What's a better book?

[chriscool]

What's a better book to buy? Aliens Technical Manual or Weyland Yutani Archives?

[Xenomrph]

Colonial Marines Technical Manual, hands down.

Well I'll clarify that a little bit, because it depends on what you're looking for. Are you looking for a book that greatly expands on a specific topic in a specific movie in near-exhaustive detail and is full of very dry, technical writing, diagrams, and a healthy dose of "world building" (and won't be bothered that the Aliens themselves are only featured in a brief chapter at the end)? Or are you looking for a book that re-tells the 4 Alien movies (and Prometheus) with varying degrees of attention given to each movie based on how popular they were, and has a bunch of very awesome full color pictures but otherwise really doesn't venture outside the comfort zone of "basic stuff that most anyone with a working knowledge of the movies will probably already know"?

If you want the former, get the Technical Manual. If you want the latter, get the Weyland Yutani Report.
If money is an issue and you can only get one, I'd definitely say get the Technical Manual - it's half the price and has 8x the content.

[Nostromo]

Thanks for the info! By the way, which of the 2 books would you say has more information on Alien and Prometheus? Info that is relatively obsucre, like info on the crew, etc.

[Xenomrph]

Definitely the WY Report, although the info isn't necessarily obscure aside from maybe crew first names and birthdays, and those tend to follow a predictable pattern. :p

The Tech Manual, due to licensing limitations, doesn't actually feature anything not in 'Aliens'. Like, the only reason the Nostromo and Narcissus get tech specs is because they're shown or mentioned in 'Aliens', and the only events from 'Alien'  that get mentioned are those that Ripley mentioned in 'Aliens'.
The Tech Manual predates Prometheus by many years, so naturally it isn't featured.

I will say that the chapters in the WY Report kinda get progressively worse as the book goes on, and the Prometheus chapter (and to a lesser extent, the Alien chapter) is one of the best chapters. Things really nosedive in the Aliens chapter and kind of never recover, which is unfortunate.

[chriscool]

I'll go with the Aliens Technical Manual and will probably own both at some point. Thanks for the info!