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?
If you are a metalhead and haven’t listened to Xoth, specifically their Exogalactic album, you gotta get on that.
The Quest For Glory series from Sierra. They ended up making 5 and you could import your character from the previous game with some save disks. You could pick between a fighter, a thief, or a magic user and grow from there. In the later games you could grow and be a paladin, a sorcerer (with a staff), or the lead to a thieves guild depending on your choices. In the last game you got to become a king and pick a love interest that you met from previous games. The 4th game had a hot vampire babe, so normally tried to marry her.
Pretty much everything “Weird Al” Yankovic and his band have ever done.
They’ve gained more recognition in recent years, but most people done realize that his catalogue goes back to the mid-1970s. A lot of people are sleeping on his work, even today, because he’s categorized as a “novelty artist”.
The early stuff is rough, but from the mid-1980s on up is worth a listen even if you’re not a fan.
My favorite band of all time is Guided by Voices. Started out in the 80s recording on four track cassettes and pressing 500 copies of the record playing local dive bars. In the early 90s front man Robert Pollard was done after 7 albums and no success outside their hometown so he wrote their final album Propeller.
Of course that made a bit of splash and got them shows in NYC where they kind of took off (at least in 90s indie rock circles). After that success Pollard kept on going until 2004 with a rotating cast of characters when he disbanded GBV for good. I unfortunately only heard about them around this time and missed out on seeing them live.
Well when I say for good it only lasted until 2010 when the “classic lineup” reunited. They toured playing all the old hits for a yrar or two, then started releasing new music and haven’t stopped.
Bob is utterly prolific and has over 100 albums to his name across various solo and side projects. I don’t click as well with most of the newer stuff but I appreciate it non the less.
Pick any of the albums from 1990-96 for some lofi rock masterpieces, or 1997-2004 for some higher fidelity power pop. The lyrics and song titles are all fairly obsurd on any of them. Bee Thousand is their classic album but I’d recommend Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. Its a bit more polished than the cassette hiss of earlier stuff but still not a full studio sound.
Anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk.
If you’re post edu and wanting more solid structured yet casual learning, The Great Courses offer a fantastic selection of in-depth overviews. I’ve spent many hours in their world history, science, humanities and music courses.
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.
Different Arkane teams in different countries made Prey and Dishonored.
Prey was Arkane Austin, which was forced to make Redfall as a Live Service game to pump up the value of the companybefore being sold to Microsoft, leading over 70% of the Prey team to leave during the development.
Redfall flopped because Arkane Austin wasn’t a Live Service developer and they had zero interest in the game, and Microsoft closed the studio.
@Imhotep @Cantaloupe hmm. I have Prey in both Epic and Steam and never felt the urge to install it.
How does it actually play?
Prey is a fun game, I recommend you give it a go.
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.
Moon girl and devil dinosaur is a great show.
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.
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.
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.
Good news (from December):
“Absolutely,” [Bryan] Fuller told The Mary Sue recently about wanting to revisit Pushing Daisies. “We have a season three pitch, and the entire cast wants to come back, and we’re hoping we get to return to them. We just have to find somebody who wants to make it.”
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.
This was a great game. I will admit I had to turn on the no kill cheat in order to beat the last boss. I was just glad they offered that as an option.
I used infinite stamina for the last boss. I think I could have beaten it without that, but I probably would’ve gotten too frustrated and it would’ve taken forever.
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.
