The State of Mindless Movies

So, another year has come to and end. This is the first full year for the Mindless Movie Marathon. It was also the first full year where we each skipped some movies – I didn’t see Contagion, but because Evan doesn’t do reviews anymore, I doubt anyone realized that the M³ was represented. I left Evan off the ticket for Kung Fu Panda II (I took my nephew instead) and Harry Potter 8 (although we saw that one later on Blu-Ray, about a month after our Harry Potter Marathon).

Anyway, I thought I’d give a rundown of all the reviews and columns posted this past year, in case anyone missed one and desperately needs to catch up. Like last year, it’s organized by quality (well, by how much I liked the movie – Theatre, Blu-Ray, DVD, Free on TV, and Avoid at all costs) instead of date. One thing I notices was that there were less Theatre movies and more Blu-Ray and DVD movies than I would have liked. On the other hand, we didn’t have any Free on TV or Avoid movies. Maybe we’re getting more discerning. I was hoping that wouldn’t happen because I want to like movies. Big, dumb movies. Oh well, on with the show …

Theatre Movies

The Green Hornet – Seth Rogan as a superhero? Yes, but only because Jay Chou actually does the work.

Battle Los Angeles – The critics may not agree with us (do they ever?) but we found it action packed and very exciting.

Paul – Funny, funny movie.

Fast Five – Turn your brain off, as well as any understanding you have of physics.

Kung Fu Panda II – Animated fun. Just as good as live action, and plenty funny.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon – Also includes reviews of the previous two.

Horrible Bosses – Incredibly funny, R-rated comedy.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 – Includes part 1 as well.

Captain America – Great action movie with funny lines. Pretty much my prototypical movie

Sucker Punch – I liked it a lot, but no one else did.

Conan the Barbarian – Gratuitous action all the way through, and dual-wielding swords.

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows – Guy Ritchie knows how to make a good movie.

Blu-Ray Movies

The King’s Speech – I downgraded it to be fair to action movies.

Source Code – Good plot and acting, but not enough action for me.

Thor – Giant spectacle, but not quite enough action. Maybe if the next director is worse than Kenneth Branagh, it’ll be better.

Priest – Vampire movie with some cool things, but standard action

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – Not quite as good as the previous incarnations (which are included).

Super 8 – Tries to harken back to E.T. but didn’t really become the phenomenon it wanted.

X-Men: First Class – Good movie with good actors.

The Green Lantern – I like it, but no one else did.

Cowboys & Aliens – a bit too serious for its title.

Killer Elite – a bit too long for its own good, but it’s a pretty decent movie none-the-less.

Moneyball – Brad Pitt doing Brad Pitt things (acting well) and a song that’ll get stuck in your head. Plus, math!

The Three Musketeers – Silly, silly movie. What did you expect. Widest disagreement ever between Evan and myself. We can no longer talk about this movie without getting into a heated exchange.

Immortals – Pretty good movie, but some scenes that’ll make people wince.

DVD movies

The Mechanic – Not much action. For Jason Statham, that’s unacceptable.

Drive Angry 3D – Plenty of action, but it was even stupider than we prefer, and we prefer pretty stupid.

Hanna – Not much action. Tries to be a good movie, so critics ate it up. We did not.

30 Second or less – Not enough action for an action movie, not enough comedy for a comedy movie. Still funny though.

Colombiana – Not a lot of action. Quite disappointing.

Drive – Again, not a whole lot of action. More quick, brutal violence.

In Time – So much potential, but so many standard movie things it drove me nuts.

Tower Heist – Not as good as the critics would have you believe. Not much action or comedy.

So besides all the reviews, if there wasn’t a movie to go to see, I would write something on my own. Perhaps of a movie I saw on DVD, or something about movies. I also started to branch out into other entertainment areas (mainly games). So here’s the collection of those.

The Year in Movies (2010) – This column from last year.

Mindless Movies 2011 – Looking forward to all the movies released last year.

Nothing Happens! – My favourite dramas. Not much action or comedy, but good anyway.

Death Race Duology – I reviewed both recent Death Race movies.

Valentines Day – My gripes about how love is portrayed in Hollywood.

Humour – Different kinds of funny in movies and TV

Religion and Film – How religion is used in entertainment

Dragon Age II – I played it through three times, and wrote down a bunch of stuff from that.

The Crucible – One of my friends was in this play, so we went to support her.

Game of Thrones – I watched the first two episodes, and was a little disappointed. Then I read all the books, but didn’t review them, because it was August by the time I finished.

If Life was an RPG – I realized there were a lot of analogies between life and games.

Sports-Break: New Kickoff Rules – I did some math to evaluate how a rule change would affect the NFL season. I have no idea if it’s actually holding true or not.

Big Trouble in Little China – Hilarious movie from the 80’s.

The Worst Survivor Ever – After whatever apocalypse comes, I won’t do so well.

Pilot Season – Every year, a bunch of new shows debut, and most get tossed out.

Star Wars: The Old Republic – I got the chance to Beta Test this game for a weekend about six weeks before it came out

Nostalgia – How we perceive things from our childhood, and how that affects what we like now.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back – classic movie I want to watched before SWTOR drops.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi – Finishing off the classes trilogy before SWTOR drops.

So that’s been the year in Mindless Movies. Thank you to all who’ve regularly stopped by. Thank you to all who just dropped by once and wondered what the heck this was all about. Thank you for all the feedback. Thanks to everyone who came to a movie with us. And a big thanks to Evan, who constantly puts up with the mindless movies I like, and my endless flow of comments during them. Here’s to much more mindlessness.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

I had to work yesterday. It’s not usually a bad thing, but I had intended on taking the week before Christmas off. And the week afterwards. And a few more days, just because. So having to work put a dent in those plans. I think working yesterday was to make up for how much fun I had the previous evening.

Evan and I (and his lab partner, and his cousin) went to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. The trailers were alright. We saw the trailers for Rock of Ages, which starred a number of rock songs from the 80’s, as well as some celebrities. It seemed to capitalize on nostalgia, and you can see my post a few weeks ago for my views on that. Not that I really blame a movie studio for making something like this. People try to recreate the best parts of growing up for the rest of their lives, and frequently pay a lot of money for that. We also saw the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises. I thought it might make Evan pull a Scanners, but his head remained intact so we could watch a trailer for John Carter of Mars (based on some pulp books in the 30’s, before we learned – or cared – that it was too cold and oxygen-deprived to live) and Jack the Giant Killer. It looks to be based on the fairy tale of Jack and the Bean Stalk, but it had knights and armies and all sorts of gussied up stuff. It was also by Bryan Singer, of X-Men fame. It made me think we’ll soon see Brett Ratner's The Three Little Pigs, with Chris Tucker as the second pig and Charlie Sheen's return to the big screen as The Big Bad Wolf. ("No Charlie, it's 'I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down.' Not 'I'll huff all your Blow.")

The movie itself opens with narration by Watson, reading in his head the book he’s writing about the latest adventure. I don’t mind opening (and closing) narration, but when it’s by one of the main characters and basically renders most of the movie as a flashback, you know that the spoiler alert narrator is going to survive. Anyhow, we soon get an explosion, and then Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) carrying a package down the street. Holmes tries to abscond with it, and after some witty banter, her escorts face off against him. A slow-motion action scene takes place inside his head as he pictures how the fight will go, and then the realtime fight takes place, exactly how he pictured it.

He catches up with Irene in an auction, who’s giving the package as payment to some old dude. The package turns out to be a bomb, and Irene slips away while the old guy freaks out. Holmes manages to save them, but not before the old guy also flees. Holmes sees him later, dead anyway, shot with a poison dart outside the auction house.

I supposed I should mark the preceding paragraphs with a spoiler alert, but all these take place before the title screen, so I thought it was alright. Anyway, the bomb-then-poison-dart thing was a bit of a problem for me. Why have a backup plan like that? Why not use the one with incredible collateral damage as plan B? Better yet, why not use both, with the bomb covering up the dart? Oh whoops, spoiler alert … they do that later in the movie. Also later, they have another backup plan. Guy with a knife fails, so they send a chaingun. Really? I mean, kudos for not always thinking your plans will always succeed, but they’re wildly disproportionate to each other.

Anyhow, back to the movie. Watson meets up with Holmes the day before his wedding, and much banter occurs. And many, many funny lines and scenes. I mean, I knew it would be funny, but I underestimated the amount and the depth of the funny. I laughed a whole lot.

Anyway, the action and humour barrel along from one location to the next, with a lot of interesting camera work, including scenes that fill us in on what Holmes is thinking, or what he’s done (how this works inside of Watson’s narration, I don’t know). And then there’s a scene in a forest, and the interesting camera shots get incredibly good. Man, does Guy Ritchie know how to shoot a movie! Slow-motion to fast-motion cuts. Shots through bullet holes in trees. He really gets the most out of the camera.

He also gets the most out of call-backs. There’s at least one Chehov’s gun that I remember, and there’s some tragic call-backs to lines at the beginning of the film, when Watson and Holmes are talking. And there’s also a shout-out to some of the later Sherlock Holmes books (besides the obvious), but I won’t spoil it here.

This is definitely a theatre movie. Lot’s of action, lots of humour, lots of interesting camera shots. Lots of other interesting stuff to hear. Almost no boring parts at all. But then, I may have been distracted near the end when the female lead asked “What do you see?” and Holmes answered “Everything.” Perhaps he doesn’t have the filter that people get when they grow older. It’s a filter that babies don’t have, either, but it keeps out all the boring we constantly see. We don’t need to constantly be aware of every tiny thing in our room, just what we’re concentrating on right now. Of course, Guy Ritchie knows this, and takes great advantage of it. When you see this movie, I’ll explain it to you.

Return of the Jedi

This past weekend, I took the time to watch Return of the Jedi. Mind you, I also played Skyrim and World of Warcraft, so it's not like I was taking time away from curing cancer or watching progress bars go by (I put in a lot of overtime at work, most of which consisted of watching progress bars go by in preparation for a software upgrade). Anyway, to end a tangent, Return of the Jedi was watched and thoroughly enjoyed, as always.

Does anyone else get irrationally excited about the opening crawl? Am I the only one who still feels like a little kid, even after seeing various opening crawls at least dozens of times? At least this one is more accurate than The Empire Strikes Back. No mentions of Luke leading anything, except a rescue of Han Solo, and Darth Vader isn't doing anything stupid. He is, in fact, doing something fairly smart - looking for his son.

Anyway, the shot pans down from the stars to rest on the forest moon of Endor (is there a desert moon? An aquatic moon? a volcanic moon? Do equally adorable native teddy bears live on those ones?) and the latest Death Star (still under construction). Then a Star Destroyer flies overhead and a shuttle emerges from it's hangar. Just so you know, none of the movies actually open with a shot of a Star Destroyer. A New Hope has a corellian corvette first, then the star destroyer. This one has the uncompleted death star, then the star destroyer. Secondly, why isn't Vader on the Executor? It's his personal flagship, he should be taking it wherever he goes.

Anyway, he lands on the Death Star and meets up with Jerjerrod, who subtly complains about the schedule (something I am intimately familiar with, as working in an engineering office means I'm surrounded by people who constantly complain about schedules). Vader suggest he take it up personally with the Emperor, who'll be arriving shortly. I suggest not taking so many people away from their jobs to greet visiting VIP's, but they didn't hear me a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

We wipe-cut to Tatooine, where C-3P0 and R2-D2 are about to unwittingly infiltrate Jabba's palace. Jabba has Han Solo in Carbonite ("Just like I ordered on E-bay. I would order from the seller again, especially if they sell the 'Chewbacca' variety.") and the droids are step one in the plan.

Step two is a bounty hunter named Boushh coming in with Chewbacca in custody. Jabba and Boushh get in some tense negotiations about the payment under threat of thermal detonation (Boushh gets a lot of bang for the buck. He's really explosive at the negotiations table. Anything could set him off. Okay, I'm done).

Late at night, after what TVTropes calls a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment (the song and dance show. What the hell was that about?) Boushh sneaks into the room where Han's being kept (he just hangs around. He's cold until you get to know him, but he's a hard man to know. Okay, now I'm done) and presses some buttons on the side of the carbonite slab. Han glows red and starts thawing out. Once he's free, he collapses to the floor.

I like was Lucas did here. Han could've popped out of hibernation and been fine, but they gave him a whole bunch of symptoms. He's wet and shivering, his voice is shaking, and he's blind. Harrison Ford plays it really well. He's hunched over and sort of withdrawn into himself.

Anyway, the quiet night was all a ruse by Jabba just to see if someone would try to rescue Han, and Jabba was right. Boushh takes off his helmet to reveal himself as Leia, and now I have to use female pronouns. Anyway, Jabba's awake and watching the touching reunion, and then breaks the bad news that they're still prisoners, and Leia will have to wear the infamous gold bikini, spawner of geek fantasies.

Part two of the plan didn't go so well, so part three is put into action. Luke himself enters the palace, and uses Jedi mind tricks to get an audience. Jabba has enough of that, and tosses him down into the Rancor's pit. Luke uses cool nerves and quick thinking to defeat it, and its trainers cry. Who decided that fat men crying was going to be funny? It's totally a double standard with beautiful women, but I realize that double standards are pretty common in movies, so I shouldn't get too hung up on it.

Anyway, Jabba gets really angry and decides to throw the whole lot of them into the Sarlacc, which is a giant, disgusting mouth in the sand. It comes with tentacles and a beak to grab passers by pull them into its gullet, where they'll "find a new definition of pain and suffering as [they're] slowly digested over a thousand years."

They go out to the great mouth in the sand, and Luke goes all hero on ... well, pretty much everybody. Lando (undercover as a guard) snags control of the skiff they're on, but gets thrown off when it's fired on by a cannon on the main sail barge. Leia strangles Jabba (that bikini didn't hide much, but apparently it hid a lot of muscles), and then Luke jumps onto the barge to kill it. He fires the cannon into the deck, then swings onto the captured skiff with Leia. Han had pulled Lando up, so they all fly away as the sail barge explodes behind them. In real life, that explosion likely would have killed them. Mind you, in real life, that explosion probably wouldn't have taken place. Anyway, they leave Tatooine behind and Han thanks Luke.

While the Millennium Falcon goes to rendezvous with the Alliance Fleet, Luke goes back to Dagobah to finish his training. But Yoda's dying, and Luke doesn't need any more training anyhow. To become a full Jedi knight, though, he must confront Vader. Yoda tells him he has another relative just before passing away.

Before departing, Vision-Obi Wan comes along. Luke blatantly asks him why he didn't tell Luke about his parentage, and Obi Wan says his point of view thing. But it's pretty much just Obi Wan lying (or George Lucas not thinking about sequels when he did Star Wars). Anyway, Luke realizes that Leia is his sister ("wait, the only girl I’ve kissed onscreen?" Ew!), and Obi Wan convinces him to face Vader.

But that would be playing into the Emperor's plans. He's foreseen that Luke will come to Vader, and then together they'll be able to break Luke and lure him to the dark side, just like his father. We'll see how that goes. He's also on the Death Star, and instructing Vader about fleet deployment.

Luke meets up with the rest of the alliance in the middle of a briefing about the attack on the Death Star. It's protected by a shield being projected from the forest moon of Endor, so a team will have to blow up the facility there (led by Han), while the fleet attacks the Death Star once its shields are down (led by Lando in the Millennium Falcon). Luke, Leia, and Chewbacca volunteer to help fly the shuttle that deposit the strike team on the forest moon of Endor. I'm not sure why they're needed, because it looks like flying the shuttle is a one person job (which Chewie mostly handles while Han nags at him).

Vader senses Luke is on the shuttle, but lets it land so he won’t be killed (or something like that). They trek through the forest, but stumble on some imperial scouts, and a speeder-bike chase breaks out. Luke and Leia take off after two and manage to take one out after Luke jumps on the back of it. Two more scouts join in, so Luke peels off to deal with them while Leia stays on the tail of the first one.

All three scouts get killed before they can report back to base (so the Imperials won’t know the rebels are there), but when Luke meets back up with Han and the strike team, Leia’s not there. In fact, she’s met the indigenous folk – Ewoks. Together, they manage to take down two more imperial scouts, so Wicket (the Ewok) takes her back to his village.

When the rest of the team goes looking for her, they get caught in an Ewok trap that Chewie sets off (whoops). They all get taken prisoner, except for C-3P0, who’s regarded as a diety. The rest of the team is supposed to be sacrificed for a feast in the droid's favour, but Luke uses the Force to convince the Ewoks that would be a bad idea.

They’re set free, and Threepio uses his story telling facilities to tell the tribe about the rebels plight. I thought this would take forever, but apparently Threepio’s a bit more succinct with history than when he’s introducing himself (“Hello! I am C-3P0, Human-cyborg relations. I am fluent in over six million forms of communications! If you-” *Thump*) so they get through it in an evening, complete with fairly realistic sound effects (Darth Vader breathing, lightsaber fighting, AT-AT’s walking). The tribe adopts them, and agrees to show them a path to the bunker.

Luke and Leia have a tender moment outside the hut. He tells her they’re siblings, and he has to confront Darth Vader, to try to turn him away from the Dark Side. He goes off just as Han comes out. He and Leia have a tender moment too (well, for them).

The next morning, things go well. The Ewoks show them to the backdoor of the bunker, and the rebels manage to break in and start planting charges. However, right as the Emperor is telling Luke he knows all about the rebel plans, the strike team is ambushed and captured by a legion of Imperial forces. To top it off, the rebel fleet has flown in, only to discover the trap. Zounds!

Luke is in the Emperor’s throne room, being taunted about the failure of the fleet and the strike team. The strike team is in the hands of the imperials. The rebel fleet is fighting for its life against a host of Imperial ships. Things look bleak, until the Ewoks decide that now is the time to enter the fray.

C-3P0 and R2-D2 provide a nice distraction, and soon all the imperials are besieged under sentient furballs. And the tactics are generally alright. Separate out the imperials and overwhelm them with numbers. Yeah, some of it’s a bit silly, and the imperials seems to be out of the fight whenever they get knocked over. But it’s mostly alright.

Han and Leia use the distraction to pick off imperials and try to get back into the bunker, but things go badly when Artoo gets shot and shorts out.

Things in space are a bit worse. Without the shield down, there’s not a whole lot the rebel fleet can do, and the Death Star has just proven it’s not so helpless by firing its planet-smashing laser. Ouch.

Luke’s had enough and grabs his lightsaber, but Vader’s there to stop him from killing the Emperor, who just laughs. And I can see why. He’s taunting Luke, trying to drive him to the dark side, but I also think he’s relishing the thought of driving Darth Vader into hurting or killing his son. It would push him further to the dark side and solidify the hold Palpatine has over him.

The duel goes on for some time, but Vader eventually pushes Luke’s buttons when he reaches into his son’s mind and pulls out images of Leia. He has a daughter too? Maybe he can turn her as well. Luke is furious at the thought of the Emperor getting his hands on Leia, and savagely beats back Vader, eventually cutting off his hand. However, the artificial limb reminds him of what he lost as well (or perhaps that he and his father are alike) and he deactivates and throws his lightsaber away. He faces the Emperor and refuses to give into the dark side.

On the moon, things are well in hand for the rebels after Chewie captures an AT-ST (chicken walker) and blows the snot out of most of the other imperials. Han uses the walker to get into the bunker, and this time they manage to blow it up without any ambushes.

The shields go down, and the fighters make a beeline for the Death Star. Unlike the previous version, this time they’ll actually have to fly into its centre and pop it from the inside. Lando, Wedge, Tycho, and a few other pilots make the run, eventually splitting up to try to draw their opponents away from their true target. Lando and Wedge continue on to the middle of the massive installation, flying through increasingly small passageways. Eventually it opens up to the cavernous heart, housing a power regulator that can bring the whole thing down. Lasers and proton torpedoes fly, and the power regulator is no more. Now to outrace the fireball on the way out. Wedge and Lando make it, but the TIE fighters chasing them do not.

Meanwhile, the Emperor finally realizes he’ll never turn Luke, and so he’ll have to kill him. He decides to do it in the most painful manner possible, and pumps Luke full of electricity from his hands. Nowadays, that’s standard stuff. But back in 1983, when no on had seen it before? Suddenly we realize that Palpatine is a Dark Jedi too. And we realize how powerful dark Jedi can be. Holy Crap that must have been awesome!

Luke begs his father for help, and Vader is torn. He’s obeyed his master for so long. But his son … his son still believes in him, still feels the good in him, even if he himself does not. His son’s love matters more than obedience, and so he picks up his master (sustaining mortal injuries) and hurls him into the depths of the station.

Together, father and son stagger to their shuttle (wait, did none of the imperials notice the second-in-command of their entire Empire was nearly dying? And he was hanging out with the guy on all the “Wanted” posters all over the place? I guess not). Vader has redeemed himself, and is now Anakin. He wishes to see Luke without his mask, with his very own two eyes, before he dies. Luke helps him take off his mask and prison for so many years, and Anakin smiles gently and tells Luke to tell Leia that he was right about their father. Listen for the incredibly quiet imperial march going on in the background. Adds so much to the scene for so little music.

Anyway, Luke drags his father’s body aboard the shuttle and pilots it away from the exploding Death Star. Once back on the Forest Moon, he places it on a bier and burns it, the remnant suit of a man no longer constrained by it. Luke may have finished the symbol, but it was Anakin who defeated Darth Vader.

Well, enough about philosophy and other deep stuff. Luke rejoins the others as the Ewoks host a party with some of the best music in the trilogy. He sees a vision of Obi Wan, Yoda, and a much younger Anakin, smiling as they’re finally at peace, and we get scenes of celebration from across the galaxy before the credits roll.

For my money, this is the best Star Wars. Sure, people don’t like the Ewoks, but I do. It might be that people also go for darker endings, whereas I’m a sucker for happy ones. Also, (excepting the prequels), this one has far more action than the other ones. At the end, it has a ground fight, a space battle, and a lightsaber duel all going at once. And sure, there’s the big space in the middle where the only action is the speeder bike chase, but it’s not so bad, especially with Han Solo around cracking jokes.

And with that, I’m fully ready to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. If only BioWare would agree with me and let me have early access already.

The Empire Strikes Back

I watched The Empire Strikes Back a few nights ago, and realized that I probably need to keep a running diary the next time I do something like this. There were too many things I thought of that I've probably forgotten most of them by now. Regardless, here are a few thoughts I've put together about Episode V.

The Opening Crawl! Who doesn't get excited about that? Actually, I got pre-excited, because that opening music was also the DVD menu music, so I heard it and got all tingly, only for me to have to stop leaning back and enjoying myself and start having to use the remote. Blockbuster movies with iconic openings shouldn't have to have a DVD menu. You should just pop it in and go. If you want the menu specifically, that's what the DVD Menu button on the remote is for. Anyway, for the actual start of the movie, I paid attention to the words. And they're pretty lame and dumb. First off, the freedom fighters are actually the Rebel Alliance, and they're not led by Luke Skywalker. At that point, they're led by General Rieeken. Luke's just a commander, way down the chain of command. That's why he's out setting scanners while the generals and higher ups get to sit in the (slightly) warmer base. Secondly, if the galaxy has billions of planets, why is Darth Vader sending out thousands of probe droids? You're off by a factor of a million, there, Darth.

And speaking of Darth, when did we start calling everyone in the Sith by Darth this and Darth that? The Emperor was supposed to be Palpatine. Just that. Even the first few books only had Joruus C'Boath and Exar Kun. It wasn't until later that people decided Darth was a title instead of a name. Now go back and listen to Obi-Wan talk to his former pupil again, and it's really awkward calling him by his title instead of his name. Try replacing Darth with Lord or Sir whenever Obi-Wan speaks, and you'll get the picture.

Anyway, we see The Executor (the giant Star Destroyer) at the beginning. In lore, it's supposed to be 8 km long. The other star destroyers are only supposed to be 1.6 km long. But there's no way that The Executor is only 5 times bigger than the others. It dwarfs them by several time. It must be 30 or 40 km long. It's massive!

Anyway, it sends out its probe droids, which jet away. No one pauses to think that the Empire must have wasted incredibly large amounts of money on disposable hyperdrives. These things must go to thousands of different systems, most of which reside several light years apart. Maybe the Empire's accountants are steeped in the dark side of the Force. *waves hand* "You have been paid today." "[monotone] I have been paid today."

One of the probe droids crashes on Hoth (or as I like to call it, Saskatchewan on a good day). What a (plot-driven) coincidence! Luke goes over to check it out, but gets attacked and knocked unconscious by a wampa. Mmmmm ... Jedi ... The Force adds extra flavour!

Han goes back to base and has a ... not heart-to-heart with Leia, but I'm not sure of the part of the body responsible for sarcasm. Anyway, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher have great chemistry! "I would just as soon kiss a Wookiee" "I can arrange that!" *stalks off* "He could use a good kiss!"

But Han doesn't hear back from Luke, so he goes outside (at night, in the freezing cold) to track him down. Meanwhile, Luke manages to save himself from the wampa by calling on his rudimentary powers of the Force. Unfortunately, the Force doesn't tell him to do prudent thing and kill the wampa, then stay inside the cave, out of the wind. Stupid Force, where are its survival instincts anyway?

So Luke stumbles out into the icy cold and bitter wind. He soon collapses, but Obi-Wan appears to him in a vision and tells him to marry his wife and take her to Bethlehem, where she'll bear the Son of God. Oh wait, sorry! I'm getting my science fiction mixed up. *dodges thrown Christian debris.* No, Ben tells Luke to go to Dagobah and train with the great Jedi Master Yoda ("Y.O.D.A. Yoda. Yo yo yo yo Yoda.")

Han comes riding through the fading vision ("scuse me, old man") and finds Luke. Han's tauntaun collapses from the cold (Han's alright though, 'cause he's the star of the movie), so Han cuts its stomach open with Luke's lightsaber and shoves his hypothermic friend inside, then goes about setting up their emergency shelter.

The next morning, they get found by Rogue Two (Han's cell phone got no bars out there, so he couldn't call in that they were alright and Leia got worried and sent out a search party). Luke gets dunked in a Bacta tank to heal him all up, but the probe droid is still out there. Han and Chewie investigate and manage to trigger the droid's self-destruct, but it's already sent its findings back to The Executor. They've already gotten a number of false needles in the haystack, but Darth Vader is sure of this one. Plus, no one wants to disobey, what with the strangling and all.

So the Empire invades Hoth. The Admiral in charge doesn't do a good job, and gets strangled (tele-strangled, no less. Vader's not even in the same room). The captain (Piett) gets promoted, and sends down his walkers.

These walkers seems wildly impractical. Sure, they withstand almost all blaster fire, but they're vulnerable to tripwires. Tripwires! Even Ewoks could have handled them. Oh, wait, bad example. Also, they appear to have maybe 2 guns total (in lore, there are supposed to be some more on the sides) that can shoot in a cone in front of them. The cone is pretty skinny, so it looks like they're awfully bad for anything other than enemies convinced of the merits of frontal assaults. Then I thought that maybe there used to pacify more primitive civilizations. After all, if 10 m high walkers suddenly showed up in medieval times, we would have fled in terror, or bowed down and worshipped our new (vengeful?) gods.

The rebels on foot, having no sense of strategy (or the common sense to spread out) get shot at by the massive mechanical beasts. Rogue Squadron leads the counter-attack in newly-refitted snow speeders, and do an alright job. Luke flies cover for Wedge as his tail-gunner (Janson) snags a walker with a tow-cable and wraps it up. The walker falls to the ground, and suddenly it's armor is useless. A few blaster shots and it explodes. Apparently the armor effectiveness is proportional to altitude.

After Dak (his tail-gunner) is killed, Luke gets shot down. This is the first of two shots following Luke in on a crash. The first one has the camera right behind Luke's head. The second one (Luke's crash on Dagobah) has the camera right in front of Luke. Both of them look down the nose of Luke's craft as it crashes into whatever (snow, then water). Irvin Kershner likes certain shots, and this is one of them.

After the evacuation is done with the aid of a giant ion cannon that can disable star destroyers (and gee, why don't they bring them everywhere they go? Useful things, those ion cannons), Luke splits off from the rest to go to Dagobah. Han gets Leia out on the Falcon after she can't get to her transport, but bad problems ensue. Specifically, the hyperdrive doesn't work. So when they get pursued by Vader's fleet, they can't outrun them. Both Han and Chewie meddle into the guts of the Falcon, begging the question of who's flying it? They leave the controls unattended (well, Leia's there but not doing much) for a few minutes. But there are star Destroyers right on their tail, requiring many delicate manoeuvres to out-pilot. They eventually run into an asteroid field, because the enemy would have to be crazy to follow them (or just scared spitless of Vader). The enemy follows them in.

Han flies them closer to a large asteroid, and here we get the second of the shots that Irvin Kershner likes. The Millennium Falcon flies away from the camera, then loops around and comes back. It happens twice more - once when they finally get out of the asteroid field and are being chased by Star Destroyers (the loop back to attack their pursuers before clinging to the back of the bridge pylon) and once at the end of the movie, when they loop back around to pick up Luke, who’s dangling from a conveniently placed weather vane (some thoughtful designer thought it should go right under the garbage chute. Right). Anyway, this time they continue the loop to fly into a rather large cave.

Vader gets a call from the Emperor, wanting to know progress, so the Executioner pulls out of the asteroid field while the smaller star destroyers continue to get pounded by rocks. Whenever Darth Vader and the Emperor talk, I always get this in my head. "What the hell's an Aluminum Falcon?!?"

Meanwhile, Luke takes his X-wing to Dagobah. His instruments short out, and he miraculously lands in the tiny patch of land that also contains Yoda. After Artoo gets eaten and vomited back out (great camera work there, actually. We get a shot of Luke's eyes as he follows R2-D2's trajectory, but we don't actually see the droid flying through the air. It's implied, only done very well), Luke sets up camp. It's invaded by a short green creature who'd fit perfectly in with the cast of the Muppets. Really, Yoda's first appearance totally reminds me of a small, green, force-sensitive Fozzie. He takes Luke back to his hut, and then reveals his true nature, while an incorporeal Obi-Wan tries to convince Yoda to train Luke, possibly because they're so much alike. Look out for the part where Luke casually tosses a large snake of the table before ladling some soup into his bowl. Anyway, Yoda gives in, and the training montage begins. (It's a good thing Han Solo didn't have to come here, because there are snakes everywhere!)

Luke pretty much fails spectacularly at being a Jedi throughout this movie. He's quick to draw and ignite his lightsaber, even striking first when he faces Vader on Bespin. He fails in the cave (although he does learn an important bit of foreshadowing). He fails at lifting his X-wing, because he doesn't believe. He finally fails to complete his training, rushing off to save his friends instead of becoming the person who could save the galaxy. The only good thing he did on Bespin was to take R2-D2 there (who saved his friends' butts) and learn about his father.

Really, Luke has his best Jedi moment when he's in the wampa cave on Hoth. He calms himself down and uses the Force to grab his lightsaber. This is especially brilliant because up to that point, he had no idea that the Force could be used for Telekinesis. Up to that point, it had only been used for influencing minds, blocking stinging bolts from a remote with a lightsaber, and improving aim in an X-wing. Oh, and talking once your dead. So the fact that Luke used it for something so physical is rather impressive.

Mind you, he's supposedly had about 3 years after he blew up the Death Star to train, but the only mentor he had taught him for roughly 3 days before he was killed. So Luke's been figuring all this out on his own, and still managed to save his own bacon with his powers.

Anyway, we see the training (and failure) montage, and Yoda explains that sometimes Jedi will get visions. Past, present, futures. Right at that instant, Luke gets a vision (how convenient) of his friends being tortured, so he decides to rush off and save them. Yoda and Obi-Wan urge him to stay, but he's adamant. He packs up his X-wing (and cleans more snakes out of its turbine intakes) and takes off. All that time in the swamp, his cockpit must have smelled like feet.

Back in the dark asteroid cave, everyone's trying to fix the ship. Han and Leia have a moment, but it's spoiled by C-3P0. Leia also spots something outside the ship, so the crew go outside to investigate, putting on gas masks. Here's what gets me about this scene, that I only realized this time I watched it. THERE'S NO AIRLOCK IN THE CAVE! IT'S ALL VACUUM! YOU'D NEED A SPACESUIT. THEIR BLOOD SHOULD BE BOILING, YOU STUPID, STUPID WRITERS!!! Seriously, given what they find out about the cave (it's the digestive tract of a worm), you could expect some of the folds of its intestines to trap air. But then, how would the Falcon fly in and out of that? They fly right out of the mouth into space, implying that the inside of the worm is all vacuum. And yes, it has atmosphere and mist. And Mynocks. How has this been overlooked for so long?

Anyway, they rush back into the Falcon and take off before they get trapped inside the worm, escaping from its mouth. Of course, if they left from its mouth, they probably entered through its other end. Do you know what that means? It means Han Solo might be a hotshot pilot and all around scoundrel, but he literally does not know an ass from a hole in the ground!

After escaping, they're promptly pursued by the Imperials again. The Empire has just hired bounty hunters to look for them (Bossk, Zuckuss and 4-LOM, Dengar, Boba Fett, and IG-88a), but it looks like they won't be needed. Oh, whoops, the Falcon pulls a nifty move and hooks itself to the back of the bridge of the star destroyer. Apparently, there are no windows back there ("hey, there's a giant piece of junk stuck back here!")

They wait until the Imperial fleet breaks up to go to hyperspace, then float away from with the trash that's standard procedure to dump before certain actions. They're closely followed by Boba Fett, in his ship Slave One. Of course, it looks like Slave One is maybe 500m behind the Falcon, leaving us to ask the question "What, don't you guys have a radar?" No, no they don't.

This whole scene begs another question. The Falcon is on Hoth, with a broken hyperdrive. So they take off and dodge into an asteroid field, still in the Hoth system. They emerge from it and get attacked by Star Destroyers, still in the Hoth system. They pull their "gnat on a hippo" routine until the ships go to hyperspace, upon which they float away, still in the Hoth system. Then, Han says they can make it to Bespin. Wait, is Bespin in the Hoth system? No, Han implies it's in a different solar system. HOW CAN THEY DO THAT WITH A BROKEN HYPERDRIVE?!? Actually, this fact has been pointed out before, but it's amazing how many things in this otherwise great movie make me irrationally irritated.

Han, Chewie, Leia, and C-3P0 arrive on Bespin, and manage to wrangle a parking spot on the floating city. Lando Calrissian (man, Billy Dee Williams is charmingly good here) comes out to meet them, toys with Han, and becomes smitten with Leia, blowing Threepio completely off. Threepio gets distracted by a potential R2 unit and wanders off, only to get blasted (poor Anthony Daniels. So good at what he does, yet he's reduced to a robot. A dead robot). Soon they get invited to lunch, only for Boba Fett to show up with Darth Vader. Han shoot him, but Vader blocks the shots with his hand (awesome!) and pulls the gun from Han with the Force.

After enjoying a pleasant meal together (presumably), the rebels get tortured. Just for fun, or possibly just to break their spirit. Chewie has his eardrums assaulted with loud, painful sounds (Justin Bieber?) while Han gets strapped into bed of something that looks quite painful. It's said to fire every pain receptor in the body, which makes sense, given the screams we hear from outside the closed door.

Chewie finally gets some piece and quiet, so he partially reassembles C-3P0. He saved the parts from being disintegrated by Ugnaughts, who decided to play Wookiee in the middle with Threepio's head. Really, you're playing that with a creature that can rip your arms off? Smart guys, these Ugnaughts.

Anyway, Chewie puts Threepio's head on backwards. It's too bad droids aren't plug-and-play. But this leads to the question of why would Chewie screw up like that? He's incredibly bright, from a technologically advanced society, but can't tell a droid's front from his back? Actually, if you look carefully, you can see Chewie quietly urffing to himself. It's possibly he did it just to see if it could be done, or maybe he did it just to piss C-3P0 off. I can see anyone doing that to the most annoying guy of their crew, can't you? I could totally see Leonard putting Sheldon together backwards, just to annoy him. Sheldon wouldn't be able to sit on his favourite spot properly, which would bring no end of delight to Leonard.

Han and Leia get dumped in Chewie's room, and Lando comes in to explain. He had to get the Empire off his back, and that was about they only way to do it. Han will be frozen in carbonite to test the process, to make sure that it's safe for Luke.

Han and Leia admit their love (sort of) right before he's frozen, and then off he gets packed onto Slave One. Lando turns on the stormtroopers to save Han once he realizes the Empire will never let him out of their clutches. Leia convinces Chewia that he's reasonable, and they flee to the Falcon. If you look closely, the stormtroopers have even worse aim here than in A New Hope, and this time there's no excuse for it. Even when R2-D2 spends far too much time dancing around in the middle of a firefight, no one thinks "Hey guys, lets aim for the slow-moving, mobility-impaired robot that constantly hacks our systems and gets those guys out of jams." Nah, they just aim for the walls around our heroes, and boy do they get shot up. Maybe it's the guns that are defective, because with nearly 30 millenia of space-faring, war-bringing technology, apparently no one's thought of putting an auto function on them. What the hell does the Empire use for suppressive fire? They have to pull the trigger each time they need to shoot!

Meanwhile, Luke lands and gets manoeuvred through Cloud City like a diabolical rat maze. He eventually winds up in the carbonite freeze room, where Darth Vader steps out to confront him. Luke ignites his lightsaber and takes the first swing, and they do awkward battle (Luke's still learning the basics, and Vader is mostly mechanical). Vader eventually forces Luke to fall into the Carbonite Freezing device, but he leaps out when Vader isn't looking. Vader turns back to see Luke dangling from some hoses. He takes some whacks at him, but Luke puts his vine-climbing skills to good use (remember that shot? Back on Dagobah, of Luke climbing a vine with Yoda on his back?) by climbing higher. He flips down, grabs his lightsaber, and the battle is rejoined.

Eventually, Luke ends up facing Vader on a catwalk that actually complies (marginally) with OHSA. It has actual guardrails and everything. Too bad guard rails are not really lightsaber-proof. Anyway, Luke loses his hand and nearly his sanity when Vader reveals the truth about his parenthood ("Luke, I am an actor being voiced by James Earl Jones!") No, No that's not true! That's Impossible! NOOOOOOOOOOOO! Anyway, Vader offers Luke the chance to rule the Galaxy together, but Luke (say what you want about his Jedi skills, but he damn sure has the courage of his convictions!) chooses death instead and falls down a hole, slides down a tube, and manages to hang onto the aforementioned weather vane. He calls out to Leia in the Force, and so we get the last of the loop arounds (again, you've had intra-galactic travel for millenia, but no one's invented the handbrake u-turn?) to rescue him.

The movie ends with them (possibly) outside the galaxy, although the background of stars seems to counteract that possibility. If they were outside the galaxy, the other stars would be grouped together in galaxies of their own, not spread out like that. And most of them would be too dim to see. Anyway, Luke gets a replacement hand that looks and functions exactly like a real hand, Lando and Chewie go off to start the plan to rescue Han, and Leia sticks around to help Luke recuperate. Then the credits roll while the Star Wars theme music plays. Yay!

Despite what you may think from reading this post, I absolutely love this movie. Not quite as much as Return of the Jedi (because Jedi had better fights and a happier ending), but quite a lot. Possibly more than A New Hope, but I'm not sure. Anyway, step one in preparation for Star Wars: The Old Republic is something something something ... complete.

Nostalgia

“Where’s mah column!?!” you’re asking yourselves. Actually, you’re not, and I’m very sorry for characterising you as redneck white trash (or internet lolspeakers). A combination of work and Skyrim have kept me from writing anything engrossing. I’ve managed to cobble together some thoughts on nostalgia for you. I should warn you, though, that I may have to shut the Mindless Movie Marathon down for a few weeks so I can huddle in my room and lightsaber my way to a level 50 Jedi Consular when Star Wars: The Old Republic comes out on December 20^th.

This was going to be a post about Star Wars. One of the things I wanted to do before The Old Republic comes out (based on the advice of a columnist at Joystiq) was watch the Original Trilogy again. I had seen Star Wars on my birthday at my brother's house, so I want to get in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi over the next few weeks. But I got sucked in to Skyrim during my free time, and even a bit into World of Warcraft (a new patch dropped with a lot of content I wanted to try out), so I mainly played video games instead of movies yesterday.

But I got to thinking about why I liked Star Wars so much. Certainly, part of it is because many other people do, and I want to fit in. It's also because it's and action-adventure with Han Solo and Lightsabers (but only briefly of Han Solo with Lightsabers, but it was pretty funny). Also, Spaceships! But I think one of the main reasons I love Star Wars is nostalgia.

It's a bit surprising because I'm not that nostalgic a guy (it could be that I'm just not old enough to be nostalgic). Regardless, I'm generally not one to dismiss newer things just because they're newer, and I try and be rational when comparing them to the earlier counterparts.

The entertainment industry is particularly susceptible to this. Movies, music, TV and video games were all said to be better 20, 30, 40 years ago. Now, it could be a psychological thing. The good feelings we had of listening to music or watching TV as a child are sort of "imprinted" on our minds, and so every time we hear that music or watch that show (or movie), those feeling come back, like an endorphic Pavlov's bell.

Unfortunately, it also throws rationality out the window. The one exception I'll make is for music. While older music isn't my thing (Trance and dubstep haven't really been around that long), a lot of it appeals to too many people to say it's just nostalgia. The Beatles hold up, as do Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, AC/DC, and even some stuff that isn't classic rock. The only thing that's really improved is the quality of the recording, which has little to do with the talent of the artist. I think it might be because chords and melodies change little over time, or they appeal to us regardless of the time in which they were recorded.

Contrast that to something like Video Games. They've been around on mainframes since the late 60's, and in homes since the Atari (1972, I believe), but definitely hit it big with Nintendo. Since then, they've gotten bigger and inarguably better.

I downloaded an Atari emulator a while ago, and spent about 5 minutes playing it before the nostalgia wore off and I realized how crappy it is. Sure, you can remember the fun that Super Mario Bros brought to you as a child, but if you play it now, you'll realize how difficult (and blocky) it is. Its second sequel (Super Mario Brothers 3) was a huge deal. So massive they actually released an entire movie just to advertise for it: The Wizard, about an autistic boy who's fantastic at video games. It had Fred Savage, Beau Bridges, and Christian Slater in it. What's not to love? It also had the immortal line "I love the Power Glove - it's so bad!"

But if you plopped a kid down in front of Super Mario Brothers 3, or in front of Grand Theft Auto IV, guess which one he'll say is better? The graphics are better, the gameplay is better, the story is better (although you don't have to call up Luigi after every level and take him bowling). And while I respect people who like Super Mario 3, if they say it's the pinnacle of gaming, they couldn't be more wrong (alright, they could be, but it would be hard).

I would much rather play through Mass Effect II again before I play through Chrono Trigger, and I like playing through Chrono Trigger. It's just that graphics are so much better, and the action so much better, and the music so much better (granted, Jack Wall in MIDI might not sound as great as it does in real life) that it's hard to say that Chrono Trigger is the greatest RPG of all time.

People try, though. Part of it is that it's hard to compare things from two generations. Babe Ruth wouldn't have smacked so many homers these days (mind you, Babe Ruth probably would've been suspended innumerable times). And any NFL team today (even NFC West teams) would've rolled over the Steel Curtain from the 70's. That's why sports generally compare how good a player is to how good he does against his chronological peers, not against everyone that's ever played. It's unfair to expect anybody to ever get 215 points in an NHL season again, because times have changed and the neutral zone trap killed hockey.

Similarly, video games get compared to their peers. That's why Ocarina of Time is held up on such an incredible pedestal. It was a stupendous technical achievement, along with fantastic story-telling and great gameplay. At least, that's what I've heard. I played Twilight Princess first, and now Ocarina looks (and generally plays) like crap. If I had played OoT and then TP, I probably would be among those stating that OoT is better (slightly). But if an older game is rendered unplayable due to the quality of a new one, doesn’t that mean the newer one is better? Not when Nostalgia is factored in.

Movies are the same way to, especially around the 90’s. That was when CGI was introduced, and suddenly we got Pre-CGI and Post-CGI movies. Plots are generally the same for both, and it doesn’t really affect dramas or most comedies, but older action movies get a lot more love than they deserve (or newer ones a lot more hate) just because of what computers can do these days. But CGI opens up vistas of possibilities. Transformers? Where would they be without CGI? And even if most things are still done live action, the advancements in today’s technology (say, for pyrotechnics or camera control) still allow for much wider variety than what we have before. You think Die Hard would be a good movie if it were released as is today? You think it’s possible to do Die Hard 4 in 1988? And yet, which gets held up as the better action movie? For my money, I’d actually go with the latter. Because I’ll Live Free (of nostalgia) or Die Hard.

Star Wars - The Old Republic

Evan and I are watching the last two Harry Potter movies this week. Since I’ve already written about those (see here), I can’t do that again. You’d be getting the same jokes, and my fanbase (Hi Mom!) would revolt. I’m not far enough into Skyrim to give a detailed review of that game (but trust me, it’s coming). Instead, I’ll write about Star Wars: The Old Republic. The NDA was lifted this week, so I can talk about what happened last week. Note: this was being written well before it can be posted, so it may be out of date.

I got a fantastic email on Wednesday. It was from Bioware (or possibly SW:TOR), inviting me to participate in a weekend beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Now, I have been looking forward to this game ever since it was announced. I imagine when it does come out, you will not see me for a month. It will replace my addiction to World of Warcraft (or possibly, just add to it). The email gave me a link to a page with more links on it, and some details. The links were for a forum, and for an installer.

The installer itself was pretty small, but it was pretty much just a downloader, and once it was on my computer, it got to work. 20 gigs worth of work, actually. Besides that, there were two main things I had on my mind. First, I had agreed to an NDA (a non-disclosure agreement), so I wasn't allowed to talk about my beta experiences for a while. Secondly, I would have roughly 55 hours from start to finish (4 pm on Friday to 11 pm on Sunday), so I intended to play the hell out of the game while I had the chance.

After a few days of downloading, Friday finally arrived. I actually had it off (honouring the memories of our World War veterans by lightsabering my way across the cosmos), which was nice, but I needed to kill a few hours. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how much free time I need in the next month), Skyrim was released on Friday at midnight. Actually it was released at 12 AM EST, so 10 PM Thursday night here. I got in about an hour that night and a few hours more on Friday before signing off for the weekend to get my Force on.

4 o'clock. Signed in. Couldn't play. 4:01. Signed in. Couldn't play. Waited about 20 minutes (it's amazing how much time TVTropes can kill). Around 4:30, I signed in again. This time the Play button was lit up, like a beacon of hope in an otherwise Star Wars-less universe (a universe in which I do not wish to live). I pressed it, the loader disappeared, and my computer did nothing for an anxious 15 seconds (I got a realistic grasp on how little patience I have when 15 seconds of my computer doing nothing nearly sent me over the edge). Finally, I get The Old Republic logo, and then a cinematic. Specifically, the game cuts directly into The Taking of Korriban trailer. Awesome McCool-Sauce. Finally get to the main screen. I fix my settings (1920 x 1080, thank you) and get to select a server. Next, a 5 step process for choosing my character. First, my alignment. I choose Sith, because I intend on playing Republic in the release and didn't want to spoil the story. As soon as I clicked on Sith, I got another cinematic. This time, it was the Deceived trailer, featuring a bunch of Jedi and Sith fighting in the Jedi temple on Coruscant. Kick. Ass.

Once that's done, I choose my class, race, gender, and specific customization. Class was Sith Warrior (dual wielding lightsabers? Yes please). Race was a bit harder. Humans were too widespread, and I didn't want the Darth Maul race because it would look a little too Satanic, and I'd probably be thrown off by the uncomfortable spiritual connotations of staring at that all day. I settled on a cyborg, which is a human but I got to choose specific metal improvements. I played a male, since it raises fewer questions than a dude playing a hot chick and getting hit on virtually. MMO's are weird like that. Lastly, I got some personal customization. That's where I got to choose a body type (ranging from 90-pound weakling to offensive lineman for the NFL), hair, eyes, the usual stuff. I ended up with a thin, young guy, black hair parted on one side, with mechanical right eye and scars on his left cheek. Pressed play, and off we go!

Dah! Duh duh duh! Yay, Star Wars Music! And Star Wars Text. I haven't even played yet, and already I get three awesome things. Two trailers, and iconic music with personalized text. Now THIS is how to start a game. F---! YES!

Anyway, the text describes how I'm brought in early for Sith training, apparently as some sort of secret weapon for a rising star in the Sith Order. I land on Korriban and meet my mentor in a cut scene, and get into a conversation with him. It's fully voiced, and I'm given some options on how to respond, but we can't loop around to the same points in any conversation, like in a single-player Bioware games. Almost every choice is irrevocable in conversations, so beware. If you’re a dick, there’s no option to go back and be nice to make up for it.

Anyway, I finally get control of my character, and get some pointers on the right side of the screen on how to move around, and other basics. I leave the room I'm in through a green screen, which apparently represents my own story mode. Green screens (they’re mostly transparent, but shaded green) are essentially instances from World of Warcraft. Some are personal (only you can go in there) and some are group only. It's cool because there's almost no loading, and if you interact with an NPC only behind a green screen, you can kill them (if the story demands) without having one of the classic gameplay and story segregations of "Hey, didn't I kill you already?" I got a little wary of green screens though, because after a few of them, I almost expected to have to kill whoever was behind them.

Anyway, I left the green screen and explored a bit, encountering a red screen. This is a story instance for a different player, so I wasn't allowed to enter. But I did find my way towards whatever I saw supposed to go towards, which turned out to be a tomb of some sort. I recognized the name from the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, so that was a nice touch. I didn't play KotOR II enough to know how much of that will be called back, but it's cool to see Bioware playing it straight with their franchise-within-a-franchise.

In the tomb, there were more quest givers. You can tell they have quests because they have triangles above their heads. If they end a quest, the triangle is filled in. This is just one of the ways Bioware is trying to make SW:TOR different than WoW, by having gameplay the same but calling everything different. "See?" They say. "They have triangles instead of exclamation points. It's COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! And our character portraits are on the bottom." I actually liked the character portraits on the bottom, because they were right next to the action bars, so everything in our HUD was sort of grouped together, except not quite. There were some menu buttons at the top (character sheet, abilities, inventory, game menu, world map, that type of thing. There were only four action bars of 12 buttons each, and you could only see up to two at a time. But it was oddly set up. You could see one bar and scroll through them all, or see two (bars one and two) and scroll through one, three, and four while two stayed constant underneath it. So two would be for immediately needed skills that didn't need to be keybound? I don't get it. I ended up sticking my cooldowns and non-essentials on it.

Anyway, back to the gameplay. I got some quests, which took me around this giant tomb, with a bunch of other people. The lag seemed small enough (it was listed at <100 ms), but there seemed to be a bit of a disconnect between when I pressed the button for an action, and when I took that action. On top of that, enemy health gets taken off at the beginning of what action you take, but the animation may take half a second or so to complete. So I'd press a button, then a slight pause, then the enemy's health could decline before the animation would take place, and then my action would end. It all seemed disconnected, which is a problem for newbies. I have plenty of experience with newer Bioware games, and a few years with WoW, plus some other RPG's as well. I'm a veteran player, and it took me a while to get into it. How will this affect people that don't know what they're getting into?

Anyway, some of my quests popped up a bonus option. For instance, a quest for setting off three explosives at specific places might have a bonus option of killing 6 mobs, but that bonus would only be triggered by killing off a mob. So if you don't hack and slash everything around you on your way to your objective, you may be passing up valuable experience.

My original quest was to get a weapon from an ancient Sith Armory in the tomb. It wasn't a lightsaber, but it was a melee weapon. I got it (from behind a green screen), completed its bonus of beating droids, and ran around the tomb, doing other quests and getting hopelessly lost. I also levelled up and got some more abilities. And there was this little bar below my health that kept filling with dashes. Eventually I figured out what I was doing, what those dashes were (rage, a familiar gameplay mechanic for WoW warriors), got into the game, and found a route out of the tomb. I also got some nifty abilities. One was a distance closer, with me leaping at an enemy from 10 to 30 meters away. Usually, this would just be me flipping or jumping straight at an enemy. If something was in the way, though, I'd end up flipping sideways at it. It sounds silly, but looks unbelievably cool, like my character is hyper-acrobatic and gravity is his plaything. The other ability is an AoE (damages more than one enemy around me) that also stuns for a short duration. There were a few rage builders, but more rage dumps for large damage.

Out of the tomb, I ran to the Sith Temple, where I got more training, and met up with my mentor behind a green screen. Ominous indeed. I got sent to various other tombs that I recognized, and introduced to the travel system. There are taxi points, where one can take a speeder (sometimes bike, or just a shuttle) to another taxi point, but only to ones you’ve already discovered. It's a quick way to get across the massive planetary areas Bioware's provided. I completed some quests, and tried to take down the monster that was part of my main quest, but got killed pretty quick. I turned in some quests, killed some mobs, levelled up, got new abilities, and took another crack at it. This time, I barely got the monster down. Whew. It was behind a green screen, so it was story related.

When I got back, my mentor informed me I was summoned by the head of the academy, a Lord Baras. He was also behind a green screen, and gave me the quest of killing my mentor (for some political shenanigans involving my rival that didn't work out) and bringing his hand as proof. So, back to my mentor, I told him what was going on, and got a big choice. I could kill him reluctantly, kill him with pleasure, or just take his hand.

I decided to kill him reluctantly. I needed him dead, or else my new master may sense him still alive, or at least that I was trying deception. But he had brought me to Korriban and given me this opportunity. I had played up to this point as a rather arrogant douchebag, so it was a little jarring being thrown into this situation. Normally I play (any character in many games, actually) as a nice guy, but I tried to think as a Sith would. This was one time where I didn't just want to pick the worst option for gameplay reasons. So kudos to Bioware for story-telling.

I took this guy's hand back to Lord Baras, who sent me on some more quests. More tombs, better gear, higher levels. I got some HEROIC quests, which are labelled that way because they'll need two or more players to complete. They deal with elite mobs, or higher than that. And usually a boss. I tried one of them, and didn't make it very far. I hung around the entrance to the other, beside another player. After a few seconds, he invited me to a group, and we got to it. Well, we tried. We died. A lot. Sometimes I didn't see mobs, or pulled one set while he pulled another. Eventually we cleared the area and beat the boss (that last part went pretty smoothly), completing the quest. Then we went to the other area and did that one. It went a lot better, even though it was HEROIC 2+ instead of just HEROIC 2 (like the one where we died a lot). He died once, I didn't at all, and another quest done.

I didn't notice too many bugs. My lips didn't move during one quest, and my gloves were screwed up for a while. My right one was fine, but the left one flared up around my elbow. It looked like my wrist had it's own gravity-defying mini-cape. I noticed a similar bug on an NPC that was awaiting execution for treason. Due to the static nature of the surrounding environments and NPC’s, he’s going to be kneeling there, waiting for the killing blow for months. I’d feel sorry for him, but he betrayed my order and should die. You know, my order built on evil and all that jazz.

Eventually, I got sent on a quest called "The Final Quest" to retrieve an ancient Sith Lightsaber (if you're wondering why everything is Ancient Sith this and Ancient Sith that, it's because Korriban was the homeworld of the Sith millennia ago, but lost it or died at some point a while back). I ended up killing my rival (fulfilling the political shenanigans of my now-dead mentor) and getting myself an awesome weapon.

Also, I had a companion tag along. She was a Twi'lek named Vette who had been captured opening the tomb I was supposed to go into, and now a slave to the Sith Empire. I was to take her to the tomb and make her open up whatever secret passages would lead me to my goal. She sported a blaster and stat-worthy (if revealing) clothes. I treated her as a guide, rather than a slave (even if she did wear a shock collar to which I had the controls).

We got back to Lord Baras and got a new quest to meet him on Dromund Baas (the Sith Capital world). The personal questline never really stops. You end one in a conversation that also gives the next one, so there's always at least one quest to do or turn in. Anyway, I got a special token to show to the shuttle pilot that would get me access and take me offworld, which I did after clearing up some side quests and getting me through most of level nine (all the good stuff pops up at level ten). So I took a shuttle to the space station, which was part of the orbital fleet. I took off Vette’s shock collar (we’re more partners than anything). Somehow I completed some necessary quests and got to level ten, which opened up some options: Talents trees and PvP, as well as a quest giver. He told me to talk to a specific trainer to pick a specialization (Sith Warriors can choose Juggernauts - tanks - or Marauders - Melee DPS). I chose Marauder, because they can dual-wield lightsabers. The reward for this quest was a second lightsaber, so I was ready to get my dual-wielding on.

I was also given a flashpoint quest. Flashpoints are group quests in instances. This one involved a battle in the middle of a trip to Dromund Kaas. People were looking for a group in the General chat of the station, so I managed to get myself into a group with three other players. I got really lost, but eventually made it to where the group was (after a few blue screens - these are green screens that a group member has gone through already - elevators, and loading screens). We beat a boss, went back to the command deck, and got sent over to the enemy cruiser to kidnap or kill a general over there. We didn't die much (thanks to the healing of the Sith Sorcerer in our group. He was a pretty good player already), and I got some good materials from my Salvage skill. Salvage is a crew skill (think professions in other games) that can snag the wreckage of some droids, as well as some junk piles in random locations (like ore nodes in World of Warcraft). There were more gathering skills as well, and some crafting skills, but you're only allowed to choose one crafting skill (I got salvage, cybernetics to craft tech equipment, and investigation, which gives me companion gifts and some compounds I need for crafting). Anyway, I got some salvage, but not a lot of gear. Still, good times, learning how to group. Getting into social scenes is fun. In conversations, everyone is able to choose what response they want, and the game chooses randomly who actually answers. Doing these increases your social rank, but I'm not sure how useful the social rank will actually turn out to be. Anyway, once that was done, it was really late, so I landed in Dromund Kaas and logged off.

The next morning, my server was greyed out. I had no idea what that meant, so on a different server, I started a Bounty Hunter. Built like a linebacker, and of the Ratataki race. I got the opening crawl, and I played him a lot more sarcastically than my Sith. I'm not sure if that's because more sarcastic options are available, or what. Also, his voice was a lot different, and I got to wondering how they split that up. By race? By class? By body type? My skinny guy sounded arrogant (and familiar. I think he's the voice of Fenris in Dragon Age II) and my big guy sounded gruffer.

Anyway, after my opening crawl (it still gets me excited), I get plopped down into the bounty hunter's story. Same type of quests as the Sith Warrior, although I do get something new: Heroic Area's. These are areas where the mobs are much harder, but they aren't separated from the rest of the world by a green screen. I got lost and wandered into one. I was actually able to complete a few tasks there because another group was in there, clearing out the mobs and doing the same quests I was. I'm not sure if heroic areas are good things or bad things. You can sort of tag along with a group if you're feeling shy, but it's easy to stumble into and not realize what's going on until your paste on the ground.

Not that being paste on the ground is such a horrible fate. Dying is actually pretty painless. Gear takes some damage (which you’ll have to repair, but just about every vendor can do that, regardless of what they sell), and you have to wait increasing durations of time (depending on how often and quickly you die) to resuscitate in the same place, or to be resurrected in a nearby outpost. If you go to the outpost, you get full health. In place will leave you temporarily stealthed but at low health.

Low health isn't a problem as long as you're not in combat. Each class has a channelled ability that can regenerate all your health in 15 second. If you're not damaged that much, you can stop the channelling whenever you want. This ability means far less downtime between fights, or less money spent on food or drinks (as some people are used to in WoW). Fantastic choice.

Another good choice is a companion ability to sell all the vendor trash in one fell swoop. You don't even need to go to town. Just send the companion away (it’s an option around their portrait) for a minutes, and suddenly the inventory is a lot less full. I'm not sure where this was first borrowed from, but I did notice it in Torchlight. Bioware tends to borrow from good games, at least. From Borderlands, they borrowed the Glowing Loot Pillar. If the mob you killed had loot, it'll glow, and you can right click it to get the loot. A blue glow means vendor trash (it's conveniently labelled, too. "This item has no use, but may be sold to a vendor.") while a green glow has two good meanings. One is for uncommon equipment that can either be equipped, or sold for good credits. Green glows can also mean the loot contains a planetary badge. Each planet has its own badge (and sometimes you get separate badges for other stuff as well). Multiple badges can be traded in for rare (blue) equipment. Badges can show up as a quest reward, and very occasionally on a mob. Yellow pillars mean a quest item dropped. I imagine dark blue means a rare drop, and purple pillars mean epic loot (keeping with the tradition of white < green < blue < purple for gear quality).

And yes, purple gear is already in the game. In fact, I managed to loot a purple mod of some sort, but had no idea how to use it. Mods fit into modification slots on some pieces of equipment. The quality of the equipment determines how many slots they have. For instance, green-level lightsabers only have a color crystal, whereas blue-level have crystal, support, overlay, and one more that I can't remember. So I can stack my blue-level lightsabers with massive stats. Good times.

Well, anyway, I managed to get a group for the heroic zones, but missed out on the bonus because most of the required enemies had been killed already. That's one of the problems with heroic areas. So I missed out on a little extra experience.

I actually abandoned my bounty hunter around level eight (just after I had gotten my companion) to do some laundry. When I logged back in, my original server was back up, so I hopped back on (into?) my skinny douchebag of a Sith.

I picked up and completed a couple of quests around the Dromund Kaas Spaceport, then took a taxi to Kaas City (the capital city of the capital planet). Besides continuing my story with Lord Baras, I got a couple of quests limited to the city (but they took me around the city, so I got to explore), and I found my trainer and bunch of vendors. Vendors are usually grouped together, and offer a lot. Expensive but good equipment. Mods. Weapons. Armor (heavy, medium, and light). Badge stuff (this time selling for Dromund Kaas badges), with the added benefit of being able to trade in other planets badges on a two-to-one scale. So leftover badges from other planets can still be used, albeit at half price. Also, there was a companion gift vendor. Companion gifts come in a variety of flavours (historical, underworld, decorative, whatever), and you're supposed to pay attention to your companion or read their codex entry (the codex is an in-universe encyclopaedia for everything you've learned) to find out what they like. The one time I tried to give a gift, Vette asked "Is this a joke?" and I got no added affection from her.

Companion affection is one of the meters in the game. I tended to gain it in 15 point burst (a good decision will gain me 15 points of affection) and lose points one at a time (an arrogant or cruel decision will lose one point). I only lost a bunch once, when there was a quest with the option of what to do to rebellious slaves. I decided to manipulate them into doing what I wanted, and Vette (being a former slave) didn't like me to the tune of -30 affection. But I gained it in leaps and bounds on other quests, so it didn't really matter all that much.

Dromund Kaas involves hunting through the jungles outside of Kaas City for rebels, slaves, and aliens to complete various quest. It has a heroic area of Mandalorians, and another involving an invasion of some sort. Here, another problem with heroic areas popped up. I got a quest to retrieve three packs of explosives by killing the demolitions experts that held them. I got into a group, but was fairly far away, so it took me a few minutes to get to the area. My group had started without me, so I could only find two experts to kill. Then they got the next quest, while I was stuck gathering explosives. Their quest was to blow up shuttles, so they went from one to the next to the next. In between the first and the second, we killed a demolitions expert and I got the last pack, advancing my quest to the next stage, but it meant once we were done blowing up three shuttle, we had to trek all the way back to the first one so that I could blow that up (luckily, they respawn). Then we all advanced to the next stage of the quest, which was to kill the leader of the invasion forces. Fairly easy to do, then we took a death port (intentionally getting killed, and resurrecting at a nearby outpost) to get to the quest giver and collect our awesome rewards. Heroic quest tend to give out Blue-level rewards, so if you can finish them, you'll be set for a few levels.

Bugs turned up, but they were few and far between. One quest I couldn't complete because I couldn't loot the required object from a corpse. One quest I managed to reacquire despite having completed it the previous day (maybe the server maintenance reset it). I didn’t complete it again for fear that it would bug out completely and I’d have to restart. It's possible it was a daily and I just didn't know it. A few junk piles I couldn't scavenge, but that's it. My glove had fixed itself, and my lips moved when I talked.

At level 14, I got an ability called Sprint (actually, everyone gets it) that allows characters to move 35% faster when out of combat. This made it a hell of a lot easier to get around, particularly for quests that don't take place near discovered taxi's. I had to keep remembering to turn it back on after I died, though (and yes, I died often enough that that got to be a real annoyance).

Once I wrapped up my personal quest, Lord Baras sent me to the spaceport for my very own spaceship. Awesome! I cleared up a few more quests and wandered over there to take a look and try it out. I looked around and found a droid who couldn't fight, but could do crew skills for me while I did other things. See, that's another thing that companions can do. The perform crew skills, but have to be away for a certain amount of time for it to happen. I didn't really want Vette to depart while I had to fight (since she's quite useful in combat), so getting a second companion (you can only bring one with you) let me always have a crew skill on the go.

I activated the holoconference table (it's a 3D telephone, basically), and Lord Baras told me to go to two planets to hunt down and kill his spies. They're about to be exposed, so it's best to have them dead rather than alive, providing proof.

I also got the chance to try out some space combat. Man, is that awesome! It's a rail shooter, but it's a spectacularly beautiful rail shooter. My first mission was to escort a shuttle as it tried to make it to a friendly ship. Other fighters would fly in to take pot-shots at it, and heavier ships (think the Corellian Corvette that Princess Leia flies on at the very beginning of Star Wars) have turbolaser turrets. Each fighter and turret has a nice ring around it on the HUD, making them easy to spot and shoot. Fighters go down after one or two hits, but turrets take a number of hits. Shooting is done by left-clicking. Right click unleashes a missile at whichever target you have your mouse over. Your ship generally follows your mouse around within the confines of the rails, like a spaceship version of a third person shooter. The mechanics are fairly well done, and because it's on rails, Bioware can make the rails go every which way. I was screaming over some ships while shooting at fighters, then ducking under more ships before firing missiles off at various turrets on the frigate that was trying to shoot down my protectee.

The first time I tried that mission, I failed. But I succeeded on the second time, and then tried a few more space missions (three are available right from the start, and they appear to be dailies - you can do them once a day after you complete them the first time, so that's pretty cool). One of them involves an assault on a republic controlled space station, so the rails took me around the heavier cruisers guarding it to make a run over the top, then back out and in again for a strafing run at the bottom. I had a certain number of targets I had to destroy (shuttle bays, tractor beam emplacements, turrets) before I was allowed to jump to lightspeed, leaving a smoking station behind me and my allies.

The last mission is a showdown with some elite Republic pilots, led by their veteran boss. I was tasked with taking down 5 elites and the boss, all while flying within an asteroid field. And the asteroids are made of ice, making this combat deadly and beautiful. Bioware has made magic. This thing is just phenomenal. I can't wait until launch day. If they add PvP space combat, I may pass out from sheer excitement.

So, after I took a run at those, I went to another planet whose name escapes me, but reminded me of Tatooine, only with slightly more water and vegetation. There, my personal quest was to destroy some sort of building that contained evidence of who the spy was, and possible links back to Lord Baras. Oh yes, if you're wondering how Lord Baras knew his spies were in danger of being compromised, it's because we tortured it out of a captured agent back on Dromund Kaas. One of my quests there was to find a device that could break him, because he was rather resilient. The cutscenes involving the final device were both disturbing and pretty cool.

Anyway, I destroyed the evidence-holding building on this new planet and did a few other quests, before my intermittent helper - a Lieutenant Quinn - pointed me to a droid factory where the spy was. The factory was guarded by a lot of the best Republic troops, so this quest was going to be a bit of a handful. I managed to avoid a lot of combat, actually, before entering a green screen.

There, a bunch of a troops confronted me, delaying me so their superior (Lord Baras's spy) could bring in reinforcements. They never came, although the spy did. He was quite willing to die, but put up a good fight to make it look authentic.

Unfortunately, the Jedi investigating all of this managed to record our conversation, so I had to rush to the Spaceport to head her off. I got too her right before she could board her ship, but she had already transmitted her recordings offworld. Curses! We fought lightsaber-to-lightsaber (well, with Vette on my side as well) and brought her down. Lieutenant Quinn showed up during her dying breaths and told me he'd intercepted her transmission offworld. Good man! Our plans were safe (for now). I went back into town and upgraded my ship (you can do that), before doing the space dailies, this time with far more firepower. Ridiculously fun! Then I got on the holo with Lord Baras, who told me to go to Nal Hutta and kill his other spy there. After that, there was about 10 minutes left before the weekend beta was over, so I said good-bye and logged off.

My impressions? This game is seriously AWESOME! The double-trailer to Star Wars crawl opening is a fantastic way to get everyone excited about playing. Hopefully that will carry over to the hour or so it takes to get used to everything and get really into the game. From there, the personal story is engaging (at least the ones I played), although the opening planet for the Bounty Hunter is a bit depressing. It’s basically like a toxic waste dump, or New Jersey.

Levelling takes a while. I got to 19 after about 24 hours of playing. I'm not sure if that's good or not, but sometimes it feels interminable trying to get through your current level. But once you gain a level, your stats increase, you get new abilities (either new abilities or higher ranks in ones you already have are available at every level). I felt really stupid for not noticing the tab underneath my trainer that let me train in abilities specific to my advanced class (Maurader) until level 17. Meaning I had missed out on seven levels of abilities. Seven! But I picked those up and used them as much as I could.

It plays the similar to World of Warcraft, but tries very hard not to show it. It also borrows good parts from other games, for which I approve. If you're going to steal, steal the best! Space combat is awesome, and I want to get back into it. I like how groups are smaller (four people, with all roles contributing to damage instead of just the three DPS), but I don’t like that you need them for areas that aren't instanced. All in all, a fantastic game, and I cannot wait for December 20th (or a few days earlier, depending on how preorders went).

It turns out I don't have to wait that long. Bioware is announcing a new beta (the last beta), and they're trying to blow the doors off. Everyone who signed up to test before November 11th gets an invite, regardless of whether or not they've tested before. And a lot of people got to play this past weekend, so they'll all get the chance to play again. Plus, if you haven't signed up, many game companies have thousands of keys available. Seriously, there were over 200,000 between Curse and Joystiq. That's not even counting places like IGN or PCGamer (where I didn't check numbers). I think Bioware's hoping for one million testers, which would certainly put a load on their servers.

They also released some stats from the weekend I got to play. Testers put in one million hours. Since the period was only 55 hours long, there were at least 20,000 people in there. I put in 30 hours across two characters, and if people put in similar numbers to me, that would be about 30,000 - 35,000 people. I think there were about 20 servers, giving a population of maybe 1500 or a little more players per server.

This is actually divided between three duplicate levels, which is an ingenious idea on Bioware's part (or whoever they borrowed it from). Each player plays on one of three levels (one, two or three). This cuts down on player population in one area, and means that there's only one third of the players competing for quest items. However, what happens if you have a group quest and can't find anyone? You can talk across layers to other players in General chat. If you end up grouping with them, there's an option to hop layers to where the group leader is residing. For instance, I was playing on Dromund Kaas layer one, but grouped up for a heroic quest with some people in Dromund Kaas layer two. The game asked if I wanted to go to their layer, and I said yes (there's also an option in the bottom right hand corner to change as well). A long loading screen later, and I was in exactly the same place, only now I'd be able to see my group and help kill the elite mobs around us. Great decision on Bioware's part, because it's a fantastic compromise between having too few and too many players. There's no guarantee that there won't be crowding, or a lack of players to do certain quests, but it'll be three timse better.

Anyway, I signed up for the next beta, but I'm a little stick about what to do. I saw Bounty Hunters on Dromund Kaas, which means that the second world is where the classes for each faction (Republic or Sith) converge. So if I chose trooper or smuggler, by the time I got to the second world, I'd be doing quests I'd have to repeat in the actual game. So I'll have to choose Sith again (not that that's a real problem). I could play the Sith force using class, but I have a feeling they'll play similarly to the Jedi Consular I want to play for real, so that's out. I suppose I could play Bounty Hunter, but I've already played through the first few hours. So that leaves Imperial Agent. Either ranged or melee DPS, and possible healing as well. But the healing will be technologically based, so it would play a lot differently than the Jedi Consular, while still letting me get a feel for what healing would be like. So in less than a week (hopefully), I will again be advancing the cause of the Empire as its death dealing agent. You may see part II of this beta test column soon enough.