Have you ever loved something, only to realize it’s a commercial flop or just obscure? What’s something that deserves more light than it got?
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certainly not an obscure videogame, but Prey (2017) is amazing, and for some reason it flopped. Also the DLC might be the best I’ve played, it’s a completely new kind of game
if you check the free epic games sometimes you might have it in your collection
Arkane studios make the best fucking games and they keep getting shafted and its not fair. At least they got their time in the sun with Dishonoured.
I came into this thread to mention Arx Fatalis but Prey is an even better game.
@Imhotep @Cantaloupe hmm. I have Prey in both Epic and Steam and never felt the urge to install it.
How does it actually play?
Think bioshock but less repetitive combat and more characters to engage with. Also the environment is so dynamic. I recommend turning off most of the UI hints.
It may be genuinely one of my favorite games of all time. Its one you pick up and don’t pit down till it’s done.
The TV adaptation of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. The voice acting is incredible and it has the best soundtrack from any media in the last 10 years. It’s a solid show that had virtually no money so they made the most with abstract backgrounds and amazing writing. The show was always under threat of being cancelled and wrapped up so fucking well at the end of season 2 that it was clear the people behind the show knew Disney was stringing them along.
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a reboot of TMNT that removes the bioscience and introduces Yokai/Yaogwai and magic. It’s the best writing TMNT has ever had across any iteration and is on-par with Futurama with delivering a poignant moment in a cartoon full of solid jokes. The turtles learn about their dads and what family means - it’s got family moments as strong as Stephen Universe. I cannot say enough good stuff about Rise.
Steambot Chronicles for the PS2. It’s my favorite game by a wide margin. I almost never replay games, but I’ve played that one all the way through over a dozen times. It’s just chock-full of so many choices of what to do and how to do it, and the graphics and music come together to make the perfect atmosphere.
One of my favorite super hero movies to this day is the original kick ass. Beats the pants off any marvel movie by miles. Not exactly a flop but criminally underrated.
Bryan Fuller’s TV opus, primarily Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies, although the first two seasons of Hannibal are really excellent writing and storytelling. All his work deals with death, but each has something slightly different to say about it.
Came here to talk about his show Wonder Falls. It only aired 3 episodes on Fox, but the whole season was released on DVD later. I think I’m one of thr few people who watched the live broadcast, because I was recovering from 2 surgeries for like a month, and had nothing to do. Led me to discover the whole Fullerverse.
If I had a mouse for every time I’d seen Pushing Daisies mentioned on Lemmy, I’d probably have like hundreds of mice, because I’ve seen it mentioned twice and those things breed. It was absolutely excellent though and I was so gutted it never got another series. Maybe it was hit by a writers strike? Can’t remember how long ago it came out now.
It’s not that obscure, but Perfect Blue (1997) has not left my mind since I first watched it.
Games: Epistory and Nanotale. Both typing games from Fishing Cactus. Absolutely beautiful games that have interesting stories and you get to practice with your typing skills. I love both of these games so much.
Tv: Sliders. It was fairly popular when it was running and got kind of weird at the end, but I love that show. It was one that my family got together to watch every episode each week when they were on broadcast. I was also part of an early online petition to save the show and move it to the SciFi channel. I was also part of the early online petition to save MST3K, back when online petitions actually worked.
Movie: Ghostbusters Answer the Call. People will disagree with me but I unapologetically DGAF. That movie is hilarious and I love putting it on when I work out. It’s a far better Ghostbusters movie than the last two garbage ones that were put out. It has everything from the original: dark adult horror comedy about scientists who save the world. The last two were not true GB movies, they are family friend teen coming of age movies with a plot that depended so heavily on nostalgia that they felt like a crappy cash grab. ATC is my second favorite GB movie behind only the original. Holtzman is my hero!
Movie: Ghostbusters Answer the Call.
If anyone’s giving it a chance for the first time, I do recommend the extended edition. For some reason the theatrical cut out the low point of the relationship arc between the two main characters.
I don’t think all the humour lands, but enough of it does, and the movie has a good heart. At the very least it remembered that Ghostbusters is a comedy. The new movies have the same flavour as every Marvel superhero outing.
It’s a far better Ghostbusters movie than the last two garbage ones that were put out
💯
It was the CGI Spengler at the end that sealed the deal of garbage movie 🤮
At least ATC honored Harold Ramis with a bust
Cloud Atlas is my usual mention.
Favourite movie and it’s usually a fairly even split between people like myself who love it and people who think it’s garbage.
Not much middle ground
Rewatched it with my wife recently
Sat on the edge of my seat as the stories came together… Wife was completely non-plussed
I went into it blind, and immediately had to go read the book.
This isn’t alone as a movie steering me towards a book. But nothing else has spurred a drop everything else response like that.
Couldn’t stop thinking about that film for weeks after watching it.
Foundation on Apple TV is a visually beautiful show and follows the books generally well with a few caveats.
As a fan of the books, I was initially pretty upset with some of the changes, but I’m glad I stuck with it. The show is it’s own thing that goes to some fascinating places.
I’ll have to give it another shot. Love the books but couldn’t make it through the first season of the show.
I haven’t read the books, so I can’t comment on that, but wow, Lee Pace kills it as Day.
And shout out to Jared Harris for being in this and The Expanse
This show keeps popping on my radar and I mean to snag it, and then, as with many things in my life, it disappears into the void.
Absolutely check it out.
It looks like a cutesy Zelda clone, but it’s so much more than that. It’s dark with extremely atmospheric music. It is a “knowledge-based” game, with metroidvania/Zelda aspects.
The puzzles are phenomenal, and I don’t think it can ever be replicated.
I just started playing tunic a few weeks ago. Its brilliant. Need to go finish it.
I just finished up Deaths Door and watching that video really reminded me of it. Looks fun, thanks for sharing.
I liked Death’s Door. TUNIC is far better, IMO.
Story time:
I had just beat Hollow Knight and was messing with Elden Ring, and the oppressive souls-like atmosphere was getting a little stale, so I went browsing the steam store looking for something more upbeat. Oh what’s this? A cute little Zelda clone? Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.
No. No it wasn’t.
Not only was it another souls-like, deciphering that writing system absolutely consumed me, to the point I had to uninstall the game for a while because I was losing sleep over it.
spoiler
I’m 99% sure Trunic is based on the Shavian alphabet. Both scripts are phonemic writing systems for English. Both use rotated letters to contrast voiced and unvoiced consonants, but the real clue for me is that both Trunic and Shavian use single letters for rhotic vowels.
Oh, but the music is great. And I really one other devs to go further with the “manual as gameplay” concept.
To me, the soulsy-ness of it is mostly skin deep. Yes, the combat can be challenging (mainly the bosses), but there are accessibility options to make it a lot easier.
Within a Deep Forest Freeware, came out in 2006, by Nifflas. You’re a ball.
Love the soundtrack, love the controls, love the design. It’s perfect.
Not a single piece of media, but I want to make an apologia on behalf of amateur sci fi writing. No the prose isn’t going to wow you, but I love seeing other people’s unfiltered imagination at work.
I’m very much into worldbuilding, and I’ll devour fan wikis without even consuming the source material. My knowledge of Warhammer 40K and D&D is almost exclusively from various wikis. Seeing regular people build their own little paracosms, with or without accompanying art or fiction, I find very engrossing.
As for actual media, judging by how little representation the series gets in the US, I’d say Custom Robo. I thoroughly enjoyed the single entry on GameCube that Nintendo localized here.
I read book #1 (Revelation Space) and am one chapter into #2 but the RS world building is dramatic and has stuck with me. I haven’t read Dune and can’t compare (and doubt it’s comparable), but I I’d say it’s comparable to the ~2021 movie where there’s desolate landscapes that aren’t irrelevant, technologies that are demonatrated, not explained, and converging story arcs between multiple characters and times. I find it enjoyable because for the most part, it’s grounded in known physics. Near-light speeds and no wormholes. Interstellar voyages, but they’re still so slow they rely on refrigerated sleep.
The books have reviews that get more mixed as the progress but yet, people keep reading through. I’m mentioning it because there is a wiki that seems pretty detailed, though I have done much to keep it unspoiled. There’s the original 00s trilogy plus a 2021 4th main book, a separate trilogy, a support book, and over a dozen smaller works from as far back as 1990 with half being short stories and half being novellas, where the author was finding his footing and filling arcs.
Generally, the problem readers have is that the author introduces promising story arcs and dilemma solutions, only to abandon them and never mention them again. Then the endings feel rushed and anti climactic. But I’m someone who thoroughly enjoys playing Elite Dangerous, a space sim that’s “a puddle a mile wide but an inch deep” because I simply love the immersion and use my imagination. Elite is to sound design what Reynolds is to world building.
I’ve never seen any of the Dune movies (save for a few minutes of the David Lynch movie while at a friend’s house one time) but I read the first few books back in 2015 (11 years ago 😮) I enjoyed the first book very much but got less and less interested with each subsequent book.
Language is an aspect of worldbuilding I love. Sci fi rarely dwells on the language barriers between sapient species, but for me it’s the main event.
Star Wars actually gets it right with Chewbacca. An alien is very unlikely to be able to have a vocal tract capable of approximating human speech, so the best you can hope for is a bilingual conversation where both parties speak their own languages. And of course there’s nothing that says a language has to be based on sounds. Rikchick (sp?) is a sign language that uses tentacles.
The semantic space of an alien language is likely to be very different as well. Aliens with different senses will have a different Umwelt (subjective perception of their environment), and will have different words to describe their experiences. It’s common (though recently challenged) linguistic wisdom that humans are incapable of describing odors independently of analogies with the source of those odors (earthy, floral etc), or emotional reactions to odors (stinky, fragrant), or comparisons with taste (sweet, sour). Visual sensations (colors) have words that are completely divorced from any source that exhibits those colors. Green describes an instance of subjective experience independent of any green thing, but (most) well-studied languages have no such facility for smells. There are no “odor colors”.
Now if dogs could talk, they might have such odor colors, since dogs live in a very smelly world.
I got carried away there, but I wrote it, so now you have to read it.
Zero Effect (1998 film). Charming, smart, funny Holmes update with great performances.
H-E-R-O by Will Pfeifer (DC Comics)
“Love Me, I’m a Liberal” by Phil Ochs.
I enjoyed Zero Effect quite a bit. But yeah, you don’t see much praise for it.
PK. A Bollywood movie that really resonated with me.
