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Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Bill Abner 6 Comments

I saw The Last Jedi Monday night, over two full weeks after its release. Spoilers are ahead but you have already seen the movie. Shut up.

That fact alone should illustrate my level of enthusiasm for Star Wars movies. I wasn’t always like this. I was, like many people in their mid-40s in the year 2018, a passionate fan of the original Star Wars films. Perhaps it’s old(er) age, or perhaps the 2nd Lucas trilogy of episodes I-III were so deflating that they made me stop caring about Star Wars. If Lucas apparently didn’t understand why we loved the originals, what’s the point?

I admittedly was excited about Episode VII, The Force Awakens because, as sad as it id to say, Lucas wasn’t making it. Even that movie, which was universally praised as a return to “Star Wars being Star Wars” I was left feeling somewhat “meh.” Too silly, too jokey, too “wink wink Star Wars fans did you catch that reference we just made! We’re just like you!” It’s was the Big Bang Theory of Star Wars movies. It was also a remake of A New Hope and killing Han was and remains bullshit. You don’t KILL Indiana Jones, he always escapes. You don’t actually KILL Han Solo. You can make us think he’s dead, but you don’t KILL him unless it’s of old age…or maybe Greedo’s son shoots him in the back.

The Last Jedi was better than Force Awakens. I will give it that. But I have a lot of issues with this movie and not just as a Star Wars film. I stayed away from spoilers because I knew I would eventually see it. The only headline I saw was from Mark Hamill who said something to the effect of, “That it not my Luke Skywalker.”

Whoa. That could be really good or really bad, whatever it meant. Turns out, it was pretty damn good. What the film did with Luke was at first jarring — Luke Skywalker has turned into a bitter old man who is so massively depressed he wants to die alone on a rock with these cute little space penguins. Luke’s path makes sense and when you think about it, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. The ordeal of Episodes IV-VI would mind-fuck pretty much anyone, even a Jedi. Then when Luke fails training young Jedi, and fails Han and Leia’s kid, his mind snaps and he retreats into a self-hating mess. Maybe not the ideal Luke storyline, but I can get behind it. And Luke’s end game is also perfect. It’s the hero Resurrection story but without Luke going toe to toe with the dark Jedi. He uses his mind and slips away into Jedi peace-land. Really good.

Outside of the Luke stuff, The last Jedi did very little for me.

So apparently Rey is a super strong Jedi with no training whatsoever. Luke’s training consists of a few verbal warnings and the “reach out” technique. After that she can move rocks around like she’s Yoda. I guess her Midi-chlorian numbers are off the charts! Fucking Lucas. This bugged me in Force Awakens and bugs me even more after Last Jedi.

You can take a huge Rebel (sorry, Resistance) cruise ship, send it into a Star Destroyer at LIGHT SPEED and apparently the Destroyer can take that on the chin.

So if the tracker is on ONE Resistance ship, why not have everyone go to light speed in a different direction? “Ok team, you go here, you go here, you go here and they can’t follow ALL of us. Ready, break!”

So Leia was Wonder Woman all along? Her space flying scene was the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in a Star Wars movie. When she got blown off the ship I looked at Mary and said, “Shit they actually killed Leia…and early.” Then she space walks like Buzz Aldrin back onto the ship. W.T.F. Do not fgive me her “Jedi powers.” No. Stop it. No. No.

Ok so this Snoke guy. What’s his deal? Oh, you don’t know either? I guess you just gotta have that Evil Emperor character and since Vader already tossed the original down the shaft, why not just invent a new one? Makes perfect sense to me. I also hate the First Order in general. Can we not get new bad guys? A new storyline that isn’t a recycle of shit we have already seen?

Ackbar goes out like that? Damn man that’s kinda harsh.

So I guess Finn and Rose take a trip to Space Monaco to kill some run time in the movie and make sure Finster gets his cameo. That entire sequence was a massive filler. This is all they could do with Finn? Total waste.

The more I thought about the movie, as well as Episode VII, I realized why I was so indifferent to these movies.

Timothy Zahn ruined this for me. Thanks Tim. What I wanted were Jedi twins, Mara Jade, Talon Karrde, Han & Lando, crazy hermit Jedi Joruus C’baoth, and Grand Admiral Fucking Thrawn.

That’s what I wanted. Impossible due to the age of the actors, I get it. But I will take Thrawn over Snoke/Emperor 2.0 any day.

Back to basics with X-Wing and Armada

Matt Thrower 2 Comments

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My wardrobe is full of spaceships. So many spaceships that there’s barely room for clothes. Most of them live in an enormous box which crushes my shirts out of all recognition when it’s squeezed in and out for play. It’s a good job I play with spaceships a lot more than I wear shirts.

Having a cupboard crammed with spaceships is awesome, but it’s also a little tiring. Each comes with cardboard and plastic that must be meticulously selected and laid out before playing. That was, up until recently, where most of the game was in x-wing, and that’s sad. What was sadder is how often I’d ruin the suspension of disbelief just to make a better list.

Take Poe Dameron. Poe’s an incredible fighter pilot, and it shows in his skills and abilities. He’s also an incredibly expensive fighter pilot that you’ll want to preserve to cause maximum carnage and deny the enemy victory points. So, given that his ability lets him benefit from focus tokens without spending them, it makes sense to give his ship an astromech droid which can spend the token to regenerate shields. Right?

Of course it does. Poe with R5-P9 is a great combo that I’ve seen used to great effect in many games. It’s also completely and utterly wrong.

You’ve seen The Force Awakens. You know that Poe would never take to space without his beloved BB-8 and focus tokens be dammed. So, with the Force Awakens base set for X-Wing and one each of the existing expansion models, that’s exactly what I did. I flew Poe as he’d want to be flown. With BB-8 on board, a rookie wingman, and nothing else.

They ran into an ambush on the wingman’s training flight. Three members of the First Order’s Omega Squadron and their fearsome ace. Similarly unequipped with any modifications. The TIE f/o’s caught them in an ambush and smashed down the rookie’s shields with a volley of plasma fire, before smartly executing a k-turn and coming back in for the kill.

Poe screwed up. He panicked, and no matter how much he weaved and used BB-8 to barrel roll, he could barely make it into the fight beyond a couple of stray bolts. The rookie, meanwhile, took a deep breath, concentrated on the force and flew straight and true into the heart of the enemy swam.

When the dust cleared, only Omega leader was left flying and the rookie, his hull hanging together with prayers and sticky tape, joined up with Poe and caught the wicked ace in a murderous crossfire. Game over.

It was simple. It was fast. And it was brilliant.

Armada had the same feeling of freshness when it was first released. That’s part of what I liked about it: a rich, epic game that played in a couple of hours and didn’t need lots of pre-prep work. What mattered were the decisions you made on the table, more than the ones you made beforehand. Wave 1 didn’t overburden that dynamic too much, and the game did need a few more ships.

So now we’ve got wave 2 and so far I’ve picked up the rebel releases. How could I not, with Admiral Ackbar coming in the Home One expansion and giving me the chance to shout “it’s a trap” when my fleet came into contact with the enemy? Plus, Home one and the MC30 rebel frigate are sweeting looking models. The Frigate also promises to bring some much-needed black dice firepower to the Rebel side. I still haven’t tamed my inner wargamer enough to resist pre-painted plastics.

Throw in the Rogues and Villains expansion and you’ve got a plethora of ships to play with. And that, for the moment, is all I care about. So I’ve started doing the same there – forgoing lots of detailed upgrades in favour of a fleet commander, a couple of capital ships and a few characters and fighter wings.

It’s hard to leave out Han and the Falcon when you’ve got them in your collection. You can even take the little plastic ship off its stand and perch above the bridge of a Star Destroyer if you’re a real geek.

The first time I ran a list like this was against someone who’d tooled up with upgrades just like usual. Because there’s still not a fleet builder for Armada that actually prints the card effects on the output sheet, it took a while to get set up. I’d seized on the concept of using Garm Bel Iblis and just taking as many ships as I could, to maximise my free tokens. It seemed like a good plan. It wasn’t.

In truth, it was a massacre. I didn’t play well, treating it more like X-Wing and going in all guns blazing than the more thoughtful approach required for Armada, but even so, I don’t think I took out a single Imperial big ship. Upgrades, it seems, are more important in Armada than they are in X-Wing. Which makes the lack of a fully-featured fleet builder all the more annoying.

Such an awful loss was partly down to an unfortunate feature of Armada that I don’t think I’ve spotted before. With the range ruler literally allowing handfuls more dice to be thrown between range steps, tiny distances can make a big difference in the outcome. His Gladiator-class Star Destroyer was in black dice range on a critical turn, and my MC30 wasn’t. If the opposite had been true, it might have been a very different outcome.

Frankly, I stopped playing miniature games to get away from exactly this sort of thing. But I like Armada too much to hold that against it. So next time, I think I might make both lists. Hang the upgrades and just take Akbar and Home One squaring off against some big Star Destroyers and squadrons, just like the denouement of Return of the Jedi. I’ll get to shout “it’s a trap!”, and I’d urge you all to do the same.

A Quick Note from Todd

Brandon 2 Comments

So, how ya been?

If you’re reading this, you either still have an RSS subscription or you are ridiculously dedicated. Either way, hat tip!

Obviously there done be some tumbleweeds blowing through this here site, along with a couple of rather lengthy outages. If you ventured here and wondered why the site was janky, or flat out missing, I am sorry about that, and about the rather haphazard theme presentation currently in place. (The old one broke with one of the WordPress updates. Brian did his best to provide a quick fix so that at least the old place remains accessible.) I’d say we’re going to get that fixed, but at this point you know as well as I that we’ve largely moved on to Other Things, at least for the time being. That sucks, but this was always an enthusiast endeavor (as opposed to a career), and these things… well, they’re awesome while they last. And damn was this place awesome.

I’ve been poking through the archives this past week and we put up some amazing constant for those few years we were all active and pushing forward. It was a hell of a thing and, while we made our share of mistakes, I’ll never stop missing that time and all that were a part of it. On the bright side of things, all that fantastic content will remain here and in place for the time being. How long, I can’t say. That’s not so much up to me as, at the end of the day, it’s Bill’s domain and he’s the one who gets the bills. I just wouldn’t anticipate a whole lot of new stuff popping in here going forward, occasional podcast roundups notwithstanding. (JtS does continue on with Brandon, Holly, and me.) If any of the gang drops back in and feels differently about their plans for NHS in 2016, I’m sure they’ll post to say so.

In the meantime, I’ve registered a new domain, ToddsFoolery.com. This isn’t a new venture, or at least it’s not right now. It’s there because I need an online home for all my shit. As I type this, it’s just a re-hash of all my NHS content (with a good chunk of it probably broken in one way or another, given that it’s just a straight import from here), but over the weeks and months ahead I plan to clean that up and build it out as a repository for as much of my written and professional content as I can locate.

Given that all of the pre-NHS outlets I’ve written for through the years have disappeared into the web ether, I need a place I actually own and control and can kinda sorta prove that I’ve been been publishing Things, on and off, for the better part of 20 years. (Not to mention as a way to reference the hundreds of projects I helped publish as an editor for the Pearson Education technology imprint, Que Publishing.) It’s also a place for me to start really mucking around with the nuts and bolts of WordPress, possibly start digging into producing some video, etc. I really don’t know for sure what direction I’ll take it just yet, but as I go forward, if I end up publishing anything new, ToddsFoolery.com will either be the home for it or it’ll be a place where I can link to it.

Although this isn’t meant as a goodbye post, I do want to say that I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed reading the content we’ve posted here as much as I think we all enjoyed bringing it to you. This place had the most amazing audience I’ve ever been a part of (and without question the best collaborators I’ll ever know) and being a part of it will always be a point of pride. I don’t have comments enabled at TF, but if you want to get in touch, please do so any time. You can find me on Twitter @toddsfoolery or via email — Todd at the TF dot com domain. (Or comment here. I’ll keep checking in, but probably won’t post much.)

 

 

Cracked LCD- Survive! Space Attack in Review

Brandon 1 Comment

Survive Space Attack

This one is over at Miniature Market.com’s Review Corner– a write-up of Stronghold Games’ latest Survive! title. Having rescued the classic Parker Brothers family game from languishing out of print, Stephen Buonocore and his gang are now moving on to applying the Survive! concept to a new setting. Geoff Englestein (who did the excellent Space Cadets as well as the tragically underplayed Ares Project) and his family have turned in a very respectful update to the original game that adds some fun new elements.

I can’t say that I prefer the setting because I like the old “Escape from Atlantis” business. But the new material works and it is totally in the spirit of the original game. My five year old son LOVES it, he asks to play it every day…so I’d say it’s a great choice for a family/kid-friendly title.