Jamie Lovett

As someone who doesn't go in for early access games, I'm excited to finally play Hades 2. I'm also excited about Metroid Prime 4, but a little puzzled that they haven't put Prime 2 and 3 out on Switch yet, though I suppose there's still time.

Love both the show and the books and hope they get around to adapting the final three books at some point. Still in awe of how they took the concept of blue states and red states and applied them to Earth (blue planet) and Mars (red planet) without it feeling on-the-nose or reductive. I could go on, but it's probably my favorite sci-fi show since Battlestar Galactica.

Silksong news. ....wait

1) Damian Wayne, as written by Grant Morrison and only by Grant Morrison. IMO, much like Quentin Quire, that boy should have stayed gone once the story he was created for was over. No one else has known quite how to write an enfant terrible into a superhero story the way Grant does. 2) Carrie Kelley. I just think she's neat. 3) I'm partial to Tim otherwise, probably because he was Robin when I was growing up. I like Dick, too, though I always think of him as Nightwing first and foremost. I've never had any affection for Jason, and I missed Stephanie's time entirely, and haven't read We Are Robin (though they show up in Wayne Family Adventures, and that made me curious about them).

So, I don't know that I would say that "Identity Crisis was good, actually," but there are things about it that I really like, particularly how it depicts the superhero community and the bonds between those characters. I feel like people have kind of turned on Infinite Crisis in recent years, but I was fully wrapped up in that storyline when it was happening. Admittedly, that might have to do with it being my first big DC event. Some people say Final Crisis is undecipherable and boring. Those people are wrong. I am unqualified to comment on Flashpoint because I was so checked out of whatever Geoff Johns was doing with Flash at that point that I was content to skip it and wait for the New 52 relaunch, which is full of good stuff marred by the event's larger rollout problems. I know New 52 Wonder Woman is controversial because of the Amazon retcon, but I loved that book.

Just trying to manifest Lanterns + Man of Tomorrow =

Gonna dig deep here and say Wolverine and the X-Men.

Having finished Expeditin 33 around the time Metaphor: ReFantazio game to Game Pass, I've been plugging away at that while my to-play list accrues smaller games that I need to get around to, including Quartert, which I backed on Kickstarter ages ago and finally came out. Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, Demonschool, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, and the FF Tactics remake are all in the mix for me the rest of the year.

Honestly, my focus is less on Doomsday and Secret Wars, which I fully expect to be a string of stunt-casted cameos and scenes deliberately built to go viral like the "On Your Left" moment from Endgame as Marvel tries to cling to relevancy. And really, why should I care about the big finales to a series of movies that haven't been all that impressive and failed to build a coherent meta-plot? I'm more interested in what they do after the next Avengers movies. That's where they fumbled the ball last time: they made "Marvel movies" for so long they forgot how to make real movies. As Ben kind of alluded, there's something special about those Phase 1 solo movies: they came out before the Disney purchase (mostly), and before Marvel Studios developed their cinematic house style. They're movies first and part of the MCU secondarily. That's what I want out of Marvel again, and Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four both had that vibe, especially FF, so I have hope. I just need to get through another Patrick Stewart Professor X death scene to see if they still have the goods in there somewhere.

Star Wars talk reminded me that I should shout out the recently wrapped Star Trek and Star Trek: Defiant series. Both are very good and give us the closest thing we're likely to ever get to a Star Trek: Picard for the DS9 & (non-Seven of Nine) Voyager characters (and even, to a lesser extent, for the ENT and TOS characters).

I won't claim to have played a ton of new releases this year, but I feel pretty comfortable making Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 my pick. In fact, it's up there with my top games of the decade so far.

My theory is that, having worked on this story for so many years, and knowing where it is ultimately heading, Martin is actually pretty bored with his own work and thus uneager to drill down and finish it. I'm pretty sure we only got A Dance With Dragons because he was facing so much pressure to time a new release with the premiere of Game of Thrones. So no, I don't think we're ever getting it finished, and I don't think anyone else should do it for him. At best, we may get a Silmarillion-esque collection of his notes sometime down the line.

I rewatch The Dark Knight Trilogy pretty frequently -once every couple of years or so - and every time I do, a little bit of the shine comes off of The Dark Knight and I find that I appreciate the other two movies more. Don't get me wrong, The Dark Knight rules (if there was a fourth movie, it should have been titled The Dark Knight Rules), but I feel like once you know all of its twists and turns, you're never able to recapture the captivating tension of seeing it in theaters for the first time, which was a big part of its appeal. Batman Begins gets overshadowed, but it's a delightful and surprisingly humorous origin story. TDKR has wonderful performances, more mature themes, and a grander scale (which does work against it at times). They've got their flaws, but they're all very good movies.

I'm here for the 30 Seconds to Mars hate.

Five years ago was about exactly when I started reading 2000 AD weekly, and while I haven't loved every single serial that gets published in there, it is almost always worth the time to read. Judge Dredd has been consistently good with "A Better World" being possibly the best comics storyline I've read in the last year or two. Brink is probably the best sci-fi ongoing in comics right now. Proteus Vex is up there as well, and Feral & Foe is a great fantasy serial. Otherwise, I mean, Saga is the obvious answer, even if it hasn't been quite as perfect since the big, long break. 20th Century Men skirts around the edges of being a superhero story, but I'm still going to count it as non because most people wouldn't recognize it as such. Ditto The Power Fantasy. Kaya rules. I'm hit or miss on James Tynion's work, but Something Is Killing the Children and WorldTr33 are both great horror comics. Monkey Meat is great satire. DIE is up there as well. Oh, and Lazarus, which just came back for its final arc. Usagi Yojimbo is an underappreciated classic that's been good for 40 years. Lots of good comics!

The Seasons is underrated and so different from Rick Remender's other work that I almost didn't believe it was him at first. I need to read the other new book he put out this week, Escape, which has some gorgeous Daniel Acuña art.

... but Batman: Dark Patterns is actually the best Batman book being published right now, and too many people are sleeping on it. Anyone else reading this?

I remember being really into these movies around the time they came out. Revisiting them more recently, I can appreciate them, but they've definitely lost some of their magic. That said, I'm going to go with Batman Returns because it's got more personality, and that personality is pretty weird. Also, this might be controversial, but I think Jack Nicholson makes a fine villain, but not a very convincing Joker; the performance just isn't far removed enough from what he's done in any number of other movies. Gimme the unhinged duo of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman and Danny Devito's Penguin any day. (I think Jim Carrey gave a better Joker performance as Riddler in Batman Forever than Nicholson did in the '89 movie.)

Is there an option for neither?