Raithe

Heh, all this talk of the Civil war is tempting me to dig out the old JT Edson books. Now that was a man who could write a fun, pulpy western story.. and did do a fair amount of "good" background. He hammered the minutiae and loved being accurate on exactly how you cheat at cards, the workings of firearms, and the practical matters. Generally keeping it all interesting without turning into mini-lectures within his books. About the only serious ways he played with historical fact was when he included a few of the "ladies of the west" like Calamity Jane and the outlaw Belle Star as characters that turned up a few times - he made them a hellava lot more attractive then they really were. They might have had moments of being a little right-wing in their views, and not overly complicated, but they were fun and generally had interesting characters.

Tis that wandering way of threads... technically the whole "influence of Kotor 2 on TOR" was somewhere in the beginning, it wandered into some strange argument on interpretation of a character, and then the nature of jedi relationships. Oh yes, and in TOR they have said that Jedi that do follow the "romance" route will start picking up dark side points. Not because it's strictly dark side, but because it's against the jedi code. So if you want to be a glowing, purer then pure jedi then romance is something to avoid in-game.

I always favour a little to get a bit of start when you need to get going..

Stardust was on tv again tonight. Tis a good film, well worth the watching. It never gets old. And Michelle Pfieffer still shows how she can be worthy of rawr-dom. And De Niro steals scenes. Not to forget his dancing the can-can.

On slow, grey sundays.. maybe listening to the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack isn't exactly going to be cheery to the mood...

Thor has that slightly camp, almost theatre quality to it. It's big , bright, glossy. The visuals of Asgard are pretty amazing. Natalie Portman looks fairly cute, they sneak in an appearance of Hawkeye in it, and it sets a chunk of the stage storywise for the Avengers movie. Captain America feels much more like an Indiana Jones adventure then a superhero blockbuster.. and also picks up a few elements from the Thor story. On the DC side of things... Green Lantern was entertaining, and has some strong background performances (Mark Strong as Sinestro is rather quite good). Reynolds doesn't do a bad job, but they don't really do that much impressive with the power of the ring once he gets going. It did give the feeling that it was a film more about the setup of who he is, how he got the ring, and prepping everything for what a second film would do.

In the book adaption of Revenge of the Sith, there was a rather good paragraph or so just after Yoda had attempted to fight Palpatine. Basically Yoda goes into self-castigating mode, because he realised he'd been a tight-ass, and spent the previous 800 years training jedi in the wrong manner, and to fight the wrong war...

It's more like they're free to date and have short flings, but if they become too attached, then feelings go askew and to the dark side it can lead. Pretty much the 3 dates, a night of passion, and then they're off. Hm, I guess they're kind of like James Bond. They get to have the girl from whichever life-threatening, risk-filled, heroic adventure they're on, and then move on to the next world and adventure... Although, in the EU, that view ups and downs on the times. Sometimes the Jedi feel that family is good, and they're acceptable of keeping an eye on jedi offspring. Hell, even in times when family and marriage as such is a no-no, they still keep track of jedi lineages. However, if you track the assorted things in the EU, pretty much every time a major Sith/Dark side influence has shown up and caused a furor, in the aftermath the Jedi Heirarchy starts frowning on marriage and families for jedi. Go a few centuries on, and they slacken up and let the marriages return...

Getting in a little old school Dungeon Keeper 2 between the usual saturday errands..

Stumbled on this clip about Clive Cussler's car collection Now I'm tempted to dig out those books to read again...

One of the things about the classes.. is that when you take the advance class options at 10th level or whatever.. it opens up a lot of variability (supposedly) with skill trees. So while a lot of people are saying the likes of Sith Inquisitor is the long-range mage equivalent.. you can turn them into a type of tanker, a dps close in melee, a healer type, or the long range dps type.. OldRepublic.Net - Class Guides This might be of some interest to folks..

Hm, trying to write out the summary of a report and listening to this... does that say anything?

This one is easy, Jedi aren't allowed to have sex. Sex is part of the dark side. Think the rules of religions against the debaucheries of hedonism. The New Jedi Order allowed marriage. Luke himself married. In the EU it pretty much bounces back and forth. After the Hyperspace War but before the Sith Wars of Qel-Droma and Exar Kun marriage and family were fine for Jedi, then they were forbidden.. Then some point before the time of KoTOR marriage was allowed again.. It's one of those things that comes and goes pretty much depending on the mood of the Jedi Councils at the time and how they feel about the dark side and the benefits of family stability vs potential emotional anxiety... So it's not as if it's something that's had much coherency over the millenia of story...

Picked up Darklands, WC3, and Dungeon Keeper 2 from Gog because that mood just hit me.. now I just have to find some time to sit down and actually play them...

It's always been a flaw to my mind.. the Dark side is all "if you're feeling certian emotions you're tapping into a 'bad' side of energy, or it's being twisted slightly" If you're at peace and serene and unemotional then it's all "good". Wouldn't that mean that sociopaths who have no emotions as such would make perfect jedi?

I'm curious on how they've been pushing the whole light/dark side for every class and making it fit into the storyline. Not that you can shift from Republic to Empire or such, but within the framework of your "side". The jedi that goes dark, but is all about ruthlessly defending the Republic and willing to make the hard choices really too easily.. that sort of thing. I'm tempted by the idea of running a Sith Inquisitor running along the "grey" line just to see how that will shape up.

Playing around with Universe Sandbox. Satisfying some of those God delusions..

You and everyone else. But you'll be unique among them, with that particular combination of chin depth and eyebrow distance that the character generator provides. Well, considering most of the various polls regarding class choices around on the collected TOR websites , it actually looks fairly balanced rather then everyone going for the two sith classes. Of course, that only takes into count the people paying attention to those sites and the official forums...

The game. In fact, I went and picked up the game.. and for the hellavit a copy of WC3 from Gog in between report re-writing..

Dang, that's tempting actually.

I found myself pulled into pre-ordering the CE edition as well Hurlshot... Although I haven't sat down for an mmo since I took a break from City of Heroes a year or two back. The stuff that I've seen makes the story elements look quite interesting, just how well that'll merge with the mmo is something that just has to be tested. The fact that you can now edit the appearance of companions (so people won't have to run into other folks with the exact same companions) is nice, but I'm curious how they'll actually stage that, since running into companions is integral to each class storyline..

I've heard from several friends who saw it that the acting was down right horrible... ? but that the tongue-in-cheek humour saved it. It's kind of obvious that no-ones taking themselves seriously in it. As long as you approach it in that manner.. and understand that they're doing a pseudo-partial-steampunk version rather then sticking to exactly what was in the book.. (Not that any film version has truly stuck to the book, but some have been closer then others) It's pretty much full of some decent actors just having a laugh rather then being serious. If you look at the actors in it, none of them are actually bad actors : Mathew Macfadyen, Luke Evans, Roy Stevenson, Mads Mikkelson, Christoph Waltz... The whole film has that, slightly campy, over-acted, non-serious attitude. So yeah, its not something thats got depth of acting.

The Three Musketeers. They might have hashed the story up, and given some quite.... fantastical... elements in it, but they've caught the heart of a good swashbuckler. Throw in some nice action sequences and decent acting, it's actually quite entertaining. A few smart lines interspersed in there and Orlando Bloom is really smarmily villainous as Buckingham. Milla Jovovich makes a very acrobatic/ninja style version of Milady rather then the purely seductive route. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis actually seem to click together quite well, although something does look very odd about D'Artagnan's hair (but that's just being a wee bit nitpicky). Mads Mikkelson does a brooding Rochefort, but doesn't really get fleshed out. I still find it amusing that Christopher Lee caused a trend in eyepatches for Rochefort. The eyepatch was never used till he added it back in the 70's version, and pretty much every version since then has had Rochefort wearing one... And of course, they've added a small sequence at the end that practically promises a sequel.

Well I just took half an hour to finish off Rage. Hm, its a fairly pleasing shooter, and the vehicle stuff isn't too bad once you get into it. The single-player story has a fair few quirky, memorable characters populating the world.. but there certainly seemed something a little missing. You get warned about not paying attention to the Authority propaganda..but you never actually hear any of it until long after you've ended up joining the resistance.. Then all the buildup towards the end just.. peters out. It doesn't feel like an end-game mission. And the way it has you hitting a series of buttons while fighting off several small waves of not-too-hard enemies.. and then goes into a 30 second or so cinema sequence that doesn't provide any real payoff. It feels like it's only half a story. So I'm guessing they're planning on a sequel or some extensive DLC to do something. They talk about the big bad guy..and you never encounter him. Ah well. Entertaining for what it was.

So the whole "Galaxy of War" thing which is going to be some mass-cross-platform assortment of secondary "games" which can have an effect on the SP campaign, but aren't needed to play the SP to a satisfactory conclusion... Why do I have a vision of them doing another Facebook game, some cellphone/android/iphone based game app, and a bunch of other rather silly "mini-games" that can all hook up to the actual ME3 game in some manner... Although Ubisoft already did something similar to that with their AC facebook game....