Disney’s John Carter is a film that’s based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “A Princess of Mars”. Or is it? The film deviates quite a bit from the source material, so fans of it should certainly check out the John Carter novels if they’re looking for a good read. The movie is a great amount of fun. The fantastic world of Mars, known to it’s natives as Barsoom, is a rich world full of amazing creatures, people, places and technology that will delight and entertain audiences of all ages.

This is a science fiction story, but based on a work so old that we’d barely started flying airplanes and driving automobiles when it was written, so it gives a perspective not seen in a modern work. The fantasy world seen in the movie, and within the pages of the John Carter stories, is one born not out of intentional ignorance of other planets as much modern science fiction is, but rather from a time when we really did not know much of anything of worlds outside of our own. The world of Barsoom is based off of ideas that astronomers from the early 20th century had about Mars. It’s not spaceships, computers and laser guns because this was all conceived in a world without knowledge of such things.

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Okay, so this isn’t a video game, or even video game related (although War Machine is a playable character in Marvel vs Capcom 1 and 2, and makes appearances in other games that feature Iron Man), but it is a slept-on classic. In 2001, Marvel introduced Max comics, a sub-line of books aimed at mature audiences (a’la DC’s Vertigo). Although many of the books were hit or miss, the line was used to introduce some pretty creative concepts at the time. Alias introduced the character of Jessica Jones to the Marvel Universe, while Garth Ennis’s hideously gory take on The Punisher was a hit with readers. Writer Chuck Austen contributed a brand new take on War Machine, Iron Man’s buddy. Although he may have been one of comicdom’s most hated writers, Austen scored a hit with this series.
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When Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit the toy shelves in 1989, Playmates made a name for themselves with fun and creative figures, the likes of which we had not seen since Masters of the Universe peaked three years earlier. While MOTU, in a way, tried to take itself seriously, TMNT felt no such obligation. As a result, the toy line ranged from the hilarious to the grotesque. Today, we will take a look at the top 5 most disturbing figures from that era of the line.

We will focus on the figures released between 1989 and 1993, at which point Playmates relegated the line mostly to variations of the four turtles, Bebop, Rocksteady and Shredder.

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The Korra clips keep on coming. This time around we get a look at a Pro-Bending match, because thats apparently a thing. It pretty much looks like the most epic game of dodgeball ever.

The launch of Mass Effect 3 is without a doubt one of the most disastrous I have ever witnessed. First, we learned of the import save problem if you decided to move your game to the new Cloud storage feature. The only solution is to track down the hard drive on which you originally finished the game; an impossibility for some. BioWare is offering no other solutions.

Second: just yesterday, we learned of the Shepard face import problem that also has no official solution… yet. This one BioWare is going to fix. In the mean time, there are a bevy of homebrew solutions, but all are overly-complicated.

Then there’s MY problem… This is what NewEgg sent me today:

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How times flies. 20 years ago today, on March 7th 1992, the first episode of Sailor Moon aired in Japan. 5 years ago I wrote this short article commemorating 15 years. Not a ton has changed in the past 5 years. The manga is being released again and a lot of merchandise has come out in the past few months but the rights issues with this now classic 20 year old anime series remain the same. You just can’t walk into a store and buy the greatest anime series of all time in North America.

Take a moment to think back on the show, an maybe watch an episode or two.

In our ninth (!) and final part of the KEEP PLAYING: Mass Effect 2 romance series, we take a look at “Kinky Kelly”, and her somewhat Easter Egg romance — which is probably the best in the entire game.

We have a lot more to say about this particular romance option (that isn’t officially a romance option), so keep reading, or watch the entire nine-part series from the beginning after the jump!

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