It’s possible the armor proves largely ineffective and so they abandon it. Pretty much what happened in real-life between World War I and the Gulf War, when we finally devised semi-functional body armor that could work in modern combat.

Yeah, I think the point with CGI / digital effects is not that it’s intrinsically bad (which a surprising number of people seem to believe) but that like practical effects it’s something that requires skill and finesse and shouldn’t just be a go-to-easy solution for rendering something.

Everyone hated the shiny ships and Technicolor cityscapes in Phantom Menace, but that’s what every big budget SF movie set in space is going for, and nobody seems to care one whit.

I love Ripley but it’s long past time to retire the character. She got a good death in Alien 3, whatever other people say. She should stay dead.

I think it looks fine.

That makes a lot of sense.

TBH, I’m not sure Inquisition is better than Dragon Age II (IMO). I certainly liked the characters in the latter more and while it suffered from recycled dungeons that’s not really substantially worse than drab filler.

Yeah, the more I read about all this the more it sounds like this was a management screwup by either BioWare or EA (or quite reasonably both). I feel bad for the mid and lower-ranking employees who are getting blamed for what was clearly out of their control.

What I’m most surprised about is defenders of the storyline are acting like people who criticize it aren’t aware that it will obviously all be undone. Everyone knows that. Pretty much every big shakeup eventually results in a return to the status quo in the long term. That’s not the point.

I’m pretty sure everyone expects this. But the problem is it will feel like a cop-out to a lot of readers and they also feel insulted Marvel’s pretended this won’t be the case.

The Netflix shows are tougher, because the characters are more… obtrusive. Well, you could easily bring in Jessica Jones and/or Luke Cage for an episode or guest-arc, because you have the time and space to get the audience up to speed, but you can’t have Daredevil fighting aliens in the first Avengers movie…

You can start anywhere really as the manga, movies, 2000s TV series, and recent reboot are all separate continuities.

Set in a place that resembles a future Hong Kong, a caucasian woman infiltrates a building guarded by what look like Eastern Europeans, filled with Japanese geisha robots, where Americans and Africans are meeting about “race change” technology and how cyber enhancements are fuzzing national borders and individual…

...your Lord of the Rings...

Yeah, I kind of agree. I mean, generally I’m all for making villains more complex and somewhat sympathetic but it seems like the fact that the villagers were super shallow and Gaston was an unrepentant boor was kind of the point.

It was definitely too long. Should’ve been at least half as short.

That’s actually a pretty interesting idea. Isn’t Snoke running the First Order though? I guess he could be doing the Palpatine angle of running both sides to build towards a new regime.

Did anybody actually like the Yuuzhan Vong besides me? The New Jedi Order books are admittedly very uneven in terms of quality but I thought as a concept they were actually pretty interesting (especially once their backstory was revealed) and later stuff like the Legacy comics used them quite well I thought.

The big W and Y logo is cool too and more like what you’d imagine a giant megacorp coming up with but I like the ol’ wings as well. Seems more like the product of an idiosyncratic, egotistical, and hyper-controlling CEO like Weyland to boot.

I would imagine no (at least not before the late Qing dynasty) since time zones really only came into existence with the emergence of railroads and the subsequent recognition that scheduling could get very complicated and confusing if time wasn’t regulated.