The Colonial Marines Technical Manual
68My brother reminded me this was sitting on the shelf at our parents' house, and it seemed like a perfect book to pop up on the channel. I'm sure quite a few of you out there probably poured over it just as often as we did growing up. Of course I was finishing high school around the time this came out, and I'd like to think I had evolved enough to stop manhandling books like a caveman. Considering the age of the book I'd say it's in pretty good shape too.
I love that it seems to have released with no real tie in at the time of its publication- Resurrection was still a bit off (perhaps this was released in anticipation of the movie?) and by this point the Kenner toy line was winding down.
Regardless of its reason for publication, the book is just pure movie fluff for the sake of its consumption. I do wonder if any of the material included was meant to tie in to the tabletop RPG that I vaguely recall existing around a similar time frame.
There's certainly some fun stuff to be had here- all sorts of excerpts from various Marines' accounts, long-winded technical manual readouts, cross sections of vehicles like something out of the Jane's ship and aircraft books, some background on the androids utilized by Weyland- Yutani... yeah, if you know your Xenomorph lore, this is a fun deep dive.
It still mystifies me how it seems to have been released in isolation. Maybe I'm just jaded to the fact that everything these days has to be a tie in at launch or they don't want to bother with it.