/dev/null/kevin

As a Star Wars fan, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.  I got to sit down and watch Star Wars with my daughter on my lap.  She loved it.  I loved watching it with her and answering her questions (she had many).  Afterwards she wanted to play with my Star Wars toys vintage collectables.  And, yes, I did show her Daddy in the movie.  She wants me to wear that costume for Halloween.

She cannot escape her destiny:

She's four years old and is really into characters and plots now.  No more Dora, Blue's Clues and Wiggles.  Now it's High School Musical (1 & 2) and many new books.  She can handle the idea of death without getting scared and she also knows that everything on TV is "pretend."  It helps that I tell her what's going to happen so she's prepared.  Still, some concepts were hard to explain.  The Force, Obi-Wan dead, but not really.  I didn't want to call him a ghost so he's just "living inside the Force" now.  She also didn't like Alderaan betting blown up.  I had to compare that to the Big Bad Wolf blowing down the pigs' houses.

She liked Princess Leia because she's into the whole Princess thing (thanks, Disney), but that's also got her interested in the first place.  I think her only disappointment in Star Wars was that Princess Leia didn't do anything during the final battle.  Where is she?  What's she looking at?  Where's her spaceship?  Time for some Nancy Drew books now and some Buffy videos in a few years.  Maybe some Xena. 

She wants to watch "the second movie" but I may wait a bit.  It's a bit darker.

Since today is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars I am required, by law, to tell my Star Wars story.  That's me on the left there, cut and pasted into the Special Edition of Star Wars that came out in 1997.  I wrote a web page about it in 1998 and it's still there, looking like I wrote it in 1998.  Can you say "looks best when viewed with Mosaic?"

Something that I didn't mention is that I didn't know if I would make the final cut of the movie until I actually saw it in the theater.  We had filmed quite a few sequences so I didn't know what to look for, or even where to look, other than somewhere in Mos Eisley.  I ended up being quite easy to spot and everyone who came with me saw me right away.  I was lucky that you can see my face as most people's faces were covered.  The guy on my right was wearing glasses when we filmed that scene and was told to remove them, because glasses don't belong in the Star Wars universe.  I guess they worked around his glasses by covering his face with a building.  Tough luck, dude.

This was the first scene we filmed and I remember trying to stand as close to the camera as they would let me.  We were told to have a conversation so what I'm actually saying to the two other guys was, "If this shot gets into the movie, we'll be right up front!"  And I was right! 

Tags: star wars

The URL on the mailboxes isn't working (yet).  Here are the obligatory one-liners:

• Still no word on the Jar-Jar Binks port-a-potties.
• I, for one, welcome our droid overlords!
• "When you want your mail sent to a galaxy far, far away."
• "Help me, Postmaster General Kenobi, you're our only hope."
  

Link and Source

Tags: mailbox | r2d2 | starwars | usps

Based on this noisy site (turn speakers down).  Original picture from flickr.

Tags: star wars rocks | awesome

If you are a hard core Trekkie (or Trekker), then this is for you. This scale model U.S.S. Enterprise measures approximately 32.7" x 16" and comes with stand. Cost?  Only US$1200.  Maybe I should have said, "hard core, rich Trekker."

Not a Star Trek fan?  How about Star Wars?  You can also buy the Millennium Falcon Studio Scale replica  for only US$2200.  Use the force, and your Visa card, Luke!

Tags: scifi, enterprise, millenium falcon, star wars, star trek

Sadly, I may never be able to use this line again...

Your Star Wars Pickup Line

"Hey, Beautiful. What's a nice girl like you doing waiting in line without bathing for 10 days?"

One of the things that I was looking forward to was the game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Sith Lords. I've played the game twice now, taking both the "good" and "evil" paths. Here are my thoughts, and I'll try to touch on things that I haven't seen in other reviews. I'll also try and note any plot spoilers.

Bottom Line

KOTOR II is about as almost as good as the original KOTOR I. However, it does so by being both better and worse, so it averages out to be about the same.

If you liked the KOTOR I, you should play KOTOR II. If you haven't played either one, then you should play the original KOTOR first. It's probably cheaper and some of its plot points are revealed in KOTOR II.

What's Better

• The graphics are minutely better, but probably only on the PC.

• There are some much bigger battles to fight.

• Customized fighting modes for your NPCs (melee, ranged, jedi, grenades) lets you select a fighting style for each party member.

• The whole workbench/lab station idea is nice.

• No limit on your characters' level (the best improvement, IMHO)

• More weapons, force powers, skills and upgrades.

• Consistent upgrades. No more having to plug an item in to each weapon to see what it does. Now every upgrade component does the same thing.

• Faster "space suit" walking (oh the pain, the pain...)

• Swoop bike racing almost free. If your persuasion skill is high enough, you can race for free. Maybe this is a bug, but at least you don't have to keep saving and reloading. They also added "up and down" to swoop racing.

• Bigger story concept and deeper ideas.

• Very complicated action/reaction matrix for your dialog choices and other actions. Different things happen if you're good vs evil or male vs female. They added a whole new dimension of "influence" between you and each party member.

• New pazaak cards. Also, starting draw now alternates, making it more fair.

• More opportunities to play the NPCs in special missions.

What's Worse

• It takes freaking forever to get your lightsabre.

• Combat mostly too easy, even in hard mode. In the original KOTOR I found myself pausing the battles often to micro manage all three members of my party, especially in the early and weak stage of the game. In KOTOR II I almost never did that since there just wasn't a need. The new "role assignment" feature may have something to do with that.

• Confusing backstory revelation. In KOTOR I, you as the player knew exactly what your character knew and your backstory was revealed to you in normal conversation with other NPCs. However, in KOTOR II, your character knows most of his/her own backstory but you as a player don't. Your backstory is revealed to you, and in fact constructed by, your character's dialog choices. At the same time that you're trying to select what to say to be either good or evil, you're also reading the choices just to figure out your own past. Sometimes it's hard to tell what you're supposed to already know and what you're just learning.

• More bugs. I'll note them individually, but most revolve around dialog and quests and the order in which things are done. Basically, the complicated action/reaction matrix has a few bugs in it.

• While the first KOTOR had perfect story construction and an excellent non-linear game design, KOTOR II makes a lot of assumptions on the order in which you do things. I found many inappropriate dialog choices while playing. Someone might say something that they shouldn't because the programmer assumed that I had been somewhere, or spoken to someone, that I hadn't yet. Likewise, they'll still talk about something that I "solved" but they don't seem to realize it.

• Some quests that I had completed were resurrected in the journal because I talked to someone who would trigger the quest again. Or a quest was rendered impossible because I had already done something quest related before speaking with a quest trigger person.

• There is a real assumption that I will visit a particular planet before others. The NPCs practically beg be to go there first.

• As my backstory is revealed, my character doesn't seem to realize it. I'll still have the option of asking the same stupid questions that I ask everyone, even though I already know the answer.

• Swoop Bike Racing. Lots of problems here if you are a swoop bike racing fan. In addition to a bug where some of the accelerator pads don't work at some speeds, the first race is basically impossible. The first race also doesn't have any prize for 2nd and 3rd place like every other race does. So, you can spend lots of time trying and get no payoff. The Xbox version had a cheat to let to win, but this doesn't even work on the PC, so we lost out.

• Even with the workbench, I found myself with a lot of extra junk.

• SMALL SPOILER. White on white text, so select to read.

  KOTOR I had one big plot fork, based on your alignment. KOTOR II has multiple small plot forks, but no big one. Dialog is also different, but in the end, the whole thing is mostly the same for good and evil.

• SPOILER. White on white text, so select to read.

  The "BOSS" characters are kind of lame. I found almost every BOSS fight to be rather easy, except the last one. That one was almost too hard until I figured out an easy way of winning. Both the box and website feature the two characters shown above, but both are rather easy to beat and aren't even a big part of the story. I guess they just look cool.

• It's been reported that they rushed the XBox release for Christmas and ended up cutting parts of the game out. The PC version is almost "bug compatible" with the XBox and with none of the cut features readded. The few bugs that they did "fix" were done by disabling some features (tiny spoiler: the transport on Nar Shaddaa ). You can even see parts of the map that exist, but you can't get to them. This is rather unfortunate.

• No real quests for NPCs. In KOTOR I, some of the NPCs could trigger subquests on the various planets, sometimes revealed by getting to know them. That's not really that case in KOTOR II. The rewards for "digging deep" into an NPCs dialog tree are different.

• BIG SPOILER. White on white text, so select to read.

  The ENDGAME for both sides is very rushed. I think that the "XBox cut" caused them to yank large portions of the ending out. By the time you understand the true nature of the plot the game is basically over. There is a lot of text telling you what might have happened, but it's just text. What actually happens in each ending (good/evil) is so similar that if you blink, you'll miss the difference. Also, once the main "bad guy's" motives are revealed, their actions don't quite justify it. Do they love you or hate you? Do they Want you to live or die? You just don't end the game with the same feeling of accomplishment that you did in the first game since it's unclear what you were fighting for.

So, my hope is that they release a patch to KOTOR II that includes the complete game and fixes to some of these bugs.

There are a couple of Star Wars name generators out there, but I think I found the worst one. Target's Star Wars toy site now has a name generator (click on Yoda). I won't spoil the humor by giving away some of the names, but I will say "make sure you try different departments when selecting the options."
Tags: name starwars target
April 05, 2005 05:52 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [1] |

In light of starwars.com's release of the new Star Wars III opening credits crawl (shown below), Sequential Pictures has release their Episode III parody Star Wars III: A Lost Hope. It's quite funny. Make sure to check out the blooper real, too.

Remember, this is parody, but the following is real:

 Episode III
REVENGE OF THE SITH

War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by
the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku. There are
heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere.

In a stunning move, the fiendish droid leader,
General Grievous, has swept into the Republic
capital and kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine,
leader of the Galactic Senate.

As the Separatist Droid Army attempts to flee
the besieged capital with their turgid hostage,
two Jedi Knights and a brave but clumsy Gungan
warrior lead a desperate mission to rescue the
captive Chancellor....

Hopefully, the parody doesn't end up being better than the real thing.

The folks at slashdot seem all up in arms about General Grievous. I'm more worried about the return of "a brave but clumsy Gungan warrior."

I guess my Star Wars sensors are offline. Some how I missed this story about a guy who is selling his Star Wars tank on amazon.com (only US$20,000). And to think that it's been used by the Stanford Marching Band all of these years.

The vehicle is not street legal, but does go 40 mph and has a 400 watt stereo. Sweet. Since this is a company blog, I won't tell you what "badonkadonk" means.