The Mandalorian Season 2 this Fall

Thank the Force, but The Mandalorian will be back this fall according to a recent announcement (news bit here).

Tiny post! That was all....just excited to know that the best Star Wars since the original trilogy is set for a return.

Year in Review: Movies in 2019

This was a grotesque, weird year for movies. I personally think it all boils down to the nine-foot tall purple gorilla in the room: Avengers: Endgame came out this year (remember that movie?!?!?) and it overshadowed everything else before and after it. The rest of the year was, at best, a middling to average year for movies, with a vast number of serious duds in the mix.

So here are the high (and low) moments I noticed for 2019:

The MCU's Grand Finale Couldn't Be Beat

Avengers: Endgame dominated, so maybe other films knew they couldn't compete and dished out their subpar content instead? This argument doesn't really hold up; lots of movies this year clearly thought they had the chops to contend. No movie this year (not even Star Wars Rise of Skywalker) could possibly hold up to the 20-film long conclusion to the MCU juggernaut.

I think it is more likely that, outside of the sharp contrast of a monumental conclusion to a united film series in the final Avengers film, every other film this year suffered from a dearth of new content ideas; even the really good movies suffered from this simply by comparison; Shazam was great, but really just the Superman film we didn't get with Man of Steel. Terminator Dark Fate was an impressive film to the few people who saw it, but really just the Terminator 3 we wanted but didn't get back in the day. Spider-Man: Far From Home was proof a Marvel movie could be fun post-Endgame, but also still very much a continuation of the "let's fix Sony's horrible mistakes from the past" kind of movie.

The Duds Were Many And Prolific

Hollywood flooded the theaters this year with movies which couldn't hold a candle to the major blockbusters. If your movie wasn't a Disney film, then as a director, producer or distributor you were probably sweating in your boots this year. The list of distinct duds....movies which fell flat or failed to stand out in the crowd in a meaningful was way was shocking. In prior decades these were called "normal films," but today, anything lacking the clever polish of an MCU film when it comes to action blockbusters seems doomed to fail.

Examples I was subjected to (some I enjoyed, some not so much) were prolific: X-Men Dark Phoenix, Zombieland Double Tap, Hellboy, Men in Black International, Godzilla: King of the Monsters....all of these movies came out this year, and I ended up seeing them. Of these movies, each had something good, but some were grimly bad in weird ways. It could just be me; as I get older and more curmudgeonly (it's a horrible thing to feel your mind and body aging into something less pleasant, something which disdains fun in the conventional sense) but honestly....none of these films really "had it" regardless.

Streaming Got Complicated and Expensive

You can't just subscribe to Netflix anymore. Now you need to consider at minimum four or five streaming apps for your entertainment if you're serious about watching TV or have a family to entertain. It's annoying; we thought we were moving away from the cable companies, but in a sense we're right back where we started; too much money, spread too thin for the entertainment value.

I've personally continued to maintain my subscriptions to Netlix, DC Universe, Disney+, Shudder and Curiosity Stream....but five services is honestly too much for the actual amount of time spent watching TV in my "mostly gamer" house. 2-3 stations almost feels like too much! But such is the era we now live in.

Star Wars IX Ended an Era and The Mandalorian Started an Era

I've worked through my antipathy for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker; I may post more (like I haven't enough already) but I've decided it was totally fine, even if it's plot and pacing sucked, in terms of a Star Wars film. I recalled having similar feelinsg of antipathy for Return of the Jedi when it came out; in 1983 the RotJ movie felt like something for my younger self from age 7-10, not my 12-13 year old self; I had moved on from Star Wars (at the time). Now, decades later, I realize I was prepared to go in expecting the movie to be bad; actively looking for it. That Abrams accomodated with lots of obnoxious plot and pacing issues was a coincidence; I could have overlooked many of those, as I had in all the other movies. Honestly....I suspect that, except for Revenge of the Sith (which I loved), I think I just experience burnout with Star Wars periodically and it just so happens the release of this movie coincides with that period of burnout.

But what about The Mandalorian, which itself kicks off an era of streaming films for Star Wars? I totally love it....but also probably because it feels so different from the latest movies; Mandalorian is a thing unto itself; something which manages to get back to an old version and style of Star Wars I had forgotten I loved so much.

Crap! Writing about Star Wars again. Okay....enough of this for now....will dig up my predictions from the beginning of the year next to analyze for accuracy (or lack therof).

The Mandalorian is Still Good

A very brief post/observation, but I finished ploughing through to episode 7 of The Mandalorian last night and it was the perfect palette cleanser to Rise of Skywalker. Indeed, I realized that The Mandalorian is so much closer to the general feel of classic original Star Wars (while also keeping its own style and pace) that it felt like a much more genuine Star Wars experience than the new movie did.

Anyway.....just a suggestion, that if you like Star Wars but maybe came out of the latest film feeling like you got mental food poisoning, The Mandalorian may be the cure for what ails you.

Watching The Mandalorian

Two episodes of The Mandalorian have been released since Disney+ premiered a few days ago. Tonight I decided to bite the bullet and do the free trial, if only so I can see the show for myself rather than hear everyone else talk about it.

First: some Spoilers ahead! I suggest you go watch at  least the first two episodes yourself. If you are not sure it's for you, here's my suggested criteria for taking the time to do so; any one of these will do:

1. You like Star Wars, and have also enjoyed the expanded content beyond just the films;

2. You always thought Boba Fett specifically was a loser but the concept of the Mandalorians deserved more development;

3. Or you played a lot of Star Wars RPGs in the past and always wondered what those would look like on the big screen.

Really though, just enjoying SF on TV is a sufficient criteria. Also, SF with a nice budget.


...Anyway, minor spoilers ahead! A few, I will try not to do much (some reviews I have read don't even do the courtesy of not explaining they are about to broadcast the entire plot, including a huge reveal that I feel is much better experienced in viewing than my telling you what it is).

Right off the bat, my gut impression after the first two episodes is, "It's Lone Wolf and Cub, but with Star Wars trappings." I also liked that it leaned hard into a strong "space western" thematic; you will get shades of classic spaghetti westerns out of this series as well as throwbacks to classic ronin-themed samurai films. I won't explain why, but you will see.

The two shows break with some Star Wars conventions. No classic music; no screen crawl at the start. Fine with me. It does not always break with "Star Wars-isms" though, and some of them are a bit annoying. An example: the Mandalorian approaches a door for a secretive bounty, and is greeted by a robotic eyestalk, just like in Return of the Jedi. This scene is here because of that callback; it doesn't mesh well with the "lore I remember" which raises questions about why a creature I vaguely recall as being some sort of cyborg monk in Jabba's palace would also be on this other unrelated planet. But....the fact that the old Expanded Universe is no longer canon also means perhaps that the robot eyestalk deal is really just a "door answering service" in the outer rim, maybe?

These Star Wars-isms are more annoying in the first episode, but they start to diverge quickly enough as the plot and setting start to take better hold. The events in the series are post-Empire, so take place some time after the Return of the Jedi. The locations all appear to be in a very lawless Outer Rim, and The Mandalorian dives in short order into some serious world building that thoroughly takes advantage of the "show, don't tell" approach. This pays off exceedingly well.

Throughout watching episodes one and two I quickly got in to it for being it's own thing; sure, it's Star Wars, and I sort of feel like I'm watching Star Wars because it keeps throwing things at me on screen that are reminding me its Star Wars....but it's also very much its own style of film, exploring a new niche in the Galaxy Far, Far, Away that we have sort of wanted to see on film for a long time now, but really only seen in books. Arguably it does a better job of this than Rogue One or Solo, both of which tested the waters but maybe were also too timid to really try and expand the idea of what a Star Wars tale could be.

Well, I didn't want to pay for another service....but I'm hooked. If this is indicative of the average quality of what Disney has lined up, I guess it will make for a fun ride.

Juggling Continuity - or how Disney got me interested in Star Wars novels again

Like many beloved continuities the Star Wars Expanded Universe grew over a period of thirty years in a manner typical of a complicated invasive pest organism let loose into an unprepared wilderness. Like tumbleweeds in the American Southwest, rabbits in Australia or the nutria in Louisiana the Star Wars Expanded Universe has run rampant though the unexplored off-screen potential universe of Star Wars. For better or worse this has led to some memorable stories that people love (anything by Timothy Zahn) and some horrible stuff that we all wish we could forget (list too long to name; also, contentious as everyone has their pet peeves). It's also led to an interesting and weighty nightmare in terms of just how a reader keeps up with all of this. Take a break from Star Wars novels for a year or two and you could find yourself hopelessly out of touch, unable to catch up and figure out what the heck happened.

Juggling continuity like this is a real beast of an issue, and some IPs have managed this better than others. Comic book publishers are especially famous for this: DC Comics, for example, periodically likes to reboot its universe and uses its many alternate realities to do so, a tradition going back to the Crisis on Infinite Earths which was ironically designed to clean up their many alternate-reality crossover storylines that had turned their comic continuity into spaghetti mush. This has the advantage of making it easier to jump into a contemporary storyline for DC (with the New 52 reboot most recently) but with the disadvantage being that older graphic novels and comics may be contradictory or nonsensical in relation to the newer tales.

Marvel, by contrast, dogmatically sticks to their core universe and periodically "soft reboots" with retellings and reimaginings of the classics stories of yore (for example, the Season One graphic novels) that are designed to make the original tales (many dating to the sixties with all the baggage that entails) more contemporary while not precisely negating the original tales. As a result, you have to read all Marvel comics with the implicit assumption that everything that has ever been published for the series technically takes place within the last 10-15 years of their condensed "super-floaty timeline." That means that in the early eighties when I was reading about the first Phoenix tale, in "Marvel-universe-time" those stories technically took place around 2000-2004 in "current Marvel-universe-time." And in ten years those stories will be taking place ten years later.

In Marvel's defense, they do seem to be progressing their universe, ever so slightly. It just so happens that their batch of younger protagonists, the second and third generation after the originals, tend to be really uninteresting. Marvel's focus on a sort of "quasi realism" in terms of these character arcs and the whole super heroes in suits concept puts brand recognition for the younger characters at odds with the more readily identifiable characters.

Marvel also has a problem with characters tied to specific time periods: the further the timeline "ages" the weirder the stories and justifications for these characters get. Magneto, as an example, should be 79 years old roughly by my estimates. He looks it in the movies, but I suspect in the comics he's had some sort of slowed aging going on....something? Who knows.

But back to continuity and Star Wars. The idea that the Expanded Universe would survive Episodes VII-IX is silly; there's no way that the people working on the films would slavishly adhere to the bizarre complex canon that grew up in the Expanded Universe, and in fact by not doing so they have opened up the Star Wars universe to a new reinterpretation, one which does not reflect the many years of various special projects, games, novel events (NJO) and other detritus that turned into the Expaned Universe.

For people like me this is a great thing: I get to jump back in to Star Wars feet first when they start releasing the "new canon" novels being scheduled for release. This is going to be great, especially if you (like me) often found the old EU novels to be strange ducks, a product which was one part fan service, one part "we don't know what we can/can't write about in relation to the prequels" and especially the weird anachronism that is the unaging characters of Luke, Han Leia and the rest whose real-life actors carried on in the real world while their on-screen doppelgangers at best got a slight dusting of gray around the temples on their book covers to symbolize the decades spinning away.

I don't know if ditching the whole canon like this is a good move for the cavalcade of Star Wars die hard fans out there, but for me it's just the incentive I need to actually think about getting back into the core Star Wars universe. I really look forward to reading some novels free of the baggage that the EU brings with it everywhere it goes.

Star Wars Non-Retcons Part 4: Imperial Armor Really Does Suck

Imperial Armor Really Does Suck

Anyone who’s into the 501^st cosplay may disagree, but the fact is, Imperial Armor doesn’t do squat against blaster technology in the Star Wars universe. There’s no disputing this: they have no decent targeting system (or we’d see more confirmed kills, more often), their tactics are only slight better than subpar AI in a video game and usually one or two blaster hits smokes your average Stormtrooper.(EDIT: Stu Rat pointed out yesterday the stormtrooper armor is basically "second chance" armor, and that's certainly true....in fact it got me to thinking that for all we know most stormtroopers we see drop may only be stunned, wounded and unconscious, unless they also fell off a bridge when they were hit!)

It didn’t always work like this, however. Clearly the Clone Troopers of the prequel series were on average more competent; highly trained soldiers bred from birth to kill, and obey unerringly (i.e. Order 66), and there is evidence throughout the prequels that their armor is a bit more tactical and effective than their descendants. So what changed?

There’s an obvious reason for this, one which is never addressed in the movies but which can readily be implied: storm troopers are trained (or bred) and outfitted by the lowest cost contractors with an emphasis on numbers over competence. Palpatine needed competent troops in the Clone era because he had plans to exterminate the Jedi. Later on he needed a wopping huge volumes of thugs….everyone under the sun who could serve in any sort of militia working for him and not any seditionists in the Empire era. He needed the appearance of endless armies, essentially….and who cares if they can shoot straight or take a blaster hit when you’ve got billions of trained soldiers at your command?

We'll save the whole ewoks vs. stormtroopers debate for another day....

Star Wars Non-Retcons Part 3: The Empire Really Was That Incompetent

The Empire Really Was That Incompetent

A big deal has been made about how the Emperor must have been in control through the force of the Imperial Fleet around Endor’s moon, due to the fact that they seem to fall apart when he dies; I think this retcon goes back to Kevin Anderson’s writings. When you actually watch the original film (RotJ), ignoring the EU explanations for this, what you see is a series of fortuitous events all happen at once: Emperor dies, and a lone pilot slams into the flagship of the fleet (The Executioner) and downs it in one fell swoop….the Executioner falls into the Death Star II’s gravity well and blows up real good; also, ewoks and an exploding shield generator. Things suddenly go horribly south for the Imperial Fleet, and they are rapidly routed.

So using Occam’s razor for our fictional process, what’s the simplest solution: that the Emperor was able to mind-control thousands of Imperial ships into an effective cooperative organizational structure, and that when he died they suddenly all got stupid….or that they were already basically a highly autocratic military organization built on a regimented approach to using straight up overwhelming force, and when they simultaneously lose their coordinating flagship and also have said ship plow into their partially completed space station the regimented military structure suffers a complete and total breakdown?

Seriously….this is a no-brainer. It also explains why the original Death Star had such a glaring design flaw; anyone who’s worked on design by committee or in a bureaucracy heavy environment knows how this works. Even introducing the notion of “force tactics mind control” into the mix was basically denying all the evidence of gross incompetence with the Empire in the prior two films.

The Empire are the English Red Coats, you see; being mercilessly gunned down as they operate on their strict and time-honored drill habits while the Rebels pick them off from the treeline. Case closed.

Also: watch Troops. It explains everything.

Star Wars Non-Retcons Part 2: Han Solo Really Did Refer to Parsecs as if they were a measure of time and not distance

Han Solo Really Did Refer to Parsecs as if they were a measure of time and not distance

The Scene: Han Solo brags to Luke and Ben about making the "Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs." Did not bother me as a kid, but when you get older and realize it's a measure of distance, not time then it becomes something of a head-scatcher. This, of course, was bampow sci fi dialogue from an era when technical consultants were not the norm, and audiences were not sophisticated enough to concern themselves with stuff like this.

As the years drew by however this became a bone of contention for many a fan, and the retcons have been frequent, usually centering around the official EU notion that the Kessel Run is something that happens in a black-hole rich region and doing it in the shortest distance is considered extremely impressive.

Let’s face facts, though: Han didn’t know what he was talking about, and may never have done the Kessel Run in any measure of parsecs or time worth bragging about. Occam’s razor suggests not that he was referring to some complicated distance-based space stretch but rather that he was talking out of his ass to some local yokels and impressing them with some garbage that he made up to sound cool to Luke, to put him in his place. But we know from the very same movie that Han is terrible at coming up with lies on the spur of the moment (witness the Prison Cell Block scene for proof) so it makes more sense that he was just grabbing stuff out of the air...badly.

But….Han’s an accomplished pilot and so must also be a decent navigator, right? Well sure, maybe he is; but he’s still terrible at coming up with stuff on the spot. Also, he may just leave a lot of that to Chewbacca, or even the Millenium Falcon’s computer….so navigational terms may be a thing he prefers not to pay close attention to. One does get the impression that in the Star Wars universe the ability to fly is strongly divorced from the need to understand the underlying physics of that process, so it is not unreasonable to assume that the basic principles of stellar navigation are actually unnecessary to a pilot so long as he’s got a computer or a co-pilot who does understand that stuff for him.

Star Wars Non-Retcons: Problems that go away if the EU Stops Being Canon

I was reading about some of the developments and rumors on the forthcoming Star Wars Episode VII recently, and last night sat down to watch a bit of Return of the Jedi with my son. He’s too young to fully be into Star Wars right now….but he does have a toy lightsaber, and I thought it would be fun to let him see where it comes from (and so now at 23 months he knows the word “lightsaber” as well).

Incidentally when you’re two, and obsessed with airplanes, cars and robots everything falls into one of those three categories; so tie fighters? Airplanes. Sand crawler? Car. R2D2 and C3P0? Robots! One out of three isn’t bad.

So while watching Return of the Jedi with my son I realized that, from all I’ve read, the next movie isn’t going to assume any of the continuity of the Expanded Universe (EU) has happened….or at least, if it does make any assumptions about the EU it may be to borrow broad concepts or specific characters (if there’s a Thrawn or Mara Jade in Episode VII it will be pure fan service, for example). Not taking the EU into account also means that certain “fridge logic retcon moments” (look up fridge logic on TV Tropes) that have become so typical for the last few decades are no longer necessarily valid.

What are these retcon moments? Glad you asked! There are a few obvious bits in the original trilogy that for whatever reason people couldn’t just take at face value….and as a result, the ever expanding content of EU material through game and fiction has made consistent fundamental assumptions about the why’s and how’s of the Star Wars universe in such a fashion that the original movies lose some of their original specialness because of the retconing nitpickery.

Examples? Why yes I do have a few! In each of the following cases I present this week we have an ordinary event, character or scene in which something innocuous in the movie that could at best be explained away as “it made for a good moment “ and on its own merits needed no real alteration, was instead the springboard for an elaborate and lingering retcon. Each of these are fairly notable, and by no means inclusive….but they do reflect ones I've always thought were handled rather….oddly….in the EU canon. Here goes:

Leia Really Did Strangle Jabba With Her Own Muscle Power

The Scene: In RotJ Leia strangles Jabba with her own slave chains. It's a nice "poetic justice" scene and allowed Leia a little payback for Jabba's nasty BDSM xenophilia.

I forget the exact way this one turned into a retcon, but I seem to recall it started with Timothy Zahn concluding that Jabba’s flabby neck was too thick and stubborn to be properly strangled by Leia on the Slave Barge. The solution? She was using latent force powers to enhance her strength! Problem apparently solved.

This is actually a writer’s equivalent to Occam’s Razor. Apparently it is predicated on the assumption that:

1.       Leia is not strong enough (even though she’s probably about 24 years old in the scene and in very good physical shape) to pull the chain sufficiently tight to cut off Jabba’s flow of oxygen

2.       Jabba is assumed to have some sort of physiology that is not susceptible to the sort of strangling he experiences, nor is it assumed that his health is dubious enough to make the job easier (despite the fact that Jabba seems positively sickly in his scenes)

So what happened was EU authors worked out a retcon implying that Leia used magic to do it. Mhmm.

What makes more sense? Well, let’s start with an easy premise, that what was on screen was all it took. Leia was strong enough, and Jabba unhealthy enough that the job was fairly easy. She didn’t even need to kill him….all he needed was to pass out, after all; the exploding barge took care of the rest! Thus….no need for the force to enhance Leia’s musculature despite a lack of training or understanding.

This gets rid of a big bugaboo I’ve always had with the various Star Wars retcons: that Leia was too delicate a woman to do the job of polishing off Jabba.

I'll present another one of these "non-rectons" each day this week.....

2012 RoC MMO Year in Review

Green Armadillo at Player vs. Developer did a sort of cost-analysis/overview of his 2012 MMO expenditures and time, and I thought it would be fun to do something similar, with more of a focus on my "year of MMOs" and what they amounted to (if anything). So, here goes...



Star Wars: The Old Republic
TOR may have come out in December 2011, but I didn't get my copy until late January. My wife played this game continually for close to a year, but it seems that her interest (and that of her highly dedicated RP guild) waned dramatically after the game went F2P, at least partially due to the over monetization of the game going forward (paying for content previously announced as free, for example, and the souring of the community due to the flood of F2P gamers who are sight-seers and gawkers, and presumably not very RP-friendly).

For my own purposes, TOR has a great single player experience wrapped in a world of MMO suck. It has padded regions (Coruscant, for example) that drag on and on, and feel very tedious and grindy to someone like me who approaches this game less as a new Star Wars MMO and more as the KOTOR 3 single player experience we really wanted. Still, the free to play option opened it back up to me, and I find that being able to jump in and play occasionally is making the game more accessible and fun, now that I don't have to worry about a monthly fee. If Bioware/EA could just realize that a person like me would prefer to pay for a couple extra character slots and not have to subscribe, then we'd all be a bit happier.

Conclusion: SWTOR moving F2P was a smart move for certain types of players, but the game still has problems. That said, it's a casual friendly MMO if you can avoid falling asleep during the long slog through boring padded areas like Coruscant.

Tera
Tera was billed for its action MMO combat and its unique revision to an otherwise very Korean style setting. The game was pretty compelling, initially....but some odd hiccups left me cold in the end. A major problem was its early billing snafus; I signed up for six months on a deal when it first came out, but after four weeks I realized this wasn't a game I was going to care for in six months, so I tried to cancel the subscription. Surprise....they didn't provide for a way to cancel! I did get my money back, and in a twist of irony that changed my opinion of the matter from "they are sleazy con artists" to "they or their billing service are merely incompetent" I still got my six months of play time. Which I barely used until the tail end, in a bid to revisit and see if my feelings had changed. They did not.

Conclusion: Tera is a weird action MMO that is fun to play but it has some unfortunately disturbing undertones, a bit too much of the Korean Cutesy for my tastes, an excess of BDSM inspired armor and for all it does offer it just doesn't seem to feel as satisfying as other, better games out there (among which I would include Rift, GW2 and TOR). And their crappy billing issues soured me from ever letting En Masse have credit card or paypal info again, period.

Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 was heavily anticipated and I was ready for it on its first week or so of release. It's timing was atrocious, however (for me, at least), as I had gotten sucked into Rift and so found my precious game time seriously divided. GW2 is a fantastic game, but thanks to its Buy-to-Play model I have been able to safely play it just a bit, and othewrwise set it aside for now while I concentrate on the two other games worthy of my attention.

Conclusion: all MMOs should look at GW2 in the future, for both the payment model and for ideas on how to innovate. Not too closely...a future full of GW2 clones would be sad.



World of Warcraft
Blizzard sent me a 10 day "please come back" trial to Mists of Pandaria. I logged on, tried a pandaren monk, then jumped to the original Kalitherios who was still stuck in that god awful fhsibowl undersea region, was reminded why I left WoW during Catalyclysm and deleted the game, again.

Conclusion: WoW is getting very long in the tooth, and the only way to appreciate it these days is to be stuck with a low end PC, or otherwise avoid other games entirely.



Dungeons & Dragons Online
I was a HUGE proponent for DDO when it went F2P, and it was the first F2P game I also decided to invest in. I rationalized that if I spent $15 a month for a year, I'd have spent $180 in that time, and if I spent that (or less) on in-game purchases over time, then I'd be ahead.

In the end, I spent more than that (and in fact bought about $50 of turbine points plus the expansion pack at half off on a Steam sale this year) but I also played it heavily for more than two years, and only in the last year did I lag badly. DDO has a huge disadvantage over other MMOs, that outweighs (for me) it's advantages: it has a major grind component, and it's XP is (except for slayer/explorer missions) tethered to mission completion. You can spend a long time leveling in this game if you play in the way I do, which is slowly, mostly solo, and with a methodical pace in mind. I have friends who can blast through this game from level 1 to 20 in weeks. I envy them, because they have a system. The system necessary to earn XP at the fastest rate in DDO is beyond my time frame or network of friends, unfortunately.

Conclusion: DDO is still great, but my love for it has been replaced by Rift. Still, I like to revisit on occasion, even if I've given up hope of ever getting to max level.

The Secret World
The Secret World is everything I want in an MMORPG with a modern horror theme, short of it being a single player experience. It has immersive, thoughtful storylines (with key stories fully voiced), a mature theme that's not just "adult" (although it delves in that direction occasionally, too) and a smart world that really meshes well with the modern urban horror/fantasy trend in fiction these days. However, it was subscription based for a while, and so like GW2 it was something I didn't feel I had time for with my Rift obsession.

Now, of course, that has all changed and TSW moved to a Buy to Play model just like GW2. This was a very smart move, and it has revitalized my interest in the game....more so even than for GW2, because while GW2 is an innovative drwarf-and-elf free fantasy MMO, TSW is a modern horror MMO that ditches the Tolkienesque fantasy entirely.

Conclusion: I'll be playing a lot of TSW in the future and plan to focus my money on their planned future content.

Age of Conan
I've tried to get back into AoC a couple times. Unfortunately their cash shop was pricey, the play mechanics felt clunky if you stayed away too long, and the game can't survive its main crippling issue (one that TSW fixed) which was that 90% of its primo A game content was front-loaded in the first 20 or so levels, and everything after that right up to level 80 suffered from a "rushed to finish" conclusion. I recently tried it--again--in the wake of some changes that opened up previously gated instances to F2Pers and I was shocked at how empty the game was (okay not really) and how it just doesn't hold up to today's crop of games.

Conclusion: AoC is a game I want to play, badly. Just not the one that actually exists.

Champions Online
When this went F2P two years ago I was in on day one, took advantage of their first two weeks of excellent discounts, and basically absorbed this game (as did my wife). Then we burned out as the game dragged along; the momentum could not be sustained by the title itself, which still needed more...sometuing...to make it better.

Perfect World Entertainment came along and snapped Cryptic up. At first this was bad; a merge of accounts between Cryptic and PW made accessing their games problematic for a while, enough so I gave up on trying. Eventually they got their act together, and by the time I got back in Champions Online was sporting all sorts of impressive new features. It now remains, like DDO, a game I like to keep installed even if i only jump in once every couple of months or so. Unfortunately it's not really that exciting to play (for me) anymore, and I hate the crafting/equipment mechanics of the game with a passion, but the character generator is bar none the best there is (now that CoX is dead).

Conclusion: it's worth vacationing in Champions every now and then, and Perfect World made Cryptic respectable again...a miracle!

Rift
Rift snuck in toward the start of the year and snagged me first with its Lite F2P through level 20 and then with its mixture of interesting story content and compelling mix of traditional and innovative gameplay. It is officially the first game since 2005 when WoW and the original Guild Wars sucked me in to grab and keep me for the long haul. The core game is so good I continue to mainly play it while I occasionally log onto my level 50 guardian warrior and explore the new Storm Legion content at an excessively leisurely pace.

Anyway, I don't need to blab on about how great Rift is, as I've done that a lot already this year. Suffice to say it's my top dog in the kennel right now.

Conclusion: I bought a one year sub along with Storm Legion. That's about as dedicated as it gets for me in the world of MMOs.

Next Year
I'm looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online. I think some new titles like Firefall and Wildstar may be dark horses ready to sweep in and change everything up. I suspect more publishers will eyeball the B2P model just as much as the F2P model, and if industry analysts like Michael Pachter are right we may see a decline in the number of MMOs being pumped out as publishers grow wary of entering a saturated market.

MMOnday Madness: SWTOR F2P, Elder Scrolls Online, dead internet tales, and more!

Still chillin', didn't watch any movies this weekend, hardly got any gaming in either (a short run in Gears of War with a friend who is a bit behind the times; and the Saturday evening AD&D 1E retro game, about which I'll talk more another day) and other than that my kid is rapidly polymorphing from a baby into a sprinting, climbing, insatiably curious little daredevil. Marcus is learning new stuff every day, his favorite thing his hanging with dad and doing stuff, and so like 90% of my weekends are spent trying to keep up with him. Whew!

Still, eventually he goes to sleep and then dad gets a little game time in. So this weekend in the MMO world I noticed the following fun bits:



First, Star Wars: The Old Republic is going free to play Thursday the 15th. This is a good thing, I guess! There's going to be a cash shop (and a positive overview on it can be found at the Imperial Intelligence report). It sounds like the cash shop is taking a few hints from the Mass Effect 3 supply pack shop, which gives you mixed random bundles of loot, and the cost goes up proportionate to how many uncommons or rares you are guaranteed. Although I am eternally annoyed at the ME3 shop because I dislike the randomness, it still lets you buy them with in-game currency, so I tolerate it and enjoy the "surprise package" nature of it. I wonder if SWTOR will let you buy random packs with in-game currency...?

Either way, I plan to resume playing SWTOR on Thursday. I didn't really want to stop playing the game, if only because I'd like to see how the spiritual KOTOR 3 successor concludes in some of the storylines. For me, SWTOR was a great single-player game with multi-player options and a monthly fee. If I'd been able to wrap up a storyline or two in a month or three at the most, I'd have been content. As it is, I've got a long way to go. Hopefully I can find a speeder bike or something in-game soon, because running around Coruscant was getting very, very tiring.

On other news, Bethesda's looming Elder Scrolls Online now has some detailed videos on its development available for viewing. I have to say, it looks pretty nice, and I'm kind of excited to see it. I imagine someone who's been drinking from the MMO kool-aid for far longer than I might be a bit jaded at ESO, but as I only occasionally drink deep from said kool-aid (i.e. this last six weeks or so with Rift), I think I'll be ready to check it out when it arrives next year...hopefully.



Sunday night the internet went down and forced my wife and I to consider the realm of single-player offline gaming again. It's always amusing when this happens (amusing being pirated by "annoying and painful" in this case) because you get to see what games do and don't work when the internet dies. Some choice bits I noticed, when trying out games linked to Steam, Origin and others:

Steam's Offline Mode: it worked this time; it hasn't always in the past. However, a number of games still wouldn't work, namely those which still required another agency to authenticate activation (Fallout 3 thanks to GFWL and Max Payne 3 thanks to Rockstar's Online Pass, I guess). However, all the other Bethesda title which were Steam-only without another authenticator worked fine (Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, Hunted: The Demon's Forge, Wolfenstein, Rage and Doom 3 BFG Edition). Thanks Bethesda, you get a gold star!

Origin: For some reason I have Kingdoms of Amalur linked through Origin (must have been a sale). As such it, along with all other Origin-linked titles freak out when you can't log on online, removing access to DLC and also preventing you from starting save games that depend on said DLC. This remains bizarre and concerning as always, and is one of the reaons I will continue to only use Origin in those cases where I absolutely have no choice.

GFWL: as usual if you don't have internet access GFWL has a heart attack and limits or shuts off access to titles and saves linked to this "service."

All the Cool DRM-Free Games on Gamersgate and GOG: Of course, pretty much any game that I purchase through, say, GOG and Gamersgate with DRM-free or one-time activation requirements worked just fine.

Ubisoft: I recently gave up on Ubisoft and deleted everything related to it on my PC, chiefly under the expectation that I lack the fortitude and determination necessary to plow through three Assassin's Creed II games to get the story to the point where I can see AC III, which in turn is getting reviews that suggest it's probably a bit weaker than I was expecting, not to mention I don't look forward to watching Ubisoft spend the next two years milking this iteration of the franchise. I like the AC storyline, plan to buy the books instead.

Luckily, the internet was back up this morning. Disaster averted! Just in time for Rift: Storm Legion to hit...tomorrow!

Disney Owns Star Wars and is Going to Give Birth to Star Wars Episode 7 in 2015

From the WTF news dept....

I head it on the radio while driving home today! It must be true, it was right after Hurricane Sandi reports and the stock market news. What the.....Wow.

Apparently Disney bought Lucas Films for four billion dollars or something. and announced a seventh Star Wars movie to be slated for 2015.

I wonder if in a few years fans will all remember the good old days of Papa Lucas fondly or if they will bask in the glory of a Star Wars film liberated from his force grip?

Time will tell....



This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as John Scalzi entertainingly points out. Remember, Disney also owns Marvel....and ergo, Avengers.

If they can do for Star Wars what they did for Avengers, then theaters across America will need to set up splash guards as millions of nerds heads' pop in exultant joy.

Muh-Mor-Pee-Gee Madness: Or, What's up with this genre, anyway???

I've noticed that two genres/substrata of gaming at large that seem to engender fierce opinions and feelings, usually expressed as fact regardless of the subjective nature of such, are D&D and MMOs. I think the reason is simple: both D&D and MMOs in general require a great deal of personal investment and energy from the player to get something out of them, and both are sufficiently involved that its more or less impossible to not get a sense of personal ownership on the game. In D&D's case this leads to situations where people loudly and angrily state that their preferred edition of D&D is the ideal, almost biblical edition while the current iteration or all other iterations are heresy of the worst sort. Likewise, among MMOers I think this argument is typified by the average gamer who discovers MMOs through WoW and proceeds to harshly scrutinze all other RPGs in the context of how WoW-like (or not) they are. This is exacerbated by the old guard, who sourly blog about the good old days of Everquest, when community meant something, or Ultima Online, back when getting ganked every hour was a proud badge of honor you wore as you streaked to your (probably looted) gravesite.

So I preface what I am about to say with the above observations, because I'm about to do a bit of the same with Star Wars: The Old Republic. I've played this off and on now for (according to Raptr) about 50 hours. I've not gotten past level 15, but I have five characters running coterminously. Altitis, the term is. So I haven't even set foot in a starship yet that I then piloted, and I have yet to successfully tackle the first real multiplayer instance (the one on the fleet, where you have two options to get to Coruscant: go to the cityworld on shuttle A unmolested, or get on shuttle B for a serious Imperial Arse Kicking). Shuttle B make my poor Republic Trooper's bum hurt, every time.

But as I said, I've played for about 50 hours now. That's more than most single player games ever demand. And yet, I feel like I've barely done anything. Hmmmm.

So, my observations!

1. Huge ass corridors. Everywhere. And running. Endless, endless running. All MMOs require running, sure. All MMOs eventually give you mounts, but it feels like a good progression. Star Wars litters the landscsape with speederbikes and land speeders....they're everywhere, and you can't use any of them. What the hell. People complain that the game emulates WoW too much in terms of game mechanics. Well, this concept of a modern SF future in which everyone walks miles and miles to do anything...it's bat shit insane, I tell you!

SWTOR desperately needs to integrate vehicles, and not in a tiered reward fashion like WoW and other MMOs. I need a speeder bike I control from level 1, or the ability to rent/steal one.

2. So much story and yet SO LITTLE STORY. This hit me last night, while jumping between my bounty hunter, who at last escaped the Nooblet zone, and my freshly minted sith warrior, who promptly got lost multiple times in the confusing tombs of Corriban. There's not actually as much story going on as it might seem. Maybe the republic trooper section confused me (that has a bit of story and a decent continuity) but at some point I realized that most of these quests with voice over were starting to feel really inane. I imagine the same thing would happen in WoW or Tera if instead of getting a quest text box I got a fully interactive speech/conversation path. Then again, Age of Conan did this and I usually enjoyed the interaction a bit. But then, Age of Conan made no bones about player morality (or amorality, as the case may be). Unlike Star Wars, which leads me to...

3. I want to be evil but my buddy won't let me. The morality system is being tempered by the damned henchmen. I didn't notice this until I moved over to the dark side/imperial sith component of the game, because its generally pretty easy on the Republic side to just go, "Hey, I'm a good guy, and I'm going to make good choices." So when you make a bad, dark-side-point choice in the Republic side you'll be all, "whoa, that wasn't cool" and try to avoid making that decision in the future. 

Now, I tend to be a bit more involved when I play RPGs, in that I have a hard time playing the bad guy because for whatever reason I have a difficult time separating my personal moral compass as a human being from the virtual moral compass of my character. So for me, I like as GM to set up really evil characters because I know they will eventually get taken down by the PCs, or at least motivate the PCs (in theory) to excel at becoming good to stop the baddies. But as a player at best I play mildly amoral types with a heart of gold. So for me, I decided that after learning how to play a really bad, bad wastelander in my fourth Fallout 3 playthrough that I'd try to play a genuinely evil Sith or bounty hunter (or both, as it worked out) in SWTOR.

Not so with the dark side, as it turns out! You have plenty of dark side choices, yes. But you have mutliple problems, and its a subtlety that I am reasonably sure the writers of Bioware intended: you can often get rewarded with light side points for doing what is clearly regarded as the right thing even by Imperial standards. This is an interesting situation, because it means that being a good sith isn't the same as being a good imperial, apparently. Also, you get a naggy companion character, at least on the bounty hunter side, who frowns upon you if you get all evil and dark-sidey with her watching.

I tried to play my bounty hunter as utterly inimical and evil...a person who takes the first bounty and follows through, no matter the counter offer, no matter how often she is shown that the path she's being paid to follow is actually paved with babies and kittens being trod under her jackboots, and I have this whiny camp follower with me who ruins it every time by either disparagingly questioning my ethics or glowering while I rack up negative points with her friend-o-meter. Jeez!

Anyway, it was at this point that, rather weirdly, I realized that downside of fully voiced speech for a character that I supposedly had personal ownership on. My bounty hunter wasn't really MY bounty hunter, because if she was, I'd have shot the whiny henchman I was saddled with and also that big stupid hutt, then taken their stuff. Instead, I was one of three bounty hunters that Bioware allowed for: the "heart of gold bad guy secretly yearning to do good," the "neutral planet bad guy with no real opinions," and the "I am in ur houz eatin yur kittens" bounty hunter who liked having a whiny goody two shoes camp follower along only because it allows for a shocking contrast. Hmmmm.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that the game is good and thought provoking but damnit I still can't for the life of me figure out why I keep getting drowsy and start falling asleep while playing. What the hell????

Rift, to its credit, is standing up as my favorite MMORPG now, and is looking to have some serious legs. If I have to cut back, and I may, I'll stick with Rift. I think I can play that one for the long haul.

This Old Republic

My wife jumped on the bandwagon months ago with a preorder of the $150.00 super crazy collector's edition featuring a Darth Ugly action statue. I resisted. I have spent most of the last year burnt out on MMOs and focused on the decidedly more engaging single player experiences offered in most other games (or the short and frenetic madness of pvp-focused games like Black Ops and GoW 3). I haven't felt very "Star Wars-ish." I didn't want to buy into yet another MMO that was destined to string me to disappointment after a week or two (Rift, Star Trek Online, DCUO, etc.), chiefly with the fact that MMOs seem necessarily limited in their storytelling conventions and just how they can engage a player with that oft-ignored -RPG component that can sometimes be found at the end of the MMO-part.

But yeah, after weeks of ignoring my wife's Star Wars: The Old Republic experiences in beta and then special pre-release early start play, I finally caved and got this game yesterday. I can tell you this much so far:

1. I'm glad I'm playing it now, because I always did want to play KOTOR 3 and this is it.

2. Bioware has managed to wed MMO styled gameplay to their traditional single player RPG storytelling medium. This turned out to work very well. I basically feel like I'm playing KOTOR 3 but with the occasional need to ignore random people running around and a chat window.

3. Whoever made those Bioware movies should be comissioned immediately by Lucas Arts to make a Star Wars trilogy of films using the CGI displayed here. Oh, and maybe give them cart blanche to do whatever the hell sort of storyline they want.

4. The gameplay is really conventional (I haven't even read the tutorial bits, the gameplay is a natural to anyone who's played any MMOs at all since December 2004) but this does not detract from the fun. The shoot-them-up component I've experienced so far as a republic trooper has been fairly engaging as starter zones go.

5. Bioware-style dialogue trees. I am already developing a sense of who my trooper cyborg is and whether he's a maverick, a tow-the-line sort of guy, or an embittered soul. I'm only a few hours in and I'm already being confronted with tough decisions. Hell, I got a classic, "fetch me my necklace" quest and it rapidly blew up into a "she could be a spy for the Sith Empire!" subplot. I really don't know what I'd do with all my free time if it weren't for Bioware and Bethesda knocking out such quality, thoughtful RPGs these days. Read a lot more, I guess.

6. Fully voiced, including your own character. I can't express strongly enough what an impact this has. Age of Conan had this up to about level 20-22, for example, and it was well done (until you left the starter zone and voiced dialogue suddenly got very scarce). Hell, even among single player RPGs I think a voiced protagonist is a smart move; contrast Mass Effect with Dragon Age or Fallout 3, for example.

7. Graphics are good. I cranked it up to max and it is a nice looking game, for an MMO. Not as slick as a dedicated single player experience, but still superior to most MMOs on the market right now.

So I opted for a three months at a time subscription plan. I think it will take me at good long time to finish all of the individual character campaigns in SWTOR, and it's the first MMO I've played since DDO and Champions Online that really grabbed me and now has me keen to play more.

While playing with Marcus in my lap last night he did something I hadn't seen to date: he started staring long and hard at the screen.* Did he recognize shapes and images as the same stuff he sees Mom playing all the time? Or is he just now starting to develop better, far ranging vision? I need to read up a bit on this. He's starting to pay more attention to odd things, like staring intensely at my book shelf (which I imagine looks like a panoply of colors to him) or his stuffed monkeys and ducks hanging from his comfy baby chair.

Okay, enough rambling! I have some preloaded stuff for my S&W Ages articles, and am hoping to get another TME feature done this weekend, but if I don't post much else between now and New Years, have a grand old time for the holidays!

Dies Natalis Solis Invicti! 




*Should he even be looking at a computer screen? Try reading up on early childhood parenting, and you'll discover more wacked out, contradictory information than you can shake a stick at!

A Long Time Ago...

Just had to share this: