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A few of my recent and most favorite things.
For any of you that missed Staw Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on XBox, you can now pick up a copy for the PC and it is incredible. I venture to say that the game itself rivals the movies in many regards. Prove me wrong and play it! Most enjoyable is playing through the game as a protagonist, a Jedi if you will, then going through the game a second time as a Dark Jedi. I found the evil and hatred of that character hard to execute at times, and I struggled with the game morally and ethically. Whoa!
If you are a Dune fan, I had a hard time reading the first two books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson: Dune: House Atreides and Dune: House Harkonnen. Do not misunderstand me, I enjoyed revisiting the Dune universe, but the books did not captivate me like the majority of Frank Herberts related works, namely everything but God Emperor of Dune, which I found to be the hardest book of the series to enjoy personally.
However, Dune: House Corinno was much more exciting than the first two books by Herbert/Anderson, and although gratitutious at times, I enjoyed it enough to rush out and buy Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. This book renewed my faith in these two authors to attempt to finalize Frank Herberts masterpiece. However, I have not read Dune: The Rise of the Machines yet...
As far as snow, we have been locked in cold's deathgrip here in western PA for over a month. There have been no intermittent thawouts, and I am running out of room to pile snow. With over 2 feet accumulated and drifts everywhere, I spend HOURS on my tractor plowing like a fool. Even now as I sit here, I watch a winter storm advisory, a school day cancellation, and freezing rain dump all over yesterday's attempts at making my grounds accessible. Madness. I am not fibbing when I say that I have gotten my 4 wheel drive tractor stuck in this mess because the snow is deeper than the ground clearance on my tractor! Oh well, I better get the gear on and get back at it!
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I second the recommendation for KOTOR. It may have replaced Planescape: Torment as my favorite RPG. I just played through with the light, and then immediately started a dark jedi character. Her name is Varen Thrad by the way. I'll bet most of those who played can figure out why I think that name is clever .
There are some bad attributes to the game, but they are made up for with the really good things about it.
BTW, I wish there was a cool male character model for a Sith Lord to have. The only ones I like are two of the black guys, and I already played through with a black woman as the light side character. The bald guy is okay, but both the current Sith Lords are bald. Oh well.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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Maybe this isn't the right place for this. I have tried several times to read Dune, but I've only gotten about halfway. As I've heard it's the greatest book ever written or something, I feel like I'm missing out. I need some help or something.
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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The first time around that I played KOTOR, I played as a light side character. The second time around, I played as a dark side character, aptly named "Sith Lord" which made some of the conversations in the games rather amusing.
Posts: 1466 | Registered: Jan 2003
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The end of the book Dune, or the end of the series? If it's the latter, the reason you're probably confused is that Herbert didn't conceive of that as "the end"--he died before he could write the final book in the series. Supposedly Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have Frank Herbert's notes on the final book, and will be writing up their own crappy version of it after they finish with all the prequal stuff. I hope they'll be publishing the notes too; I'm much rather just sit down and sift through those.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I second that. It's nice, the newer DUNE books. I find them highly ironic, in light of the temptation in that universe, to have the corpse of a person you loved hooked up to Tleilaxu vats and resurrected as a golem. That's pretty much what happened to the books. Of course, some of us are grateful even for golems.
Yeah, reading just the notes themselves would be better. Herbert had a very dense, dark style, and those books are like DUNE Lite. Like, DUNE according to Peirs Anthony. Ok, maybe not that bad. Posts: 575 | Registered: Jan 2004
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As far as KOTOR, I did something I have never done before with a game. I solved and, and I too immediately started up another game to play through as my Dark Jedi. I chose a skin with a caucasian character with black hair. What was interesting is that the more "dark" he registered on the light and dark meter, the more pronounced his facial hair became. I thought that was a nice touch.
I think mack knows that the ending is not the ending, but Chapterhouse Dune left me hanging more than any of the books, as if Frank Herbert were building up to something cataclysmic, and then he passed. Geez.
I like the comment about the new books being Dune Lite, but I found Dune: The Butlerian Jihad to have much more substance than the 3 House books. I am enjoying the discovery of where the Bene Gesserit witches, the Mentats, the Guild Navigators, and the Fremen originate. Good stuff indeed!
Posts: 1870 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Thought I'd did this 'ol thread up. I've never been an RPG fan in the past, but damn I'm lovin' KOTOR. I've had way too much to do this last week, but I've been playing it every spare second....
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Yeah. I beat KOTOR over a spring break this school year. I played it like a full-time job. I spent 40 hours on it over 5 days, but it is, in my opinion, the best Star Wars movie released since 1983. It beats the craptasticallity of the prequels and is just slightly better executed than the graphical tweaks in the rereleased SW movies (if they can be considered separate).
I've only had time to play through it once, but I played it as a perfect lightside character. In my 40 hours, I did almost everything. I followed through all the characters' story threads and found out a lot about them (Juhani is my favorite character, although the accent got trying at times).
I know why there aren't very many force-sensitive people in the period of the Star Wars movies; I KILLED THEM ALL! I swear I must have killed millions of sith in my bloody conquest of the dark side. Pacifism my eye! I think I killed so many force-sensitive people in my quest that the force-sensitive population still havn't recovered by the period of the movies.
Anyway, I agree that the Dune prequel novels are a lot lighter than the original books. Stylistically, IMO, they're much easier to read (just as modern fantasy is easier to read than Tolkien), which is as big bonus. The prequel books feel a lot more like scifi compared to the original Dune books which had a mythic and dark-age feel to them. I really liked Butlerian Jihad, there was a lot of really interesting stuff in it and it had some hints of the darker tone of the original books. The scifi feel is pulled out a little more than I'd like, for a Dune novel, but it's still decent. That said, I thought Machine Crusade was a painful read. It didn't even begin to be worth it until halfway through, and it never really had much going for it. I'm really looking forward to the third Jihad book, which I think is The Battle of Corrin. At the very least, it will be informative (especially for my subversive attempts at getting a Dune PnP RPG started up at some point).
Posts: 903 | Registered: May 2003
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