Star Wars: 1313, a 'Darker, Grittier' Star Wars Game 133
MojoKid writes "When it comes to Star Wars, the gaming industry has a long history of cranking out titles of uncertain quality. For every brilliant title like Knights of the Old Republic, we've seen several clunkers and a few outright failures like Republic Heroes. LucasArts demonstrated a new Star Wars game at E3 this week, Star Wars: 1313 and despite the brand's uneven history, folks are cautiously optimistic. The 1313 moniker refers to a specific level of Coruscant which is a haven for criminals, bounty hunters, and crime lords. You take on the role of a bounty hunter looking for information on an unspecified criminal conspiracy who descends to 1313 in search of data. This will likely be the first Star Wars game to be rated 'M' for mature, and it focuses on the seedy underbelly of the universe."
Lame (Score:2)
Hard to tell from what little it on display, but it looks like a Star Wars take on Uncharted - where the emphasis is on making it through set pieces, rather than proper game play. I hope to be pleasantly surprised, but this game looks like something you'd be just as well off checking out a few highlights on Youtube rather than playing.
And for every KOTOR there are far sight more than a few clunkers and failures.
Re:Lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Er, yeah, sure, I like open games too, but Uncharted was really fun. Really really really fun. Uncharted is one of the few games I've played through many times (and similarly for Uncharted 2, which was arguably even better).
So while I'm generally kind of down on overly linear games, when done well, they can be wonderful. So don't write off "1313" just yet...
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Eh, different strokes for different folks. I have trouble enjoying linear games. Uncharted drove me bonkers.
Skyrim is much more my cup of tea.
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I played a bit of Uncharted 2. Like, a few hours worth. Navigating a train car that's falling off a cliff is sort of vaguely amusing, but did 1313 have to copy that pretty much exactly? There's a certain amount of novelty to a set piece like that that wears out very quickly.
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Yeah, although I'm obviously a fan of Uncharted, I totally agree about the "hanging train car." One really isn't doing anything there (there's only one path to follow, and almost no skill is required to follow it), so although it's sort of neat the first time, it gets boring quickly with repetition; it's more like a cut-scene where one has a tiny bit of control.
The fun parts are those where you actually do something, mostly the shootouts. [Though the jaw-dropping scenery really adds something to it...]
I
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Re:Lame (Score:5, Funny)
the game looks stiff and scripted
In this game, the Force guides all your actions...
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blur the transitions from cut scene and gameplay
That's code for quick time events.
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I saw their presentation on G4 yesterday. It was a joke. All they have is some concept art and a vague idea about it following bounty hunters. They're barely in pre-production. They had so little information that I'm not sure why they were even at E3. I guess LucasArts wants to remind people that Star Wars still exists, since there hasn't really been a decent Star Wars game since the KOTOR/Battlefront days in the early 00's (unless you count The Old Republic, which seems to have burned out pretty fast).
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What ending? Or which ending?
I played through it one summer with a borrowed disc. Got all the way to the end and couldn't beat that boss lady because my character just couldn't handle it--and I wasn't about to go replay the whole game with a new character just to see if I could beat the boss this time.
People rave about it--ok, it's a cool game. But it definitely got repetitive, the graphics weren't that great, and the combat--well, I'm just not a big fan of dice-based stuff: if I want to play Yahtzee, I'
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1313 ... PG-13? (Score:4, Funny)
Please show me some hardcore 18+ Star Wars with Nathalie Por ... heu, Chewbacca kinky X-mas explosions and stuff.
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Or is that the point?
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I think LucasArts' idea of "mature" these days is having Han shoot first and not having some annoying kiddie character running around making fart jokes.
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The Old Republic had flaws, but if you haven't played five worse MMOs then your experience is limited.
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Sorry, but give me "Knights of the Old Republic" *ANY* day over "The Old Republic" MMO. If I wanted to play WoW, I would play WoW.
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X-Wing
TIE Fighter
Dark Forces
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (if only for the fantastic multiplayer)
Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
LEGO Star Wars
LEGO Star Wars II
Apprentice of the Force
The rest are crap.
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I think he means that first-person tie fighter sim that was very "Wing Commander". It was a lot of fun mid-90s.
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These days? It's so tainted and diluted with an abundance of junk that it no longer represents any particular tone, style, or theme.
Real-time rendering.... (Score:2)
The 'interviewer' being overwhelmed that the scenes aren't pre-rendered seems pretty forced. Considering that pretty much every new title looks about that good/bad, disbelief around a scene being realtime seems silly. I do think it is part of a good trend of moving away from the pre-rendered scenes. So long as all graphics are done realtime, you can easily forget just how lacking the graphics are. In a modern title with cutscenes, they just serve to remind you that the lighting isn't quite right, reflec
AKA (Score:2)
Starwars Pumps and a Bump edition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsunEfZFG1Y [youtube.com]
Good luck with that, the edgy card only works when you are not known for being soft
Chest high walls....chest high walls everywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously. Can we all move past the GOW cover based shooting formula already? It's been obnoxious for a long time now. The Dark Forces series was awesome back in the day. Noticeably absent were chest high walls.
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In the future... there will be crates.
(OK fanboys, I know Star Wars is set 'a long time ago')
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There will always be crates. No matter if you must use them for cover or break them for goodies; there WILL be crates!
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If real life were like a video game, everywhere would look like a warehouse or shipyard.
Everything is darker and grittier. (Score:3)
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Maybe a darker and grittier Mario game where the koopahs die violent deaths and at the end you find out exactly what Bowser was doing to the Princess the whole time she was kidnapped?
i would play that game in a heartbeat!
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I have to wonder what is going to be next? ... Dark and gritty My Little Pony where Nightmare Moon stomps Twilight Sparkle to death?
Poor waif, you have no idea what kind of fanfics are out there, do you? Take a look at Fallout: Equestria [equestriadaily.com] sometime. It doesn't get any darker or grittier than post-apocalyptic ponies. (It's also possibly the best fanfic ever, from any fandom, if you can handle the darkness.)
The simple fact is that the major consumers of games and fiction these days are adults, not teens or children. The most valuable demographic is 18-35 now, not the 10-17 that it used to be. So companies are going to produce some cont
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I'm just guessing, but they're probably all in Japan. The ones they make for export are, of course, geared to American tastes, which is ultraviolence.
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That would still be lighter and softer than the original, which featured such lovely things like the Penguin Hitler and his explicitly depicted and visualized plans of genocide of all the "unworthy" non-Northern species (and on-screen murder). And of course Nightmare Moon herself is a way toned-down version of Tirec. Ah, golden childhood memories.
The old MLP was pretty much a superhero show with ponies. It even had the vil
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This comes back to haunt her in season 2 finale, when she finally gets up to fight herself and is promptly overpowered and knocked back down by Chrysalis. Even the megalomaniacal villain is confused about getting such an easy vict
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The only thing dark about that movie was that it actually got made.
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switch your editor to normal text
works fine
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click the options button when you start a post, its in a drop down box
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Wow, incredible! An amazing experience:
1) line breaks are easy
2) i can make bullet lists simply
3) this is especially helpful because html on an iPad keyboard is a pita.
I can even do double line breaks! This is helpful if I want to call attention to certain phrases...
like this.
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have fun!
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I disagree. It's not just comic books and such that have gotten that way, it's everything. Maybe you're not old enough to remember, but back in the 70s and 80s, even things aimed at adults were much "lighter" (and some say "campier", at least for the 70s). Serious TV shows like Star Trek: TNG weren't "dark" or "gritty" at all, but the later shows in the 90s and 00s were darker and grittier than it, though that was nothing compared to what's going on these days. The levels of violence depicted in those p
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They should just redo the entire Star Wars series, and have Lawrence Kasdan (the guy who wrote the screenplay for Empire Strikes Back) write the entire thing.
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I know I'm talking about taking the food off developers' plates when I say it, but there is a time when a franchise should die, and that was the end of the Empire Strikes Back.
If that happened, we'd never have had the backstroke of the west, which in my opinion was the highlight of the star wars series of films.
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>backstroke of the west,
Who?
*google*
Wait, what is this, I don't even...
--
BMO
Literally blown away? (Score:2, Funny)
Have I gone insane or did I actually hear the reviewer host guy say, "You'll be literally blown away"?
Egad.
Re:Literally blown away? (Score:5, Insightful)
Literally, when people say literally, the almost never actually mean literally. Literally.
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I literally threw up in my mouth when the reviewer guy said it.
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Have I gone insane or did I actually hear the reviewer host guy say, "You'll be literally blown away"?
Egad.
I think he means the game is Da Bomb
Re:Literally blown away? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you're talking about the most illiterate users, most are using it as a form of ironic emphasis.
Of course, due to Poe's Law, you never really know. Make your best guess, but at some point you just gotta let go, man.
Meh ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like a lot of button mashing, which means we'll most likely end up with a fucking dumbed down console port again that barely works on the PC (e.g., Force Unleashed 2, where the game's toughest enemies were the character controls, camera controls and other assorted bugs).
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As far as I can see, Star Wars games have sucked since X-Wing/Tie Fighter. Have there been any good ones in the last twenty years?
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Echo the lament of the lack of a decent successor to XvT!
Rebellion was a good remake of MoO and the ability to make multiple death stars and cruise around and blow up every planet in the galaxy was a bonus!
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Knights of the old republic and Dark forces 1 and 2. Other than that, I can't think of any.
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Jedi Outcast.
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As far as I can see, Star Wars games have sucked since X-Wing/Tie Fighter. Have there been any good ones in the last twenty years?
You might like this then. Only 13 years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_X-Wing_Alliance [wikipedia.org]
Re:Meh ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The funniest part of all this is that aside from the art/sfx, design and coding a space shooter is one of the easiest things to do in game development. I could solo the a whole project like this myself, and I'm weak in matrix algebra.
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You mean you never played Dark Forces, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Mysteries of the Sith, or Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast...? JK had an incredible community for years. I ran a clan for 5 years--we had up to 50 members at one point, from all over the world. The level editing and modding community was fantastic, and it's not dead yet. JK2 was not bad, but completely different, being based on the Q3 engine. JK had its own, sector-based (negative space-based editing) engine--such a pleasure to make levels
From my cousin, who saw Phantom Menace first.... (Score:4, Funny)
'But.....it just won't be Star Wars without child-friendly racist analogues and Galactic Dance-offs'
I've raised this young Padawan well.
Quick time events suck. (Score:3, Insightful)
The demo video they showed looks like it's entirely quick time events. Which means as pretty as this game may be, it'll be complete garbage.
Quick time events ruin everything they're put in and make the game suck. I cant think of any example where they actually add anything but frustration. You can't pay attention to the action that they trigger because you have to focus on hitting the combination it throws up on the screen.
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Agreed : they're shit.
Whoever thought that having players ignore the painstakingly crafted cutscene and focus instead upon a flashing X icon was a good idea is deranged, and I can't understand why the idea persists.
Whether cutscenes are good or bad is another question, but don't fuck up your cutscene by having players look for stupid icons that pop up. Please.
1313 Mockingbird Lane (Score:2, Interesting)
Well there's that but there was also 1313 Mockingbird lane, lest we forget! (Munster's street address)
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And a reboot of The Munsters with Jerry O'Connell. See Dark Horizons [darkhorizons.com] for the details. :(
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The 1313 moniker refers to a specific level of Coruscant which is a haven for criminals, bounty hunters, and crime lords.
Well there's that but there was also 1313 Mockingbird lane, lest we forget! (Munster's street address)
We'll know for sure this fall. "The Munsters" is getting a reboot [hollywoodreporter.com].
PC gamers o_O (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing that jumps out at us from watching the video is that the game clearly isn't running on legacy console hardware. Creative director Dominic Robilliard confirms this a little later in the interview, when he states that the demo is being powered by PCs using Nvidia hardware.
Obviously we can't say for certain, but there's some good circumstantial evidence that the game is built for DX11. Shadows are always the best thing to check -- DX10/DX11 shadows are softer and more realistic than their DX9 counterparts. Fog is another area where DX11 implementations tend to noticably improve on DX9, and the 1313 scenes are impressive on both counts.
There's no reason LucasArts couldn't develop the title for current consoles and cutting-edge PC hardware simultaneously, but this is good news for computer gamers -- games built on our platform tend to play better (and look nicer) than console ports that offer better textures but otherwise keep to the limits of six year-old hardware.
Nobody cares about PC gaming epeen. Really, nobody. Prettier shadows.. got it, that's one of those boxes we uncheck for consistent framerate when playing against other people.
These guys are as bad as the audiophiles that are made fun of on /. all the time. First it was frame rate, 200+ FPS with 85/75/60 display refresh rate... /eyeroll
Now that the average PC gamer has found vsync it's teh softer shadows and highlights. Lets be honest, if you can't do pretty with a moderately consistent frame rate, it gets turned off by any serious gamer.
I'm not saying your shadows _aren't_ super pretty, just that the money you have to spend for slightly prettier visuals at smooth not-disrupting-gameplay frame rates reminds me of $200 audio cables.
And... as nearly all of us are typing and reading this on a PC.. we most likely play/have played games on them. There is no us v them, just mostly people who already have played PC games and still don't give a damn about ridiculous epeen contests.
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Woah, slow your roll there, you're missing one vitally important difference: While the softer shadows might not be important to you (or even objectively important), they are an actual, measurable difference, that somebody can rationally decide is worth the money.
$200 digital cables do absolutely, positively nothing, and $200 analog cables either measurably don't do what's claimed, or the claims are unmeasurable nonsense--"It's a brighter soundstage, with a hint of orange peel tang."
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Arent you supposed to be drinking natty ice and palying halo with your brahs?
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If the better graphics lead to a better game, then I care. I understand what you're saying, but better graphics make a game better. Denying that is a luddite philosophy.
Of course, all the pretty in the world can't make a shit not a shit.
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Competitive gamer != serious gamer. There's an intersect, but they are not identical. If I'm playing a single player game and I put all this fucking money into my hardware, I'm not going to fucking turn off shadows just so I can move from 60 fps to 65 fps. If it's a multiplayer online game and toggling that down can confer a strategic advantage, sure, but what part of this game and its description makes you think it will even have a multiplayer component? And even if it does, why the fuck would I lower my g
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Sceptical (Score:2)
I'm always immediately sceptical of any game that tries to trade off a successful movie. If the game can't trade on its own merits, why should I bother? I wish the game companies would give up trying to franchise from Hollywood. I don't support it.
Gritty has already been done... (Score:4, Informative)
Republic Commando [wikipedia.org] was a gritty look that for once nearly made Star Wars look like an actual war. It had casual senseless death and the tactics in it were pure military.
I'm pretty sure the reason why it wasn't all that well received was that it was so jarringly different from the cheesy "war-esque" melodrama that pervades Star Wars, and never got the idea playing it, that the clones were really finding their situation terribly fun.
It was, needless to say, the best Star Wars game I played, at least in terms of actual suspension of disbelief.
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I liked Republic Commando and have been surprised that it never got a sequel. I think it came out at the wrong time - a few months before the launch of the 360 and the start of the transition to the current generation of console hardware. It was very rapidly eclipsed by prettier (though often shallower) games (and its PC version suffered from being a less than stellar port of a game for old hardware).
Worse still, despite still being a fairly new release, it wasn't on the 360's backward-compatibility list at
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J.E.D.I. or G.T.F.O (Score:2)
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I'm having trouble thinking of a star wars game (with perhaps the exception of Star Wars: Rebellion, a 4X game) that the main character doesn't later on find out that he has some level of latent jedi abilities. There'll be cameos by C3, R2 droids, star destroyers in the background and all the other bits and bobs that help verify what universe you're currently occupying.
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Why would anyone want to play in the SW universe, if you're not going to be a Jedi?
Two words: Boba Fett. BOBA FETT!
Jetpack, a host of nerd gadgets, awesome outfits, cool ship, trained and skilled enough to hold his own with the magical-powered Jedi.
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Attn: LucasArts (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, just give us a new TIE Fighter or X-wing vs TIE Fighter game already, okay? That is what the market has been demanding for years.
God I hate IP laws. With LucasArts sitting on the Star Wars IP, it's impossible for any competitors to come out and make a TIE Fighter game.
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Haven't you heard? Space fighter sims have been dead since Freespace 2.
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Haven't you heard? Space fighter sims have been dead since Freespace 2.
Are there any decent space battleship sims out there? I wanted to like Vega Strike for that but there's not enough controls in the game to even build a keyboard map that would make it fun.
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I've yet to find one. You could possibly class Gratuitous Space Battles or EVE as "space battleships", but they're essentially exercises in offline design, leading to pretty screen savers.
Personally I'd like to see a skill based wet navy game like Navy Field given a space spin. You know, actually aiming guns rather than just clicking and letting some subroutine handle it while you get on with the serious business of trading in the auction house or removing spam from your clan's forum.
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I've yet to find one. You could possibly class Gratuitous Space Battles or EVE as "space battleships", but they're essentially exercises in offline design, leading to pretty screen savers.
EVE is too deep for me to get into at this point and GSB is great but it's not got the immersion I'm looking for.
Personally I'd like to see a skill based wet navy game like Navy Field given a space spin. You know, actually aiming guns rather than just clicking and letting some subroutine handle it while you get on with the serious business of trading in the auction house or removing spam from your clan's forum.
Yes, please. This sounds like a game I'd buy new. Lost Planet 2 had aspects of this from a third-person perspective and that was pretty cool (running around the vehicle to load the cannon and fire it and so on) but I'm not clear I'd like to see that in space either. It's close-ish to what I mean, though. Not enough replay value, glad I got it used :)
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X-Wing vs TIE Fighter vs Cosmic Encounter vsTribes (Score:1)
It was a very long time ago, in the year two-oh-oh-oh. Humanity had just survived the Apocalypse, only to be confronted with a new one. No, not because it was the year of the Linux desktop, though that was seen as worse than the end of the world in the dark aisles of Microborg. Still, in a low level PSYOPs training facility, a group of fresh fish were dreaming past all and every doomsday, planning to create the ultimate space combat simulator, which would allow them to recruit an elite squadron to take o
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You could try the x3 [egosoft.com] series. You start at the bottom, so there's a lot of piloting your own small ship early on, but later on you can own industry chains and warships. And when you get there, the battles can be truly epic.
No new Games till New Movie is out..... (Score:2)
30 year obsession, needs an intervention (Score:2)
Seriously, George needs an intervention because in any other social circle being obsessed with something for 30+ years would warrant some form of mental deficiency diagnosis.
What is most disappointing about Star Wars is just how much new and innovative concepts that COULD have come out of Lucasarts/film were stifled because of an all encompassing desire to increase the Star Wars Franchise payload. They don't even do special effects for other movies anymore (well, Red Tails, meh), they are just automatons p
M (Score:2)
Adult themed Star Wars games? Meesa can't wait!
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Jar jar Biggs
That's some really disturbing slashfic you've got going there, mate.
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FYI I just bought that festering turd SW:The Old Republic MMORPG, where Jedi wield wiffle bats as neutered tanks, unlike Star Wars but exactly like MMO design dictates, and I'm pissed.