joefavs

Shadow of the Sith sounds like it has the potential to address a lot of the issues I had with TROS, I’m really looking forward to it.

EDIT: here’s the full description for anyone who doesn’t feel like clicking the above link:

Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian return in this essential novel set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.

The Empire is dead. Nearly two decades on from the Battle of Endor, the tattered remnants of Palpatine’s forces have fled to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But for the heroes of the New Republic, danger and loss are ever-present companions, even in this newly forged era of peace.

Jedi Master Luke Skywalker is haunted by visions of the dark side, foretelling an ominous secret growing somewhere in the depths of space, on a dead world called Exegol. The disturbance in the Force is undeniable…and Luke’s worst fears are confirmed when his old friend, Lando Calrissian, comes to him with reports of a new Sith menace.

After his daughter was stolen from his arms, Lando searched the stars for any trace of his lost child. But every new rumor only led to dead ends and fading hopes–until he crossed paths with Ochi of Bestoon, a Sith assassin tasked with kidnapping a young girl.

Ochi’s true motives remain shrouded to Luke and Lando. For on a junkyard moon, a mysterious envoy of the Sith Eternal has bequeathed a sacred blade to the assassin, promising that it will give him answers to the questions that have haunted him since the Empire fell. In exchange, he must complete a final mission: return to Exegol with the key to the Sith’s glorious rebirth—the granddaughter of Darth Sidious himself, Rey.

As Ochi hunts Rey and her parents to the edge of the galaxy, Luke and Lando race into the mystery of the Sith’s lingering shadow and aid a young family running for their lives.

Now that we haven’t had a new movie in almost two years and the dust has pretty much settled on the ST, I’m revisiting my list. This is how I’m feeling with a little bit of hindsight.

1-2. Star Wars
1-2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. The Last Jedi
4. Return of the Jedi
5. The Force Awakens
6. Rogue One
7. The Phantom Menace
8. Solo
9-10. Attack of the Clones
9-10. Revenge of the Sith
11. The Rise of Skywalker

ThisIsCreation said:

Sometimes I feel like tearing my hair out with all this stuff.

I would love to read all the vader comics but where do I get them all in one purchase?

It doesn’t help matters that there have been three different canon series titled simply Darth Vader. The first two (covering the immediate aftermaths of ANH and ROTS, respectively) have long since ended and should be available in compendium editions. The current series, which picks up right after ESB, is about halfway through its run now if the length of the other two are any indication. Another wrinkle is that Vaders 1 and 3 have a good deal of crossover with the other ongoing comics and I really have no idea how the print collections handle those arcs; these days I read all my comics digitally issue-by-issue.

Not sure if it’s been discussed already, but these past couple weeks I’ve been absolutely devouring the Alphabet Squadron books. I’ve taken a lengthy break from Star Wars novels recently and now that I’ve dipped back in I’m really blown away by these. The tone is similar to Rogue One, but I think that the characterization here is actually a lot stronger than in that film. I really hope they keep Alexander Freed around, after this series he’s right up there with Claudia Grey and Charles Soule for me.

Would love to have Billy Dee narrating the “Calrissian Chronicles” version of events, while we see the messy reality with Donald Glover. Hopefully we see Ehrenreich’s Han and/or Qi’ra too; I could take or leave a full-blown Solo sequel, but I enjoyed the cast enough to think it would be a shame if we never saw those versions of these characters again.

For now, I like the DNR versions of 4K77 and 4K83, with D+80 in the middle. Once Harmy’s 3.0 is available, that’ll most likely become my preferred SW; I do tend to prefer the polished home release look. I liked D+77 fine, but I got really distracted by the landspeeder shadow. I haven’t looked at D+83 yet.

Would anyone be willing and able to seed these again? I no longer have the hard drive where I’d saved these and I’d love to revisit them. Been feeling a lot of GOUT nostalgia lately for whatever reason.

canofhumdingers said:

There were multiple instances showing the ships performing these super tight, skidding turns much like a car drifting around tight corners. It’s alright if it’s a rare, one off occurrence. But I’m not a fan of it being a regular part of the gameplay as the trailer implied.

I saw someone on twitter say that these hairpin turns are achieved in the game by cutting the engines while you’re in the middle of a boost maneuver, so it’s definitely something that you can only do as frequently as you can boost at the very most. If this person was right, that is. I’m not sure what their source was, I assume it’s in one of the articles that dropped yesterday, but I haven’t actually checked. Anyway, I thought it was a little odd too, but it doesn’t bother me. The vortex lines and high-contrast, almost cell-shade-y rendering also reminds me of No Man’s Sky, which visually is one of my favorite games. Squadrons seems to be a bit more stylized than Battlefront II for sure, but I’m fine with that.

I missed the boat on the original X-Wing series, but Rogue Leader might be my all-time favorite (it’s a toss-up between that, KOTOR, and Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight). I’ve been dying for a new game like this for almost 20 years at this point. Absolutely can’t wait.

Speaking of the old X-Wing series, does anyone know how to go about configuring a ps4 controller to play the games with on Steam? I know I ought to be playing with a joystick, and I’m sure I’ll pick one up eventually, but in the meantime I’d rather use the controller than a mouse. Steam recognizes the controller in the menus, but once I launch the game it stops working. Googling around, I found a pretty thorough guide for setting up an XBox controller, but I haven’t come across anything detailed for PlayStation. Any ideas?

^I don’t know exactly which speeder scene in Rebels you’re talking about, but I’ve always figured that landspeeders were capable of flying at altitude for short bursts because of that moment in the ROTJ speeder bike chase where Leia swoops in from above and behind the scout trooper. If the landspeeders in the scene you’re referencing are engaged in sustained flight, though, then I agree, that seems wrong.

Anton Lesser would play a great Tarkin, and I’d have liked to see him in Rogue One instead of fake Peter Cushing. He’s significantly shorter than Cushing, but they could have gotten around that with staging.

canofhumdingers said:

Can’t wait to play this. I think I saw it’s retail at release is $40? Not too bad.

$40 is great, but I also saw something in one of these announcement articles about preorders coming with 10 hours of free play? If this is going to require a subscription to some EA service on top of PlayStation Plus, I think I’m going to have to pass (or at the very least wait until I’m out of grad school and working full-time again).

If this is “Project Maverick,” which was always described as being smaller in scale than Fallen Order or Battlefront, then I’m guessing it will just be an expanded version of the Starfighter Assault section of Battlefront II, with an all-flight campaign and probably more ships. Which I’m fine with; I actually like the ship combat in BFII a lot. I just hope the price isn’t out of control if it is indeed the case that this is more of an expansion than an original game.

Speaking of starfighters, this weekend I tried out the new solitaire rules for the X-Wing tabletop game:
https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2020/5/29/flying-solo-1/

I ran the intro scenario in the rules supplement with two generic X-wings against three waves of generic TIE fighters and interceptors, then I ran my main squad of Leia in the Falcon, Luke in his X-wing, and a generic Z-95 Headhunter against Soontir Fel in an Interceptor, some character that I guess is from the Lost Stars novel in a Lambda shuttle, and two generic TIE fighters. It was fun and a lot more streamlined than the home brew solo play system I’d used before, but the AI isn’t very clever at this stage and the ships it was controlling often made “wrong” moves that no human player would make (obvious collisions mostly). These rules are only in alpha testing and I’ve already filled out the feedback form to let them know what issues I ran into; even though it’s clunky at this stage, I think it’s more fun than the more complicated systems out there and I’m looking forward to the next version.

I posted some of these in the Star Wars Games thread, but this seems like the more appropriate place going forward. With all the quarantine down time I’ve had in the past few months, I decided to finally start getting into Star Wars: Legion miniatures – the time commitment for painting the 30+ minis in the core set was always a barrier in pre-covid times, but now with nowhere to go, I’m burning through them. Here’s what I’ve painted so far:

Next up will be Leia, Rebel Hoth troopers, and a snowspeeder. After that, I’m planning to pick up Chewie, Veers, Bossk, Rebel Endor commandos, and Imperial scout troopers. At this point, I barely even care if the game is fun; I’m getting plenty of enjoyment just from the painting.

Galaxy Quest by a country parsec.

canofhumdingers said:

Those look great! I’m not a table top gamer, but I love miniature things and model building. I bought a pile of Bandai Star Wars models recently when BigBadToyStore had a really good sale on them.

The Bandai models are really fun. I’ve built the TFA Falcon and the snowspeeder, but I never painted them - I only started doing Dungeons & Dragons miniatures last fall. Now that I know what I’m doing, though, I’m thinking about finally taking a crack at it.

I’ve taken advantage of all this quarantine downtime to finally get set up with the Star Wars: Legion tabletop game. I just finished painting my core set squads last night. I’ve got a couple tauntauns for the Rebels and an E-web cannon for the Empire on order that should be here by the end of the week. Man, these are fun to do.

Any ideas on how to fix the aspect ratio on the OS X (non-Steam) version of KOTOR? I fired it up for the first time in almost a year yesterday, and while it used to run pillarboxed in 4:3, now it stretches to 16:9 and doesn’t offer me any obvious way to adjust it (I’ve gathered from googling around that this issue has something to do with the update to Catalina). I can find numerous tutorials for patching the Windows version to open the field of view and run in true widescreen, but I’m seeing nothing for the Mac version. Of course, I’d love to get it working with real widescreen, but I’d happily settle for just getting it to work like it used to.

Bought new:
-standard Blu-ray releases of TFA and R1
-4k steelbooks of TLJ and Solo
-digital copy of TROS (purely a quarantine impulse buy)
-Best Buy Skywalker Saga 4k box set

Bought used:
-2006 GOUT dvd set
-2011 PT blu-ray set

Received as gifts:
-1997 fullscreen SE VHS tapes
-individual PT dvd releases
-2004 OT widescreen dvd set
-2011 OT blu-ray set

Didn’t feel too bad about scooping up the new set because I really haven’t paid for any of these myself more than once, and because it seems likely that this is it for physical media releases apart from repacks.

I got the Best Buy set this morning and watched ANH, might fire up ESB tonight if I have the time. I remember being really impressed with the way the D+ versions looked on the Roku TV with DolbyVision in my apartment, then looking at them on the Samsung with HDR10 at my parents’ house when I was home for Thanksgiving and thinking they looked really washed out and dull. I’m not sure what they did here, but the disc looks so, so much better on that very same Samsung TV, so I’m pleased so far. Can’t wait to see the next iteration of Despecialized and whatever other projects here are sourced from this.

ray_afraid said:

joefavs said:

Racer Revenge has been available in the Playstation store for a while. I snagged it last year and played the first couple races

Any good? Pod Racing is the only thing from the PT that I like. Despite hating the drivers & the race itself, I love the designs & idea. Seems very Star Wars & hits my hotrod button.

It was fun, but I didn’t stick with it. Combination of being so used to playing the first game with the very different N64 controller, and just having other more current stuff to play, I guess. I’d like to pick it up again (and replay the original, if that’s going to be available too), but I’m quarantining at my folks’ place in my hometown and I left my PS4 at my apartment in New York and god knows when the hell I’ll be able to go back for it.

Speaking of quarantine, I found a really solid dice-based AI system for X-Wing the other day, if anyone else is going out of their skin wanting to play some tabletop stuff. It was designed for 1.0, but it works fine with 2.0 as long as you aren’t using any ships that didn’t exist in the first edition.

https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/161995/tactical-droid-i-x-wing

I know there are also systems for Legion and Armada, but I don’t play either of those so I can’t say whether or not they’re any good.

joefavs said:

Just watched TROS for the first time since December, and I enjoyed it a lot more this time! Adjusting my ranking:

1. A New Hope
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. The Last Jedi
4. The Force Awakens
5. Return of the Jedi
6. Rogue One
7. The Rise of Skywalker (was 9)
8. Solo (was 7)
9. The Phantom Menace (was 8)
10. Attack of the Clones
11. Revenge of the Sith

After watching TROS again in quarantine with my parents, I have decided this was a ridiculous ruling and I am reversing this decision. Back to the old order it goes!

“Sheev” doesn’t sound any better or worse to me than any other made up Star Wars name, to be totally honest. There are a handful of really good ones, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt like they really fucked it up. Now, regular Earth names showing up in Star Wars is another story (Beaumont in ROTS being the most recent, and John D. in ANH being the ur example).

Just watched TROS for the first time since December, and I enjoyed it a lot more this time! Adjusting my ranking:

1. A New Hope
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. The Last Jedi
4. The Force Awakens
5. Return of the Jedi
6. Rogue One
7. The Rise of Skywalker (was 9)
8. Solo (was 7)
9. The Phantom Menace (was 8)
10. Attack of the Clones
11. Revenge of the Sith

Mocata said:

I’m sure they all did their jobs. But there competency as storytellers is laughable in many instances. It’s not really a conspiracy to say that they rushed this out without a good plan. It’s certainly not the best possible outcome if you genuinely sit down and plot out where the unresolved threads and arcs could go.

Oh, sure, I certainly don’t mean to argue otherwise. I just thought the article did a good job of addressing the idea that the TROS team deliberately set out to undermine TLJ in response to all the Fandom Menace horse shit (a theory that I haven’t seen too much of here, to be fair, but that’s all over Twitter)

Good article about the issues with the creative process that got us here.

“Conspiracy theories abound regarding this film, but the truth is probably dumber and more well-meaning than angry fans love to hate to believe.”

https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/12/31/decoding-the-rise-of-skywalkers-difficult-creative-process