Yup.It's funny how much you can get away with when you're Light-sided, too. See: Qui-Gon Jinn. He's the of the Jedi Order.

After making the connection myself, I don't mind the male consular voice so much. After all, my Shadow is played by SUPERMAN. As for myself, my picks are as follows: Agent: Female. BH: I like them both about the same, actually. Warrior: male. I play Light, and I tend not to go for hammy in general. The Warrior's got a bit more subtlety in the performance Inquisitor: female. Knight: female. I dig Snake's voice. This may be Snake's voice actor, but it's not Snake's voice. And that voice wouldn't have fit anyway. Consular: Both are all right. Neither is really great, I think. But that may be because I don't play traditional Jedi. Smuggler: male. He's got the right amount of snark and suave in there. Trooper: Female. It was the same in Mass Effect, too. Though I have to admit that Hale's voice works great with a body type 3 (which my commando is), whereas the male's doesn't. I think when I make my Vanguard, he'll be a BT2.

Crowdfunding is for small startups and individuals who don't have the financial backing to put their ideas out into the marketplace. Large companies like EA should be using traditional methods of earning revenue. Leave Kickstarter and its ilk for the little guys.

Yesterday's Penny Arcade comic and Gabe's news post pretty much sum up my problems with the Marvel MMO. Pretty sad that Champions was supposed to be the Marvel MMO before it got repurposed into the Champions MMO. At least DCUO lets me make my own character, even with its limited color pallete and costume selections. I don't want to play Wolverine. I want to play my own hero and help out the X-Men or the Avengers. But screw that Richards guy. He's a douche.

Not to mention that it looks nothing like a real space janitor's outfit.

No. You "randomly stumble across" the cave and its elevator while doing Imperial missions, which send you into the Cave Under Tree. Then, you spot this huge machine with usable buttons there. You play with it, and you realize it's asking for something called a "Rakata Energy Cube." Having never seen an item like this before, it does seem much like the Matrix Cube Assembler device you saw on Dromund Kaas near the Dark Temple, so you need to find these cubes (the machine looks like ti requires four of them) and turn it on to see what happens. So, you type "/1 Hey. I found this machine, and it's asking for Rakata Energy Cubes. Anyone have an idea what those are?" Then someone answers, "I found one of those as ground spawn in the wreckage of a crashed ship. It disappeared when I took it, though." And someone else replies, "Yeah. I found one near the rock bridge to the southern part of the area. Looks like they spawn in random places." Then, you and a few others are engaged in finding these cubes. And, because you're extremely tired of looking for them, you get a group together that has a total of four cubes just to see if, by any chance, you can use one set of cubes for a whole group. Everyone places his cube in one of the slots, then someone turns on the machine. After a bit of a light show, you get the familiar quest marker above a glowing cube, and everyone gets a nice stat boost and codex entry. Then, you go and write up a guide on the forums to help other people (especially the Republic rubes that never go to the cave to find the machine) figure out what to do to get this datacron. Someone else decides to farm the energy cubes for a few days, and he makes a guide on how best to gather those. Everything has to be discovered before there can be a guide put up. It's not like Bioware or Blizzard or SOE or anyone else is putting out how exactly to do these things (though I assume some employees do nudge their in-game compatriots toward the final goal, as is their prerogative). There will always be a type of gamer that has to be on the cutting edge of content. They want those server firsts, world firsts and what not. They want to be in the guild that did the first Plane of Time clear, or killed the Sleeper, or first cleared some Nightmare Mode operation. And then there are the masses that don't have the time or wish to devote what time they do have toward really doing such things. We don't care to be first; we just want to do it. That's why the first group writes up the guides: to help the rest of us. We choose to read the guides to help us out and make better use of our time. It's not killing the game. It's contributing to community, such that it is. And, you can always be in a third group that doesn't read the guides. That's your prerogative.

So, there I was, hacking my way through Dr. Oggurobb's Lab, when all of the sudden, the people I was fighting ran back to their places ... Evade ... and then acted like they never saw me, suddenly coming at me as if I had just appeared among them. Then, they did it again ... Evade ... and even a third time ... Evade ... and a fourth time ... Evade before I was finally able to actually kill them. I don't know where the Regs are getting their minions, but they seem incredibly resilient, even if they do have a problem with short-term memory.

Heh. But, yes, the lekku need more weight. This is incredibly apparent when riding an elevator of falling a decent height. About half of the lekku will point straight up, like hair might do in the same situation. Lekku are muscled appendages--not hair.

The Tionese trooper helmet reminded me of the snowtroopers. Actually, with the exception of the ginormous shoulder pads, the entire set of armor looked very snowtrooper-ish. But, since that's not available anymore (and it was Trooper-only anyway), I'll keep an eye out for more. http://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x3/thewok/walden_tionese_helm.jpg With a white/white preview for you.

Thank you Greyle for showing me a way to take decent shots of my characters without having to roam around for hours looking for that one spot in the game with decent lighting. I have a number of characters I play (one of each class plus some extra), but here I present some of my favorites: This is Ruminara Ven (class: Jedi Guardian). Currently at odds with the Order on interpretation of the Code. It took me a while to find decent gear for a Twi'lek that wasn't just trampwear. Rumi spent some time undercover on Nar Shaddaa, helping the Order stop a slaving operation. For that reason, she had eyebrows tattooed on. http://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x3/thewok/ruminara.jpg This is the suave, debonair Captain Nicolao Rio. I think this is the one character I had where I was happy with the Tionese look, so I've kept it around since then. He's a Scoundrel, for sure. And not-so-secretly had a thing for Rumi up there. That is, until he met Sergeant Walden, my commando. http://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x3/thewok/nicolao.jpg Before Captain Rio met up with Rumi, he had to make a bit of a forced landing on a Rattataki colony world. There, he spent some time with a powerful warlord, with whom he traded for parts, food and shelter. During this few weeks' stay, Nico spent a great deal of time with the warlord's daughter, wooing her with sweet words and plenty of attention. They spent a lot of quality time together, with him teaching her how to shoot, her teaching him about such a violent culture, and both teaching each other ... more private things. Nico promised to take Suhina with him when he left. Of course, by the time his ship was fixed, he completely forgot about that pillow talk. Suhina, angry at this betrayal and abandonment, left her world and put the skills she learned from her people to good use as a bounty hunter. She hopes one day to come across a bounty for Nicolao Rio, and she will destroy anyone who gets in her way of collecting on that contract. http://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x3/thewok/suhina.jpg As an aside: Hey Bioware! See these stances? Where are they in the game? Give us these stances as options for idle stances for our characters. Give us new stances via the Mood system or something. Give us some more heroic poses all around, with some more feminine poses (like above) for the women.

The problem with using Lucas himself as a source is that he's changed his mind a number of times on what exactly the "balance of the Force" means. There was a time when he did say that the Dark Side was what caused the imbalance in the Force, and that, by killing the Emperor (and then subsequently dying himself), Anakin Skywalker returned balance to the Force, even with Luke still around. He likened the Dark Side to a cancer, with "The Force" (he never mentions a Light Side, after all) being a body. The tumor must be removed in order for the body to maintain homeostasis. At other times, he's gone the D&D druid route: the struggle between Light and Dark, good and evil. Honestly, the answer you'd get from Lucas really depends on a number of variables that seem to include planetary alignment, fatigue level, and what he ate for lunch earlier.

Small correction: Bioware developed Neverwinter Nights. Neverwinter Nights 2 was developed by Obsidian, using an "upgraded" (the accuracy of that term depends on what you're talking about, and to whom you're speaking) version of Bioware's engine. Pretty much just like KOTOR and KOTOR 2. However, I still maintain my support for a Mac client for the game. Any increase in audience is good.

The Talz and Kaleesh sound like mobs you'd get as part of a mission, specifically, the Imperial mission to assault the Kaleesh caves to gather the weapons and challenge the leader. There's another mission in the area to kill the Talz outside, and another branch of that cave goes to a small instance where you kill a Talz elite. Like many of the elites in these achievements, it seems you'll have to run the Ilum questline to kill them again, since the game didn't track their kills before.

Yep. Levels 1-50 take place over more than a year (likely more in the realm of three to four years) of in-universe time, and they don't all line up perfectly. I always figured that Drayen found a way to contact the Cabal after being unfrozen and before he finally died.

Or, you can use the Bantha Drifts Tunnel and completely bypass the Outlaw's Den and the Imperial bases.

If we see more class story in the future, I'll be quite thrilled. But, right now, I'm viewing TOR as more of a long-form Dragon Age: Origins-style game, where the class stories are the origins, and the rest of the game's lifetime is the post-origin game.

Green Gree rep tokens are worth 500. Blue trophies are worth 1000. Not sure about the purples.

5: The Secret World 4: Neverwinter 3: World of Warcraft 2: EverQuest II 1: The Old Republic Honorable Mention goes to Asheron's Call, because I enjoyed the story as it developed, and I enjoyed the mostly open-ended character development. I decided to keep my list to only current MMOs. Yes, I know AC is currently running, but it's not a game I'd go back to, for fear of killing my memories with the truth. I guess AC is to me what Pre-CU SWG is for other people. I'm afraid that the game itself isn't as good now as it was back in '99. WoW is another game I wouldn't go back to. I played the hell out of it for years, but at the end I was so burned out that I was logging in only to chat with friends rather than play the game.

It's not that tunnel. It's just north of Zaroshe in the sand people camp, and it lets out just outside the southern part of Outlaw's Den.

Rather than adding another level of reputation (what's better than Legend? "Myth"?), it would make more sense to create a new reputation that would need to be raised.

There's nothing on Tatooine that forces you to run through an Imperial base as a Republic character. Nor do you have to enter Outlaw's Den to do anything, save for actually PvPing in the area or searching for stuff with seeker droids.

Genetic expression within a species can be incredibly varied. The best example is dogs. All dogs are Canis lupus. Yet, there are so many breeds of dog that look completely different from each other. The pug and the great dane. The greyhound and the corgi. These are all the same species. So, technically, a Duros and a Bothan could be the same species, but expressing is widely different ways. They're not, but they could be. But, if you look at the Duros and the Neimoidian, you then have a closer example; neimoidians are offshoots of the duros species. Twi'leks are another example, with the widely varying skin colors. Same species, different expressions. You could call Rutians, Lethans and other "colors" of twi'leks different races of the twi'lek species. There are such things as human races, since "race" is just a classification of people, usually in regards to ethnicity. Every human being is **** sapiens, but we have many races within our varying cultures. "Speciesism" is the same result, but for different reasons. The term may be a neologism, but the idea dates back to Cicero and even Aristotle. A human that hates all houks because they are houks is guilty of speciesism. Houks and humans are not the same species. In regards to twi'leks: slavery is ingrained in the twi'lek culture. Families often raise children and sell them into slavery. Slavery is technically illegal in the Republic, but, since slavery brings so much money to Ryloth, few are the people who will rat out every slaver that comes knocking (and even fewer once the rat gets found out, most likely). They didn't necessarily like it, though. Most just viewed it as a necessity. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Twi%27lek

It's the color of the crystal. You can see a similar color sample in the dye module tooltips.

It's not just on the fleet, either. Before 2.1, I had no problem with performance on Makeb. Now, there are times when performance degrades a lot, even going into single-digit framerates (usually at the respective faction bases). I could routinely get more than 50 fps in the fleet, with immediate loading of all terminals. Now, terminals do take a long time to load up, and framerates have plummeted, though I haven't actually measured. There was something in 2.1 that really killed my performance. Every setting in Windows, every hardware setting, and every setting in the game has remained the same. The difference was the update.

Cyborgs are their own species because "Species" in character creation used to be "Background." When they renamed background to species, they didn't then merge cyborgs with humans.