Star Wars Archives - Page 5 of 10 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Spoiler Free Review

December 18, 2015 by Belghast

Doing Silly Things

#StarWars #ForceAwakens = my childhood memories vindicated. Nicely done JJ Abrams

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) December 18, 2015

So the other day I said I would be doing a spoiler free review today, since I was in theory seeing it ahead of a good deal of the potential folks that will eventually see it. As a result I am leading off my post with the single line tweet that I sent out last night after getting home. Now I am going to talk about the day and night itself for a bit. I was not one of those first day ticket scroungers, in fact I ended up waiting at least a week before trying to find any. We have a smallish theater in town within walking distance of the house… however last night it fell in the “too damned cold” territory to even consider walking. For Lord of the Rings I was able to simply walk in on opening night and get tickets, without any pre-order… so I had no real doubt that I would be able to see the movie this weekend without much fuss. The original plan was to eat dinner at Plaza De Toros a Mexican place that I like quite a bit that just happens to conveniently border the parking lot of the movie theater. Just to make life easier… so we could meet up at 5pm and then walk over and start standing in line around 6pm for the 7pm show. This at least was our plan… our plan changed.

I went home over lunch yesterday to pick my tickets up, since pre-orders still need to be printed at the theater in our setup. I ended up having a lengthy conversation with the worker that was manning the booth, and he told me that they were seating for the 7pm show… aka the first showing as early as 4:30 so that we could go ahead and get seats. So when I went back and talked it through with my boss, we agreed that we would simply meet at the theater around 5ish instead and either eat at the theater… or like I did and grab something really quickly on the way home. The positive of both options is our theater has unlimited refills on both soda and popcorn, so my boss went with that option. The only negative is that I didn’t think to warn him not to take one of the Highways that is notoriously hell to travel on during the evening rush hour… so this meant it was running about 30 minutes later than planned. Luckily about this time another friend popped her head out of the theater and hollered at me, and saved us some seats near her, her husband that I work with, and their son who was completely amped about the experience and wearing and Ezra Bridger costume. So there we sat in the theater for an hour and a half ahead of the start time… chatting away and killing the time.

The Movie

I had a lot of hope riding on this movie… but at the same time I kept trying to prepare myself for the potential of it being just as disappointing as the prequels. In fact a good deal of my conversation with my friend was that both remember how excited we were for Phantom Menace and how disappointed we were immediately after. I have to admit… I was not immediately in love with this movie. Not saying I was disappointed in any fashion… but the movie has a look that is significantly different than the traditional “star wars look” for lack of a better term. JJ Abrams simply has a different design ethic than George Lucas did… and this is perfectly okay… but I spent the first few moments of the movie “adjusting” to the style. However at about the twenty minute mark… I was hooked and from that point through the end I was completely drawn into the world and believed that I was in fact watching a new Star Wars epic. The characters are all excellent, and more importantly than that… their interactions… are also awesome. There are jokes and quips… and not in a way that takes you outside of the picture. Much of this movie had to be about passing the torch from one generation to the next… and feel like we are now firmly introduced to the conflict through the eyes of Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, and Kylo Ren. Not really going to delve into characters outside of the group, because those are the ones we already know quite a bit about thanks to the trailers.

What I like the most is that each of these characters is their own “new” character… and not “The New Vader” or “The New Luke”. They are each their own person and don’t really fit any predetermined molds in the Star Wars universe. The conflict that is set up… is one that I cannot wait to see resolved over the course of the next few movies. In fact I am hungry to see what happens next…. which is something that never happened during the prequels. This is the first “new” story that we have had from Star Wars on the big screen in a very long while, because the prequels had a fixed beginning and a fixed end point… and we were simply seeing how the details worked themselves out between. This time with Force Awakens… we have no clue what is going to happen in the beginning, middle or end… and in spite of all of our machinations and predictions… we know that we know next to nothing. There are certain aspects that I think seasoned veterans of Star Wars and the Expanded Universe might guess at…. but those guesses are never justified with a firm answer. This movie feels very much in the tradition of A New Hope, and also feels like this grand Star Wars pen and paper adventure… played out on the screen. The critics are more than likely not going to like it… because this is absolutely a “Star Wars” movie… and not something that is trying to get an Oscar. That said… the costuming and use of practical effects absolutely SHOULD get an Oscar.

The little kid in me is alive and happy. There was a period of time after the prequels where I doubted if my memories of Star Wars were really genuine. I wondered if the universe really was as cool as I remembered it. I am happy to say that yes… this setting still has amazing things to show us. Now stop reading this shit and go get tickets to see Force Awakens.

Predictions and Dots

December 17, 2015 by Belghast

Star Wars Predictions

It is in fact the day… and I have reached full on Kermit Flail status. All day yesterday my brain kept going “Star Wars! Star Wars! Star Wars!” and I have zero clue how I am going to be a reasonably functional human being today. The tickets are for 7 pm tonight at my local generally no frills theater… in 2D… which is honestly the way I would prefer to watch this movie. If it can blow me away without any frills, then it will have been a good day. At this point I am largely in a Star Wars information black out other than occasionally checking what the Rotten Tomatoes “freshness” score happens to be. For most of yesterday it was around the 98% but right now it is sitting at 95%. I am super thankful that Google shows the score without having to actually click through into the site, because really I am trying to avoid knowing much of anything about the actual plot. That said… when the Legion announcement happened in WoW I did a few predictions that morning, some of which were serious… others very much not. So I thought it might be fun to do my Star Wars: Force Awakens predictions. Please note that any alignment between these and actual plot points is pure coincidence and based on sheer dumb luck. I promise I know nothing… and these are not spoilers… but “wouldn’t it be cools”.

Rey – I think it is probably a given at this point that Rey is the child of Luke and Han that somehow got stranded on Jakku, or at least that is my working theory. There was a shot of Rey and Chewie flying the Millennium Falcon which kinda lead me down this line of thinking.
Han – Harrison Ford has long said that the only way he would ever return to the Star Wars franchise is if they were going to kill off his character. So I think without a doubt Han Solo will die in this movie. It will be an even bigger shock to me if he doesn’t… because I guess at the end of the day that means that Harrison Ford REALLY likes printing money. It would be cool if he got used to the fandom, and approached it with less disdain… but I am not holding my breath.
Chewie – I think if and when Han dies… the Life Debt that Chewie owes Han… will transfer to his daughter. My biggest fear is that they jettisoned the Expanded Universe just so that Chewie would be alive… only to kill him off again. This movie should be all about passing the torch to the next generation… but you still need some aspect of the current generation to make that work, and I think Chewie continuing on would be a good callback.
Kylo Ren – This one… I am torn on. For the longest period of time I thought maybe this was also Han and Leia’s kid… if for no reason other than in the Expanded Universe… their son did in fact turn to the Dark Side. Now I simply do not know. I have a feeling he ties into the Skywalker lineage somehow… but at this point it makes me wonder if he will end up being Luke’s son.
Luke – One of the big mysteries is what exactly is up with Luke. I think this one goes one of two ways… either he has turned to the Dark Side himself and becomes the new big baddie … the power behind the throne of sorts. There are problems with this however… because if that were the case why would Kylo be on this hunt to collect all of these artifacts of Darth Vader… why wouldn’t he just worship the new embodiment of the Dark Side instead. I think more likely he is going to play the role of Obi Wan from the first movie… where he has isolated himself from the world and we go on a hunt to find him, where he is slightly mad in an almost Jorus C’Baoth style.
Poe Dameron – I think a safe bet would be he somehow ties lineage back to a member of the Rogue Squadron that we will come to know during the Rogue Squadron breakout movie. That said I am going to go down my “wouldn’t it be cool” line of thought… and say… wouldn’t it be awesome if he turned out to be the child of Boba Fett? I mean he bears a vague resemblance to both Jango and Boba as seen in the prequels, and I mean… vague… because its not like Boba looked exactly like Jango.
Finn – I really have no real guesses on this one. My fear is that they will go with the simple answer and make him Lando’s kid. I would love to think that he is tied into the original cast somehow. I know in theory he could be the child of Han Solo and Sana Solo which was introduced as Han’s wife in the comics. I’ve long thought that Han himself was a force sensitive… because his unnatural luck at times… could just literally be latent force sensitivity. I think Finn is going to play into the main story line in an important way, and we know he at least ends up wielding a light saber… so could he be also of the Skywalker lineage somehow?

Whatever the case any of these things might be… I am just hoping that I really and truly love the movie. I need this to be awesome… because I am still so disappointed in the prequels. I am even wearing my special Star Wars vans today… in hopes that tonight will be a truly awesome experience.

Warlocking

In theory Wednesday night is the night that I raid with Jed and crew, but I needed the night off. It has been a pretty crazy week, and with something scheduled almost evening… Wednesday night was really the only night I truly had to sit at home at chill. So instead of raiding I ended up working on the new holiday quests. The positive is that there is now a whole sequence of Winters Veil quests that start from your Garrison, the negative is that one of them is horrifically bugged and largely impossible to complete if you wish to retain your sanity. I guess in theory if you caught the quest during off hours you would do just fine, but since this is the sort of thing you want to do on every character that can possibly do it… it means that the area is pretty much constantly camped. Realistically they should have had the Alliance event happen in Shadowmoon Valley and the Horde event happen in Frostfire Ridge… because simply getting there is a bit of a pain in the ass for my Alliance characters. The worst part about the new quests is that Christmas has now also become a mount chase… with these chests purchasable from the vendor in your garrison for essentially one days worth of tokens. If you are insanely lucky like apparently Jaedia… you can end up getting the Minion of Grumpus mount… which I will be shooting for during this event.

After fiddling with holiday bits, I relaxed to an evening of working on my new Orc Warlock. Essentially I am leveling just like I would an arcanist, which means running around like mad and dotting things up. The end result seems to be a pretty rapid fire way to level… and I am already out leveling the content. Granted I am fully decked out in heirlooms which is in part what is making that be a thing. Mostly I am just trying to push my way into “dungeon” levels as fast as I can so that hopefully I can be queued for a dungeon the entire time I am leveling. If nothing else I am enjoying myself which is a first when it comes to Warlocks. I’ve always been interested in the class… because demons… but always struggled with getting into the spirit. However during the AggroChat podcast and through playing Final Fantasy XIV… I am learning that I basically tried playing all dot based classes wrong, and that the answer is in fact to run around like mad, dotting everything up and watching it just die before my eyes. So upon leveling this Warlock that is absolutely my new MO, and so far … it seems to be working. I needed a chill out class to play and this one is fitting the bill.

Week in Gaming 12/13/2015

December 13, 2015 by Belghast

Blogging is Hard

I’ve been in a bit of a relative funk this week, and found it extremely hard to get started writing most mornings. It is like for whatever reason my will to put fingers to keyboard and make important sounding things happen… has been drained out of me. At this point we are a few months away from going three whole years worth of blog posts, and I guess in a way it is having its toll on me. At this point I have far more regular readers than I have ever had at any other point in the blogs history, and that is freaking awesome. The fact that I have so many supportive people with my back… is ultimately the thing that keeps me moving forward on days like today. We recorded this insanely huge podcast last night where we took the normal crew of myself, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen… and included some other friends InkyBrushes, Nephsys and Pizzmaid. Sadly we were missing Ash but he had his own version of a really rough week. Combined we focused a single topic… and recorded for over two hours… which compressed down to just under it. The problem being… by the time I did even the most basic editing pass… it was around one in the morning.

I’ve been fighting what I think is largely sleep deprivation most of the week, and it has ended up with me falling asleep as early as 8 pm on a couple of the nights. Well granted I went to bed at 8pm… and read comics on my new kindle but still I ended up drifting off to sleep about 30 minutes to an hour later. I have been getting a lot of use out of my Marvel Unlimited account, and largely using it to read the backlog of awesome Star Wars comics. At first I went through what was available of the modern series, namely Star Wars and the Vader series. I started on the Princess Leia series but struggled with it, mostly because I simply was not a huge fan of the art style. Recently though I have been running back through and reading the Knights of the Old Republic series from the start. I am maybe a dozen episodes in at this point and I am loving it… this totally feels like I am consuming comics in the same way I binge Netflix shows. I just wish the lag between print and them showing up on Marvel Unlimited was not quite so great. The latest issues of the modern Star Wars comic to show up are from August of this year, but what I am really hoping is that they release the issues on a semi-monthly basis just with that lag. I can totally deal with reading comics late… I just want to be able to read them with a certain regularity.

World of Shipyards

This week has largely been about reconciling my differences with the Shipyard system. I commented last week that they were essentially a worst possible version of the Garrison system…. and in many ways I don’t have a significant change in that opinion. What did change however is that I realized that after so many of you told me about it… the Garrison addon I was already using had built in functionality to automate a good deal of the shipyard bullshittery as well. The end result is that I have somehow managed to learn to live with the Shipyards and they have rewarded me well for my blind submission. At this point between the three characters that have them… I have earned a hippo mount, a bunch of hellfire citadel gear caches, and more left sharks than I could ever have a use for… I seriously have three sitting in the inventory of my MooCowAdin. The problem with all of this of course is the fact that I now need to feed the beast that is the shipyard, and the only reliable way of doing this… is schlepping out to Tanaan jungle and completing the daily mission. Now some of my characters have been stockpiling oil from Garrison missions for along time now and won’t really have this problem… but Belghast is constantly struggling to pay his daily upkeep.

Other than this I have been slowly inching up my gear levels on Belghast and Belgrace, and attempting to run the Timewalking event on my alts… that can actually benefit from the 660-675 gear that they can drop. The funniest part of the week however has been learning that I don’t simply remember the BC era content as being significantly rougher… that it actually really is. PUG groups are simply not prepared for mobs that crowd control and fear the hell out of players… and are in no way ready for just how hard everything hits. There have been more wipes from the party finder than I have had in ages… and I am really enjoying every minute of it. The alliance side… has been a colossal mess of chain group joins and splits until finally we push through the dungeon. Horde side on the other hand.. people just buckle down and pick themselves up after a wipe and keep pushing forward. I guess when you have to wait through a thirty minute dps queue… you are significantly less likely to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. Alliance will always be my first home because that is where my army of alts lives… but I have to say Horde is growing on me really quickly.

Fabian Strategy Lives

I know I spent a good deal of my post yesterday gushing about the new and revised Fabian Strategy… but seriously I am in love with this gun. It had been roughly a month since I had seriously spent much time in Destiny, and yesterday I poked my head back in. Apart from being woefully out of practice, I am still amazed at just how fun the moment to moment play is in this game. I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to play Battlefront, and the gameplay just doesn’t hold a candle to just how good Destiny feels. Now that I have this weapon that allows me to abuse all of my instincts, I can see myself really settling on it as my main gun. Now I have said that numerous times… and I know I said it recently with the Xhalo Supercell… but seriously…. this gun is amazing. I will always be a Titan at heart, because I want to play like a tank in most games. This gun makes me FEEL like a tank, because the chance of regeneration upon kill ends up firing a lot more frequently than I think most people realize. There have been several strikes that I survived entirely because of this weapon constantly triggering my shield regeneration. It is my goal this week to pop in periodically, and not go quite so long between play sessions.

Misfortune Mordren

November 16, 2015 by Belghast

Boring Post Material

This morning I am struggling a bit to remain conscious. Neither myself nor my wife managed to get much sleep last night, because in our partially finished state… the rain kept dripping off a metal plate just outside our window. Which meant either try and sleep through this loud irregular dripping pattern, or sleep with the television loud enough to hopefully drown out the noise. We did the later which means we never really slept that deeply, kinda like we do when there is a tornado warning and we end up with the weather blaring all night hoping we would wake up if we needed to take shelter. As a result I am struggling a bit when it comes to stringing together thoughts into a sentence. This is absolutely the sort of day that I would just say screw it and not blog… but after several years of this madness I don’t really want to break the chain. That’s the funny thing about doing the daily blogging thing… is after a point you really don’t want to do something to break the pattern of posts. It is like the pattern itself becomes the important thing and not so much what I am writing about.

This weekend also was one where I did a surprisingly small amount of gaming. We recorded the latest episode of AggroChat on Friday night this week, and during that I piddled around in Fallout 4. Then as usual I stayed up way the hell too late wrapping up some minor details on the podcast. Then Saturday we had the very first of our family “Christmas” activities, I say it in quotes because it is technically a dual purpose Thanksgiving and Christmas that we have with my wife’s dad and step mom. They are snow birds and spend the winter in warmer climates… so for the last decade or so we have had this dual holiday day around Thanksgiving. Thing is they keep pushing it up so they can get down South “before it gets cold”, and admittedly they have a really nice place down there so I don’t blame them. It just ends up making for a strange holiday get together… when I am absolutely not even in Thanksgiving mode yet. When I got home from that… I had every intent of taking a nap, but instead the contractors were banging on the wall of the bedroom which would have made sleep impossible.

As a result I pretty much sleep walked through the day until we went to bed that evening relatively early. This is the point at which we realized that the drip was a thing… which woke us up about 4 am Sunday morning. My wife just stayed up, and I attempted to sleep through it… which I am guessing I eventually succeeded because it didn’t wake me up again until around 7:30. Over the last several years we have pretty much ignored we had a back yard. The siding had gotten bad and honestly everything back there was just overwhelming in that it all needed attention. With the bedroom door thing leading out there, my wife has become determined to fix the problems back there and reclaim it as usable space. Since we had a dumpster thanks to the construction folks… she was damned determined to use that to take care of some stuff. We had a few hour break in the rain, so my wife and I were trudging through the muddy back yard picking up things and carrying them to the dumpster. I am surprisingly sore from this, even though all I really did was act as the person moving stuff from the backyard to the dumpster, and she did a lot of the brute force gathering stuff into piles for me to move.

Star Wars Pen and Paper

The highlight of yesterday has to be our Star Wars pen and paper game. The AggroChat crew and a few friends have been doing a fantasy flights Star Wars system game through Roll 20. The way that game integrates with Roll 20 is amazing, and quite literally if you fill out your character sheet correctly all you have to do is push a single button when you want to do an attack. I am assuming there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that Tam is doing to run the game, but for the most part… this is the best possible remote pen and paper experience. Essentially we are a group of force users during the A New Hope era, with one significant monkey wrench thrown in. My character is the one that does not fit… I am not a nice person… I never claimed to be. My character has pretty much spent his entire life working as a Bodyguard/Hired Gun/Enforcer for one Hutt cartel after another. The problem is… I get these “bad feelings” and often times my employers don’t heed my warnings and end up dead. As a result I’ve developed this persona in the underworld of “Misfortune Mordren”, and it has been interesting to see how that is working out.

I built this persona because I thought it would be interesting to play… but apparently I am some sort of underworld bogeyman. We had an instance yesterday where our craft was about to get boarded by some pirates, and the mere mention of my name…. and some really high deception rolls on the part of Kodra… caused them to back off because they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Apparently I am considered to be so “Bad Luck” that even after interdicting our ship… it was not worth their time to try and take us on. Then again there is a whole other side to this tale, because I am racking up quite the body count. While I am playing a character from Edge of the Empire, we decided to make things easier and put me on the Force and Destiny conflict system. I feel like I am not understanding this system… because every time I take conflict I cheer out loud. Much to the horror of my otherwise party of “goody two shoes” that are trying desperately to avoid the Dark Side. We walked into a gang base yesterday, and I opened fire before they had time to even speak. To my defense though… I figure if you are in a gang on Nar Shadda you have made some poor life choices anyways. Also to my defense Kodra did ask me to create a diversion… so yeah I was just doing that.

Essentially I am becoming somewhat of the conflict sponge for my party, and I am perfectly fine in that role. The thing is… I never said I wanted to be a light side character… and additionally I never said I was a “good guy”. My character has spent his entire life living in Hutt territory, and in truth I am turning over a new leaf. As a Hutt enforcer I would have been expected to torture every single one of these people I took down… just for good measure, because that is what Hutts do. I have yet to feed a single one of them to some bizarre creature we are keeping in a pit to entertain the boss. So simply taking them out cleaning… is a bit of a mercy from what I have been used to. It is going to be interesting to see how my character and the rest of the party play out… as they so carefully use their stun settings… and mine has dust on it because it has never been used once. The game usually runs for several hours… and by the time it wraps up I just have enough time to grabs some food and head downstairs for my Sunday evening television time… including Walking Dead, Talking Dead… and now maybe Into the Badlands. I watched the first episode last night and I have to say so far I am digging it heavily.