Star Wars: The Old Republic – Becoming a Jedi Knight and a Jedi Sentinel

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I love Star Wars: The Old Republic. If you don’t know it’s a massively-multiplayer online game along the same lines as World of Warcraft. The thing is, in many ways it’s much, much better. Star Wars: The Old Republic (or SWTOR for short) has a couple of things going for it that WOW doesn’t have, the most important of which is that SWTOR is based on Star Wars! I loved those movies as a kid, especially the original, so being able to play as a character in the same world as the movies is great. On top of that, SWTOR has a great storyline with voice acting and personal choices for each of the different types of characters you can play – and yes, one of the characters you can play is a Jedi Knight.

My first character in SWTOR was a Jedi Knight, customized to look like me (with a beard). I named him Zann. Here he is:

As you can see, he has a female Jedi companion and two badass lightsabers. There’s a very good reason for that. My Jedi is a Jedi Sentinel, a class of Jedi Knight that deals more damage than any other type of character in the game. You can also choose to be a more defensive-minded Jedi but you don’t get to use two lightsabers at once like a Sentinel can!

His storyline is awesome. You start off on Tython, which is the Jedi homeworld, and you go through training until you get to level 10 when you are sent off-world to do all kinds of missions. You get a couple of companions, the best IMO being Kira Carsen, who you can see in my picture above. She becomes your padawan, and depending on the choices you make all kinds of paths are open to you, including the path to the dark side of the force, which makes your character a bad guy. I chose to stay on the side of the light and Kira fell in love with my Jedi (how could she resist)! Kira kicks ass in her own right, she has a double-bladed lightsaber staff that deals quite a bit of damage. Kira has a very interesting storyline of her own which you get to influence along the way. You also get a little droid companion that can fight alongside you and beeps and whirls like R2-D2, which his own personality and storyline as well.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is an excellent game and I recommend it highly. It costs me $14.99 a month for my monthly subscription but it’s money well spent. My only criticism of SWTOR is that they should keep expanding it, adding planets and storylines. There’s a million things they could do with this gaming world and now is the time to put it all together, but from what I’ve seen so far they’re doing a good job releasing new content all the time.

Check out the trailer for the Jedi Knight below, and check the game out when you get a chance!

The New Official Movie Trailer for The Avengers – Coming Out This Summer, 2012

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I love the new Avengers movie trailer. This is the big one, the long trailer they want the most people to see. Here it is:

We have been getting teasers for this movie since the end of the first Iron Man when Robert Downey Jr. comes home to find Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) asking him to join “The Avenger Initiative”. For comic book fans, and especially Marvel fans, hearing those words meant we would finally see Thor, Captain America and Iron Man together on film. I remember being incredibly excited at the time but I don’t think I really believed it was going to happen. Well, as you can see, it’s definitely happening.

They made Iron Man 2 with a scene after the credits teasing Thor, then a scene after the credits of Thor with Nick Fury again (this time teasing that Loki would be the villian in The Avengers… but is he the only villian? We don’t know for sure…) There was also a scene after the credits of The Incredible Hulk with Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark which also laid the foundation for The Avengers. They’ve been doing an amazing job of preparing us for this thing, and actually I don’t think there is a precedent for this kind of years-in-the-making advertising strategy in the history of Hollywood. You have to go back to the original comic books to see anything like it.

My reaction to this most recent trailer is probably very similar to most of you. I thought it was fucking awesome. When Hulk catches Iron Man, 2/3′s of the way through, I started grinning like a little kid because I immediately knew they were going to nail the entire movie just from seeing that one shot. Marvel knows what they’re doing with this thing.

Joss Whedon is the director, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame (but I will always hold him in the highest esteem for Firefly, also known as the greatest 6 episodes of anything in television history) and it looks like he nailed it. Robert Downey Jr. seems comfortable as part of the gang, one thing I’d been concerned about before but no longer. Chris Hemsworth as Thor is note-perfect, as is Chris Evans as Captain America.

I think Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, in a replacement role filling in for Ed Norton, will actually be the surprise stand-out performance. His line that “We’re not a team. We’re a time bomb” said so much about the depth Whedon is hitting on a character level that the exposions and special effects in the trailer seem that much more impressive just for being in the same movie with what we know will be moving, witty and story-driven writing.

As I said this February 2012 trailer isn’t the first Avengers trailer. There was a shorter teaser trailer released in December 2011 which had a Nine Inch Nails song in the background that I think could have been excluded, The trailer itself had many of the same scenes as this one but did not have near the effect on me as this new one did.

There was also a quick Avengers teaser at the end of Captain America (a GREAT comic book movie btw, if you haven’t seen it you’re missing out) which I thought was excellent. You might still be able to find it on YouTube. It really was great. But this trailer is better.

The music, the action, the characters, the fact that we still don’t know 100% of what the story will be, Scarlet Johansen looking hotter than I’ve personally ever seen here (it’s possible I have a thing for leather)… all great, great stuff.

And I haven’t said it already, but that scene at the end… fucking awesome. I’m getting excited all over again. This movie is going to make so much money it’s ridiculous.

And then after The Avengers we get The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises, both of which look pretty remarkable in their own way. This is going to be a fun summer for movies.

Game of Thrones Book Review – First Book in the Series, “A Game of Thrones” (Spoiler-Free Review)

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“A Game of Thrones” is a fantasy novel by George R.R. Martin, the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. It has spawned a critically acclaimed HBO television series (which is the reason I heard about the books in the first place). There are seven books in the series: Book one is A Game of Thrones, then comes A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter, and A Dream of Spring (the last two haven’t yet been released).

There aren’t a lot of books like Game of Thrones. The obvious comparison is to J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings trilogy but other than being a fantasy novel series there really aren’t that many similarities between the two. I would personally compare it more, in terms of scope and political intrigue mixed with fantasy elements, to Frank Herbert’s Dune or Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. In many ways however, George R.R. Martin’s world surpasses both of them. I have never been so keenly aware of the threat of disaster or the promise of hope for an entire fictional world as I am when the main characters in Game of Thrones face off against one another, on the battlefield and, more impressively, in the halls of power behind the throne.

The book takes place in the fictional world of Westeros, a sort of middle ages Europe without the Pope. Indeed there is magic and fantasy in this world, but it is far in the background, hidden in the cold frozen north and across the sea. The focus of the book are the trials and tribulations of the richly textured characters and their respective moves and maneuvers. This is a world of high political intrigue and actions with huge consequences.

You could actually argue A Game of Thrones doesn’t have a protagonist, as the “good guys” and “bad guys” get nearly equal ink and their perspectives are not judged or cheered on except in the sense that the author wants the intrigue to continue. That’s not to say these characters aren’t morally distinct, however, because they most certainly are. There are a few competing clans in the book which vie for power and political supremacy – the Starks, which hail from the icy north, are the stoic and noble heros of the storyline, but theirs is not the traditional hero’s journey. Far, far from it. Their natural enemies are the Lannisters, a rich and successful clan represented most powerfully by the queen of the realm, Cersei. The king is her husband, a Baratheon, who vanquished the insane previous king in battle some years before the story begins. The final main clan is represented by the Targaryens, two teenagers whose father used to be the king but who now plot in exile to reclaim the throne. Into this mix are thrown various henchmen and loyalists for all sides, including some very well written schemers in the capital city, King’s Landing, who plot to advance themselves using the other, less clever players in the game as pawns. There really could be no better title for this book than A Game of Thrones, as the game to gain and keep power is very real and animates every move every character makes.

The book begins with the Starks called out of their northern lands and down to King’s Landing, where Ned Stark, the patriarch of the family, must help Robert Baratheon, his old friend and the king of Westeros, to rule. The reasons for this are murky at first but then revealed in due course to be a world-historical power play, in which Ned, the king and countless others are unwitting participants. The Starks soon clash with the Lannisters, which includes the queen Cersei and her son, the young prince Joffrey. No love is lost between the various members of these powerful families, but various steps are taken to sooth this conflict including the betrothal of the prince and Ned’s daughter. Tragedy soon strikes the king however, and the fates of the competing families as well as the court intriguers and the people of Westeros are thrown into chaos, out of which arise a few plot twists so unexpected, significant and satisfying in their execution that one cannot help but be emotionally jolted after reading them. This is rare in fiction and rarer still in the fantasy genre. I believe this book reached number one on the New York Times Bestseller list for this very reason. Needless to say the plot does not go as you would expect, but that is a big part of the strength of the story.

I wanted to review A Game of Thrones because it captured my imagination and because I read it just as the HBO series was coming out, which gave me the unique perspective of being able to compare and contrast the book and the series while both were relatively new and fresh in my mind. There are some definite differences between the book and the series but for the most part the stories converge. I would absolutely encourage anyone who’s read the book to check out the HBO series however, and if you’ve seen the show but you haven’t read the book, I hope this review has helped encourage you to pick it up. You won’t be disappointed.