Category: Feature

In an industry dominated by American and European companies with massive, big-box campaign and strategy board games, Oink Games stands apart. The Japanese publisher is best known for pursuing an uncommon philosophy: small boxes with a striking art style. As modern board games seem to get more complicated every day,...

Mike Le was furious. Maybe sad? There was a touch of despair. On the morning of Dec. 9, 2008, news broke that M. Night Shyamalan had cast his upcoming live-action adaptation of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. Le, then a grad student at UCLA, was a huge fan of the...

In a landscape where movies based on comic books rake in billions of dollars, there’s an assumption that anyone in the comic book business is making tons of money. The reality is an entirely different matter: Since its earliest days, the American comics industry has been built on the exploitation...

After Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, after Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected), after Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children and the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, film fans must be used to the idea of Adam Sandler as a comedian willing to step into dramatic roles. But they...

The Tomb Raider franchise, as reimagined by developers at Crystal Dynamics, will be brought to life as a new tabletop role-playing game called Tomb Raider: Shadows of Truth. But don’t expect anything as simple as a 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons clone. While combat and exploration are more or less...

In the year and a half since the season 1 finale of Our Flag Means Death left awkward pirate captains Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi) emotionally staggered and physically separated, the show’s vocal, expressive fandom seems to...

Even before I got to the theater, I saw the pink. One or two people in bright pink outfits isn’t unusual in a crowded space, but it became clear as I walked toward the movie theater that the pink-clad group I was following wasn’t alone. Dozens of people sporting pink...

The world as we know it is on the brink of collapse in Invasion season 2 — but fortunately for humanity, Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna) isn’t going down without a fight. The Japanese space engineer has taken center stage in Invasion’s second season, repeatedly going head-to-head with a hive-mind creature...

In the early to mid-2000s, the coolest main character was a female spy. TV brought Alias’ Sydney Bristow to young adults and Kim Possible to kids. Charlie’s Angels was rebooted for film. And in games, Joanna Dark became the heroine of Perfect Dark, the spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007. The...

Anita Sarkeesian is tired. It’s been more than 10 years since Sarkeesian first released Tropes vs. Women in Video Games on YouTube; it’s been 15 years since Sarkeesian’s oldest video and the start of what’s now known as Feminist Frequency. Over the years, she and her team created several groundbreaking...