Solo: A Star Wars Story: A Trailer

So yesterday during the Superb Owl, Lucasfilm debuted a teaser trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story. After feeling the pressure from the Cloverfield guys who don't even release trailers anymore they just beam the movies directly into your brain without warning, they went ahead and released a full length trailer. It looks fine, I'd probably be a bit more excited about it if the guy playing Han looking even the least big like Harrison Ford, or better yet showed just a fraction of his charm.

I'm sure a lot will be made about the rocky road of filming this movie; Rewrites, fired directors, additional scenes filmed after wrap. Honestly I don't really care how the sausage was made. Rogue One supposedly had all sorts of problems and it turned out fantastic. Personally, I'm more interested/concerned with how this movie is going to fit into existing Star Wars cannon.

For an obsessive nerd like me, one of the worst sins of the prequels is that they contradicted the original trilogy at every turn. Rogue One was able to avoid most of those pitfalls by having a new cast of characters and then killing them all off. They put in some hard work to make sure Rogue One transitioned into A New Hope seamlessly. That's going to be a lot harder with a prequel that's all about a couple of the main characters.

For whatever it's worth there probably isn't a bad review on earth that's going to keep me from seeing this in the theater, I'm definitely not going to be dissuaded by a luke warm trailer. Heck, the movie will probably be worth it just for the speeder chase we see a couple of seconds of. As bad as Episode I is you can always put on the pod race and I'm still happy as a clam.

The X-Wing v Tie Fighter Sequel That Never Was

A couple years ago a studio video game studio Double Damage pitched EA on a new Star Wars space combat game in the same vein as classic PC games X-Wing and Tie Fighter or X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. It went nowhere, I'm guessing because EA already has all their Star Wars eggs in the Battlefront basket a game that already lets you fly Tie Fighters and X-Wings for a bit. Think of all the microtransactions they would have lost by splitting the audience!

It's too bad space combat games have been dead since the Wing Commander series went out with a bang with Wing Commander: Prophesy. That was about 20 years ago now. Do you know how long it's been since I had to complain about an escort mission? It's a criminal when you think about it.

Death Star Construction Timelapse

If you have two minutes to spare today you could do a lot worse than watching this CGI animation of what assembling the Death Star might have looked like. It's a fun reminder that the Empire is enormous and pretty much has an unlimited amount of resources at their disposal. I mean when the first one blew up they were like "eh, lets make another one but bigger!"

Oh yeah, I saw the new Star Wars movie all the kids are talking about. It was good, very good. I'm not the kind of person to rank movies but it's in the top half I guess? I don't think I liked it better than any of the original Trilogy but I've only seen it once, I've seen the OT like a thousand times so it's kind of hard to compare it right now. I definitely think some of the fans upset over how any characters have changed or what you can or can't do with the force need to relax. It's a movie about space wizards, not a Chilton manual to repairing a car. There's a bit of room for interpretation over how everything works.

I'm excited to go see it again, maybe over Christmas break or something. I actually have a full week off from work for the first time in a year. Who knows how to party?

Not this guy anymore, I might take the bulk of that week on reorganizing my comic books.

Daisy Ridley Builds A Millennium Falcon

The fine folks at Elle Magazine, which I guess is still a thing, had the clever idea of interviewing Star Wars: The Last Jedi star Daisy Ridley while she builds a Lego Millennium Falcon. I'm not sure how they'll put that in the magazine but as far as youtube content goes it's pretty cute.

Smart of them to go with the off the shelf Millennium Falcon and not the new UCS Falcon, that would have been less an interview and more of a Hoop Dreams documentary where the film crew has to live with her for the next 4 years.

You see the UCS Millennium Falcon is like 8,000 pieces and takes hours and hours to build. "It's smart. It's a smart line, and a smart crowd will appreciate it. And I'm not going to dumb it down for some bonehead mass audience!"

EA Says: "Downvote This, Pleebs"

Yesterday a gamer went on Reddit's very popular Battlefront subreddit and voiced their opinion that EA was gouging gamers in the soon to be released Battlefront II. Some poor idiot from EA responded by inserting their foot very very far in their mouth.

The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.

As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.

Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.

The response garnered 683,000 downvotes, a locked thread and a thousand memes on every major social media platform.

The original complaint is that in a game that costs $59.99, you're going to have to play 40 hours to unlock a single popular character like Luke or Darth Vader. You of course can skip those 40 hours if you want to pay for extra credits or lootboxes. It's WAY more confusing than it needs to be but the The Verge has a pretty good rundown of what's going on here. EA has already backtracked on the policy a bit, but frankly I think they made the policy outrageous in the first place so people would accept the nerfed version. A version what's still a pretty shitty monetization strategy. They're treating Battlefront II, a full price, giant release from the biggest game publisher as a free to play game you might download on your phone.

Some old timey gamers like myself might harken back to the days of Street Fighter II, where if you wanted to play as M. Bison you had to beat him first, but I don't think this is very comparable. We're talking an on-line shooter, in theory you're competing against other games, some of whom may have done the grind or paid the extra $$ to unlock characters and features you can't use while trying to beat them. It's more like playing Arcade Street Fighter II and your opponent has access to all the bosses because they put in two quarters instead of just one.

But Kevin, don't you love Overwatch? Doesn't that game have lootboxes and micro-transactions? Aren't you a giant hypocrite?

Well yes, I'm sure I am but not over this. Overwatch does have lootboxes you can both earn while playing and buy. However none of the items you get in Overwatch lootboxes effect gameplay in any way. All the characters and maps are available to everyone. New characters, maps and gametypes are added all the time for free. The stuff you get in lootboxes is 100% cosmetic, it fun to have cool new skins for your favorite heroes but it doesn't change anything about your character, other than the way it looks or sounds.

Of course EA isn't the first company to pull this kind of garbage. Big ticket video games cost a shit load of money to make these days and publishers are trying to squeeze consumers out of their cash anyway they can. Season passes are somehow just a thing we're completely ok with these days, which boggles my mind. I mean as long as consumers keep paying it companies will keep doing it. It's one of the reasons I'm cool with just buying old games on Steam, once a game is a year or two old all that additional content is usually included.

Disney Is Doing Big BIG Stuff

Earlier today during an Earnings call Disney CEO Bob Iger dropped a bombshell of Star Wars news on all us nerds. Disney is developing a live action Star Wars TV show that will air on the soonish to be launched, as yet untitled, Disney Streaming Service. He didn't stop their, they made it official that the Marvel Deal with Netflix would end in like a year or something AND that they were working on a brand new trilogy or Star Wars movies. This new trilogy will introduce new characters set in a part of the Star Wars Universe we've never seen.

Big stuff right?

I'm sure the speculation will run rampant over what the TV show and the new Trilogy will be about. Like a decade ago when Lucas was still in charge of his own universe he had supposedly written 50 episodes of a Star Wars show that at the time was just too expensive to shoot. I'm sure this new show won't be related to that at all, but its a fun fact for everyone. I'm hoping the TV show follows some smugglers or better yet some bounty hunters. I'm kind of hoping the movie takes place during the Knights of the Old Republic era. I know in this day and age prequels are all tired and junk but how cool would that be to visit a time and place where Sith were everywhere, not just one or two crusty old dudes hiding in shadows.

As far as the Marvel stuff goes, I don't even know if that was new news. Netflix bought out Mark Millar's Millarworld brand of comics specifically so they could get some sweet superhero content they actually own. It's all about owning that content these days. I know everyone creamed their jeans the other day when it was rumored that Disney would be buying Fox's film side because we could finally get the Fantastic Four and the X-Men in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. BUT there's more to Fox than just terribly run Marvel movies. Owning all of Fox's films would be a HUGE get for them when it comes to launching their streaming service. Disney has a lot of content for kids and families to offer but not as much adult fare as other movie studios. Sure Fox is a pretty terrible studio but they've had big, well respected hits recently like the Martian, Life of Pi, or the Taken franchise.

It sounds like the deal was put on the backburner but there's zero chance Disney doesn't try to keep adding to its library in anticipation of their new service. I could write a whole other blog post about how it's actual quite bad that Disney is growing like this but I don't want them to blacklist me from seeing the next The Last Jedi.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi "Awake"

Merry Christmas, it's a new Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer. Although I'm not sure you can call it a trailer if it's only 45 seconds long. Is there such a thing as a post trailer teaser? That's more like what this is.

There's a lot of new stuff in this that hasn't been shown in the previous trailers so if you're avoiding even the most minor of spoilers it's probably not a bad idea to skip it.

We're only a month and a half away, do I need to start thinking about buying tickets? I don't HAVE to see it opening night but it would be fun to at least see it opening weekend. After months of my son saying he doesn't want to see it, now he says it looks ok. Maybe I'll check it out Saturday afternoon on opening weekend. Easier to get free babysitting for the girl on a Saturday. Obviously I'm not the first person to point out how expensive going to a movie is but holy jebus. A family of three with popcorn AND babysitting. That's like $100 for a night out. I could start working on building my own Astromech for $100. That's the reason I'm seeing Thor: Ragnarok next weekend instead of this weekend and trust me I REALLY want to see Ragnarok.

Oh well, I guess that's the price of doing business. At least when I'm old my kids won't throw me in the cheapest home they can find. Will you Logan? LOGAN?

Star Wars: The Last Jedi Trailer

Guess what? Star Wars: The Last Jedi still looks pretty cool. Shocking right?

Happy Force Friday Everyone!

Did you know it was Force Friday today? Do you even know what Force Friday is? Basically it's the day our Disney overlords have decided to make merch for the next Star Wars movie available in stores. Some stores are doing "events" but for the most part its a big social media ploy to get people talking about cool new toys.

And no new Star Wars toy is cooler than the UCS (Ultimate Collectors Series) Millennium Falcon. It's been a good 10 years since Lego has released a UCS Falcon and this one makes the old one look like a pile of crap. It's roughly 7,000 pieces strong and will only run you about $800. I'm not going to lie, I'm tempted to buy one and store it in my garage for the next 10 years. The UCS Falcon that they made 10 years ago is incredibly expensive on the secondary market. It cost something like $300 new and now in the box unopened they can go for around $1,500.

Considering this is the second UCS Falcon they've made and it's already really expensive, I doubt you'll see that some sort of return on investment as the original set but it's still pretty tempting. Of course if my son ever found out that I bought one of these and never let him play with it he's probably kill me in my sleep. Maybe I'm better off just admiring it from afar.

Old Links

Atari’s new Ataribox console will be like an NES Classic. As much fun as it it to imagine an Atari revival this thing looks like it's going to be a huge failure. There are already a half dozen different Atari retro consoles on the market and it's not like anyone is dying to play Yar's Revenge again. Don't get me wrong, I loved my 2600 when I had it but Atari games aren't that fun to play these days. I'll play combat or boxing for a few minutes but that's about it. This thing has Ouya written all over it.

By the by, I know all these links are super old but I bookmarked them and never got around to using them last month. I'd like to say that this month I won't be just as busy and will have more time to blog but that's a total lie. I'll probably be lucky if I get to 10 posts this month.

Frank Darabont's Furious Emails to His Walking Dead Coworkers: 'Fuck You All'. The e-mails they have published here are pretty funny. It's obvious at the time Darabont was writing them he either thought he was getting fired or really wanted to get fired. It's amazing to think looking back on it now that Season 2 was pretty much DOA due to AMC's insistence on cutting the show's budget in half. Now a days its the biggest thing on TV. The showrunners could probably get an old space shuttle if they wanted to do a couple zombies in space episodes.

Star Wars' Firing Reveals a Disturbance in the Franchise. Lots of people wrote about this but the Hollywood Reporter probably had the best breakdown of the exact reasons Lord and Miller were fired from Han Solo. It's pretty interesting stuff and goes to show you Disney is not messing around with the Star Wars franchise. That's probably a good or bad thing depending on your point of view. We're probably never going to see a director go completely off the rails and turn in a crap movie but on the other hand there's no room for a real talented auteur to come in and carve out a piece of lore for him or herself.

Japan’s Most Ridiculous Wrestling Promotion Hits Somewhere Near The Big Time. DDT-Pro Wrestling is crazy pants. Like they have some ultra serious looking matches with some of the hottest young talent around and then they'll follow it up by putting a title on a table. Like literally a figuratively, the table's the champ now. I wish I could justify spending the cash on their subscription service but I'm already spending too much on other stuff every month. In the meantime I'll just have to keep following them on twitter, which is still pretty fun.

Holy Links

How To Track Down The Holy Grail Of Subarus. I don't have any particular interest in Subarus but this article about a pilgrimage to Car Do Subaru Mitaka a Subaru dealer outside of Tokyo is pretty cool. Someday I'd like to have a car that has a really active community like Subaru does. Nothing against my Mazda 6 Wagon but there's not a lot of 6 Wagon clubs in Western Washington. I mean there totally should be, but people don't know what's cool around here.

What Microsoft got right and wrong at E3 2017. First off, Xbox One X? LOL.

The new Xbox looks like the system that probably should have come out when they launched the Xbox One but didn't because it would have cost like $1,000. Even if it's an extra $100 if I had to choose between the XBX or the PS4 Pro I'd pick the Xbox. It's the first console in a while that can sit beside your average gaming PC and look good, I mean it can't go toe to toe with a high end PC but next to a hodgepodge like mine it's very comparable.

It's too bad that while Sony was showing off all these cool exclusive games (or at least semi-exclusive map packs and DLC) Big Redmond was "stuck" showing Forza 7 and Crackdown 3. Also a lot of talk about backwards compatibility, which to me always seems weird. You have a chance to really make hay with your newest and shiniest toys and one of your big announcements is a game that came out 17 years ago? Good luck with that.

Still, if I end up forced to get a new console because those rat bastards at Rockstar won't put Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC I'll probably get an Xbox One X.

Sony PlayStation at E3 2017: The 15 best announcements. Speaking of Sony and their cool exclusive games, just watch the footage of the new Spider-Man game. Holy carp, that looks super fun. All the VR stuff they showed off looks doofy to me but I don't know. Maybe this time Virtual Reality will stick and not just be some brief fad.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2: Free DLC, better weapons, and new character classes. Do I dare get on board the hype train here? I finally got a chance to play Battlefront a few weeks ago and it was a pretty cool game. I know it got a lot of hate with your "hardcore" gamer but I don't know. What I saw I liked a lot. If they've taken that same experience and added to it? I might just have to drop the $59 and put down Overwatch for a few weeks.

Today's Star Wars weather

Apparently meteorologist Sian Welby from 5 News over in England somewhere really likes to sprinkle pop culture puns and references into her reports. She's done Back to the Future and Superman v Batman, Suicide Squad, etc. I know this clip is about a year old but what the heck, it's Star Wars day and I couldn't find anything else that was both interesting and quick to post.

ENJOY!

Star Wars THE LAST JEDI - Easter Eggs & Predictions

I've been so busy the last few weeks I'm not even sure I posted the trailer for The Last Jedi. So lets just skip that and go straight to this Easter Egg breakdown from The New Rockstars. There's definitely some good stuff in there that I missed the first dozen times I watched it. I'm not 100% sure their educated guesses to storyline points are more than guesses but hey, it's always fun to speculate. Plus my son watched this with me yesterday and said I need to put it on my blog. Not even sure he knows what a blog is yet but that was a fun Sunday,

A Tribute To Carrie Fisher

Today started the big old Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, if you're not familiar with Star Wars Celebration it's like Comicon but just Star Wars and they don't exactly have it every year. ReedPop the same people that own and run NYCC and ECCC run it. Whatever, that doesn't really matter.

Today they premiered this really nice tribute to Carrie Fisher, they also announced a bunch of other stuff like new toy lines and books and a cartoon. The thing that made the most hay on the internet was this tribute. It's all Star Wars, so it doesn't cover her writing career or anything, which I guess is to be expected. It's nice that even though she did a lot of other things in her life she's perfectly fine with being remembered as Princess Leia. It always kind of sucks when a celeb becomes really resentful of their big break. It's also impressive that she remembers all her dialogue, I bet you money Harrison Ford couldn't recite more than 3 lines.

Star Wars Battle Pod: The Review

A couple years ago Bandai/Namco introduced a big fancy new Star Wars game for the arcade market called Battle Pod. I think I did a post about it but don't quote me on that. Well, thanks to a doctor canceling an appointment same day, my son and I spent the afternoon at an arcade and got a chance to check it out.

The arcade that we went to has a lot more classic games than new ones (with the exception of all the fancy new pinball machines) so I was surprised to find it there. It wasn't cheap, $2 a play, so we only played it a couple times. If the levels weren't so short and you didn't have to pay to continue to the next level we might have played it more but it was worth giving it a try. It's a bit hard to tell by my crack photography here but the screen is curved and wraps around you somewhere around 180 degrees. It's not total immersion but it's pretty close. Close enough that when you're making that trench run you definitely feel like you're Red-5 and Darth is on your tail. It might not be the best Star Wars game I've ever played but as far as feeling like you're in a movie I don't think it can be beat. It's a rail shooter so you don't have much control over where you're flying. I feel like if they took the same screen and graphics and just made it a full on space flight sim you'd really have something special. Maybe save the rail shooter stuff for the trench run but also have full space battles where you're actually piloting the x-wing.

Just throwing some ideas out there.

If you run across one of these in the wild I heartily recommend you try it out. It's worth the couple dollars just to experience once or twice. Or if you're a millionaire and had $20,000 burning a hole in your pocket this would make a real nice cornerstone of a home arcade.


UPDATE! These things cost $100,000, that's a lot of wampa pelts...

Nestled Links

Xbox exclusive action game Scalebound has been canceled. Well this is too bad. Scalebound looked kinda cool, Skyrim but with friends and floating castles, what's not to love there? It was from the studio that did Bayonetta which I just picked up for like $12 on the WiiU and that game is the bomb.com. Hopefully this doesn't bode poorly for other hotly anticipated Microsoft studios titles. I'm excited for this whole PC/Xbox synergy thing they announced last year. Get me some semi-exclusive PC titles stat.

People still use the Amiga today, and new Viva Amiga documentary shows why. I'm pretty sure I've never used an Amiga before. I'm familiar with the computer and I remember people who had them really liked them, but I'm near positive I've never had the pleasure. Still, I'm all in on this documentary. I'm a sucker for anything about old technology like this and the people that are obsessed over it.

All the Major Star Wars Cameos and Connections You May Have Missed in Rogue One. I know this is like 3 weeks old but who cares? My wife still hasn't seen Rogue One and I'm really eager to see it a second time in the theater. In fact now that I'm typing this out there's a small chance I posted this already right before I went on vacation. Oh well, no stopping now!

The Rock’s 2017 Fitness Regimen Includes A Toilet Nestled Among His Weights, Possibly Sparks New Trend. People who lift weights, are weird.

Silent Night by Chewbacca

Not sure if anything really needs to be said about this. It's Chewbacca singing Silent Night in his native tongue, Shyriiwook. There's something you should keep mind bottled for the next time you play Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. Shyriiwook.

Darth Santa Strikes Back!

You know, my son has a really fantastic Kyle Ren costume he got for Halloween. All I need is a Darth Vader costume and a bit of free time. What could possible go wrong?

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer #2

Hey there second trailer for Rogue One, how you doing?

I'm not sure that this trailer is "as good" as the first trailer, there's a disturbing lack of Stormtroopers on a tropical beach, but it does give us a bit more on the main character. Also we get to see more cool things like the new U-Wing, K-2SO and Forest Whitaker's robot feet. Save the date for Dec 16th, you're definitely going to want to check out what's going on with those robot feet before the internet spoils it for you.

STAR WARS Easter Eggs: Prequel Trilogy

I've mentioned before here that my son watches a lot of YouTube. That can be a good thing and a bad thing, some YouTube channels are just mindless garbage but others can be pretty interesting even dare I say a bit educational?

This Easter Egg video isn't one of the educational ones, unless you think learning about Star Wars cameos counts as education. I mean, I guess you're learning something, just nothing anyone actually needs to know. My son might never be valedictorian but he's going to kill it at trivia night at the pub.

Back to the video, I was actually impressed with the amount of interesting cameos George Lucas filled the prequels with. It doesn't necessarily make the movies any better but it's nice that he's willing to put so many of the crew on screen. Good for you George.