C3PX

Mr Ghostface said:

But none of us should ever make the mistake of thinking this is any less illegal.

I must have missed the part where someone suggested it was. This is really a non-issue. We don't support piracy here, and are very picky about the kinds of projects we will even allow discussion for. There is nothing illegal that goes on at OT. We mostly do preservations of work that are not commercially available. Any discussion of pirated material gets the attention of the mods real fast. It is also weird fe.org keeps poping up in conversation, they are not us. Two completely different entities. Whatever they do does not concern us in the least. We couldn't care less what kind of trouble those self important jokers get themselves into.

goonar said:

 There should really be an official website.

It would certainly help reduce some of the "no brainer" questions.

For this sort of thing, that sort of thing is a bad idea. Even though the desired material is the stuff adywan worked hard to make, the actual film itself is still a copyrighted work representing the money and efforts of the people it belongs to. No one has the right to give it away for free. Within the fanediting community, there is an understanding that one should own an original retail copy of the edited film before downloading.

This sort of thing is much easier to keep running smoothly when existing slightly under the surface of the internet. An official site, boldly advertising the existence of this edit, and inviting every Tom, Dick, and Harry to come and download it while explaining to them exactly how to go about doing so is a very good way to draw negative attention.

Right now fanediting is a small community of hobbists trying things out and passing their efforts on to one another. The bigger and more noticable it gets, the more it looks to outsider like a bunch of pirates just wanting free movies. Fanedits.com, and the links provider therein really have all the information one needs to find what they are looking for.

Ah, I shall continue to converse with myself, with my third post in a row... I am starting to feel a little lonely in this thread.

I just wanted to mention that I noticed in target's weekly ad (these guys ought to start paying me for plugging them so often!) that you get a free $5 gift card with the purchase of a 1600 microsoft points card ($19.99). That brings the price down to $15 bucks for 1600 points, though of course you have to use the five dollars you save at target (still saving five bucks though, since you can use it on groceries, or anyother neccessity you'd have to buy anyway. Looks like this offer is only good through Saturday. Just thought I'd give you all the heads up. Wish I had waited a few more days to buy Monkey Island, then instead of paying $10, I'd be like paying $7.50 for it.

Trooperman said:

I want to send it out as-is.  If nothing else it'll make good conversation.  But, you'd lose the impact of seeing it finished, assuming that ever happens.  

I like the idea of sending out a time coded version. I, like many others, have followed this from the beginning, and spent a great deal of time being really, really, really excited about this. I kid you not when I say I felt much more excitement and anticipation about seeing your edit than I did about seeing either AOTC or ROTS for the first time in the theater. I was really looking forward to this for a very long time. I read your ideas, and saw your clips, and you had me completely sold on this thing.

To be completely honest, I had pretty much accepted the fact that I will never get to see this long ago, and disappointingly put it out of my mind. Yet, every several months I'd still find myself visiting the SW fanedit section and searching this thread just to see if anything new had come up.

Getting to see this in rough form with a time code would be absolutely brilliant. You'd really make my year. I am sure if it was something you had been looking forward to for a long time, and you had the choice of getting to see a rough cut or nothing, you'd jump at a chance to see the rough cut. Words cannot describe how thrilled I'd be to get to see this even in rough form.

You mentioned others getting to see the rough version and liking it, so obviously there is quite a lot there to like.

And as for these guys complaining about the voice not being the right voice, hang it. It is jarring at first, because it isn't Hayden's voice. But that change was the whole essence of your edit. That is the fanedit I have been dying to see for years. I heard the voice, and I liked it. Don't let this kind of criticism get you down. I remember a few years ago a very respected member of this community, who is actually professional who works in the film industry, came in here and outright denounced your edit as a failure, and urged you to target your creativity and good ideas at something else. It is wonderful he felt that way, but the fact remains, even as he typed those words, you had many eager followers who had seen all the same clips he had, and who still couldn't wait to see this edit. It may never be completed, but it will certainly never be a failure. You've put up with this kind of criticism since the very first page, yet you didn't let it get you down, and you went on to make what absolutely could have been one of the most amazing fan edits ever made. If you didn't let it get you down then, don't let it get you down now.

Ambition doesn't always lead to success. Sure, you didn't finish this. You aimed really high, and found you couldn't quite reach your goal. Don't let this bother you. This project isn't that important, and you seem to have done a good job prioritizing with putting school first. You did the right thing. Even though you couldn't finish what you started, you have (or have the potential to if you release it in some form) shown what can be done. You have laid a foundation, and who knows what inspiration this may insight in others. 

Finished or not. To me it is a real shame for this to remain unseen. I would encourage you to time code the thing, and slap a notice on the beginning stating that it is an unfinished product due to the fact that it was more work than you could handle at that time in your life, and that you wanted to share what you have done even in its incomplete form, rather than just let it collect dust. Sure, there will be people who will watch it and criticize it to pieces. Screw them! That is just part of putting your creativity in front of others. Some will love it, some will hate it. It is like that with everything. You poured your heart into this. You took a truly awful film, and tried to turn it into something good. Life got in the way, you did what you had to do. Let those who complain about your work show us what amazing projects they have done. Even if they have done any, I highly doubt they could show us anything half as ambitious or as interesting as yours.

Guess I missed the Revisited thread drama.

Holy shit! That is a shock! I am gonna miss that little tike. I hope it isn't a permanent ban...

I am semi-curious as to what took place here.

Whoa, what image did he send you? I feel I have been missing out on some drama. I am assuming this dispute has mostly gone on through PMs.

Anyway, don't let any of his crap get you down. If you haven't noticed, he only ever posts here in order to taunt other posters (which is pretty sad, surely he has better things to do). In fact, I cannot remember ever reading a single post from him that actually contributed to a topic. By my observation, his most useful function in the recent past has been taking sides and cheerleading when two or more other members get into some sort of a disagreement.

In other words, the guy is just here with the intent of getting on people's nerves, so don't let him. Or as they say, "Don't Feed the Troll".

Well, I went a head and got the Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition for my xbox. If you are a fan of the original Monkey Island, I can say beyond a doubt that this is worth ten bucks. But, it isn't perfect... 

The good:

- Switch from original to the special edition on the fly with the click of a single button. Really cool to watch as the screen fades from the old graphics to the new (as well as the old interface) right before your eyes. Really great for comparisons. You can even switch in mid conversation. If only a certain other LFL franchise could have been shown that kind of love... eerrr, let's not get started on that!

- Full voice acting!

- Really great new interface.

- Even with the updated graphics, it remains very true to the original.

- Same ol' quirky humor just as you remember it (e.g. You are in a bar talking to a pirate with one eye, and one of your speech options is to ask him where the dart board is located).

The bad:

- Guybrush looks like a total retard in the SE. I am really having a hard time getting used to him.

- This is a big one NO VOICE ACTING WHEN IN CLASSIC MODE. Not sure what possessed them to do this, as I really would have loved to have played it with the original graphics while hearing the voice acting. Instead when you switch to classic mode, it also switches to text only. To me this is really a shame, and really knocks the quality of the game down a good deal. This realization really bummed me out. There is really no reason not to have included voice in both modes.

- I am also kind of disappointed there is no option to use the new interface with the classic graphics. The new interface is so much more streamlined and easy to use, especially on a console. The old style interface you are forced to use with the old graphics is really clunky with a console controller. The new interface is so smooth and perfect, I really wish I could use it while getting the visual nostalgia of the classic graphics. This along with the lack of voice in classic mode, really leave very little reason beyond curiosities sake to even play in classic mode. It is really annoying to have to go to the bottom left corner of the screen, click the "open" icon, then go to the right side of the screen where the door is located, click on it, then have to go back to the bottom right corner, click the "enter" icon, then go back to the right side of the screen to click on the door again. In the SE interface, you simply put the cursor over the door and click it twice.

- Some of the voice acting is pretty bad. Guybrush is as good as ever, but some of the other characters (the Melee Island watchman for example) really sound like they are just reading a script while putting on a silly voice. Narration is really cheesy too. The guy reading it seems to treat it as a joke, with the kind of voice you might use when reading a really corny script.

- Achievements look to be ridiculously easy. I would have liked to have seen them be a little more creative in really making you go out of your way to get these, but most of them look like they will be really easy. The worst is the achievement you get for playing in classic mode, I though perhaps you had to beat the whole game in classic mode to get it, which would have been cool, forcing people to play the game throught completely in the original to get it. Might actually fit the description of "achievement" then. But nope. Literally the first time you hit the button to switch to classic mode you are awarded the achievement. I have seen some lame achievements in my days an a 360 owner, but this one... wow... what a joke.

Final verdict: This game is definitely worth your money, whether you are an old MI fan who grew up with the game like I did, or someone who is really curious to try it out for the first time. This game may look a bit juvenile, but it is actually quite challenging, and contains several very un-juvenile appropriate jokes. I cannot freakin' wait until Lechuck's Revenge (one of my all time favorite games) gets this treatment (come on LucasArts! You've got to do that one!), and will be very disappointed if for some reason they don't bother with it.

Janskeet said:

LOL, Get a hobby and/or a job. You can't live with your parents forever ;-).

This is what people are constantly telling Janskeet. ;)

Whoa! I totally thought you were making a joke with the whole Hardy Men thing. I am very sorry to see it was real, at least I got a good laugh out at what I thought was a joke before I realized it was real and died a little inside.

So, Nanner, how was the first episode of The Tales of Monkey Island?

I noticed that the Secret of Monkey Island remake came out the other day. $10, but that has got to be worth it to experience that game with full voice acting. I'll probably pick it up soon and check it out. Has anybody done so already?

FanFiltration said:

I have been having rather good luck and saving sometimes over 40% to 60% on normal MSRP, by buying slightly used things from the better rated sellers on Amazon.

I have stuck to used stuff my whole life. Started this trend when I was a kid and discovered I could buy a lot more Nintendo games by getting them used rather than new. VHS tapes were always a little iffy, I had bought a few used ones that had problems, so I stopped with those. But I have never had any problems with used CDs, DVDs, or CD/DVD-ROM games. Most places won't buy things that are badly scratched, and I have never found a used place that won't take things back if they don't work.

Through amazon I have never had any serious problems either, just stick to people with good feedback. Any times I have had problems, I have never had any trouble getting my money back.

In fact, in all my years of buying used stuff, the only time I ended up with some badly scratched discs and a seller unwilling to do anything about it, was when I bought the collector's edition of Halo 3 on ebay for $15 bucks. The seller listed it as "very good" condition, but due to the H3 collector's edition tin being really poorly designed, and not holding the discs very tightly, they became disloged during shipping and got the shit scratched out of them (turns out this was a huge issue when the game was first released too, many people picked the game up on release day and were unable to play it because it was so badly scratched). Fortunately, they still work well enough and I got a good deal on them, but it was still disappointing.

Just in case my previous post didn't come off tongue and cheek enough, I have to completely agree with DFNYC, Janskeet. Your thread had no context to it, so it should be no surprise that none of us knew what you were talking about.

DFNYC is right that you cannot assume that every member keeps up with every active thread. It is not a bad idea to make a new thread to talk about something touched on in another thread, so as to avoid hijacking the original thread. A good way to overcome the issue of context, is to take a few quotes from the original thread to set the context.

generalfrevious said:

Hate to say it, but I was never bothered by tortured droids (they're just metal after all)

I don't think anyone was bother by the droids being tortured in a "holy hell! how can they show this kind of thing to little kids! This is awful!"

but in more of a, "Whoa, they are torturing droids. this is seriously lame..." kind of way.

Janskeet said:

If you would have been paying attention to the discussions on here about this you would've learned this.

Yeah digitalfreaknyc! What the fuck man! Why don't you pay attention!

EyeShotFirst said:

Batman III Nolan's vision of Batman was only good with Heath Ledger. So Heath is dead and therefore he should not make any more.

I can't help but see this statement as really freakin' weird, considering Heath Ledger was only in one out of the two Nolan Batman films. Seems odd to say that the series is no good without him and ought to die with him, when it didn't even start with him in the first place. Would you really want three Batman films featuring the Joker

I really think the Heath Ledger thing is a bunch of bullshit anyway. Sure, he had an interesting take on the Joker, but it was way too over hyped. Might have been impressed with it if we hadn't all been bombarded with half orgasmic news stories about how brilliant Ledger's Joker was for months after his death. By the time I did actually see his preformance in the movie, I didn't find it quite as brilliant as it was hyped to be, and the fact that the movie was pretty uneven and at some points nonsensical really didn't help impress me much. I think most people just found it orgasmically amazing, because the idea that it was orgasmically amazing was shoved down all of our throats literally for months before the films release.

Since The Dark Knight ended on a really weak cliff hanger, I think a trilogy might not be a bad idea, just to finish off the story and recover for the dip it took with DK. But I definitely don't think we need more than that.

Sluggo said:

The Gonk droid being tortured in Jedi didn't make any sense because it had steam blasted from small jets built into his feet when heat was applied.  This bit would have actually made some sense if they were just melting his feet without the steam.

You are right, that is rather odd. I haven't seen ROTJ in years, and don't actually remember the jets. I always figured the point was that he was being melted down slowly. I am curious what they were actually going for here? Perhaps they intended it to be smoke coming out of him as his insides fried? Or maybe they did intend it to be him being melted, and the jets were just a visible part of the special effect.

Is the garbage can droid actually called a "Gonk droid"? Or do you just call it that because when we were first introduced to it in the first film it made a gonking sound? I thought I remember the action figure based on its likeness being called a power droid. I always assumed he was a bit like a walking power generator.

That was part of my disbelief on the matter. My imagination was spinning with thoughts of PKD having recorded some comments to the rough version he had seen. That would have been brilliant, though PKD was never very good at speaking, and had gotten increasingly eccentric in his later years. Would have only been a bunch of paranoid ramblings anyway... still would have been pretty cool though.

Just looked it up, it is a commentary by Paul Sammon. Knew it didn't sound right having a commentary by PKD, which would have been by far the most valuable bit of extra feature on any of those discs. You are right, he did die before the film was released. He was never a fan of his movies being adapted to film, but pretty much the only way he ever made any money was by selling rights to his stories to film companies. I seem to remember reading that he watch a rough cut of the film (or parts of the film) before he died, and was actually impressed by it.

For any BR fans who haven't read PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I highly recommend you do so. It is quite a bit different from BR, but it is really cool to see where many of the ideas that appear in the film come from. It also adds a lot of light to the whole "Is Dekard a replicant?" issue. It was a very important aspect of the book's story, I like that they added at least a vague hint of that plot line to the film, even though its vagueness seems to piss a lot of people off, which is why Ridley Scott made it less vague by coming out and saying he is definitively a replicant, and why the unicorn was added, both of which pissed people off even more.

Janskeet said:

I was always like huh? Droids don't feel pain. and then the one foot droid's foot bein burned with the steam shooting out of it, I was like you have got to be kidding me...

Really? I mean, the thing is being melted down. Should he have just been cool with that and let it go on without making a noise?

You really have to look at this with what you learned about robots in the SW universe from the other films.

I never really saw an ounce of comedy in that scene. Threepio's reaction of sheer horror to what he witnesses is the only thing humorous about it, and the reaction is the bit that can be taken as humor, not the actual torture.

I still think it was a fitting scene to establish that being a slave for Jabba was just as much of a hell for droids as it would be for humans. Everything in Jabba's Palace could have been done far better, so I really don't want to defend this scene too much. Had I been doing it, I still would have had some scene to indicate that droids don't have it easy at Jabba's Palace, and are subject to discomfort and threat of death, showing that Jabba is a very ruthless guy who is all to happy to destroy his material possessions in order to make a point, rather than just reprogram them.

While I agree on many points of ROTJ's silliness, this scene actually isn't all that nonsensical to me.

We have already met Threepio, an overly emotional droid. This emotional Threepio has been part of Star Wars since the very begining. He is the first character we are introduced to. The idea of a robot being emotional is pretty nutty, but it is part of Star Wars. Even Artoo shows emotion, he often has a little laugh at Threepio's expense, he expresses fear right before being captured by the Jawas. So, it is pretty well established that robots in the SW universe have feelings, and express emotion. Perhaps you could say that they are not really emotional, but are programed to express faux emotion. Either way, same effect. 

So, is it really all that unreasonable to think that a droid might not exactly be thrilled about being melted down slowly? Or torn into two pieces? I know for sure the two droids we all know the best would put up a protest very much like the "garbage can" did. Perhaps that power droid wasn't in pain from the burning, but was freaking out with anticipation of being melted down, or perhaps droids are programed to feel pain (just as they are programed to exhibit emotion). In the context of everything we know about the SW universe from the previous two films, to me this certainly isn't one of the worst concieved bits of ROTJ.

Having purchased the regular DVD version, I have no disc five. Still really irritates me. For us old fashioned DVD guys, we only get five discs if we decided to dish out $80 + dollars for the brief case version. Yet BD and HD guys get all five discs in the basic version.

I have the HDDVD of the 5-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition on my shelf. There's a commentary by the person who wrote that Blade Runner book I also have

Whoa! The work print has a commentary by Philip K. Dick? I had no idea! That is freakin awesome! No I wish even more that they hadn't decided to short non HD adopters by excluding the workprint.

Janskeet said:

not the love story, it's the fact that it happened exactly as you imagined it would happened. There's no twist or turns in the story. It's just generically layed out. It is exactly how you would've imagined it as a child. That's the problem, the movie shouldn't happen the way you imagined it as a child.

I can say as a solid fact, that it was NOTHING like I imagined it as a child. I spend many hours in my childhood acting out what I imagined the clone wars to be with my action figures, same thing for the fall of Anakin.

I had my Obi-Wan and my Anakin figures, and my Luke figure playing the role of another Jedi, fighting my two identical white Cloud City Security Guards who played the role of my cloned army. For some reason, I always assumed the clones were the bad guys the Jedi were fighting against. Or my other imagined scenario was that both sides kept cloning their best soldiers which put the war into a stale mate. Soldier after soldier dies in bloody battles, soldier after soldier is cloned. With infinite soldiers on each side, the Jedi had to step in and force an end to the thing.

Those were the things I imagined as a child. AOTC is such convoluted crap, you'd think a child did think it up, but it was nothing like I ever imagined it. Had it been anything like the way I imagined it as a kid, I probably would have really liked it. I mean, the first battle of the clone wars being kicked off in a gladiator arena? Please!

Sluggo said:

It is all about the nicknacks, my man... Just a little touch to highlight my dorky-ness.

Ah, it is great to have this place to go to where people understand me. ;) Great to know a few fellow citizens of Dorkdom.

I have been wanting to pick up that Hot Wheels die-cast NCC-1864 for a while now, but have been hesitant to spend the money. It isn't that expensive, but having owned a die-cast Enterprise D since way back when TNG first began, and having long lamented the fact that there was no die-cast Enterprise A or earlier or any other die-cast ST  vessels to be its companions, I am really having to hold myself back from getting both the NCC-1864 and the NCC-1701 refit, which may just open the door to more madness as more ships are made. If either the Excelsior or the NCC-1701 E are made, there will be no holding me back...

Gaff, you've got to play this game. You seem the type that would really like the subject matter (of course, you've also got to have a stomach for first person shooters).

That "Oh, no! I'm getting sodomized by Big Daddy's drill!" line is pretty funny. The image of Neo having a Bouncer's drill run through him is rather satisfying.

Well, now my newly built Big Daddy resides on my shelf right next to my headcrab and my tribble. Not sure how well he really fits in with them though... Once I get the weight issues worked out, I think I'll hang him back inside my TV cabinet, not really in full view, but just where observant people might spot him and either think "Oh cool!" or "What the hell? Why do you have push pins stuck in a baseball sewn onto the body of a ragdoll with a cork screw for a hand?"