Jingle All the Way (the original, not the abomination with Larry the cable guy). 19% RT.
I think most people think it's too "weird", but I genuinely love it. It's got all the great 90s tropes, a cartoony core in a live action movie, an anti-consumerism message in a Christmas movie, and Phil Hartman. What's not to love?
Gonna go with Mortal Kombat (1995) 45%, a video game to film adaptation of a fighting game is never going to be deep, but this is a fun ride.
Could add in the follow up, Annihilation (1997), 4% and the 2021 film which sits at 54% too. Don’t expect much and they are fun films.
Same for me. That film ended my many years of obsession with a song I once heard on the radio and only managed to record half of it. The pain of living in a time before Shazam & Co existed was horrible. With no track lists on the web, the best way to identify a song was humming it to an employee in a record store.. and good luck with that.
The acting, effects and story aren't all that great, but still fun to watch IMHO. But I will always love that movie just for picking Halcyon from Orbital in its ending scene.
Modern games have become too focused on providing a clean, balanced and no-real-obstacles experience. Sometimes I want to play a game that is a cohesive experience without being laser focused on some big idea about how I should play it. As an example, I've recently replayed arx fatalis. It's really fun how you can do everything in that game that you'd want an npc for in any other. It's also fun how each playstyle requires its own big chunk of knowledge about how the game works. Modern games try too hard to be minimalistic and fail to see the fun in a truly open experience. Even when you have options, they have all the fun pre-balanced and pre-optimized out of them. They give you too much info. No sense of discovery
I just started playing Max Payne 3, which released in 2013. The game aged well, still looks great and a ton of fun.
On a related note, the Steam Deck is the perfect platform for Patient Gamers. It runs these older titles really well, and the portability + ability to suspend / resume games at any time is a game-changer (pun intended).
I'm usually playing older games of some sort. There's retro games, like those from the 32-bit era and before, but I also play...old-ish games, ones that were released within the last decade or two. Just last year I began playing Tokyo Xanadu eX+, which was released in 2017 (albeit as the definitive version of a 2015 game).
I think a number of the indie games I play are generally newer. Though, given my tastes, many of them tend to be games designed to evoke some sort of similarity to those older styles of games. So I guess it's an interesting question whether they count as "retro" or not.
That said, given that I pretty much only use store-bought laptops (and not of the "gaming" variety), my hardware means that I'm much better off playing older games anyway. "Newer old" games can probably still run, depending on the game, but some may be choppy and I can probably wait on those.
I‘m playing pretty old games all the time that have been sitting in my library. I hardly even buy new ones these days cause… why? I‘m sitting on a ton already lol
Big upside: They run smooth as butter on my modern PC up to 4K even.
Have there been many cake is a lie moments recently? The only current game I quote frequently is Deep Rock Galactic, and that one is cheap enough and potato-friendly enough even for us PGs.
Oh yeah, DRG is the real deal. Not Alien: Fire Team Elite and not Back 4 Blood (of the 4-player short-mission co-op shooters out there inspired by Left 4 Dead)
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