Wars Galaxies

Galaxy Quest [Blu-ray]
$29.99
if Star Trek had never existed and this movie hadn't been created as a parody of it, galaxy Quest would still stand on its own merits as a good space comedy-adventure movie. Fun for the whole family! I enjoy it wayyyy more than Spaceballs

Star Wars Main Title & A Galaxy Divided
$0.99
Great music especially for the junior light sabor jeti warriors in the house to practice to.

Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine
$7.50
As the Matrix Online closes after four years, and as I prepare to dip my toes in the Star Wars universe, while waiting for Star Wars: The Old Republic to go to Beta-test phase, I stumbled across this book as I was looking for another book in the Extended Universe. I'm planning to play Star Wars Galaxies as a way to tide myself over during the inevitable wait for TOR, and so I decided to give this book a try.

While this might not be an earth-shattering addition to the SW canon, it's a fun book to read. The settings are well-described and the characters are fleshed out nicely. Maybe they don't accomplish anything that rocks the galaxy from the Outer Rim to the Core Worlds, but it's interesting and it holds ones attention. It's like a high-quality story written by a pair of role players who have a deep and abiding respect for the storyline and the universe. It's not a perfectly written book, but it does manage to pull in a little bit of the game's mechanics in a way that doesn't seem forced or pull you out of the story: one bit where the hero and the heroine are going through a cache of weapons and the hero is recommending the best sort of blaster featured some very convincing chatter about the strengths and weaknesses of each weapon. The main characters, an Imperial bioengineer and a Rebel spy, are likable and convincing: no Mary Sue long-lost siblings of Luke Skywalker/Princess Leia/Han Solo/:: Insert canon character of choice:: who do something outrageous which warps the storyline of the series out of shape, the kind of characters that one sees all to often in online games and fanfiction. But they do manage to accomplish small things which change their outlook on the world and help them discover things about themselves and each other which they and the readers did not know at the beginning of the book. For what it is, for a book based on a small portion of an MMORPG, it's worth a read; it may not stand up to more than one read-through, but it's still a good introduction to the game for someone coming to it who's only had a casual acquaintance with a certain galaxy far, far away...

Star Wars Galaxies: The Complete Online Adventures
$19.95
-you would run out of printing paper in the middle of the list, my friend. Not to be impulsive or make "converting" reviews, this game is horrid. After playing Star Wars Galaxies for about a year, what would I say? I would save my breathe and just answer "No" to keep myself from making redundancies. Why are they redundancies? They're redundancies because it would be too many words for something that doesn't even deserve more than just that, "No".

To start off, there's the graphics. I'm sure any 6-year-old that saw at the top of any map editor the "raise terrain" or "color terrain" would be quickly hired by the SWG Team. Not to mention, the whole randomized nest system is made from a scripting class in high-school. It's evident that the SWG Team can't seem to care enough to keep random monsters from making a nest in the middle of your guild hall, much less make the levels of said monsters in sync with the area you're in. Running into a nest of level 69 wamprats when Han Solo just gave you a speeder (the first mission you get when you start, aside from the tutorial) isn't the best thing to get your levels, or your patience, up.

Secondly, there's this whole "player-made economy" business. It must have sounded like a great idea on paper, or in the SWG Team Members' dreams (they're good at sleeping), but in reality, this is another "No" response. The usual 13-year-old that plays the game usually wouldn't prefer to sit on a rock and gather 1,000 materials for a farm so they could harvest 100 units of lumber for a single plank of wood, then making 500 more so you can build a house. Once the house is built, you need to pay for it or they take it away. Of course, you don't have money, you've been sitting on a rock.

Speaking of the house you can't pay for because there's no way for a trader to make money without begging, there's the city system. I could go on forever harping on it, but instead, I'll make a summary. The city looks either a complete mess, or a bunch of cubicles. There's no in-between point here. There's absolutely no way to make it look beautiful without making your Trader friend sit on a rock, but he doesn't have time to sit on his rock, he's got to beg for money. Since he's got to go beg in an over-populated city, you've got to kill 20,000 alligator things until you find one that's doesn't obey the laws of physics and happens to have a statue on him.

With the mayor in mind, there's the whole guild system. Ugh. There's only three types of leaders in the Star Wars galaxy. The first one is the power-crazed 12-year-old dictator that kills every guild he sees, and now that you have the abbreviation for the guild hanging over your head, people will now throw garbage at you. Secondly, there's the "nice" guy. This guy is the person with two personalities and is either doing illegal things, or online dating with your sister, brother, boyfriend, girlfriend, mom, dad, grandmother, grandfather, cousin, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, et cetra. Third, there's the guy who wants all the other traders to sit on his rock with him, of course, these only exist for 2 seconds because either the 12-year-old dictator found you, or they lost their begging spot to another trader with a big friend. How do I know all this? I've met them all.

That would summarize all my comments on Star Wars Galaxies. To summarize that summary, No. Happy rock-sitting.

Love,
Me.