Back in 1996, when I was 12 and my father got me my first PC, I started collecting a magazine called PC Player, since I had just turned into a PC gamer. I did a subscription, but the magazine ended just after I received my third edition of it.

Anyway, one of the editions I had had this article on MSX games and there was an unnamed still on one of the pages with a bad-ass techno-ninja/samurai with lightning in the back. Awesome looking stuff, but I never got to know what game that was. The picture got burned into my brain, though, and about an hour ago, I remembered it and decided to look for it and find out.

At first, I tried to look for digitized copies of the magazine, but couldn't find any. Then, I decided to take the brute approach and searched for MSX games on Google images.

After a few minutes looking, I found it! It was Aleste Gaiden all along. The techno-ninja is actually the main character not an evil enemy as I thought.

Here's pretty much the magazine still from the game: Bad-ass ninja (I don't recall his face being visible on the magazine still, though).

Here's a long play so that you can see what kind of game it is: Aleste Gaiden longplay

Well, not sure what's to discuss here so i'll share a similar story.

In my case, there was this game that i played when i was younger, it was a sidescroller action game, a guy with a sword and a shield but there was some modern stuff in it ("helicopters", granades, etc), i have a strong memory of it because it was the game that i was playing when my console died (it was one of those fake nes consoles) so i never actually finish it and years has passed.

For years that i never knew what game that was until one day (2013) i decided to make a better search and found it.

Trojan

Honestly it's just a random a sidescroller and i'll never play it again, from that era i have better memories of playing Sky Destroyer, Bomberman, Battle City...

I know it's not much of a discussion. The original plan was to ask here for help identifying the game, but once I found the image, it was pretty easy. Thanks for sharing the story. :) I think everybody has a few games they knew once by a single image or title or whatever that they would like to know a little more about. I had plenty of these back in the nineties because many magazines would come with interesting descriptions and just a couple of images from games and we would never get to know more because there was no internet available back then.

Frequently, the games end up sucking, but every once in a while we find a genuine gem.

Just last week I managed to find a game I've been curious about for many years. Something like 20 years ago I briefly saw my older cousins play a sidescrolling dos platformer that looked like a lot of fun. All I had to go on was some vague recollections of a sub like pilotable craft, and perhaps an overworld map. The style was also somewhat like that of Blackthorne, at least in retrospect. After an hour or so of going through all 2d dos platformers from the early 90s on mobygames I'm pretty sure I found it:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/xargon

Thankfully the game doesn't suck :) However, without some strong nostalgia to go on, I'm afraid I'm finding it a bit difficult to enjoy :P

Reminiscent of Blackthorne you say? I got to play it then. :)

I had a similar search for a couple of old arcade coin ops, I was trying to locate the e.g. from MAME. One side-scrolling shoot'em up, and one motorcycle/platform jumping game.

In the end I eventually found them, but now I don't remember the names anymore. :) It was quite exhilarating to find especially the side-scroller as I had played it only a couple of times as a kid (the only place I ever saw it was in a spa my father sometimes took me, there was a recreational room there and that one arcade coin op in one corner, no one else playing it except me), and had only some vague memories of it.

Only a little I'm afraid, and it's not nearly as good. Unlike Blackthorne it also doesn't have such a strong 80s-fantasy-B-movie-with-synth-rock-music vibe going. I really wish that more games did...

That's a shame. Still might track it down.
Yeah I wish more games was like that. It's a great atmosphere for media of any kind.

I'm still trying to find a game (EDIT:it's PC) I played as a kid, but I don't want to even start a "Help me identify this game" thread because I have extremely little to go on. Played in early 90s (before 93) in Poland. It was a side scroller and it had keys. It was kind of outside, so there was sky and grass and trees (not a dungeon). And as I mentioned it had keys. The keys were important because they opened doors (duh!). What I do remember is that one time when we progressed in the game we found a secret key or something, and then to our surprise we found ourselves in one of the very first areas. It was surprising because we thought that once you progress, you leave an are forever. Anyway, now that we were back in the first area it turned out we could go through a door that was locked before, because now we had the key.
And the game had a short name. ken or len or something (No, it's not Commader Keen). But... it could just be that that's how they called the folder the game was in and it had nothing to do with the game name.

I tried the obvious mobygames/wikipedia searches, but no luck. I still hope that someday I'll see a gameplay or a screenshot and I'll recognise it as that game.

PC?

Yes.

Don't know why but that game made me remember a game that i never got to play, back then i somehow got a floppy disk (perhaps from a magazine?) with this sidescroller game but i didn't have a pc back then so i had to use it on the school computers.

Thing is, i didn't know how to use a pc so a friend of mine installed the game on the computer and i got to see him playing for a while until we had to go back to the class. Back then the pc was a new thing so the computer lab was always full, i never got to play it, just watch the other kids playing it until someday the game was deleted from the computer.

The Lost City of Atlantis

That's might be a pretty cool topic: games that we only saw other people/kids playing, never getting a chance to play ourselves. I remember being at a birthday party where my friend got a brand new pc as a gift from his parents, along with a whole bunch of games. Of course I like everyone else wanted to play, but most of us only got a precious few moments :P I remember that one of the games was an early Wing Commander / Privateer (which I got to play for perhaps 3 minutes) and another was Space Hulk. I think he got the first Lands of Lore as well. What annoyed me the most though was that the coolest game he got was 7 Cities of Gold but he had little to no interest in it. Perhaps I should finally check it out for myself, even if some of the reviews are strangely scathing.

By the way, your game in turn reminds me of another game, a demo of which I did own. I think it might be a bit crappy, but the nostalgia is strong with this one for me, so I'll probably attempt a playthrough one day:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dark-ages-volume-i-prince-of-destiny