The strength of the Jedi Knight series is the online multi-player option. I’ve been playing that series since 1998, starting with Jedi Knight, then Mysteries of the Sith, Jedi Outcast, and finally Jedi Academy. Whenever I upgrade my home computer, it’s usually so I can play the newest Jedi Knight game. If you ever see “Hero from Shaolin” in an online game, come get some. 
Originally posted by MasterKiller
[B If you ever see “Hero from Shaolin” in an online game, come get some.
What, “MasterKiller” was taken?
I’ve been using “Hero from Shaolin” as my screen name for that game since 1999. I changed my screen name here to MasterKiller a couple of years ago because I kept getting nasty emails from Shaolin Kempo guys because I was dissin’ on Steve DeMasco and his fake Shaolin lineage, and after a while responding to them wasn’t fun anymore…
I’ve never tried KOTOR, even though it is generally regarded as the best_Star_Wars_game_ever. The sequel, Sith Lords, looks like it will be REALLY cool though, so I’m sure I’ll try that.
I really liked Jedi Academy too – the saber battles were amazing. I hear that Jedi Outcast is a much deeper and better game, so I may have to pick it up now that’s gone down to a cheap $20.
Never did want to try the Galaxies game – after playing Everquest in the past, I knew it would be a very time-consuming kind of game and definitely not something I wanted to get “hooked” on, even if it was hellafun.
Anyone going to get the Battlefront game that comes out on the 21st?
Jedi Outcast kinda sucks, except for multi-player. You don’t even get the lightsaber until half-way through, and then you can’t use it because you are on a sniper level. I generally hate any game where Kyle Katarn is the main character.
Don’t Cry for Me, George Lucas
Don’t you feel sorry for poor, misunderstood George Lucas? Check out this Q/A quote from GL on the OT DVDs:
AP: Why not release both the originals and special editions on DVD?
Lucas: The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it. … I’m not going to spend the, we’re talking millions of dollars here, the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.
Is it me, or is he sounding a little like Rodney Dangerfield here?
Re: Don’t Cry for Me, George Lucas
Originally posted by Judge Pen
[B]Don’t you feel sorry for poor, misunderstood George Lucas? Check out this Q/A quote from GL on the OT DVDs:
AP: Why not release both the originals and special editions on DVD?
Lucas: The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it. … I’m not going to spend the, we’re talking millions of dollars here, the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.
Is it me, or is he sounding a little like Rodney Dangerfield here? [/B]
hey i dont get no respect.
Lucas’ argument only works if he didn’t make a bizillion dollars marketing stuff to the fans. The fans have invested HEAVILY into this franchise over the last 25 years in clothing, toys, books, games, conventions, museum shows (Myth and Magic wasn’t free) etc…so he no longer owns the story, no matter what he thinks.
I agree and most of the fans would probably leave him alone if he would only release the original versions also. The majority would buy both so I don’t buy his argument that its cost prohibitive to restore the originals also.
Originally posted by Judge Pen
I agree and most of the fans would probably leave him alone if he would only release the original versions also. The majority would buy both so I don’t buy his argument that its cost prohibitive to restore the originals also.
i got the originals on VHS, before they came out in thearters a couple years back 
:gome: :gome:
just to go OT for a sec.
the company that makes Kotor is a Canadian one, Bioware and they make probably the best rpg/rts game out there. It’s called Neverwinter nights.
Not starwars, more of a d&d theme, but, I run a server now and then and occaisionally build mods and dm them. Geek that I am.
There is a new upcoming release for it called dragonlance and it will have ridable horses! woo hoo!
anyway, I hear Battlefront is realy quite good.
But check out neverwinter nights if you get the chance, this is a game that is like heroin in it’s addictive qualities. 
Battlefront = Star Wars version of Battlefield 1942. It’s pretty cool. You can drive AT-ATs, AT-STs, speeder bikes, Clone Wars vehicles…and snipe Ewoks.
I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed in the audio mix of the new DVDs. It seems that the special effect and ambiance sounds are too loud for the audio track and I have difficulty picking up on the dialogue because the other sounds drown them out.
There are a lot of problems with the audio mixes. At one point in ANH, they even reversed the L/R audio for a few lines. They over-tweaked the sound, IMO. Shoulda left well-enough alone.
Anyway, I don’t have “official” versions yet…but I’m assuming my copies are the same as yours.
I’m not liking the new Emperor in ESB hologram very much, either.
But the colors and clarity are beautiful.
Anyway, they’ll probably tweak it again for the 2007 box set. But since it will be on Blu Ray/HDVD, the picture will get cleaned up even more.
The reversal of the L/R audio doesn’t bother me that much, nor does the emperor hologram. I haven’t watched ROTJ yet. Did they remove Leia’s line about remembering her mother?
Interesting article :
Return to Mos Eisley: The Star Wars Trilogy on DVD
[SIZE=1]written by Will Brooker[/size]
Mos Eisley Spaceport, a landspeeder-drive from Luke Skywalker’s homestead on Tatooine, is the connection between Luke’s farming community and the worlds beyond - like the end of a funnel turned wide-side up to the galaxy, channelling bizarre foreign species and exotic travellers into a single neighbourhood, and specifically into the single dark interior of the Cantina. Mos Eisley is a hub, a centre – a microcosm of the galaxy, representing the diversity of the broader spheres outside Tatooine – and it also concentrates much of the essence, the charm and energy of George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars: A New Hope into a single sequence. In the twenty-seven years since the movie was first released, it is Mos Eisley – its layout, its inhabitants, the action that takes place there – that has changed the most dramatically, and so this sequence also illustrates the key differences between Lucas’ creation of 1977 and the revised versions – the 1997 Special Edition is now altered further with this DVD release – that supposedly take us closer towards the pure vision that Lucas wanted all along, had he not been constrained by budget and technology.
“Well, you know, its fun to make films for young people,” Lucas muses casually in the DVD set’s core documentary, Empire of Dreams, explaining why he ever began drafting a Flash Gordon-style space opera during the mid-1970s. “It’s a chance to sort of make an impression on them.” Of course, Lucas made a seismic impression on the young people who saw A New Hope and its successors between 1977 and 1983 – some went into filmmaking because of it, some drew a system of religious belief from it, and millions woke up in C-3PO pyjamas, spent the day making laser noises with mini-action figures and fell asleep in the glow of an R2-D2 nightlight. That he originally meant A New Hope to be a children’s film is less obvious, especially given that the saga is frequently accused by today’s adult fans of having become progressively infantile, with return of the Jedi’s Ewoks marking the beginning of a slide that reached its nadir in Episode I’s Jar Jar Binks. The standard messageboard retort to this criticism claims nay-sayers have lost their “inner child” and the sense of innocent wonder with which they approached A New Hope: if they watched the original Star Wars movie now for the first time, as adults, these cynical “bashers” would find fault with its fairy-tale qualities.
Watching the Mos Eisley scenes now, as an adult who first experienced them in 1977 – a time before domestic videocassettes, let alone DVD – there does seem a clear difference in tone between this fourth episode in the saga and the prequel films to date, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Mos Eisley is an adult world presented for a young audience; the urban nightlife in Attack of the Clones is, by contrast, a childish version of an adult world. Coruscant’s Outlander Nightclub where Anakin and Obi-Wan track Zam Wessell is a gaudy neon den, as threatening as a set from the 1960s Batman. The young Jedi weave confidently through the crowds, hassled only by a kid who tries to sell them “death sticks”; even the local drug sounds lame, with a sensible health-warning as its street name. The Nightclub is a set-piece, one more visual spectacle in a sequence that looks like pre-production for a video game; it’s a ten year-old’s idealisation of the kind of “adult” place his big sister goes to when she’s dressed up for the evening.
The Mos Eisley Cantina carries entirely different connotations. This is a stripped-down, basic hole for locals, and it’s immediately clear that while Ben can mingle successfully, the droids are unwelcome and Luke, the point of identification for the young viewer, is a potential target. Despite being of legal drinking age – just about – Skywalker is a farm-boy, gauche and over-eager, fired up on bluff to cover his nerves. He boldly tugs the barkeep’s jacket to get served, but immediately gets bullied by one of the patrons for no reason other than that he’s a new face and an easy mark.
Luke’s behaviour in Mos Eisley is a constant performance, an attempt to act big and keep up a tough-guy front in an environment where, right from the start, he’s out of his depth. “Watch your step,” Ben advises. “This place can be a little rough.” “I’m ready for anything,” Luke boasts, and tries to borrow his mentor’s worldly tone as he in turn advises Threepio, “why don’t you wait out by the speeder. We don’t want any trouble.” Even at the table with Han Solo, Luke squares up to the older man, trying to bargain and brag on an equal level – “I’m not such a bad pilot myself, we don’t have to sit here and listen to all this – ” – while the smuggler lounges back in amusement. It’s in his wondering comment to Ben, though – “I can’t understand how we got by those troopers. I thought we were dead.” – that Luke reveals the more genuine combination of apprehension and awe that Mos Eisley evokes in him. This spaceport, however minor and shabby, is an edgy, dangerous place, and Luke’s reactions cue us to that.
The novelisation of A New Hope, ostensibly by George Lucas himself, confirms this sense of teenage unease and self-consciousness through which we experience the Cantina.
Luke now found himself the subject of some unwanted attention. He abruptly became aware of his isolation and felt as if at one time or another every eye in the place rested a moment on him, that things human and otherwise were smirking about him and making comments behind his back. Trying to maintain an air of quiet confidence, he returned his gaze to old Ben… (pp.95-96)
Rather than a child’s fantasy of adult venues, the Cantina feels like a real adult venue, captured in the way that it appears to a kid: something big and daunting, smoky and noisy, shadowy and dirty. And kind of sexy too – even if the finished movie does cut “the humanoid wench who had been wriggling on [Han]’s lap” (p.101) along with Koo Stark as Luke’s friend Camie (who “wriggled sensuously, her well-worn clothing tugging in various intriguing directions” in the novel (p.18)) – both characters were actually filmed before being edited out of the final cut, and this unpolished, unashamed sensuality still seems to leave its tint, lingering in Mos Eisley like perfume and hinted at in the remaining, brief shot of poised, pretty floozies surveying the bar through hookah-smoke. Though this may be a compromised version of the original conception, it hasn’t lost all the flavour of John Mollo’s pre-production sketches, with their rough fashion-plates of humanoids labelled “2 x Space Girls, Tight Top.” The Cantina owes something to scenes of Harlem bars in 1970s Blaxploitation, as well as Western saloons in John Ford films; Coruscant’s Outlander Nightclub, on the other hand, looks like somewhere the Teletubbies would go for a drink. The funk outfit Meco produced a vinyl rendition of the Cantina Theme soon after A New Hope’s release, and indie band Ash reprised it on a b-side, around the time of their debut album 1977. A generation of Star Wars fans could play that tune on a kazoo as a party piece. I wonder if any fans of whatever age – adult, teenage, under-10 – would even recognise the music playing in the Outlander scene.
continues . . .
continued . . .
One of the pleasant surprises of the DVD documentary is seeing unfamiliar glimpses from a movie so familiar that most viewers can recite whole scenes of its dialogue. Clips of deleted scenes, bloopers, rehearsals – even just the beginnings and ends of shots, with clapperboard and sound-sync beeps – have the sense of something snatched from a real event, like historical archive footage. Producer Gary Kurz said of Lucas’s financial projections in 1975, “I think George thought it could be made like THX [1138], not having a real cameraman and making it in a documentary style.” (Garry Jenkins, Empire Building p.71) Oddly, what captivates about these clips, with their hissy sound, muffled voices and sometimes their black-and-white film stock, is that they do look like documentary. As such, they emphasise Lucas’ achievement in creating a convincing “used universe”, a coherent fantasy world that looked as though it had existed long before the cameras came along; but they also painfully show up CGI’s inability to meet that standard.
André Bazin’s theory that cinematic realism should aspire to using the camera apparatus as an objective, transparent means of recording the “pro-filmic event” were published in the US as What is Cinema by the University of California Press, 1971 – not long after George Lucas graduated from the University of Southern California, and in the year of THX-1138’s theatrical release. This aspect of Bazin’s writing was heavily-critiqued and considered dated even by the time A New Hope came out, but comparing the remains of the filmed Mos Eisley material with the CGI set-dressing that now decorates this original footage, it’s hard not to agree with the conservative notion that “realism” lies in a concrete, physical truth that the camera records, and to hanker for this old-fashioned approach to cinema. In fact, to hanker for cinema itself, or what cinema used to mean: for a set with the solid noises of footsteps and chairs scraping, with lightsabers covered in reflective tape and whirring from a handle motor, with aliens who, even if dressed in cheap fright masks, had a solid presence and took up space on the set.
Seeing the crew at work in behind-the-scenes footage that captures the energy, the innovation, the geeky youth of these skinny, bearded filmmakers – they share an insomniac spirit of experiment with the Atari games designers and console builders of the same period, not just pushing an envelope but mailing it first-class into the future – still makes you want to shoot films yourself. Seeing Lucas looking over someone’s shoulder at a wire-frame computer model of Jar-Jar rotating on a screen doesn’t carry the same buzz. Sure, CGI and live-action Star Wars fan-films are still being produced now, twenty year since I animated my mini-action figures for Super-8 stop-motion home movies, so Lucas’ saga clearly still has the power to inspire; but behind-the-scenes shots of Episode III, all blue-screen and motion-capture as one team works on the movie and another prepares the tie-in video game, barely resemble filmmaking – or at least, what filmmaking used to mean.
The crew, nerds given the opportunity to create worlds, are having a blast making the first Star Wars movie; and so are the stars. Again, the plain fact of having Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford opposite each other and surrounded by costumed extras, in a convincing simulation of a seedy bar, gives the two performers a chance to spark off each other like stage actors, Ford playing the sardonic old-hand to Hamill’s naïve eagerness – but they even do it in audition, wearing street clothes. The Empire of Dreams documentary sometimes lapses charmingly into home-video compilation, showing the main characters goofing and corpsing. We see Chewbacca talking in Peter Mayhew’s accent, Luke and Leia kicking their feet on the edge of a Death Star chasm, looking just like bored twins, and the gang in the Millennium Falcon ****pit whooping it up as though they’re about to go on a family vacation.
There’s a chemistry here that seems almost entirely missing in the formal exchanges of Episodes I and II – some of that may be due to the more constrained society depicted in the prequel movies, some to the dead air between all the principal actors, but much of the energy seems to be sucked into the green-screens that pass for setting and even secondary character in the new Star Wars movies. Once more, it would be a mistake to get suckered entirely into too-simple dichotomies about the good old ways versus soulless, new-fangled methods. Even in 1977, post-production transformed the raw material – Lucas comforted Hamill, who was worried that the Cantina looked quaint as the Nutcracker Suite, “we’re gonna fix all of this.” But in 1977, there was a lot more raw material to work with, and that material was substantial enough to tell a story, to carry character on its own, to enchant. Maybe the Cantina extras, with their rag-bag masks, did look like the Nutcracker; but maybe it’s better for your mythical fable to look like a theatrical fairy-story than a construction site with green curtains.
The teaser trailers from 1977 pick up on this “used universe” solidity and plausibility, asking the viewer to imagine “what if” this was really going on, right now? Star Wars, a saga “a billion years in the making”, was initially pitched to audiences almost as though it came in a time-capsule from a distant civilisation, a Voyager message from the stars much like Princess Leia’s distress call. A New Hope captivated because it convinced. The CGI additions to the movie can never convince in the same way, because some deep-seated instinct within us rejects them as fundamentally unreal. The original Mos Eisley was shot on celluloid in 1976 at a geographical location in Tunisia. The expanded CGI Mos Eisley never existed in time or space: it was pure data. Inevitably, despite the skills of the Special Edition animators, their creation could not duplicate organic movement or physical environment to the precise extent that would allow the viewer to accept them wholesale as real: there is always an awkwardness about a landspeeder’s bounce, an artificial sheen to a creature’s hide, a figure’s stilted stride, a flatness or falseness in the visual planes. The raw footage of the Cantina scene, even without music, is filled with the background noise of a crowded bar, a hubbub of adult conversation carrying the acoustic resonance of voices within a specific interior: what sound recordists call “atmos”. CGI, inescapably, is shot in a place without atmos.
continues . . .
continued . . .
The justification for the Special Edition changes has always been that this is the way Lucas would have made the movies the first time round, had the technology been in place. To resist the CGI updating is, according to this argument, to deny Lucas the fulfilment of his personal vision. Yet the DVD’s further changes to the 1997 Special Editions undermine this theory, or at least question the wisdom of Lucas’ approach to his creation. The 1997 version was presented at the time as the story its director had always wanted to see, but the fact that Luke’s initial landspeeder approach to Mos Eisley, already replaced with a CGI shot in the Special Edition, has been improved once more is a clear admission that the previous effect was imperfect. Given that even the more recent version of that shot still has the artificial fluidity of computer-physics, no matter how many bounces and dust-clouds the animators throw in, it has to be asked when this process of continuous improvement will end. Already the 2004 landspeeder fails to cut in smoothly with the subsequent, circa-1997 shot, which features a noticeably inferior computer-model of C-3PO with dull yellow rather than convincingly golden plate.
Similarly, the revamped Jabba sequence in the 2004 New Hope serves as tacit acceptance that 1997’s incarnation was hopelessly below-standard – it now looks grotesquely, embarrassingly primitive, a worse graphic effect than commercial PS2 software – but even the new Jabba, for all the clever shadow-effects, works only in the same way as a successful Photoshop montage. We admire the artistry behind placing Jabba next to Han Solo precisely because we know it’s an impossible image. We should be experiencing the scene as an interaction between characters, not as an impressive piece of digital manipulation. Even in this state-of-the-art update, there’s little chance of that; and yet, the illusion was achieved in 1983 simply by building a massive, foam-rubber Jabba who sat in the same physical space as the actors. Ironically, twenty-one years of CGI innovation have not yet produced a Jabba who looks as good as the original – though Lucas’ repeated tinkerings suggest that he’s going to keep on trying.
The continuous updating might be acceptable if viewed as a steady progress towards Lucas’ pure ideal of the saga, even if it throws off interim versions along the way that are later written off as unacceptable and stripped of the “Special Edition” label, which now gets slapped onto the DVD version until the next revamp comes along. However, it sometimes becomes hard to believe that Lucas does have a consistent vision of the way the films should look or even how they should sound. The 1997 edition, for instance, added a scream to Luke’s plunge down the Cloud City exhaust shaft as he sacrifices himself rather than join Vader. The 2004 release decides that he fell silently. This change quite reasonably suggests the calm strategy of a Jedi-in-training rather than an anguished mistake, but it also strongly implies that there is no single pure vision motivating Lucas’ alterations.
The most notorious example of Star Wars history rewritten is the 1997 version of Han Solo’s showdown with Greedo, in which the smuggler shoots only in defence rather than in cold blood. A blast was added to Greedo’s pistol, and Han’s immobile head was morphed into an unconvincing dodge before he fired back. In 2004, the opponents fire at virtually the same time, a detail that, crucially, can only fully be appreciated on the frame-by-frame slomo of DVD. Watched at normal speed, this sequence is now a confusion of criss-crossing energy bolts and impact explosions. Fans complained that the 1997 rewriting softened Han’s character from a coolly selfish pirate into a more honourable figure, therefore weakening the effect of his change of heart and loyalties throughout the trilogy as a whole. This recent tweaking seems to cast Han in a subtly new light: but the key point about the scene currently stands is that it makes very little sense as cinema. A viewer in 1977 knew immediately that Han had eased his pistol out from his hip while they spoke, and ended their conversation with an exclamation point as he blasted Greedo nonchalantly through the table. A viewer in 2004, especially one with no knowledge of the “who-shot-first” debate, would have to rewind, freeze the image and examine the still shot to grasp what had happened. This is now a scene made for DVD, designed for current technology and an entirely different way of watching visual texts; which is interesting in what it confirms about our changing engagement with screen narrative through the medium of ever-more-precise home technology, but disturbing in what it takes away from the original, a wide-screen space opera designed to be watched in movie theatres.
The freeze-frame, home-viewing aesthetic dominates – some might say contaminates – the CGI additions to A New Hope, and continues to inform the prequel trilogy. Each image is packed with background detail, “Easter Eggs” for the sharp-eyed fan to hunt, identify and analyse on websites. The 1997 Mos Eisley includes cross-references to the Expanded Universe of spin-off novels – opening up the canon to authorise other writers’ inventions such as the swoop bike and the Outrider spacecraft, which again casts doubt on the notion that the updates represent a steady progression towards Lucas’ personal dream from the late 1970s. The backgrounds are now busy, scurrying with activity; much of it a wearying slapstick. A jawa tumbles from his mount, one droid slaps down another. This is the Muppet Show clowning that crept into Return of the Jedi, went hyperactive in the 1997 remake – disrupting the suspense of the Jabba’s Palace scene through an extended musical number – then sprawled out over The Phantom Menace’s Pod-Race. Humour emerging from character and dry interaction – the banter between Han, Leia and Luke in A New Hope spills over with playful rivalry – is now offset by the distracting antics of computer-animated doodles in the corner of the screen.
Some of the changes, then, merely supplement, set-dress and fill space, providing bonus features for those who like to freezeframe movies to examine the details while annoying traditionalists who prefer a focus on the main characters. Others fundamentally change character, structure and story. Han Solo’s retroactive characterisation as the kind of guy who never shoots without being fired upon is the most controversial example, but the very addition of Jabba the Hutt to the 1997 and 2004 editions of A New Hope slows the pace of the Mos Eisley scenes for the sake of repeating information we were given in the Greedo sequence: Han even reels off the same line, “Even I get boarded sometimes, do you think I had a choice?” twice within five minutes.
Although Jabba was scheduled to appear in the 1977 cut, and the dialogue remains in the original screenplay, this alone doesn’t necessarily justify its reinstatement: many scenes from that script, including Luke’s first appearance with Biggs and Camie, were shot, discarded and never reinserted. Jabba’s cameo in A New Hope may be an amusing novelty and a showcase for the improvements in CGI between 1997 and 2004, but it radically diminishes the impact of his appearance in Return of the Jedi, which originally worked as the revelation of an arch-villain following two movies where his name hung over Solo, vague and ominous.