Meanwhile in geekdom

There have been some cool developments amongst my various pleasurable pastimes here of late. The Mandalorian and a few video games are keeping Star Wars alive and honoring the best of that tradition. The Mandalorian is a series on Disney’s tv channel, and we’re about halfway through the second season. It’s essentially a western in space, which is what Lucas intended for Star Wars in general if memory serves.

Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni among many others have given the franchise a much needed shot in the arm after the sequel trilogy self destructed by the end. This past week’s episode was of special significance with the debut of Rosario Dawson as the first live action Ahsoka Tano. I thought they did a great job with the character - with everything from the look, her fighting style, and her place in the story line.

I sort of had to force myself to watch all of the Clone Wars series, although it got progressively better near the end. I haven’t watched the more recently released final season, but I’m feeling like I want to go through the entire series again. The Mandalorian has been doing a great job of bringing in characters from Clone Wars and the expanded universe, and this week’s episode had a name drop that I doubted I would ever hear. Ahsoka Tano was on a mission to locate a certain Imperial Admiral, and she was in the midst of this mission when the Mandalorian tracked her down.

When the episode played out, we found out she was seeking none other than Grand Admiral Thrawn. Since his character appeared in Rebels (I think), we’ve known for awhile that Disney was going to include him in the updated SW canon, but we’d never had any confirmation that he might appear in a live action show or movie.

Thrawn first appeared in Timothy Zahn’s Lucas approved trilogy in the early 90’s, and I still think it’s the best version of post original trilogy events yet written. The problem is that it took place immediately following the events of the original trilogy, so after the 90’s it would have needed reworking to make sense giving the aging of the characters. The Mandalorian takes place in the aftermath of the destruction of the second Death Star, so Thrawn is contemporary to that time.

Thrawn is arguably as interesting as any character in Star Wars canon in my experience. A member of the race of Chiss, he is a brilliant tactician, typically several moves ahead of both friend and foe. He can orchestrate large space battles as if he were a self-contained supercomputer. He uses a variety of techniques to understand other cultures, often obtaining priceless works of art for appreciation and as a means to understand the psyche of those who capture his interest. Zahn has written some more recent Thrawn sequel novels that I’ve read, and so far they’ve been a mixed bag, not necessarily as good as his original sequel trilogy. That said, there should be plenty of material to work with for The Mandalorian and whatever other properties they consider.

Also of note, there have been a few good games from the Star Wars milieu. Jedi: Fallen Order came out a year ago and is on the Xbox Game Pass as of now. I’ve played a bit and I’m enjoying it. Also of note was the release of Star Wars: Squadrons which is reminiscent of the classic X-Wing and Tie Fighter games for PC from the 90s. I’m still figuring out the controls and fighting schemes, but it’s a lot of fun.

I went against my own best judgment and padded my backlog even further this year by purchase of the Xbox Series X, the GamePass (which essentially means I’ll have dozens if not hundreds of potential games to choose from), as well as a few games on sale for black friday. I resisted the urge to buy most of them as they may eventually show up on GamePass or at least get an even bigger discount. I knew I would buy Cyberpunk 2077 no matter what, so I took advantage of at least a $10 if not $20 discount (not sure if it will cost $60 or $70 at launch) and bought the Xbox One version (which should upgrade to Series X for free) on Amazon. I also bought the three sequel games to Assassin’s Creed for $9 from the Microsoft store.

I think I documented my backlog a post or two back, but you can now add (at least): Assassin’s Creed II, AC Brotherhood, AC Revelations, SW Squadrons, SW Jedi: Fallen Order, and any number of GamePass games. I’ve already played through a season of Madden 2020 (which justified the GamePass purchase by itself since I usually only play through one season), and I’ve got several other games in the queue, including Forza Horizon 4 which has been a lot of fun thus far.

I’ve said it many times, but this modern era in which we live is the most fruitful and plentiful for media consumption. We’ve long since passed the point when there wasn’t anything to read, watch, or play. Now it’s a matter of triaging out what you will devote your time towards consuming. It’s a great problem to have.

Zee Backlog

One of the myriad outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic has been more free time. Significantly more than I had ever planned to have. As it happens, I had an extensive backlog of games that I had never completed and in many cases hadn’t played at all. As I’ve said in other posts, I never got down to the level of even what I would consider mild depression, but it is fair to say that I’ve had intermittent COVID funks where I lost some motivation for my normal pursuits. Most days I’ve got that full schedule of practice, study, and work that I maintain, but there are just days where I feel like doing little to nothing. These are often well suited to games, books, and movies.

So, on that note, I was trying to think of all the games I’ve cleared out of my backlog since COVID-19 began. I had games going all the way back to the launch of the Xbox 360 in 2006 and around the same time with several Steam games. The typical scenario was I would buy first-run games with a new console launch or more often when a bunch of games went on sale during the holidays. It’s a holiday tradition now that retailers will put many triple AAA and other highly rated games on sale at pretty steep discounts. Most years I end up buying a game or two and they’ve just accumulated since I was mostly busy with work and musical pursuits.

With COVID-19 and all the additional time on my hands, I decided to start trying to whittle away at the backlog. So far these are the games that I have completed since then:

Divinity Original Sin 2
Red Dead Redemption
Assassin’s Creed
Gears of War
Battlefield 4
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Wolfenstein II
Shadow of Mordor
Horizon Zero Dawn
Bioshock
Alan Wake
Far Cry 3

These games have all been fun. I’ve generally gone with the standard difficulty level if it was modifiable. This is my normal practice but I have lowered difficulty if I kept dying and had to repeat the same fights ad infinitum. I enjoy exploration, discovery, and story far more than I enjoy any certain game mechanic so it’s an old habit of mine. I don’t really feel a sense of accomplishment in completing a difficult fight as much as I’m looking forward to the next new area for exploration. That’s why I’ve logged so many hours (days) on World of Warcraft despite never raiding and only very briefly being a member of a guild. I’d rather run around the map and find new dungeons, ruins, etc.

I still have an extensive backlog to clear on PC, Xbox, PS, and Switch including:

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition
Bioshock 2
Bioshock Infinite
Dishonored
Batman: Arkham City
Deus Ex: GOTY Edition
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Deus Ex: Human Revolution: The Missing Link
Uncharted 4
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
Assassin’s Creed: Origins
Shadow of War
The Last of Us: Remastered
Game of Thrones (Telltale)
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Fallout 3
Pillars of Eternity

I’m not including various Kinect games as well as a few driving and sports games. Although these often have career modes, I’m almost always inclined to play the latest versions since they don’t provide me a unique experience like these other RPG and action/adventure type games. I’m also not including a multitude of games I intend to eventually play that I haven’t bought yet.

To make matters worse (or better depending on viewpoint), my new-fangled Xbox Series X is arriving this week and will likely result in the purchase of a few more games to add to the cache. By far the two most anticipated games coming in the near future are Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate III. CP2077 will be an Xbox purchase, but I’ll be playing BG III on PC. After that my most anticipated game is probably Elder Scrolls 6, but that’s likely several years off.

I’m thinking I’ll keep working on the backlog preferentially until I get CP2077 because I have a feeling that one will be hard to resist once it’s available next month.

Troops...

I suppose it's been a bit. We're fast approaching holiday season here with Veteran's Day weekend starting tomorrow evening followed by Thanksgiving in a few weeks. Significant events since the last post?  Mostly purchases of stuff. Dining room table, what for the holiday eatage. The prematurely necessary upgrade (replacement) of the iMac and Aeyoung's further cracked iPad.  I was wanting to wait and buy a new Mac Pro when they went on sale in December, but I decided to try the mobile hotspot option with my iPad and Aeyoung's laptop and discovered I could have essentially full laptop functionality with the interwebs at work. Which is nice (without going into detail about said use of interwebs). Did I mention I started playing WOW again? No? Never mind.

Apple's most recent reveal included new macbooks and ipads. I bought the high end version of the macbook pro (from which I'm typing this) and the high end lte version of the ipad. I am fairly confident I would have waited another year or two for any of these upgrades if the imac's graphic card hadn't bought it and aeyoung hadn't delivered the killing blow to her ipad (I drew first blood with the thing a few weeks after we bought it). We've been trying to conserve the fundage a bit until we get the 401K replenished in another two years, but some of these things have a mind of their own. I've essentially stopped looking for concerts to attend, which is sometimes a significant part of the budget. There are a few artists that I will go see no matter what, but last I heard Zep and Floyd aren't due to tour anytime soon.

 Things at work are okay. We have actually had quite a light schedule thanks to our leaders in Washington and the furlough. The number of claim requests getting processed drop to nil since the regional office was affected by the furlough, but I expect the numbers will start climbing back up before too long. My last post discussed the unfinished game conundrum. So, with that in mind, I decided to jump back into playing WOW which won't help me complete any of those unfinished games and is just adding more time/money into a game that I've played around 40 days worth of. Yes, that was days.   WOW just has a special quality that always draws me back in. I'm leveling another mage this time, although I'm specced as a frost mage as opposed to my previous fire mage. And I can say frost is much more effective when soloing. I've been playing for a month and I'm just about level 73. I'm probably going to keep going and then upgrade to Pandaria once my character is ready for those zones. 

Most likely the new PS4 and Xbox will be released while I'm doing this. It's a veritable surfeit of gamage, my friends. I'm starting to think I'll never finish the PS3 and 360 games that are gathering dust currently. I've got a few steam games I'll play when I get around to them. I'm actually more interested in the new technology in these systems as opposed to any specific launch titles. The new kinect's higher resolution and ability to track not only individual limb movement but also the force of the movement means that the interactivity for the fitness programs is at a much higher level now.

 I watched a demo of a chubby game journalist (redundant?) trying to follow the Insanity workout and it looks very promising. It constantly tracks body movements and gives you instant feedback with various scoring metrics. At one point it was comparing his score to females aged 30-45 and he was falling short so he put a bit more effort into it to reach the goal. I gather there are all sorts of data to use like your former best, your xbox friends/family, all time records, etc. That's just the kind of geeky oneupmanship I like. Basically it's saying, "We know you know you're a fatass. But do you realize how much of a fatass you are? Didn't think so. Try harder, fatass"  It looks like most of the P90X workouts are on there as well and it also appears that all the kinect fitness programs (and there's a metric ton) will be free to play (at least for the first year) for xbox live gold subscribers. I think I may be moving my workouts up to the home theater in the near future.