We paid attention to films that paved the way for the genre and for filmmaking as a whole, as well as to modern classics that bring something new and brilliant to the canon today.

Right there is the end of my interest. As soon as it starts being about what someone considers important rather than actually great, it’s a list for history and not for utility or sharing what’s good in the present. I really wish people looking for quality and greatness weren’t always getting directed to historical footnotes, and nostalgia.

I think they’re sad, creatively bankrupt exercises that generally shouldn’t get made, but on the other hand, it’s good when they at least do different things or bring real ideas to the table. Tons of horror movies really aren’t very good, so you’d expect doing a good thing better to be a slam-dunk, but it’s rare for a remake to actually take that and execute. Even a frame-by-frame remake has the potential to do better and bring out the best in a proven idea, or even fix something that wasn’t appreciated from the many limitations a lot of old horror worked under. That’s one aspect more specific to horror that makes remakes potentially a lot more useful to do, but it’s still an issue that people making remakes happen are usually doing it because they don’t have something better.

Friday the 13th (2009) did a great job mixing polish, old ideas, and tongue-in-cheek series self awareness that all make it a fun way to enjoy what was good as well as what was bad about the early F13 movies. Then you have things like Shutter, where the remake is basically the same but still manages to be worse at every opportunity on top of the weird and pathetic jingoism. That was just ugly all around, and pollutes the movie space, so now we have to be forever careful to clarify Shutter (2004) instead of Shutter (2008), because the only thing seeing the remake does is reduce the impact of seeing the better movie.

For my partner and I, it’d surely have to be Baskin. I’m actually surprised to see a thread like this without it.

They’re Inside comes to mind next, but for more story reasons than just the freaky goings on.

Get a controller with underside buttons. I also consider stick-clicks an abomination, but it’s great now that there are under-buttons we can hard-remap to L3 and R3.

8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth controller has some awful ergonomics on several things, but the underbuttons are excellent examples.

The slightly more bulbous wings on the 360 controller actually do a lot for ergonomics, but it’s very hand-sized based. For me, the 360 is almost perfect in how the wings tuck into my palms. With the controller about 6 or so inches in front of me, my arms are at a natural angle with wrists straight and the controller is securely held without even a finger on it, and I can press any button without even having to brace it. Take even a little of those wings away, and that gets lost, and edges instead of the smooth roundness get annoying. My partner on the other hand, would need a smaller controller to get that same feel or to cross-thumb the dpad as easily as I do. As much as I originally preferred the symmetry of the playstation layout, I have to give the nod to the xbox layout for being able to dpad with the right thumb.

We desperately need controller makers to stop acting like controllers are one size fits all, when that’s not even close to true.

Jeez, the laziness of reviewing it based just on the store page. It’s been in early access for like five years, getting better every update, and not one person there can even bother to actually play the game they recommend to others?

Cactus is probably the single best mastery/arcade style twin-stick shooter out there. Don’t let the cute looks fool you, while this game is solid to just enjoy, the chaining and level design offer great challenge if you want it, and the way each character changes both the basic play and the way you chain a level show a just fantastic design level.

It usually goes $5 in sales, but it’s still crazy we can get games that good for so little.