Star Wars Archives - Page 9 of 10 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Media Consumption 9/19/2015

September 19, 2015 by Belghast

Another Thing

One of the things I have found myself doing a lot lately is hanging out downstairs on my laptop and watching a fairly steady feed of television and movies. Now some of this I am consuming from the On Demand service from cable and others from Netflix or Hulu. Over the last few years there is a ton of television content that I have wished I had seen, but never actually got around to seeing. With fall coming on, I tend to spend a lot more time snuggled on the couch, and as such I think I am going to start another weekly feature similar to my Sunday “what I have been playing” column to watch about the media content I have been consuming. One of the big things that has changed over the years is I tend to watch an entire television series over the course of a couple days, instead of letting it drag out over the course of a season. In fact I prefer this method of consumption so much that I will let an entire season of a show record on my DVR before starting in on watching it. I blame Netflix squarely for this tendency and right now quite literally the only shows I watch as they are airing are the Walking Dead series simply because most of my development group is hooked on the show and we discuss it Monday mornings. Hopefully folks will dig me going back and talking about what I have been up to.

iZombie

I started this show on my own a few days ago, but quickly realized that this would actually be something that my wife would enjoy. As a result last night we started in and managed to get about three episodes into the series. Essentially you take the smart and quirky writing of Veronica Mars, mix in a dash or True Calling and Crossing Jordan, and add a dash of Being Human and maybe a sprinkle of a show like Drop Dead Diva… and you end up with the weird mix that is iZombie. The premise is simple… she was a promising surgical resident until she went to a party on a boat… where a designer drug turned people into zombies. She got scratched and wound up as a member of the unliving… completely uprooting her promising career, her engagement and most of the relationships in her life. Instead she now works in the Morgue where she has a ready supply of brains, and a series of misadventures that spring around her ability to see flashes of memory from the brains she consumed. Flat out if you loved Veronia Mars as much as I did… you will love this show. It is more of the same sort of intelligent writing and snarky commentary mixed with crime solving… just of a different sort. I look forward to picking up and continuing watching this show over the weekend.

Black Mirror

This one is available on Netflix, and is a British show which means… short seasons. There are two seasons available currently, which only actually mean six total shows to watch. I tweeted that this show was weird, but there is something infectious about it. I like to think of it as Tales from the Crypt for Futurism and Technology. Essentially they take ideas that folks have always thought might be cool… and take them to really dark extremes. One of the episodes featured a device that you stuck behind your ear, that recorded every single moment in your life allowing you to review them later. But what happens when no one ever forgets anything… and can scrutinize every moment and everything you have ever said in full high definition color? The show makes up a series of disturbing what if’s that bring cautionary tales about our own lust for technology and innovation. I managed to make it through four episodes of the series before finally falling asleep the other night, so at some point I will pick up and finish it. The six episodes make it a quick watch and if you are into dark futurism…. it might be down your alley.

Chappie

This movie combines a bunch of weak spots for me… Artificial Intelligence, Die Antwoord, and Neill Blomkamp. I loved the movie District 9, so when I saw the trailer for Chappie I thought I would probably like it as well. The problem is it just took me a really long time to get around to watching it. The movie is really odd at times… because for most of it, it really just feels like a really long Die Antwoord video. Pretty much every piece of music found in the video is theirs, and it features all of the same odd visuals that you find in their videos. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, it just makes the movie feel less “movie-like”. I am imagining there will be a Chappie 2, because they left a lot of things unresolved at the end of the movie. As far as Chappie itself… the robot was kinda adorable… and he is voiced by the same actor that played Wikus from District 9. The robot is vulnerable and childlike and extremely impressionable… but at the same time very loyal to its humans. The movie as a whole asks a bunch of trans-humanist questions about what exactly consciousness and sentience is. It will be interesting to see where this goes if there is a sequel.

Star Wars Prequels

Something that I did last weekend and over the course of this week was watch the Star Wars movies. I’ve talked a bit about how Phantom Menace was a massive let down for me… and how I have been afraid to get excited about Force Awakens because of it. In spite of all of my better judgement however… I am infected with full on hype mode when it comes to Force Awakens and Star Wars in general. I grew up loving this series… and in spite of the prequels I am once again in love with anything and everything Star Wars. As a result I thought to myself… maybe I was too hard on the Prequels, so in my rewatch of the movies attempted to go into them with an open mind. The end result is that I don’t necessarily “hate” them, but objectively they are really bad movies. The pacing feels off, and the characters feel forced to act out awkward dialog at every single turn. There is something however that bugs me even more about them. There are times in movies and television shows when the viewers know more about the movie than the characters on screen… and this can be interesting.

The problem with Phantom Menace is that it somehow pretends that we don’t know that Senator/Chancellor Palpatine is Darth Sidious. Like when we finally find out that he is the Dark Lord of the Sith… the movies act like we should be shocked. Additionally making these movies about Anakin Skywalker just feels wrong. We know from the moment this series starts that he is ultimately going to end up in a fight with Obi Wan and be damaged to the point of needing to go into the suit to survive and become the Darth Vadar we all know. The prequels should have focused on Obi Wan, and told his story… with his failure to steer Anakin away from the Dark Side as being a part of that story. Obi Wan is the interesting character here, not the whiny bullshit of Darth Teen Angst. There are awesome moments scattered among the three films, but I feel like you could make one really awesome movie if you just edited out the bad bits. In fact there is a fan edit that does just this and trims the movie into a 2 hour long epic. The only part of the first film that is shown is the “Duel of the Fates” sequence. I think this would be a much better way to jump start the awesome movies that follow… and really the original movies are awesome. I found myself thinking just how great they were as I watched “A New Hope” and “Empire Strikes Back”. I can still however take or leave “Return of the Jedi”, because I feel like it starts some of the bullshit that George Lucas tried to continue throughout the Prequels.

Fear the Walking Dead

Finally I wanted to talk a bit about Fear the Walking Dead, which this Sunday will show its fourth episode. Last week the shit finally started hitting the fan, as the Zombie infection began to finally get noticed. My wife happened to catch the first two episodes before watching the new episode last week because she happened to be downstairs grading. She made the same sort of comments that I had been making internally about how stupid the characters were acting. At one point she made the comment “Have none of these people ever seen Scream?” as another character put themselves in a really dumb position. Over the first two episodes the series played on the fact that we know how the Walking Dead unvierse works, and placed the characters in compromising positions…. only to have the Zombie NOT jump out of the shadows to get them. That however I think is changing, and this week I expect things to start to get really crazy. I love the way the series is playing on the modern riots as the way the public at large is dealing with the zombie epidemic. When the police put down a zombie, it is seen as police brutality and a huge riot breaks out downtown. The show keeps giving us little clues that things are heating up… like the first few zombies took awhile to turn, but now the virus is mutating and speeding up. In one sequence there is a cop being munched on by a zombie… and then a few scenes later that same police officer is munching on a protester. The only thing that really frustrates me is the fact that at no point do people seem to recognize what is happening. I mean are zombie films not a thing in this universe?

Heading for a Trap

September 16, 2015 by Belghast

Slightly Darker Side

One of the ways I have differed so far from my friends, is that I cannot seem to bring myself to do ONLY the class story line. As a result I am ridiculously over leveling the content, and last night I worked on finishing up Nar Shaddaa. I’ve been enamored with the concept of the vertical city since first experiencing it in Dark Forces. In SWTOR Nar Shaddaa is the darker and more disturbing cousin of Coruscant and provides a very similar leveling experience. You travel through hub sections of the city until you end up in Shadow Town and resolve the central conflict of the story and your class quest. As a Smuggler this setting feels extremely at home, and as you might expect I do in fact get into plenty of trouble with Bounty Hunters and Hutts. Generally speaking when I have played SWTOR in the past, I am extremely light side focused. In fact I generally have trouble not choosing the “blue” option on any quest dialog. As a Smuggler however… I am finding it a little easier to choose that “red” option.

I guess I am ultimately playing my version of Han Solo… the goodnatured lovable scoundrel. When lives of innocents are on the line, I always end up choosing the “right” option and get those light side points. However when I am in a situation where I serve to profit greatly by looking the other way… I find myself “playing the character” and finding it significantly easier to to take those dark side points… and console myself with a pile of credits. Similarly if I have been double crossed… or if someone is doing something truly heinous… I find it oh so satisfying to take that [Attack Them] option. Horrific Imperial Scientist gene splicing people? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! Try and talk my way out of a bounty hunter? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! My weakness seems to be damsels in distress however… because I know right now I am walking into a big trap but I am having to play it off like my character would. It will also likely end up giving me another opportunity for sweet sweet revenge… which I am sure I will be unable to resist taking dark side points for. Thankfully I have diplomacy as a Crew Skill… and even though it is likely at the end of a blaster… it helps to repair all those dark side points.

Cavalcade of Commendations

One of the good changes while not playing the game, is the fact that they standardized the planetary commendation system. Now when you complete anything you have the option of simply taking “basic commendations” instead of the planet specific ones, and at the same time they have increased the total number you get before fifty exponentially. This means that I am constantly swimming in a good supply of them, and I could probably constantly upgrade my moddable gear… but I am finding that I don’t really need to. Since I am using Treek as my tank and she came with a full set of mod gear, and I managed to piece together a workable set from the GTN and the pilot packs… it allows me to pretty much ignore every quest reward and just go for more commendations. Since I am quite overleveled I was 21 before leaving Coruscant, at which point I went to the fleet and kitted out both armor for myself and Treek in the best modifications I could find at the time. This rather easily carried me through until the end of Nar Shadda, at which point I dinged 30 and repeated the same process with level 29 gear. If I can continue this process of upgrading my gear “every other planet” I should be in really good shape to have a pile of commendations for other upgrades.

Last night I spent some of my pile of credits on making myself look cooler. At some point they added in dye slots to the gear, which allows you to “socket” a dye that comes in either single color or dual tone combinations. Most of the really cool combinations are exorbitantly expensive, but I found one I could live with that was black and grey for roughly 40,000 credits. Then I went searching for a really cool gun, and found this one that is originally a cartel item… that folks were selling fairly reasonably on the market. The gun you end up with at the end of the starter zone is functional but not that cool looking… so I was more than happy to cast aside “Flashy”. I dig the fact that it looks like the blaster rifles that some of the troopers have. It fits my shoot first, ask questions later style of playing the “Sawbones” healer. I have long said that “looking cool” makes your character feel cool, and I am pretty happy with my Chiss Smuggler. I am extremely happy that I re-rolled him ages ago as a Chiss instead of yet another human. I am starting to develop this “savior of the aliens” rep in my questing choices, which is kinda awesome since people keep pointing out the fact that I am another “alien scum”. Still having a surprising amount of fun playing through the Smuggler storyline that I ultimately missed at launch.

Star Wars Disappointments

September 5, 2015 by Belghast

Force Friday

Once upon a time I was a die hard Star Wars fan and more importantly collector. Throughout my childhood, my parents enabled the collecting of Star Wars figures, and in truth I think my parents got more into it than I did. There was a certain thrill in chasing down those last few figures that I did not have. So it was not a huge surprise in 1996 when the figured were re-released to the marketplace that I got back into it. In fact there were so many of my college friends who went damned near bankrupt buying various bits of star wars merchandise. This fervor was only made more insane by the re-release of the movies in the theaters. My wife was a trooper and tolerated the shit out of my habits, and I even got her into sifting through the racks looking for this or that figure. However when I went to see Phantom Menace it pretty much killed my desire to keep doing that. I know it is cliche’d but I still have not reconciled the disappointment I feel over the prequels. I am sure taken without the viewpoint of a lifetime of nostalgia and hero worship over the original movies… they are probably not that horrible. However for me personally… they were just a bunch of cool lightsaber battles and the bits of movie I tolerated until I got to see more of said lightsaber battles. The problem is it is a habit you never really kick, and on a regular basis I filter through the toy isle and look at the star wars figures. I still have a handful of figures hanging out around my office.

With the announcement of Force Awakens, I have to say I have been getting pretty damned excite about it. So when I heard about this Force Friday thing where they would be releasing in bulk all of the Force Awakens merchandise out into the stores…. it made me think of the sheer excitement I felt when they released all of the Phantom Menace merchandise. Now I know people who went out Thursday night at midnight for the official first moments… me however… I am past the whole doing something at midnight time. The last item I purchased like that was probably the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I did however need to run get cat food over lunch and while I was at Target, there as no way in hell you could keep me from going through the Star Wars isles. From the moment I stepped into the store things just felt strange. They had this huge cardboard stand-up of Chewbacca near the front entrance in the dollar section… asking patrons of the store to take a selfie with it… and do your best Chewie Roar. I mean I realize this is Disney we are talking about… a company that has made its entire career by capitalizing on our nostalgia. It just felt somehow more cheap… more commercial… more forced. It didn’t help that quite literally you could not go for very far in the store without running into some bit of Force Awakens merchandise stuffed here or there. I mean even in the home goods section they had cups on one of the end caps.

Low Quality Figures

The thing I regret is not having taken any good pictures, because for this next section it would help out quite a bit. They had a dedicated section set up in the seasonal area, and I of course made a bee line there expecting it to be some sort of a one stop shop for all of the merchandise. Now there was quite a bit there, but one thing was missing completely… the standard sized Star Wars action figures that I collected so many years. For those I had to go to the traditional “Star Wars” isle in the toy section, and they had a fair assortment. I had a Kylo Ren and a Captain Phasma in my hands, when I started to notice a few things about the figures. Firstly the cards they were on felt really cheap compared to modern Star Wars toys. Instead of a thick piece of cardboard with printing on both sides… it was some sort of a sandwiched construction made out of a bunch of thinner layers of cardboard which gave it a very irregular look. Then I started paying attention to the figures themselves…. and while the sculpts themselves were fairly nice… the paint jobs were atrocious. It looked like they had applied the worst sort of rush treatment to get them out the door in time for this “big event”. I’ve been looking for images that illustrate my point, but all i can really say is that it felt like they were a paint by number that just could not stay inside of the lines.

On the storm troopers for example… large chunks of black were globed over onto the white sections of armor. The Captain Phasma figures that I had seen preview shots of had a nice satin sheen to them to simulate the chrome armor. Instead the figure I had in my hand was a dull matte hunk of largely unpainted grey plastic. I looked at figure after figure and they all seemed to have these same basic defects that just made them look cheaply produced. The thing is… this is not the standard I am used to in Star Wars figures. I have a bunch of the more modern figures… and they all had excellent paint jobs. Granted the “newest” figure I have is of Savage Opress, but it still is a figure from the last few years. The twelve inch figures looked a little better, but they were still not really up to the standards I would expect from that sort of a figure. On the positive however… the Funko Pop figures looked amazing as always, and the Lego display I saw looked amazing. Lego is on of those companies that is always spot on when it comes to quality, and you know that for the most part anything you buy will be perfectly formed and defect free. Hasbro on the other hand… seems to have slipped massively, and if I were them I would be ashamed of the quality of this figure line.

Still Spinning

I find it extremely bizarre that I have yet to get Diablo 3 out of my system. When I came home last night from work, I immediately plunked myself down on the sofa, put something on Hulu and started working on bounties for crafting materials. At this point I am two achievements away from getting my season four toys, and I think probably I can knock one of them off soon. The biggest challenge seems to be getting legendaries to drop so that I can fill gear slots with them. More so than that… the real challenge is getting legendary rings and a necklace with gem slots in them… because with the introduction of legendary gems no piece of level 70 jewelry is really viable without a gem slot. I hear tell that there are items in the game that you can use to socket items, but I have yet to actually see any of them. Right now I would settle for a second level 70 ring so that I can maybe knock out the legendary in every slot achievement. Still enjoying the barbarian, but it gets frustrating the higher I dial up torment because I just take so damned much damage… since I require being in the thick of everything to deal any real damage. At this point Torment 1 is my new normal, and I keep thinking the more paragon levels I pour on… the easier things will get. In the mean time I will keep plugging away at Rifts and Bounties until I get the items I actually need to drop.

The Force Awakens

April 18, 2015 by Belghast

A History With Stars Wars

It would be a slight understatement if I were to say that Stars Wars has meant a lot to me over the years. It pretty much represents my childhood wrapped up with a neat little bow. The earliest memory I have is of seeing Star Wars at the local drive-in theater sometime around age two. I became absolutely obsessed with it, and according to my parents walked around the house pretending to be “Darfa Bader”. If nothing else it was the toys that kept the fires lit for me from the moment I started watching through the end of the original trilogy. I played and replayed the scenes from Star Wars so many times with the action figures, and in many ways it was my first foray into storytelling. Sure I started by simply mimicking what I saw on screen, but quickly branched out into telling my own elaborate stories revolving around the cast of characters I knew and loved.

I eventually moved on like all kids do to other things, like GI Joe, Transformers and Mask. The thing is that Star Wars always held a special place in my heart, so when the west end games Role-playing game was released I was all about playing that for a period of time as well. I remember one Christmas all I asked for was the then CBS FOX VHS copies of the movies, and I remember being absolutely ecstatic when I actually got them. I probably damned near wore out my copy of Empire Strikes Back, because that movie just seemed so perfect to me. While I didn’t have a hope of ever seeing more movies at that point, I could at least wallow in the nostalgia of the originals whenever I felt like it. When you grow up in a small town, and live out in the middle of the country… you end up watching a lot of movies, and more than one weekend was spent having impromptu Star Wars marathons.

The Revival

During college Star Wars started to make a comeback in a massive way. At this point we didn’t even know there were new movies in the works, but it started with the re-release of the action figures. At this point I was going to junior college and on my drive to class in the morning I frequented a lot of stores as folks were stocking. I remember the feverish search for the new action figures as they started to hit the store shelves. I was absolutely elated the day I found the extremely illusive Princess Lea and C-3PO figures because in that first run of the new figures… they were the limited quantity ones. As new sets were released I tracked them all down, including some of the variants. At this point I was going to art school and pretty much half of my class were equally obsessed with them, trading tales of where we found what.

I remember sitting in a Wal-mart super center in Fayetteville Arkansas, freaking out as they had figures that we did not have in Oklahoma. My wife was extremely awesome and helped me rifle through the stacks of newly stocked figures looking for all of the ones I was missing. She knew going into our relationship that I was a geek, and she had always been super cool about it. But I admit it was at that moment, when she was helping me hunt for figures… that I realized just how rare she truly was. Even to this day she gets excited for me when I find a cache of Legos or something else that I have been obsessing about. While she doesn’t share a lot of my interests she has always been extremely supportive of them. She put up with me having hundreds of action figures hung up in neat rows in my college apartment, and didn’t seem to act like it was strange or anything.

The Re-releases

Around this time the first of the re-releases happened as we were given the opportunity to watch the movies on the big screen. She was there with me waiting in line for tickets and even though she is not really what you would call a Star Wars fan, sat through all three of the movies. While some of the visual hackery annoyed me… I was getting to see the movies again on the big screen and that was all that really mattered. The feeling of sitting in that theater as the Lucasfilm logo came up on the screen… and the Theater erupted in deafening cheers was one that I will never forget. There were so damned many warm fuzzies coursing through my body that I felt like I was going to explode. The first two movies… were pretty great. I could deal with the silly scenes like Han Solo stepping over Jabbas tail, or the goofily animated CGI dewbacks.

Empire was similarly fine, because it god rid of some of the problems like the transparent snow speeders. My love of Empire as a movie could allow me to look past anything. But when we finally got to Return of the Jedi… my least favorite of the original movies I admit I started to lose my shit. The silly scenes like the musical number just finally got to me. I started to question what in the hell George Lucas was thinking, but by this time we knew about the prequels and I was willing to look past all the flaws and keep up my fanboy hype for the hope of seeing more Star Wars on the big screen. I admit freely I was a junkie and Papa George was going to keep giving me a fix, and I was willing to push aside the growing concerns in the hopes of seeing brand new stories. After all I had dreamt about seeing the Clone Wars play out since I was a little kid, and maybe just maybe this was finally going to happen.

Breaking Me

When the Phantom Menance was released I was working for TV Guide, and had access to a wealth of marketing materials that were filtering around our network. My hype level was over 9000 as I had 8×10 copies of each of the limited edition hand painted covers of the magazine hung up around my office. I remember the lines for Phantom Menace were really the first time I had experienced lines of any sort waiting for a movie. I remember opening day the theaters were showing it on every available screen with a new showing every 2 hours for the first 48 hours. By the time I go in to watch the movie after work I was practically vibrating. Then Jar Jar Happened… and the rest of the movie was instantly tarnished by it.

I wanted to maintain my hype… but there was just so much to hate about that first movie. What the fuck were midichlorians? Are they really telling me that Anakin is a Jesus-like virgin birth? There was just so much bullshit packed in that movie that while I tried to maintain my enjoyment, over time it just festered inside of me. By the time the second movie came around… I had no plans of seeing it on opening day until I was given free premiere tickets due to my involvement with the Fan Force group here in town. Admittedly that was a pretty damned cool way to watch the movie, in a private theater along with all of the local press… with open bar and catered food before and after. By the time the third prequel came along… it was about a week before I actually went to the theater to see it.

I’ve since reconciled a lot of my frustration with the prequels. What was anger has faded into a dull annoyance, and a tinge of heartache when I think of what those movies could have been. Brian Posehn does a funny skit about how “Star Wars is his Vietnam”. I am nowhere near as bitter about it as he is… but there are times I have been close. There was a period of time post prequels that I distanced myself from Star Wars as a whole. I stopped collecting the figures, I stopped doing pretty much anything Star Wars related. It was really when Star Wars the Old Republic released that I started to ease up on my position and enjoy the content again. Today I collect Star Wars in Lego form and love it… but anything that comes from Phantom Menace is immediately less important in my eyes. I feel like Clone Wars and Rebels television shows are redeeming the franchise significantly by giving me the sort of storytelling that I always wanted out of the newer films.

The Force Awakens

When the new movies were first announced I was admittedly skeptical, that is until I heard that they were pulling them out of the hands of George Lucas. Better yet I was excited when they announced that J.J. Abrams would be doing them. While this is a point of contention for a lot of fans, I happen to be one of the people that love the newer Star Trek movies. In fact I watched the first one twice in the same weekend. I was never that big of a fan of the original Star Trek series, so I felt the reboot made the movies more enjoyable for me personally. Now take the fact that Abrams is directing and combine it with the fact that Disney now owns Star Wars… and I think we are in better hands than we have been in a very long time. Disney is extremely good at two things… protecting their intellectual property, and churning out content for the fans to snap up. I feel like we are in the best possible place that Star Wars has been in for years.

This week the first real trailer was released for Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens during the 2015 Star Wars Celebration weekend. As you might have been able to tell… the images I am using to narrate this Storytime Saturday are all pulled from the trailer. I find myself shifting from cautiously optimistic about the prospects for this movie… towards full blown hype. Right now the trailer is quite literally showing me everything that I possibly want to see in a new Star Wars film. The costumes for the new Stormtroopers look great. The new Dark Jedi looks to be something straight out of Star Wars the Old Republic. The real money shot however is the one above when we get to see Han Solo and Chewbacca back in action. My first thought was OMG HAN SOLO AND CHEWBACCA! My second thought was… man Harrison Ford looks really old. My third thought was… shouldn’t Chewie be showing some grey hair by now? All I really know is once again I will be waiting in line for tickets so I can see this madness opening day in December. In fact we are talking about maybe going as an office to go see it. I guess in that at least Disney has succeeded in re-igniting the fires of the little kid down inside me who never quite gave up on Star Wars.