Batman Day has already passed, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get some great deals on Batman comics to tide you over until next year. Here’s what we’ve found on Amazon for (relatively) cheap today.
Batman: Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo Box Set
Batman: Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo Box Set 1 on Amazon – $28.04 (save $21.95)
I cannot express how much I love Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s run on Batman, beginning with the seriously terrifying Court of Owls arc, expanding into the action-packed City of Owls, and concluding with the traumatic Death of the Family arc. Snyder’s writing feels like some of the smartest, and relies far more on Batman’s tenacity and wits than other adaptations that relied on his brute force and magical get-out-of-jail-free luck. Capullo’s illustration feels verbose and weighty, with Batman becoming visibly torn to pieces as the Court of Owls sinks their claws into him. $28 for three huge arcs is a steal by any measure.
All September long, IGN is highlighting the best TV coming your way in the 2019-2020 season. Today the sirens are blaring for The Purge’s sinister second season, which premieres October 15 on USA. The new 10-episode run will kick things off right in the harrowing heart of a Purge night, one of the biggest and most violent ever, and then track our new main characters throughout the awful aftermath, learning that what happens on Purge night doesn’t necessary stay on Purge night. We chatted with EPs/Showrunners Krystal Houghton Ziv and James Roland about how Season 2 is first-ever exploration of the Purge universe during the other 364 days of the year – and how to keep the thrills and paranoia prevalent during non-Purge hours. Plus, check out IGN’s exclusive behind-the-scenes video for the new season, featuring the new cast!
Death Stranding has been shrouded in mystery. Since the moment it was announced the particulars of its gameplay have been unclear and, unsurprisingly, this has become the focal point of the discussion around it. As we inch closer to the game’s PS4 release, director Hideo Kojima has been pulling back the curtain on mechanics that underpin the experience and talking about the concepts that have inspired it, providing a little more clarity on what Death Stranding is.
Perhaps the most enlightening source of information has been the recent round of interviews, including GameSpot’s very own interview with Hideo Kojima. In this interview, the auteur game developer discusses his hopes for what he’s calling “Strand Games.” After interviewing Kojima, Peter sat down with Kallie and Tamoor to discuss the mystique of Death Stranding, how the community has reacted to it, and whether there’s actually a benefit to not knowing.
Mewtwo may be leaving Raid Battles in Pokemon Go very soon, but another Legendary is set to return in its place. Giratina, the Legendary Ghost/Dragon Pokemon from Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, is making an encore appearance in Raids beginning 1 PM PT / 4 PM ET on September 23, giving you another chance to add it to your collection.
Giratina will appear in five-star Raid Battles until October 17. As when it first debuted in Go, the Pokemon will be in its Altered Forme; this time around, however, you’ll have a chance of encountering a Shiny version. As usual, there’s no guaranteed way to ensure you encounter a Shiny Giratina, so if you’re hoping to catch one, you’ll need to be persistent and take part in a lot of Raids.
Giratina Raids will occur periodically at Gyms around the world, but your best chance to find some will be on September 25, when Niantic holds another Legendary Raid Hour. From 6-7 PM local time, there will be even more Giratina Raids occurring than usual, giving you plenty of opportunities to battle the Legendary. You can read more about Giratina’s return on the official Pokemon Go website.
Giratina is set to return the same day that Mewtwo leaves Raid Battles, but that won’t be your last chance to catch the Legendary Psychic Pokemon. Beginning September 25, Mewtwo will return to the invite-only EX Raids, and this time it’ll know the Ghost-type attack Shadow Ball. It’ll make another brief appearance in standard Raids on October 8, when it returns for a Legendary Raid Hour event from 6-7 PM local time.
In other Pokemon Go news, the game’s Safari Zone event is now underway in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. To celebrate the event, Shiny Yanma is spawning in the wild around the world. Meanwhile, Pokemon Go’s October Community Day is set for Saturday, October 12. This month, the featured Pokemon will be Trapinch, the first form of Flygon. A handful of Gen 5 Pokemon have also begun spawning in the game, and some require a new evolutionary item called the Unova Stone.
Warning: Lots of spoilers herein for the Gears of War franchise and for plot points in Gears 5.
I keep waiting for Gears of War to do something challenging with its story.
With the release of Gears 5, the franchise is now 13 years old, and yet it’s still walking along the same narrative path as the original Gears of War trilogy. Humanity is banding together with its last vestiges of authority to fight an existential threat of subterranean monsters. Those monsters never negotiate, engage in diplomacy, or show mercy. They have to be wiped out–and the Coalition of Ordered Governments has just the extremely beefy, well-armed, globe-spanning army to do the job.
Gears 5 revists a number of the same plot points as the original Gears of War trilogy, as new protagonist Kait and her squad try to figure out what the deal is with the Swarm, the new, evolved brand of the old Locust threat. Kait’s journey to find out about her personal ties to the Locust takes her through old COG facilities that explain the Locust’s origin, but the game doesn’t do much of anything with that information. Yet again, Gears 5 is a game about killing all the faceless, frightening monsters so you can save all the humans.
That’s fine, since an unstoppable army of sharp-toothed crocodile-people with machine guns makes for a good set of enemies for a shooter. But what’s weird is that Gears 5 hints at bigger ideas–ideas that have been swirling around the Gears story for the whole of its existence. But the game never really engages with those ideas beyond using them as set dressing to push you into cover behind a chest-high wall. Gears as a franchise seems like it might have a lot of interesting things to say, if it ever committed to saying them.
It all starts with the COG, a government the heroes serve mostly because it’s the only game in town. It’s a well-established fact in the Gears universe that the COG is more than just vaguely fascist, using a lot of patriotic language and iconography while engaging in horrible acts. They’re the surviving government of a past series of conflicts between humans, the Pendulum Wars, and when the Locust show up on Emergence Day in the first Gears of War, the COG is just about the only organization with the soldiers and the guns to deal.
You spend time in most of the Gears games trying to recruit people to the COG in the face of the Locust/Swarm threat. There are people who live in the COG’s Romanesque cities, and then there are settlers out in the wilderness, going it alone, in the name of freedom from the COG’s authoritarian control. Gears is full of people who don’t like to live under the COG boot for a number of reasons, but the biggest is the fact the COG killed a bunch of civilians as collateral damage when fighting the Locust.
Early in the war, the COG used giant orbital lasers, the Hammer of Dawn system, to blast the advancing Locust horde. But when it did so, the COG also leveled most of the human cities on the planet and turned huge portions of it into a wasteland. In the original trilogy, the humans left behind during the Locust war were called the Stranded. Gears 5’s anti-COG folks, choosing to live outside of the government’s system, are known as Outsiders–and main characters Kait, JD, and Del are all counted among them in Gears of War 4. Gears acknowledges people with a legitimate beef against the COG, but never really dwells on why they feel the way they do, or what it means for you to serve on the side of the authoritarians you might disagree with.
Gears doesn’t just gesture at the COG’s oppression, it takes time to fully illuminate some of its most heinous acts. Gears of War 2 explores the origin of the Locust and Gears 5 revisits all that territory, revealing that the Locust threat was created by COG experiments–on children–to create soldiers to fight its wars for resources. The Locust escaped underground, later emerging as a threat great enough that it could wipe out humanity, and the COG covered the whole thing up–until it was discovered by the protagonists of the series. The Gears franchise clearly has some thoughts about how governments engage in warfare, how they treat their citizens, and how they shirk accountability. Despite having some incredibly important knowledge about the conflict they’re embroiled in, though, neither Marcus nor Kait ever do anything with that information. The nature of the Gears franchise is to focus on soldiers on the ground, dealing with the weight of the war around them and, at times, the unreliable brass sending them into dangerous situations. They’re the literal gears of war, and yet the series never really pushes them to think about the war machine they’re driving.
And then there’s the Gears relationship with genocide. Most of the story of Gears 5 is about bringing the Hammer of Dawn, a weapon of mass destruction responsible for a lot of mass destruction, back online. The opening portion of Gears 5 deals with some of the implications of the Hammer of Dawn, but its dangerous effects are mostly relegated to a few brief character interactions without much in the way of far-reaching consequences. The Hammer of Dawn is an incredibly powerful creation that doesn’t discriminate about who it destroys, and yet even as Gears acknowledges its deadly, horrific possibilities, it doesn’t linger on them.
The main Gears trilogy made you a part of some pretty awful actions as well. At the end of each of the three games, Marcus and his squad inflicted massive death on the Locust, first with the Light Mass bomb, then with the sinking of the COG city of Jacinto to flood their underground caverns with seawater, and finally with a weapon developed by Adam Fenix, Marcus’s dad, that brought the Locust to extinction. (The Swarm, a mutated version of the Locust, exists thanks to that last weapon.)
Part of this is an inherent conflict between the badass nature of burly soldiers chainsawing baddies and the idea of telling an emotional story about the horrors of war. In the past, weapons like the Hammer lent themselves to some pretty cool video game moments as it rained death down on the biggest, meanest, hardest-to-stop abominations the Locust horde could throw at humanity. Gears is trying to have deep characters (recall the heavy use of “Mad World” in Gears of War 3 and its marketing) as well as its superheroic moments of kicking ass. But the emphasis on the latter undercuts the former, and Gears still hasn’t managed to strike a balance between them.
And the thing is, Gears establishes that the Locust aren’t just unthinking monsters who only know enough to use guns and wear pants. In the trilogy, you spend time in the Hollow, the Locust’s home, and discover their cities. You find that they have art, written language, and religion. They have a social hierarchy. They don’t just destroy–they build, too.
In the first Gears of War, you uncover the reason for the war on humanity: it’s because the horde also faces extinction. Underground, the Locust fight another enemy called the Lambent, a version of the Locust mutated by exposure to a fuel source called Imulsion. The Lambent are driving the Locust out of the underground homes, killing or converting whoever they find. Coming to the surface is a situation forced on the Locust by those circumstances, and in Gears of War 3, you learn that Adam’s weapon was created because he was working with Mirrah, the Locust queen, to try to eliminate the Lambent and save the Locust.
Yes, the Locust represent an existential threat that’s looking to wipe out humanity, and which engages in a number of horrifying acts against their victims. There’s an argument that the humans have no choice but to respond in kind to such an enemy. The problem is, nobody really has that argument. Gears is obviously aware of these ideas, but it never puts those questions to its characters. Kait and her squad rush around the world trying to make the Hammer of Dawn work again in Gears 5, and while a couple characters stop to wonder if it’s a good idea, they put up little opposition to it. The idea that the Hammer might not be worth the human cost only provides momentary pause.
Some of the best writing in Gears 5 is its on-the-ground character work between the members of Delta squad, and it’s pretty clear that The Coalition has the chops to write strong, interesting characters dealing with extraordinary, emotional situations. That’s what makes its reticence to deal with the bigger ideas so frustrating–it would only make the characters and storytelling stronger if they were allowed to spend more time on the less heroic moments and their consequences. Gears doesn’t need to change what it fundamentally is–a shooter about fighting monsters who want to kill everyone–but there’s a lot more it could do in pushing those characters about how they fight their war, how they feel about their actions, and what they’re willing to sacrifice of themselves to survive, individually and as a species. It’s clear the Coalition is thinking about these ideas. It should challenge its players to think about them, too.
