Ten 8-bit nostalgia-inducing short film alternatives to seeing PIXELS

PIXELS opens today, and if the reviews are to be believed, it's somewhere between "pointless" and "awful," and probably not worth spending eleven bucks on.  Instead, why not sate your 8-bit nostalgia for free with ten perfectly good, and genuinely entertaining, short videos?  Save a few bucks and get WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL? on streaming instead, and then you can just stay in your home and not have to deal with the type of people that would willingly spend the cost of a meal on an Adam Sandler movie.

1. PES's impressive stop-motion animated short that reimagines a number of video game classics


2. Lily Tomlin talking about Pac-Man addiction from a 1982 episode of "Saturday Night Live"



3. The incredible video for Royksopp's "Happy Up Here" about video game-related intruders



4. A 1982 animated short about a video game invasion


5. Alex Varanese's nifty stop motion short tribute to R-Type


6. A promotional film for the laserdisc game "Cliff Hanger" (using footage from Miyazaki's CASTLE OF CAGLISTRO)


7. Pac-Man reimagined as first-person driving game



8.  Eight minutes of commercials for food featuring video games



9. The vintage arcade game-inspired music video for The Montauk Project featuring a character called "Dookie-Poo"


10. Patrick Jean's original short film that inspired the feature you probably want to avoid



Bonus: The other stuff on this site tagged "Video games"

Evening Entertainment: ARCADE ATTACK: SILVER HEROES VS. VIDEO INVADERS is a tale of pinball against video games

Both arcade video games and pinball machines have reached an unholy alliance now, fighting for their lives in retro arcades all over the world, but Mike Wallington's 1982 concept documentary features plenty of opinions on both size of the debate, as pinball wizards and video game junkies face off.

Television commercial announcing the debut of the Journey arcade game in 1983

Journey! The name alone means excitement, and the Journey arcade game will allow you to play as every member of the band, any way you want it. Completely different from the previous year's Atari 2600 version, the 1983 arcade game was completely ridiculous, featuring digitized photos of the group in the game and gameplay that seemed dated even by then.