Marvel Studios’ oddball Halloween horror special Werewolf by Night opens on a stylized art fresco of the Avengers. A voice-over explains that we’re all familiar with certain events in the world of light, but no one ever talks about the world below, where Werewolf’s story takes place. Then it goes...
Other Ever Afters makes fairy tales subversive, kinder, and a whole lot queerer
In Other Ever Afters, Melanie Gillman’s new graphic novel collection of fairy tales, queer people find happiness, community, and kindness. It feels almost revolutionary, updating fairy tales’ traditional mores, using fantasy and folklore as a space to imagine something better than the familiar good-versus-evil binary that often defines fairy tales...
Elden Ring’s Malenia embodies FromSoftware’s problems with women
She lies there, deep in the belly of the Haligtree, as if she had merely dozed off in the shafts of lights that filter down. Malenia the Severed (defender of Miquella!) has fallen to pieces, her one good arm resting at the feet of the whorls and gnarls that held...
NBA 2K23’s game-changing Eras mode was a 20-year labor of love
At Visual Concepts, the 2K Sports studio responsible for NBA 2K23, development usually runs for a week or two, then the team takes an entire workday to play the current version of the game and evaluate what they’ve built so far. For executive producer Erick Boenisch, that also meant some...
Star Trek has truly reinvented itself
Here’s a wild statistic: There are nearly as many currently running Star Trek television series as there are completed Star Trek television series. The first 40 years of the franchise’s history include five live-action series and one animated spinoff, totaling 725 episodes. In the past five years, five new series...
The quest to save KeyForge, the first procedurally generated collectible card game
The story of KeyForge is a strange one. The collectible card game arrived with much fanfare in 2018 (including from us), boasting a procedural algorithm capable of generating some 32 billion different decks of cards all on its own. The allure was its surprise factor, since not even the game’s...
Even the Rings of Power title sequence contains hidden secrets about the show
The opening for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the Prime Video original series, is one of the most visually striking title sequences to premiere on television this year. Over the course of 90 seconds, a series of wispy veins of granite, pebble, and ichor morph and...
Gen Con organizers ‘deeply troubled’ over Indiana’s abortion ban, some vendors back out
Gen Con, the nation’s largest tabletop gaming convention, celebrated its 55th year last Wednesday. Attendance at “the best four days in gaming” topped 50,000, effectively returning the event to pre-pandemic levels. The convention has taken place in Indianapolis, Indiana, for the last 19 years, but the Seattle-based company recently signaled...
Luxury dice dominate at Gen Con
One moment I was at Gen Con, stalking the aisles of the vendor floor for the next big board game. The next moment I was shopping for an engagement ring — or at least that’s what it felt like. A woman with beautiful hands was lifting semi-precious stones out of...
How to dress for work if you’re a She-Hulk sometimes
No one is more surprised about Jen Walters, J.D. getting a new job than Jen Walters, J.D. In the second episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law when Jen (Tatiana Maslany) is hired to head up the superhero law division at Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holliway, she hopes it’s for her...