In the words of Thom Yorke, it wears me out. 

It appears to be fallout from the EiC’s resignation. On the way out, Jen Glennon criticized Spanfeller and the decision to refocus the site around guides instead of news. The commentariat over there had started (of course) mourning the implications for the site and lambasting the corporate doofuses responsible, and…

Yep. I stuck around because the comments stayed good even as the site went from insightful coverage of new books and great interviews with comics writers to what it is now: a lot of paraphrased press releases with a very occasional fun essay or something.

Looks like we still have comments over here. RIP Kotaku.

Really interesting how Aliens has fallen in esteem over the years. Nobody wants to revisit Cameron’s aesthetic for spaceships or the Aliens. I kinda get the feeling that’s because the movie just doesn’t look that good in HD compared to the original.

Why exactly does he deserve petulance?

Soooo...is this some kind of MGSV/Bayonetta scenario where the gameplay is good enough that one forgives a certain amount of fetishistic fanboy spankbait? Or is this game entering the conversation butt first with not much else to go on? After reading the article, I have no clue. 

Hard to tell whether this article is being petulant about Lanthimos (who mostly deserves it) or just snotty in a generalized, can’t-be-bothered way. But it would not have been hard to do some more actual reporting. Oh well.

I enjoyed this issue. It’s all adolescent psychodrama through a J-horror filter with virtually no continuity baggage. That makes for a big contrast with Spider-Man and Black Panther, which are good comics but very, very world-buildy. This is the only book of the three that works without a pile of context.

I feel like I’m still watching the first one, so I can live with this. 

There IS a movie adapted from the same novel. It came out the year before the game in Japan. I rented it way back when we still had video stores, and I remember it being cheap-looking but non-horrible.

“Say Metroidvania again! I dare you! I double dare you! Say Metroidvania one more time.”

I was secretly hoping that Respawn’s Star Wars shooting would let you call down an AT-ST partway through the match. And run on walls with the force. Now we shall never know.

So, like, when people say “remaster” what they mean is “we will pay you to patch this janky masterpiece”? Do I have this right?

This seems more or less inevitable. Whatever you say about his screen presence, Majors is radioactive. And audiences have turned up their noses at the multiverse nonsense. I don’t mind it, but there is no fucking scenario where I explain it to a date (or a grandparent, if I still had those). We’re just watching…

Yeah, this trailer makes the movie look like the unholy lovechild of Guardians and Jumanji. There are worse things, but it’s not necessarily what I want from an Eli Roth movie.

It would be the perfect way to sell the next Saw movie, but even if there is some degree of audience crossover, I don’t think that’s what anyone’s looking for out of an Alien film.

Before anything else, and this is not to be snarky as I feel I stumble with that particular word all the time, did you mean irreverent instead of irresponsible?

But don’t worry, as this leads to the great operatic ending where he gets captured, sits around in a chair getting verbally owned by Quinn before getting a bullet to his brain from the same person. Truly tying everything up in a neat narrative bow, absolutely the finish this epic version of the character deserved.

That’s interesting. One the one hand, it is not science-fiction or fantasy in any conventional sense. On the other hand, the culture of speculative fiction has become so dominated by corporate IP that it seems of a piece with Marvel.