Yep I work shifts and that tends to be the case in most things, quite often on a Tuesday I leave for work at 3pm so maintenance screws me most of the time. This Tuesday I happen to be off so lose a good few hours there. People say, "Just do something else that day" but for people like me who works shifts like 3pm - 11pm, 5pm - 2am, 12pm - 10pm, 8am -5pm randomly every week and whose days off are different every week it doesn't work like that. With my shifts this week my day off on Tuesday would have been a good chance to play a bit before my girlfriend gets home from teaching which I'll be missing with the maintenance. That being said, maintenance is what it is and my job is what it is, I'm always going to get screwed working the rubbish hours I work when most of my friends work 9-5. I'm doing the Bupa Manchester 10k charity run in May so I'll be getting out for a run Tuesday while they do maintenance.

I went with Ronin for my legacy name, obviously Star Wars has nothing to do with Samurai but the word worked for me. For those that don't know Ronin is a Samurai with no master, usually portrayed as a wanderer. My main is Stryfe Ronin, bounty hunter. I was going to choose Deadstar after the song by Muse as it kinda fit that 'Skywalker' style name. I decided against it, wouldn't fit so well with my Jedi alts!

I liked the basic idea's they had for SWG and it did seem very deep, too deep perhaps. It was just really poorly implemented. I did like how huge the game was and the player built cities and having trophies and ornaments in your house was cool. The ship part of it looked good but i never really got that far into it, if i remember right you had a lot more freedom to put your ship together and go off and do proper space missions and stuff, plus you could recruit other players to man your guns which was a cool feature. I'm absolutely loving ToR so far but it does feel a little 'boxed in' rather than an expansive open world. It's just like KoToR really which is great for a single player game but feels a bit restrictive and small for an MMO of this scale. I'm hoping their going to improve on that as timegoes by. It feels like going from Final Fantasy 7/8/9 to Final Fantasy 13 if people have played them that'll explain how it feels best. I do wish they'd nicked some of the idea's for player ships from Star Trek Online, another example of some great idea's implemented badly. Awesome game so far though, I look at the improvements WoW made over the years compared to vanilla and hope they do even more with this.

I'd recommend getting the books based around the Old Republic, they set up a lot of the events that take place in this game. I've just listened to the audio books The Old Republic: Revan and The Old Republic: Deceived. Revan explains lot's of the gaps in his story around the koToR games and where he went afterwards. Did you see the video called Deceived where Malgus destroys the Jedi temple? Well that's a chapter of the book Deceived and that whole thing and the repercussions are explained, there's a lot of information about Malgus and i'm glad I read it with Malgus being prominent int his game. I'm just about to start the last one, The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance, and i've now idea what its about but cant wait to read it. If your interested in the lore of this game and wander about the Emperor/Malgus/Revan etc i'd highly recommend going through them. The audio books are great as they're done with music and sound effects, makes the drive to and from work much better :-)