Game of Thrones and Harry Potter are the first two franchises that came to mind. I never read the books and only watched a little of the series/movies. They're not bad and I can see what other people might be getting out of them, but they never grabbed my interest.
I don't dislike fantasy, but in general I prefer scifi. Lord of the Rings is probably the only high fantasy series that really grabbed me. I think I might like low fantasy more because The Dresden Files was really great.
This is kind of a hard question for me because I can usually get into anything, but there is one thing that comes to mind: horror.
It seems to me to be incredibly popular. Half of the itch front page is horror games, and it seems to be very prominent on sites like youtube and twitch. But I just never really got into it that much. I guess part of it is because I was, well, scared of getting scared but part because I never really saw anything too interesting in the genre. All of these games and movies just seemed to be kinda samey to me. The few I played/watched that seemed cool were also not really all that scary.
I love horror, but not really for being scary. I mostly like the unique creature designs and the frequent use of practical effects over CGI. As a kid I might have been scared, but as an adult I just think it's cool and I like to admire the effort that goes into making the film. But that means I only really like creature-feature horror films. Suspense horrors about a serial killer or something realistic are really boring to me, and I hate what I call "torture porn" films like Hostel and Turistas that only exist to show gory scenes of people being mutilated. Hostel is the only movie that has ever made me walk out of the theatre.
There needs to be something supernatural or a biological horror involved. Films like Alien, The Thing, Dracula, Color Out of Space and Hellraiser are my jam. I'd also include Jacob's Ladder--even though it's more of a psychological horror, it does have a lot of cool imagery and some decent creature effects reminiscent of Silent Hill.
I actually hated the original Wii version of this game. The motion controls were mostly fine, until I was required to do a diagonal slash with my sword and could never get it to register. It made the fights with Ghirahim really aggravating. But the worst part was how much the game held your hand. It's like they designed it for toddlers. Every three minutes the game would grind to a halt because each time you load your save it would insist on giving you the long description each time you pick up an item; or Fi would appear and explain to you what the previous cutscene just showed or told you; or if your hearts are low, you got to listen to the regular low health sound plus the sound of Fi trying to interrupt the game and tell you that ... your health is low.
But apparently the Switch version removes all of that. Fi's tips are optional now. You only get the long description for items the first time you pick them up, even if you reload your save file. You can also speed up dialogue and skip cutscenes now. And there are button/analogue stick controls if you don't like the motion controls. It's weird using the right stick for the sword, but it's a lot like the katana at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 so it's wasn't a huge ordeal to get used to.
I went negative last time, so here are a few unpopular games that I like, all of which are from the Wii.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - It's not the remake of the original Silent Hill that fans wanted, but I think it does what it sets out to do very well. It's a reimagining of the original story, and the focus is on the game adapting to how you play it. The way different scenes can play out based on what the game has been tracking about your behaviour is really cool. It also looks really good for a Wii game. The lighting engine is beautiful. My only complaint is that, since enemies only appear in the dark world, there's no sense of danger when you're in the light world. And on top of that, since there is no combat, every enemy encounter becomes a chase sequence which just isn't very fun.
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles - The Crystal Bearers - This is actually the only Final Fantasy game I have ever completed. I really like the world and characters of this series, and I prefer the action-oriented gameplay even if the motion controls are a little bit cumbersome.
GoldenEye 007 - No, not the N64 game. The Wii was an awesome console for shooters when they were done right, and in my opinion this is the best one on the system. I think a lot of people disliked it because they were expecting it to be more of a remake of the N64 game instead of its own thing, but I was never a fan of the original game to begin with. If anything, I think the game on Wii was more like Call of Duty. Both are made by Activision, so it makes sense. I don't normally like CoD, but GoldenEye's online multiplayer was the best online game the Wii ever had.
You clearly played more of GTA 5 than I did. My take on the protagonists is based on the really early game because I quickly ditched it for GTA Online and never went back. GTAO eventually became its own mess of terrible people, but this time they were actual people who exist in the real world and seem to be motivated solely by ruining your enjoyment of the game. I can't help but think Rockstar's story and character writing influenced the way these people play the online mode, feeling the game justifies their griefing because the characters in the story mode are also a-holes.
As a result, it's practically impossible for a new player to get into the game now. It's not just pay-to-win, because even if you use real money to buy the same equipment that the griefers use in order to stand a chance against them, you can't level up enough to be allowed to actually use it. When I tried to get back into it with a new character a few years ago, I couldn't even complete the first night club mission without someone in a flying car chasing me around and preventing me from completing a single task.
I never really played GTA 4, except for one brief time when my cousin handed me the controller to drive around for a bit. I found the cars felt really heavy and unfun to drive compared to the older games, so I kind of formed my opinion of the game based on that alone. That's the point where I realized the series was trying to be more realistic and less arcadey and started to lose my attention, so I migrated over to Saints Row.
In general, it's better if you can find a way around using absolute positioning to begin with. I know all too well the temptation to use "position: absolute" because it's the easiest way to put something exactly where you want it, but using a grid or flex box is usually the better option because it'll naturally work with the rest of your layout.
Alternatively, you could use "position: fixed" on the footer so that it is always floating on the bottom of the screen, but without seeing your design it's hard to say if that would work for you.
I'm surprised nobody has batted an eye at me saying I hate Mario Galaxy, so here's one I'm sure you'll have lots to disagree with.
I hate the writing in Rockstar games. I like the worlds and gameplay they create, but the stories and characters are insufferable. The last game that I played all the way through was GTA3, and I only managed that because the player character is silent and most of the story and dialogue is delivered in cutscenes that only last a few seconds.
I loved driving around in Vice City, but I hated triggering any missions because then I'd have to listen to Tommy Vercetti or one of the other awful people in the game speak. None of them have any redeeming qualities so I didn't have a single character I could rally behind.
In San Andreas, I like CJ but every other character is an awfully written stereotype. CJ is so minimally written that most of the story is conveyed through interactions with everyone else, and I couldn't stand them.
Franklin and Michael in GTA5 are okay. They are complex characters with enough reason behind their actions that I can sympathize with them. But Trevor is such a psychopath that I never wanted to play as him. I get that these are crime games and the whole point is that these aren't supposed to be good people, but they also aren't Tarantino films where you're just a passive observer. You're an active participant. I'm also aware that games are fiction, but I just can't dissociate myself from the characters enough to play as them (I also can't play as Jerk Shepard in Mass Effect). I prefer games where the player character is either a good/complex person or a blank slate because they're not just a character to me. They're the avatar for my actions in the game's world. Rockstar, however, seems to want to write movie characters and expects the player to act out their scenes. I'm not saying that's inherently bad, but it makes the games very difficult for me to get through when I can't sympathize with the characters and especially when I don't find the movies they're trying to write very good to begin with. They rely way too much on cliché, drawing inspiration from great crime films but in most cases only managing to emulate the surface level and missing all of the depth.
The Red Dead Redemption games are a lot better. The protagonists are generally pretty good, being former bad guys now seeking a way to leave that life behind; or they are motivated by a pretty understandable desire for revenge. There are also a lot of NPCs that I like as well. Old Man Jones, Marshal Davies and Mrs. LeClerk in Red Dead Online are a few of my favourite characters ever. However, there are a lot of other characters that I hate interacting with because they're so annoying. They all talk in the most bloviated way possible. That's why I preferred to play Red Dead Online instead of the story mode, but even in RDO there are NPCs who never shut up and you can't skip their dialogue when they're giving you a mission. I actually had to mute the TV sometimes because it's so annoying. I'm sure some of the dialogue is so long because they're using it to mask loading times for the missions, but I would genuinely prefer to sit through a blank screen instead.
In a similar vein, a lot of original paper mario fans have made fun of me for enjoying the recent title, origami king. I think they might just be stuck in nostalgia sometimes! Sure, the older games had darker plots, but I thought that origami king was a very beautiful game. Especially the soundtracks and environments... have they SEEN autumn mountain? And the shogun studios theme slaps so hard!!
I really liked The Thousand Year Door and have tried to get into the other games in the series. I've played the original, Color Splash and Origami King, and they all felt like they offered the same quality, but for some reason I wasn't motivated to keep playing past the opening areas. I'm not sure what the difference is, but none of them captured my attention like TTYD.
When I joined this forum, I expected it to be filled with a bunch of Millennials and Gen Xers nostalgic for their childhood and teenage years. But as I read through your introductions, there seem to be a lot more younger people who are here to appreciate the Web 1.0 era they missed out on the first time around.
So I'm just curious how the demographic actually skews. It'd be funny to find out that I'm one of the oldest people here, but I'm sure some of you must be those cool Gen X kids that I always wished I was. I weighted the poll toward the younger generations, so if you're a Baby Boomer please speak up.
I was born in '87, making me a mid-range millennial. I grew up in the '90s but get to pretend I have a claim to the '80s.
It's funny seeing tapes and CDs become popular again like vinyl did. These were the obsolete, garbage technologies that were replaced in my lifetime as we went digital, and now they're held up as a classic medium. Not to say anyone is wrong for liking these formats. It's just fascinating watching new generations appreciate what we threw away. I was on one side when my generation appropriated vinyl, and now I get to be on the other side as the old guy wondering why the music store has cassettes on the shelf again.
I was a bit too young for the original mixtape fad, but I did make a couple of my own when I was really young by putting a tape recorder up to the radio and recording whatever songs I liked that came on. The quality was understandably garbage.
I actually made a lot of mix CDs though once I learned that you could use Windows Media Player to burn disks. We even had sticker labels that covered the whole disk and you could run them through a regular printer, so I would make my own album covers with whatever cool artwork I could find on Altavista.
The first CD I ever made had a combination of dance and rock songs from the 90s (like "Blue" by Eiffel 65, "Higher" by Creed and, of course, ":grin:arude - Sandstorm":wink:, as well as songs from the Star Trek Generations, Dragon Ball/Z/GT and Gundam Wing soundtracks. It was a really eclectic mix. I used to listen to it while falling asleep.
I made another CD where every five tracks I would include an audio clip from a Jim Carrey movie (I was a huge fan at the time). So track six was Edward Nigma from Batman Forever saying "Caffeine'll kill ya!", followed by "Around the World" by ATC. And the whole thing ended with his character from The Cable Guy saying "This concludes our broadcast day. Click."
The sappiest thing I ever did was burn a CD with only one song on it, "Talk Show Host" by Radiohead. I listened to it on repeat in my car with the girl I liked at the time because it was on the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack (the one with Leonardo DiCaprio) and earlier when we watched the movie together she told me she really liked that song.
Afterward she told me it was really sweet, but we never ended up going out. She's now married and lives on a ranch.
Today I heard "Change" by Deftones for the first time while watching American Dad. It played during the episode where Stan gives up on religion and Roger convinces him to go on an alcohol-fueled spree of crime and debauchery. And now I've listened to it about a dozen times already
What are some games that you don't agree with the general consensus on? Something that was critically panned or commercially flopped but you fell in love with; or a game that everyone else loves but you can't stand.
One that I love but nobody else seems to is Metroid Other M. I'm not ignorant of its faults. The voice acting is awful, the story is a convoluted mess, and what they did to Samus's character is downright criminal. She went from being a badass bounty hunter to someone with such severe daddy issues that she would rather let herself burn to death in a molten volcano than disobey her father figure. It's really garbage and I agree with everyone who says it's bad and nearly killed the series.
But the gameplay is awesome! The mix of 2D and 3D level design is brilliant, and works really well with the Wii remote emulating an NES gamepad. The bosses are some of the best in the series, and I loved that it's a prequel to Metroid Fusion and we got to see earlier versions of creatures that were later replicated by the X parasite like Nightmare.
I loved playing it so much that I beat it on the hardest difficulty, which is basically a one-hit-kill mode. The final boss fight against Phantoon is a bullet-hell arena and one of the hardest ordeals I've ever faced in a game, but I did it just to show that 100% completion rating on the hardest difficulty on my save file.
I was really excited for Metroid Dread at the beginning of this year, but ended up unimpressed with it and wishing it was more like Other M. The series feels like it has been going backwards because they're retreating to what worked in the past, with strictly 2D gameplay and level design. But they learned the wrong lesson from Other M. More games with the same gameplay would be great. They only needed to ditch the overwritten story and dialogue and let Samus return to being the silent, lone badass we all know her as.
On the other side of things, a game that everyone loves and I hate is Super Mario Galaxy. I really should love it too. The art direction is great and the level design is cool. It even has a pretty good story compared to most Mario games. But the camera and controls are so bad! The 3D Mario games have never really had the best camera system, but it was serviceable up until that point. Once they threw in the gravity mechanics where you could walk on the underside of objects, it became unbearable. Mario would literally run in the opposite direction I intended and I couldn't move the camera to a position where the controls made sense. Eventually it made the levels totally unplayable and I had to give up. I was dying not because it was hard, but because the controls were doing the opposite of what they logically should because the camera couldn't be oriented in a way where they made sense.
I really tried to keep going, but I couldn't. And I know that other people either didn't have the same problem orienting themselves or at the least, for them, it wasn't a deal breaker. I'm not going to tell anyone they're wrong for liking the game, but I ended up hating it so much that I traded in the disk for the measly $0.50 or whatever EB Games would give me for it at the time.
What are some movies that you hated the first time you watched them, but grew to appreciate on subsequent viewings?
Most recently, I rewatched Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Not long before, I mentioned in another thread about how much I disliked this movie. Everything leading up to its release made me think it would be the spiritual successor to The Fifth Element, which is one of my favourite movies of all time. It definitely isn't that, but I think that now that I'm quite a few years removed from that initial disappointment and I don't have any expectations of what I want it to be, I was able to appreciate it for what it actually is.
The acting of the main characters is still stiff and mostly bad, but the visuals are amazing and the story is actually pretty good. Most of all, the world created around the story is brilliant, even if it isn't always shown in the best way.
Rewatching it reminded me of the first time I was excited for a movie only to be disappointed, and then years later learned to love it. That was The Chronicles of Riddick. Pitch Black is another of my all-time favourite movies, so my expectations were astronomical going into the theatre. It was nothing like Pitch Black, and unlike comparing Valerian to The Fifth Element, this was a direct sequel! It wasn't until years later when I rewatched it on DVD that I grew to like it, and now I genuinely love it as a great popcorn flick.
Ironically the next sequel, Riddick, tried to basically recreate Pitch Black and I ended up not liking it as much.
I watched "The Witch" (2015) a few days ago; wasn't sure what to expect.. I think I though it would be a typical junky horror movie; but omg it was so much more than that. If you're into psychological/supernatural horror I recommend it.
"The Witch" was on my radar when it first came out but then I forgot about it. Is there an actual monster/supernatural element or is it one of those horror movies where it turns out to be normal people and everyone is just falling for superstition? I really prefer when there's an actual monster at the end.
I went on a bit of a horror kick on Netflix a little while ago and watched The Ritual and The Void. I really wanted to watch The Ritual because I'm a sucker for a cool monster design. This one is definitely really cool looking, but the rest of the movie was barely watchable. All of the main characters are awful, and it's one of those movies where they always do the dumbest thing possible just so the story will move forward instead of finding an organic way to get to the same spot.
The Void had much better characters, but the story was a bit underdone. And while the monster designs were cool, the actual effects to bring them to life weren't great. I really appreciate any film that chooses practical effects over CGI, but the puppets could barely move so they were really limited with what they could do with them. I'd still recommend it over The Ritual, though, especially if you're into cosmic horror. It's kind of similar to Hellraiser or Color Out of Space, but not done quite as well.
Besides Nintendo stuff - which I always end up getting - I have sat out on getting any consoles during the last generation of consoles, was "almost" going to sit out this generation.
However, I really wanted a Steam Deck. My current computer is starting to fall behind in performance and its great being able to play stuff like Elden Ring and Hitman 3 that I can't normally on my desktop anymore due to how outdated it is...
I have been thinking about ordering a Steam Deck, but when I was looking into ordering one it would have taken six months to fulfill it. There are rumors that Microsoft will announce the Surface Studio 3 this year, so I decided to wait on that before I make a decision.
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