Month: February 2019

Not even Magneto's levitating machine guns can stop Sophie Turner's Dark Phoenix in the latest trailer for the latest installment in the rebooted X-Men franchise. The Game of Thrones star plays Jean Grey, a powerful psychic and telekinetic mutant who finds herself succumbing to a dark entity called the Dark Phoenix, pitting her against her former colleagues.

(Some spoilers for The X-men franchise below.)

Jean's transformation is one of the classic storylines in The X-Men comics canon, and we've seen it on the big screen before, in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). That's when Famke Janssen's Jean Grey took out two key X-Men, allied herself with Magneto, and destroyed an entire military battalion before someone finally managed to stop her. Those are pretty big shoes to fill, and we'll see if Turner is up to the challenge.

Enlarge / The 8Bitdo M30, posed next to a pair of Toejam and Earl figurines that shipped to select Kickstarter backers. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Roughly a week ago, two bulletins landed in my inbox from companies eager to capitalize on Sega Genesis nostalgia. I nearly shrugged them off, since neither actually came from Sega. But their coincidental, nearly simultaneous appearance triggered a wave of '90s nostalgia that made me bite.

The result has been a solid few days back in my early-'90s childhood, as if I were firmly planted in front of a massive CRT TV with some of my favorite games of the era. (If you're wondering: this '80s-kid author absolutely had a lengthy "Genesis does what Nintendon't" phase.) My recent feeling may have emerged, in part, because Sega's current handlers left Genesis fans out to dry during the tiny-console fad. The less said about the AtGames Genesis Flashback—an atrocious cash-in that followed the NES Classic—the better.

But this week's one-two punch of releases was just what I needed to wash a foul taste of wasted nostalgia out of my mouth: the 8Bitdo M30 gamepad and the new game Toejam & Earl: Back in the Groove. Both feel a whole lot like 1992: hardly revolutionary in modern terms, yet somehow packed with that singular, early-'90s feeling of new, refreshing ideas around every corner.