C3PX

Both TPM and AOTC's DVD have hidden blooper reels as easter eggs. You reach them by going to the THX test screen and pressing the numbers 1, 1, 3, 8 I think. I found them mildly amusing, probably because of the cantina background music. I was disappointed when I did the same trick on the ROTS DVD only to find a stupid clip of Yoda rapping instead of a blooper reel with cantina music. I guess ROTS is when Lucas decided to do one take of everything and fix them on the computer.

JamesEightBitStar said:

C3PX said:

"Well, you don't like anime because you haven't seen this!"

 

 

No offense to your friends, but anytime I hear someone say "you don't like X because you haven't seen/read/whatevered this!" its a sign that I'm in for a world of pain. People like that, simply put, are always into something stupid.

Or maybe its just me.

No offense taken. One of them wanted me to watch Akira, and another wanted me to see Evangelon. So yeah, you hit the nail on the head, they were most certianly into something stupid.

You suggested I go to the video rental place and look at the anime until I find something I find interesting, the problem with that suggestion is that I should not have to go to so much trouble in order to find out if I really don't like anime. Since I have not been able to stand any of it I have sat through, I am pretty sure I don't like it.

bkev said:

I hate it when people say they hate all anime. I mean, anime comprises of different genres entirely. There are ones that are simply comedy, or simply action. I can understand hating a particular part of anime (note: overrated giant robot shows), but all of it as a whole?

I have yet to find an anime I can sit through, multiple friends of mine are, by my assessment, pretty big anime fans, and all of them have said things such as, "Well, you don't like anime because you haven't seen this!" And everytime after watching "this" my opinion of anime has not changed. I just don't get into it. And it is not because I have not given it a chance.

I guess if worse came to worse, all that would have to be done would be an audio capture from the VHS tape of the highest possible quality, then rip the DVD to a PC and cut out the old line and splice in the new one. If I am not mistaken, the audio on the DVD version isn't that incredibly great to begin with, so perhaps it could be done without a too bad of a drop in quality.

Though if some of the region 2 versions were in fact not tampered with, which seems likely, that would by far be the way to go.

So what we need now if for people from NTSC land (like myself) to stop replying to this thread so that someone from PAL land can speak up.

lordjedi said:

 

Unfortunately, if I even think about the prequels while watching the OT, I think of Vader as a whiney little bitch instead of the true evil villain he is.  That's probably why I don't think of the prequels much :)

Yeah, I know what you mean. Right after seeing Revenge of the Sith for the first time, I went to visit my parents, and my dad wanted to sit down and watch ANH together. I remember it felt like a totally different movie to me. I couldn't stop squiriming in my seat. All I could think of when I saw Vader on screen was whining Anakin and the stupid turn to the darkside in Revenge and his accidental murdering of the woman he was trying to save. That was the last time I watched ANH up until SW Revisited came out, by then I had gotten enough of the bad taste of ROTS out of my mouth that I was able to enjoy it again.  

I am not sure why MI:3 doesn't work on the DS, it just is not compatible with the DS port of SCUMM. Probably has a lot to do with limitations of the DS. Perhaps someday they will release a version that can run The Dig, Full Throttle, and Monkey Island 3. It is really cool to be able to carry these old games around in your pocket. What I would really love would be to play Grim Fandago on the thing, but that is asking too much. Who knows, maybe someday someone will make a LUAvm and port it to the DS.

As far as the expense of homebrew, it is very inexpensive now. Barely more than it cost for a brand new DS game. You can get MircoSD cards very cheap off of amazon.com. I payed $11 plus a couple of bucks shipping for my 2gb microSD that I use in my DS.

JamesEightBitStar said:

Nanner Split said:

Anime doesn't translate into worthwhile entertainment at all. It blows. All of it.

That's what I think.

 

Maybe I'm just a major fanboy but it irritates me when people say things like that. The problem is your thinking of anime as a genre, when its really a medium that can (and does) tell any type of story. There isn't just one kind. So saying "all anime blows" is like saying all books blow, or all movies blow, or all black people blow.

I dunno, just something to think about.

"All black people blow" lol. That is one of the funniest comparisons I have ever heard. Perhaps anime should be thought of as a medium instead of a genre, but comparing it with books, movies and black people is really silly. Books can be written in any number of styles, movies can be filmed in and directed in a vast number of various methods, and there are people with black skin from a wide range of varying cultures who have absolutely nothing in common other than their skin color. I guess that is the point you are trying to make, but it just doesn't work. I would call anime a "style" more than a medium. And it is a style that both Nanner and I do not enjoy. The medium of anime would be film or animation, I am not really sure you could accurately call anime a medium of its own. The fact of the matter is, it is a certian style of animation. Animation is a medium that can tell any type of story, books are a medium that can tell any type of story, and film is a medium that can tell any type of story. Just as I don't like the animation style of anime, there are several styles of book writting that I enjoy almost regardless of the story, and there are other styles of writting that cause me to put the book down, even if I might have found the story of some interest.

Yeah, I am pretty disappointed in Nintendo. The Wii and the DS are both amazing machines with great potential, but... well... yeah. I love my DS, the best handheld gaming system ever produced IMHO, but there are actually VERY few real DS games of any interest to me. Sadly, to unlock the true greatness of the DS, some way of playing homebrew is required. Now on to answer Nanner's question.

No, The Secret of Monkey Island was never released for the NDS. Neither was Metroid II (and the DS can't play the good ol' monochrom GB carts), nor was Super Metroid (though it really should have had a GBA rerelease, and it is truly ashame that it did not). Via SummVM for DS you can play all those old LucasGames adveture games, including Loom, Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, the Indiana Jones adventure games, and any other of those older classics that ran on the SCUMM engine that I am forgetting. It can also run a good deal of non-LucasGames/Arts adventure games. They run flawlessly on the NDS. Unfortunately games like Monkey Island 3, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandago do not work though. I would have loved to play those on my DS.

And of couse Metroid II (in full color) and Super Metroid are made possible to play on the DS through emulators.

ferris209 said:

I thought I was about to read a suicidal statement.

Yeah, me too. I read the topic and I thought, "Oh, crap, no Sean, what have you done!" Grateful to see it is just a strangly titled manga.

Citi Field, ouch. Yeah, the world totally sucks these days. The tree me and my friends used to build tree houses in (houses plural, because they usually fell down after a couple of days), the canal that ran under it (which the tree house usually fell into, causing our precious lumber to float away), and the surrounding vast and endless wheatfields are all gone now, in their places are a Wal-Mart, a Mormon church, a K-Mart, and about a zillion houses. The world changes and it is extremely depressing. 

Before you know it, Mt. Rushmore will be torn down and replaced with a new mountian featuring more up-to-date Presidents (such as Bill Clinton, JFK, Obama if he wins, and someone else), the Statue of Liberty will go down (on account of her being too French and the fact that we no longer believe in liberty) and will be replaced with the Statue of Commercialism, it will be a full color staue modeling the latest clothing trends. It will have speech abilities and talk about what great sells Dior, Macy's, Gap, or whoever else feels like paying them, has going on that week.

Johnboy3434 said:

If anyone's writing is to be criticized here, it will be mine. Got it?

Understood and agreed. So, Johnboy, has anyone ever told you your writing sucks worse than that of George Lucas? Just kidding. 

Honestly, I think "I can't breath" sounds equally as bad as "I can't breathe". In fact, it sounds slightly better. Sounds like a line out of Backstroke of the West, which makes it humorous instead of just lame.

The thought of Revenge of the Sith, I can't breath!

Yeah, Bea Arthur should totally have been in Empire Strikes Back. She could have been a hard core Rebel Commander during the battle of Hoth. Or she could have taken the place of the guy who Han said he would see him hell. How great would it be to have Bea Arthur delivering the line, "Your Tauntaun will freeze to death before you reach the first marker!"

Seriously, it would have defined awesome.

Threads like this one surface all the time. I usually don't even bother with them anymore, but I am kind of bored and posting is slow elsewhere.

The whole point Hunter is making is that the prequels could have been a million times better in any number of ways. Some people have a hard time admitting that, and want to think they are still better than average movies. What the Star Wars prequels and the new Indiana Jones movie suffered from was lazy story telling. I admit, the prequels cause quite a conundrum. Thing's like "Vader betrayed and murdered your father" are a little complicated. We have episodes IV-VI that fit together for the most part seamlessly, they may have their flaws, but they are pretty close to water tight. Now we have to make three more films that take place before this block of original films. The outline of the story is already written, because the original trilogy relied so heavily on its own back story, much of it was mentioned during the course of the OT. So the outline is that there are

• an ancient order of Jedi protecting and keeping peace within the Republic.
• But their peace keeping attempts somehow fail and a massive war breaks out that involves the whole galaxy. This war involves cloning to the degree that it is historically labeled "The Clone War".
• During the course of this war and perhaps the time following it, the Republic fails, the Empire rises, and the Jedi become "extinct".
• Two men who fought in the Clone War had the names Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. Obi-Wan was Anakin's master. And Obi-Wan's master had once been a man named Yoda.
• Anakin was killed by a man named Darth Vader/Anakin was suduced by the darkside and became Darth Vader, which to the Jedi (or at least Obi-Wan) meant that the good man Anakin Skywalker lost the inner struggle between good and evil and was essentially murdered, leaving behind only his evil side.
• Someone Anakin had managed to make pregnant somewhere along the way gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Anakin never knew about this. Obi-Wan did, and decided he needed to hide them from the man who had once been his best friend and commrade.
• The mother dies somewhere along the way. The twins do not know of each others existence. The girl knew her mother and she knew her living parents had adopted her. The boy lives with his aunt and uncle and knows very little about his real parents, and what he does know are lies meant to protect him.
• C3PO has a silver leg.
• Darth Vader was in part responsible for the extinction of the Jedi by hunting down and killing the ones who managed to survive the war.
• Obi-Wan and Yoda are the only ones who survive Vader's purge. Both moving to remote planets to live as hermets.

I think that is about everything. This is pretty much the mold the prequels had to fit based on information given in the OT. Not that hard right? Somethings like keeping the Vader suprise and the twins reveal is a little tricky, though not even 100% necessary. These things could have been revealed in a way that still made those moments meaningful in the OT.

There are millions of ways this outline could have been made into an amazing story. It is all vague enough that it could have been taken in any number of directions. With this information you could have made a whole seven season TV series. This is some fantastic material to work with. It should not have been hard to built three fantastic films around this framework. But what did we get? We got a guy who has been lead to believe he is the best story teller in the world sitting down with a notebook and lazily scribbling away silly stories that barely fit that framework even while stretching beleavabilty to the breaking point in order to make it almost fit the framework. A little imagination and some more careful thought, and it could have really been great. Instead of three great movies we get things like episode one, because George felt that the real story didn't begin until the third part. I think the most exciting part of Ep. 1 was Obi-Wan and Qui-gon sneaking aroung the Trade Federation ship. Why not just start the series as Obi-Wan and Anakin together. Dialogue between Obi-Wan and Yoda could have presented Yoda's past misgivings about Anakin's training. Didn't need a whole movie devoted to finding Anakin with a very loose action filled plot woven around it. Like I said, lazy story telling.

Now, to the point. This story could have been pulled off in one of millions of different ways, there really is no room for excuses such as, "Well come on, you couldn't honestly expect them to be as good as the OT, right?" Yeah, they could have been. Why not? But the fact is they were not. There are those of us who love them for what they are, and good for you guys. Then there are those of us who constantly lament and think of how much better it could have been. It will never get better, and all you can do is dream, if you enjoy that then it is fine, if not then it might be time to get over it. You still have three really good movies that are really fun to watch, use your own imagination to create the back story, just like we all did for over twenty years before the PT came out.

To me it feels like Twilight Princess hasn't been out that long, but I guess it has been a few years now. Didn't Phantom Hour Glass just come out last year? I still haven't gotten around to beating Windwaker, and I have yet to play Twilight Princess (figured I'd beat Windwaker first and wait for the price to come down on TP before buying it). They have been whipping Zelda titles out left and right over the past few years, maybe a short break isn't too bad of an idea.

My list of games I am currently working my way through:

Resident Evil Deadly Silence (DS)

The Secret of Monkey Island (DS)

Metroid II (DS)

Super Metroid (DS)

Windwaker (GC)

Biohazard 4 (PC)

Half-Life 2: Episode One (PC)

God of War II (PS2)

Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2)

Republic: The Rovolution (PC)

Looking at the list you'd think I was living several years in the past, which isn't too far from the truth.

I desperately want to play Bioshock, but I lack the hardware to do so. Once Resident Evil 5 is out and they make a Xbox 360 port of MGS 4, I will consider buying a 360 just to play those three games.

Finally got to see the last few episodes a couple of days ago. This season left me feeling pretty positive about the show's future, a few crappy episodes (which is unforgivable when there are only 13 of them), but over all fantastic. The whole coffin thing wasn't a shocker, especially since Locke was everyone's first guess right after the season three finale aired.

I liked how after Locke and Ben descend the elevator to the Orchid, Locke asked if it was the "magic box" Ben told him about in season three. The whole magic box thing came from the novel The Third Policeman (Desmond is seen with a copy of this book way back in the beginning of season two), and in that book to get to the magic box you must descend a massively deep subterranian elevator. That was a cool reference to the book.