Old Sites
One of those pre-wikipedia info sites for Rumiko Takahashi's work, run by slavishly devoted twin brothers Dylan & Harley Acres since *1998*. It's ***STILL*** being updated on a regular basis, so if you like Rumiko Takahashi's work (and I do), it's
a genuinely useful and interesting fan resource. Inside, you'll find plot synopses, character bios, articles, etc.!
It's through this site that I learned Rumiko Takahashi was knighted by the French government. Wild??
A super charming tiny site with four interactive maze games that load as HTML pages in a small pop-out window, originally published 2001. There's basically nothing else to this site, but it does have a hints
section if you're struggling to make it through. I took a few stabs at "The Dungeon" and kept losing during or shortly after the fight with the dragon, so there's a need
for braver players (and better navigators of mazes) to explore what else lies within the labyrinths of Amazeworld.com .................. because I'm bad and can't do it ........
This site gives me overpowering "It's free time in the Computer Lab in middle school" aura (in a great way, this is super nostalgic to me!!).
An archival site that hosts mirrors for PC-98 games (and is still actively updated, as of the time I'm posting this!). I like it for the screenshots and the brief, wry descriptions at the bottom of each game's page. Since it seems like 99% of the PC-98's game library was hentai, clicking on pretty much any game is bound to bring up NSFW screenshots. 18+ only!
A fascinating (and historically indispensable, if you're doing research on cons) library of first-hand coverage of various anime conventions, complete with photos. Its earliest coverage goes all the way back to 1998!
An anime fansite for Trigun, established 2003. I'm a big fan of Trigun so a site like this is obviously gonna be my thing, but I think the genuine nature of the site is really charming and makes it worth visiting for anyone, if only for its authentic weeb fanpage feel.
A Slayers fansite from 1997 with a shockingly appealing site layout, which is a pleasant surprise for something so old -- maybe it was worse when it launched, but the earliest archive.org cache is from
February 29th, 2000 (leap day, what are the odds of that), so...
Anyway, the site has boatloads of information collated from Slayers media, from lore to production details. There's a potent "Web 1.0 fandom" energy, and the earnest enjoyment for the franchise on
display here makes me pretty jealous that this whole "independently hosted community resource site" thing has more or less gone the way of the dodo, and I will likely never partake in something so genuine.
Then again, there's a rambling article about how the site got too big for the site admin, and he was harangued for getting some plot information wrong, so maybe it wasn't all sunshine and roses, but still...
The whole site is hysterically corny-looking. For a company that published Disc Station and made a lot of their games for computers, it sure looks... Angelfire-y. Carbuncle says "web design is my prison. guu"
I love Madou Monogatari/Puyo and this site is a goldmine of webcore graphics from both series. This may be an incredibly niche recommendation, but if you like crusty websites (I'm guessing you do, you're on
NeoCities after all) and Compile-era Puyo, this is prime pickins' for assets to steal for your own page. Oh, and there's really interesting contemporary information about Compile's projects circa right before
the company crashed and burned, but I'm not paying attention to that. I'm trying to download a microscopic gif image of Schezo.
The Internet Raytracing Competition, or IRTC, was a 3D graphics contest run between 1996 and 2006 as attested to by the landing page. According to this random article I found, it was a pretty big deal in its time (presumably among 3D graphics enthusiasts and no one else) mainly using POV-Ray, a raytracing tool that looks like a vaporwave holdover's wet dream (aka me). The art produced by the IRTC in the years it was running is really cool and I'm grateful that every entry has been neatly and tidily preserved on one convenient gallery site. It's my favorite place to go hunting for desktop wallpapers.
A fansite dedicated to the VERY niche subject of Sogna, a game development company in Japan that made eroge games mostly for various PC platforms, with brief dalliances with smash hit consoles like the
FM Towns Marty. Since Sogna is most remembered for the "Viper" series (a collection of low-gameplay, impressive animation hentai games), that's
mostly what the site focuses on.
(You can probably tell I'm a big fan of the VIPER series since Carrera is on like, basically every page of DaikoNET lmao)
"Jolly" Jim the Court PEZJester has created a space online where he can discuss his greatest passion in this world: collecting PEZ dispensers (only the old ones that don't have feet, whatever that means). In all seriousness, Jim's unabashed love for what he collects is pretty charming. There isn't much else to say, I just included this site for being off-beat and strange. Definitely the most Hypnospace-y site in this link dump.
A Ranma ½ fansite last updated in early February of 1997, which makes it older than dirt. Brad Rancourt, the site admin, clearly has gone balls to the wall with custom graphics, which I can't imagine was easy to do in those days. As previously established, I like Rumiko Takahashi's work, and this is another one of those fan pages with a lot of enthusiasm and detail for all the series minutia, which I really respect.
Wayne P. Armstrong is a former college professor and hardcore botanist/biologist who seems to be very serious about the free dissemination of information in a time pre-Wikipedia, as the madman has been updating his site with educational content since *1994*. I don't think there's much of a need for a site that doesn't have information on literally everything like Wikipedia these days, but if you're interested in plants and animals and Wayne himself, check this site out!
A coelacanth fansite that still gets actively updated with new Coelacanth lore. This site is adorable and I learned a lot about our living fossil friend!
Media
My favorite website. It's a wiki that catalogs unused content within video games. I frequently browse this site when I'm bored.
A massive manual on the Game Boy Advance's hardware and how to homebrew your own games. The guy that wrote this thing is a MASSIVE nerd. I really really want to learn to do this one day. (But why is it called Tonc???)
My favorite YouTube channel. A chill guy demonstrates the payloads of computer viruses, in addition to their history (when there IS history) and how they spread in their day. It's mostly the flashy, entertaining side of malware analysis (i.e. just looking at malware payloads), but danooct knows his stuff and I feel that I've learned things by watching his videos!
A NeoCities page documenting the search and archival for earlier versions of Yume Nikki. The site updates very infrequently (basically whenever a breakthrough occurs), so it's not something you'd need to check regularly. Still, the story of where these pieces of lost media were hiding all this time is pretty interesting if you haven't heard it!
Someone who, at time of writing, is trying to play and review every single GBA game released in English. It's written in a loose, conversational style and it's a concept only a nutcase would attempt. Really, really cool page! Best of luck to its creator; more people need to appreciate the torture you're willingly putting yourself through.
A review site that covers esoteric software and forgotten games. This one might be more well known than I realize, but I still really enjoy and hope other people will too.
A games media archival site, containing scans of basically everything related to games, from magazines to boxes to development documents. It's probably the single most important site to me on this link page, since media preservation is one of my Big Interests, and these people are scanning the niche minutia that I don't always see other people caring about.
A really old gaming information site, mostly by way of articles about every game under the sun. There's basically nothing too obscure to not get a brief review and some screenshots here, and I browse it surprisingly often, bookmarking games that seem cool.
My favorite game reviewer! This site is, along with TCRF, one of my favorite haunts when I don't have anything better to do. It's more or less completely responsible for me wanting to do reviews too, and thus I added the DaikoChannel page. Coverage of arcade games and niche weeb games seem to be a specialty.
A site reviewing every kind of apple. I cried laughing the first time I read it.
Resources
A searchable image database containing nearly every graphic and site asset hosted on Neopets.
A colossal repository of abandonware downloads, from games to operating systems.
A download page for a handful of miscellaneous .sf2 files, if music-making's your thing.
A NeoCities page that hosts a collection of random graphics pulled from the internet that you could use for your site.
A shitload of webcore site backgrounds you can download, with a convenient way to preview how it looks by hovering over each image. I find myself constantly in need of cool unintrusive backgrounds, and this site is kind of like a site background yard sale; mostly tacky, ugly crap, but occasionally something really neat is in here!
An automated player of random clips of sakuga animation, sourced from sakugabooru.com. This one's straddling the line of "resource" and "interactive", but I guess it's a resource if you think of it like a collection of animation references, presented in a convenient way. I don't know where else to put it, but it's cool.
Interactive
A free-to-play MUD that's more like a virtual chatroom than a game. The game has been in defunct limbo on and off since its launch in 2017, but the servers remain online. It's cool to see this kind of thing independently hosted in the modern day, even if it's a little lonely to explore an inactive virtual world.
Technically not Living Worlds (as far as I know?), which is an app featuring beautiful pixel art created in the 90s by Mark Ferrari as part of a "planner program" called Seize the Day. This website allows you to examine the palette of each background included in Living Worlds and view the scenery at different times, all animated through color cycling.
An in-browser version of the 1989 version of Kid Pix.
A super cool and addicting version of Sokoban that runs in-browser from a NeoCities page.