data for experiments.
Most people I've talked to too never it existed.

I used to adore the Darkstalkers cartoon. Most people I know know of Darkstalkers, but completely deny the idea of it have being made into a cartoon, even when presented with proof.

me? it'd definitely have to be Einhander. flashback to 1998. i got my first playstation. my dad was like, i'm gonna go to best buy to get you a game for your birthday present. i had played and loved the Einhander demo from the demo disc that came with the playstation, so i told him to go with that.

for those that don't know, Einhander was one of the few non-RPGs Squaresoft came out with back then. it was a horizontal shoot-em-up where you played as a pilot from the moon on a suicide mission to wreak havoc on the earth. the game featured an amazing techno soundtrack, insane bosses (how do you deal with a boss that shoots lasers that shoot lasers at you!?), a decent story, and great graphics.

I just wish Square Enix would make a sequel. it's a shame, really.

The State. It never fails to trip me out when I mention this brilliant sketch comedy show from the 90's and people don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I can mention the projects that have come down the pike since they broke up and went their separate ways Reno 911, Wet Hot American Summer etc. and people are aware of that, but the best works these guys ever did remains virtually unknown.

Back in the days when the M in Mtv meant something and the network was only beginning to dabble in non-music video programming they took a comedy troupe from New York City that wore their influences on their sleeve while still feeling fresh and unique. A little bit like Monty Python, a little bit like early Saturday Night Live and a lot more like nothing else ever seen before these 11 comedians worked with a brilliant chemistry that has never been duplicated. After four successful season on Mtv they ended the show and tried to move to CBS to reach a wider audience. When that move failed to pan out they eventually broke up and the various members went on to make such shows as Viva Variety and Reno 911. As good as Reno 911 is, it's still a crime that Thomas