io9 
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San Francisco, 9:23 PM
Sat Dec 19
18 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/08/08
ldevitt
GuardianOfChaos
ThomasinaMarten
Arachnophilia
Congrats! Each will receive the latest Aliens and latest Predator novels, along with a Predator chop figurine.
(We've sent a private message to all four, giving the email addy to send your snail mail to so we can do the shipping.)
11/07/08
11/07/08
Predator vs Spartans.
11/06/08
It's Christmas, 1913, and Pancho Villa's revolution just become a lot more complicated. Not only is the geriatric but crack-shot American veteran and journalist Ambrose Bierce refusing to leave Villa's ranks, but the Texan sheriff Billy Wilson is demanding Villa hand over one of his soldiers for the murder of three nuns. Villa would have no qualms executing the presumptuous lawman if he did not know Wilson from an earlier time in their lives, when Wilson was on the other side of the law and went by the name Buffalo Bill. Besides, it is Christmas, and so Villa resolves to oblige both Bierce and Bill--until a mysterious shooting star arcs across the sky and plummets into the surrounding Apache-controlled canyon land. Northern Mexico was not the Predators' first stop; the eggs they retrieved from a forgotten Aztec pyramid have unexpectedly hatched, and the facehuggers assault on the Predator crew brings their ship crashing back to Earth. Now a short-tempered revolutionary, a bandit turned lawman, a bitter veteran, a heretical murderer, a dozen of Villa's finest soldiers, and twenty-three Apache bandits are all that stand between civilization and the aliens. Allies and enemies must come together to make a stand, not just for the nation Villa seeks to unite but for the entire planet. Pancho's Christmas is officially ruined.
11/06/08
This prequel to Dark Horse's 2000 comic miniseries takes place during the Skynet war on Earth. Several flying Hunter/Killer units shoot down a mysterious object that crash lands near one of John Conner's Tech Com divisions. When Conner receives intel that the object is a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin, he orders the Tech Com division to find and destroy the spacecraft before Skynet can harness its technology. The spacecraft is a Predator ship containing a supply of Alien eggs and facehuggers. The Tech Com soldiers arrive too late to destroy the spacecraft and their search takes them to a nearby Skynet prison camp that has been hurriedly converted into a research facility to study both Predator technology and Alien biological capabilities, with human prisoners serving as test subjects. The story becomes a race against time to stop Skynet from successfully integrating the new alien secrets into its arsenal, with a lone Predator and the surviving Tech Com fighters seeking to destroy the prison camp and prevent the Alien spawn from taking root on Earth.
Aliens vs. Predator: Point of Origin.
AvP: Point of Origin takes place between Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. A clandestine scientific research expedition is organized, using ill-gotten Weyland-Yutani technology and information, to re-trace the doomed flights of the Nostromo and Sulaco and study the disasters on LV-426 and Fiorina 'Fury' 161. What the members of the expedition do not know is that their leader, Dr. Franklin Drake, has been experimenting in biomechanical genetics for years, to the point of integrating some of the Alien's biological characteristics into his own physiology. Drake is convinced that the expedition will unearth enough clues to take him to the home world of the Space Jockeys from the first film, and there he will find the secrets that will allow him to transcend the limitations of both man and machine. The expedition eventually finds what appears to be the long-abandoned Jockey home world (which appears to be a combination of a Mars-like planet and a sort of spherical insect hive), where several orbiting Predator ship have already arrived on an journey of their own. The Predators also appear to be interested in understanding the Alien's origin (assuming that the planet is also the home world of the Alien), and have released several groups of Aliens onto the planet's surface to prepare for an epic hunt. Seeing the Predators' actions as both a rude disruption of his agenda and an opportunity to test his rapidly maturing biomechanical abilities, Drake takes his expedition to the surface as well. The ensuing conflict between Drake, the Predators and the Aliens force the expedition to take refuge underneath the planet's surface, where they learn more about the Jockeys and their role in ongoing conflicts between humans, Aliens and Predators.
11/06/08
It seemed another unnamed, uninhabited world, rich in the natural resources that would make plutocrats of the first colonial charter-bearers with the guts to stake and perfect a wildcat claim. So when their instruments indicated the presence of another craft in orbit above the largest continent, the crew of the Fleming cut their orbital survey short and made a hasty landfall. In a high desert valley, they found the unexpected tracks of various migratory animals and the lupine megafauna that hunt them, but the real surprise arrived with the beginning of the seasonal migration as the crew set up their extraction and processing works. Along with the animals came a band of non-human hunters -- "obviously intelligent and advanced enough to have come from the wrecked craft that we saw in orbit," observes one character, "so what are they doing down here wearing wolfskins and throwing flint spears?"
"Killing us and taking my ship home," the captain replies.
11/06/08
11/05/08
1) ripley's dead, lets leave her alone. please, for the love of god, no more character resurrections to keep the series going. find new characters -- i'd love to see sigourney stay involved, but leave the character dead.
2) the alien chasing people through dark coridors has been done to death. what made aliens a good movie is that it completely changed genre from the first movie. alien 3, while a decent film (in the director's cut version), wasn't all that exciting because it basically rehased the first movie, with the sexual innuendo replaced with religious innuendo. so if we're gonna make a good one, let's really change it up and not try to be like any other alien movie before.
so here's the premise. the film opens on earth, and it's absolutely devastated. we are approximately 30 years after the aliens first arrived, via the company's finally successful attempts to capture and research a sample. and now, every alien on earth is dead, save one. it has been a long and hard war, and one that humanity has won in a manner very similar to hg well's "war of the worlds." because the aliens pick up host DNA, each rapid and successive generation partially hybridizes more and more with the host species, before it reproduces and dies off. the alien corpses that litter the streets are pink and fleshy, with shorter heads and smaller stature than we are used to seeing. they have been defeated by genetic abnormality, and compatibility with human immunodeficiency disease: they caught something very much like aids. all is looking up for humanity, until a forgotten relic shows up just past the outter rim: a strange u-shaped spacecraft, moving very slowly and leaving a trail of ghost ships in its wake.
now the planet must turn to the remnants of the weyland-yutani bioweapons division, and one of their scientists' pet alien for salvation. the origin and function of the aliens as biological warfare and planetary colonization need to be examined in light of the reappearance of the ancient ship at the edge of the solar system -- that might be coming with a much more dangerous "pure" form of alien ready to devastate earth all over again. can we turn the aliens on their creators, without again destroying the planet in the process?
11/01/08
One Predator decides to hunt and kill all Aliens in the universe with the help of a Space Police Chief and a Galactic Attorney from Earth.
Desperate for survival, the last Alien Queen enlist for the help of the Alienater, a being not quite understood by the colony itself. The Alienater, with its white mask with some bloody lipstick set in motion an elaborate plan which will definitely stop the Predator on its tracks.
Several fight scenes and dramtic crises later, the Predator faces the Alienater on a hand to hand to hand combat leading to an admission from the Alienater that he did something to the Galactic Attorney.
The Predator rushes to the GA's location, but he was too late. A facehugger has already incubated in the GA's body albeit immaturely. The Predator, trying to save what's left of the GA, quickly slashes the spawning Alien from the GA's body.
In the end, the GA was left with two heads, his own head and an alien's head protruding from his chest. He will later be known as the Two-Head.
Meanwhile, the humans hunt the Predator, for he is not the hero they deserve but the hero they do not need.
He is the Dark Predator.
(Damn. I just wasted 5 minutes typing that...)
10/31/08
10/31/08
You: Uber-hot fetish warrior gear... you look like a Tops! I <3 your big swordy-staff spear. Big, leathery dreadlocks-- were you born with them?
Me: Tall, dark, slick bald oily head, seriously drooling over you. Big black claws... and I bite!
We met inside that Aztec-pyramid thingy on the North Pole. It was kinda cold, but things got really heated! I think we have some things in common. We can both unhinge our jaws... we're both Doms but we can take turns.
If you can live with my queeny mother, I can live with your feudal honor-violence and trophy room. Call me sometime, sailor!
10/31/08
A Predator returning from a hunt on a distant world is tasked with eliminating a rogue Predator that is breaking the rules of the hunt by attacking anything in its path, even if it cannot fight back. The rogue Predator, roaming around in Austin, Texas, attracts the attention of the US black ops group tasked with capturing Predators, forcing the second Predator to fight not only the rogue, but well equipped teams of commandos hell bent on capturing both Predators. After dealing with a human trap and killing the rogue Predator, the hero Predator leaves a parting gift for the commandos who tried to capture him: an EM pulse that ruins most electronic systems in the city. After dropping off the body of the rogue Predator, the hero Predator goes off on another hunt somewhere in the galaxy...
10/31/08
Black Spacecraft Down
A routine seek and destroy mission goes horribly wrong when a crack squad of predators are brought down in enemy territory. Trapped and hopelessly outnumbered by hordes of dark-skinned and faceless killers, they fight for their honour and their lives.
In the intense heat of a generic African town, these plucky warriors must defeat their foes or die in the attempt.
Starring: Ewen Bremner, Tom Skerritt and Tom Sizemore.
10/31/08
It's the future, and humans have begun to explore and colonize other worlds. Our intrepid band of human explorers--including a sexy commander with a past she can't escape, a hardened criminal being transported to a prison planet, and a reprogrammed T-101--land on frozen wasteland called Hoarfrost, where they uncover the remnants of an alien civilization. They also find terror, as they stumble onto a raging battle between Predator clones engineered for cold weather and an advanced subspecies of brain-sucking face huggers. Our heroes fight off these menaces as the learn the secret of Hoarfrost--it's actually a giant virtual reality game where only the strongest and most 2-dimensional survive.
Tagline: Check your character development at the door, because in space no one can hear you whinge.
10/31/08
There's another predator hunting ground/ultra-pyramid structure in the deep Atlantic ocean. An international research group discovers the pyramid, thinking they may have found the lost city of Atlantis. While exploring the ruins (via submersible) they reengage the structure, emptying sections of the city from water. The predators come to reawakened city and discover that some of the aliens had escaped and adapted (much like the aliens in Resurrection) to swimming in the ocean. Explorers start disappearing; mayhem ensues. Cue the predators having to band with the explorers to survive. Ends with the survivors (human and predator) resurfacing with alien eggs attached to ship and the lens pans to a far off island...