Tag: The Old Republic

Review of ‘The Old Republic’: An Amazing Game produced in an Amazing Time

I had said that I was going to reward myself for all the hard work I did in 2012 and celebrate the first quarter release of my new book Tail of the Dragon.  Typically authors in my position might take a cruise to the Mediterranean, or schedule a few weeks in Hawaii to celebrate the conclusion and release of their novels but I had stated that I was going to do something different, I was going to invest in a video game that my wife and I had been eager to play for all of the last year, but didn’t have time–or to be honest–the machines to properly play them on.  Instead of an external vacation, we were planning to go on an internal one by playing the very involved MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is the latest creation of Bioware, LucasArts, and Electronic Arts with a production budget of over $200 million dollars.  The Old Republic MMO is the very latest of its kind following along the tradition of World of Warcraft, and the popular, Guild Wars.  MMO’s are very involved, all-encompassing, and can be very complicated.  There are a lot of computer calculations that are made per second with people from all over the world playing at the same time as you are, so they require computer systems that can operate at peak performance all the time, and that required me to make a major computer upgrade just to play for myself.  However, for my wife to play with me, it would require two supercharged computer systems, so after the fourth quarter sales closed on my Tail of the Dragon and with the help of my son-in-law, we built two specially designed, eight core processor, 75 Watt power-driven monsters for a few thousand dollars just to play The Old Republic which is very graphics intensive, and at times stunning to behold, especially if you love Star Wars like we do, enjoying the story lore with great reverence.

For kids who have grown up with MMOs–who have been over 13 years old since Play Station 2 came out, I think they are missing the wonder of these modern games.  I have read some of their reviews of Star Wars: The Old Republic before making my purchases, and I think they have the attention span of a nat.  Their expectations in the field of gaming are unreasonably high, which of course can never be satisfied completely by anybody.  Because of my schedule being as intense as it had been for many years, the only type of video gaming I had time for were X-Box 360 classics like Red Dead Redemption, Dragon Age, also from BioWare, and an old X-Box game that my wife and I loved to play together called Gladius, which was an RPG co-op–an early design that has obviously carried over into Old Republic.  My family, meaning my kids, my wife, and my extended nephews played Star Wars: Galaxies a lot, and World of Warcraft, but I never had the time to play with them, and found it irritating that most of the MMO’s did not have a way for players to co-op in story mode in the way that Gladius had, so I stayed away and my wife never invested much time because of it.  This problem has been fixed in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which allows two separate players to do just about everything together, with two totally different storylines—and the way that BioWare pulled this off now that my wife and I have played it for over a week both day and night is nothing short of a technical miracle.  For the kids who want the kind of story content available in The Old Republic, to go on forever, they are deeply unrealistic.  There is no video game on the market today that is as deeply story driven as The Old Republic, and everything is absolutely epic in scope.  For people like me who grew up watching the original Star Wars movies in a movie theater when they were first released, and had to wait almost an entire decade for the ability to watch those movies at home on a LaserDisk—well before VHS video tape or DVD’s, the work that has went into The Old Republic is a small miracle.

My wife is playing as a Jedi Counselor and I am playing as a Jedi Knight, and The Old Republic allows us to both play our stories in a co-op mode that is just stunning in its conception.  If all married couples could find something like Old Republic to do together, I think the divorce rate in America would drop off the chart putting many lawyers out of business—because the game is simply wonderful in its co-op play.  For instance, my wife and I got up at 5:30 AM on Saturday December 30th after playing the game intensely for 5 consecutive days, and we logged into the game on our two monster computers, each of them being cooled down by 5 internal fans just to keep the video card temperature down.  We logged off the game at midnight that same day and went to bed but were up again 5 hours later to follow the same routine on Sunday and Monday.  The story content is very intense, and every couple of hours of play there is a major climax in the action similar to most movies, where there is a plot driven introduction, a series of problems that must be overcome, then a resolution to conclude that portion of the story.   In one instance on the capital planet of Coruscant—which is absolutely stunningly rendered in the game—I had convinced a member of the Senate who I had caught doing a lot of double-dealing between the criminal underworld, and the people’s business of the Senate, to resign.  She offered me a lot of money to keep her name clean, which of course I didn’t take—just like in real life—and forced her to come clean with her resignation.  The Senator in question was not a bad person, or evil in any way.  She was doing what she felt she needed to do politically, but she had crossed the line and lost her way, and it was my job to make sure she stayed clean.  In the world of Star Wars that is the job of a Jedi Knight—a defender of the Republic from not just countless hoards of bad guys, but from the corruption that is indicative in politics.  Jedi are a great plot device that fills a need that is indicative in all democratic republics, such as what The United States is facing with unbridled corruption within politics.  Jedi are the stabilizing spiritual force that keeps everyone honest and reminds me of the kind of philosophical leader that Plato had in mind in his book The Republic.  The Old Republic as a video game excels at giving players those types of moral dilemmas every few hours of game play and so far, my wife and I have over 70 hours each invested, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of the sheer amount of content that is available.

The servers we are playing on were all full much of the time we have been on the game, so it looks like Electronic Arts strategy of offering a free-to-play option worked.  Lots of people are flocking to the game, and on the worlds especially like Coruscant, there were many people running around just like any major city.  They were everywhere, even in the most far-flung corners of that particular planet.  But my wife and I are subscribers and proud to be.  I saw that Amazon.com was offering The Old Republic for $14 dollars which will allow people to play under a preferred status.  BioWare is offering the game for a free download off the web site.  But I personally think they should sell the game for over $200 each, because it’s worth it.   The game is that good.  It simply dwarfs similar games that are console driven.  The computer programming alone to make planets like Coruscant or the space port of The Republic Fleet look so great is mind-blowing.   In fact, when my wife and I arrived at the Republic Fleet Space Port we were slammed in the face by the sheer size and scope of the place, the countless video advertisements, the street vendors, the sights, the sounds, it reminded me a lot of a real life Las Vegas where you can’t help but look out the window at the scope of creativity put forth by the human mind in the rows and rows of theme driven hotels and resorts.  Star Wars: The Old Republic is loaded with these kinds of bewildering scenes leaving many hours of discovery open to any diligent gamer.

The Old Republic is simply an amazing game that exceeds all my expectations and then some.  I was a tremendous fan of the previous two X-Box games called Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Republic II but The Old Republic MMO is in my opinion the best game I have ever played.  It’s also been the nicest vacation I’ve ever been on, and I’ve been on a lot of good ones.  My wife and I have been having so much fun that we forgot to eat but two complete meals during the entire previous weekend.  We were so wrapped up in what we were doing that we didn’t want to go into the kitchen to get food.  Instead we ordered Chinese and took 10 minutes to go and pick it up.   Once when our shoulders were getting stiff from sitting in the same position for about 15 straight hours we sat in the hot tub for an hour to loosen up, then we went back at it for another 5 hours before going to bed.  I don’t know of any place that a couple can go and have that much fun and be clean as a whistle, and still be deeply satisfying physically, emotionally, and intellectually.  The Old Republic has all the intellectual stimulation of a great novel, all the visual dazzle of a blockbuster motion picture, but all the strategic satisfaction of the most intense simulation games.   In fact, at times it reminds me of a favorite game my wife and I used to play when we were first married called Star Wars: Assault on Hoth, which was a board game of sorts that was a role-playing adventure similar to Dungeons and Dragons.  This was well before computer games were anywhere close to where they are now, in fact LucasArts biggest title back then was a game I played all the time on an Atari 7200 called Ball Blazer.  That should put things in the proper time frame.  She and I would play Assault on Hoth three or four times a week popping a bowl of popcorn and going to war together on the paper landscape.  Many years later we would introduce our children to similar war simulation games such as Wiz Kids wonderful Pirates series (CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW MUCH WE ARE INTO THAT).  So we are used to playing these kinds of intense strategy games as a family, and The Old Republic is simply every bit as good as I’m saying it is.  It is the pinnacle of the gaming genre to date.  There is nothing like it, and it may be a long time before something close to it comes again.  The production values that went into the game are unusually over-the-top and not likely to be seen again.  The cost to produce as much content as BioWare did with The Old Republic is just prohibitive.  That is an economic reality that few who play games understand.

I anticipate that my wife and I will stay on this vacation well into the summer, so if my readers here wonder why I seem more reclusive than normal, and difficult to contact, or to pull commitments out of, blame it on The Old Republic.  I haven’t turned on a television in over a week, and have only casually scanned news reports, so the benefit of the vacation has been effective in this case.  There are few things that could divert my mind as effectively as something so intellectually stimulating as The Old Republic.  It is a miracle of the modern age and I cherish every moment I get to play it.  It is worth the thousands of dollars I spent just to play the game and then some.  It is a lifetime experience that my wife and I will never forget.

As for those who wonder why I’m on this type of vacation and would choose to put my energy into this kind of fictional endeavor as opposed to something more, “real,” well, all I can say is that you’d have to read the great novel Atlas Shrugged to get the full idea of why I’m on this particular journey with my wife and not out there in the world building hotels, playing politics, or starting new forms of revenue.  In many ways, The Old Republic is my own form of Galt’s Gulch.  What I earn there stays with me forever—even if it’s just a memory.   It’s my memory, and one that I can share with my wife.  And to me, nothing else matters. 

Elections have consequences…….but they don’t force people to participate in a fools game, and that is what modern politics offers.  Atlas Shrugged was right all along.  The Old Republic is my personal Gulch and I’m thankful to have it.

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Star Wars: The Old Republic: ‘Deceived’ — A book review relevant to modern America

We live in a dangerous time, the progressive utopia of collectivism is failing dramatically worldwide, and every cog in that machine is collapsing primarily impacting teachers, firefighters, police officers, nurses, politicians, and virtually every government employee.  The world of progressive vision is failing and the participants are thrashing about like fish just caught and thrown upon a dry deck moments before being cooked over a propane oven—and we all know it.  The failures of that society are due to a focus on all the wrong human attributes, and have materialized into massive economic failures.  Those who bought into those progressive social fantasies are in store for serious social unrest and are now beginning to panic like guests on the Titanic once it had been realized that the ship will sink—slowly, and they will all find themselves soon in the freezing water fighting for their lives.

People like me, and my readers here knew as soon as the ship of America hit the iceberg, that the ship would sink, and we immediately took action to save ourselves.  We knew that when America was faced with life or death in the icy water that it would take individual effort to save ourselves, and collectivism of any kind would result in drowning.  We were wise to not embed ourselves into any collectivism, so that when the ship of our nation sank, we could swim freely, and be away from the chaos—driven by shock that will surely follow.

But it is painful to see my fellow countrymen suffer needlessly, because I tried to warn them—we all did.  But they did not listen—expectantly.  They thought we were pulling their leg, that we were “conspiracy theorists” that we were radical right-wingers—which of course does not justify why we are prepared for the detriment of the fiscal cliff, and they are not.  I was asked the other day what I do to stay sane during the whole ordeal, and I replied that I read.  In fact, I read a lot.  Right now, I’m averaging three books a week, completing one about every 3 to 4 days.  The only exception is that I spent about a week and a half on War and Peace, and before that, about the same amount of time on The Golden Bough.

Out of all the books that I have read lately however, one book jumped out at me as being wonderfully reflective of our times here in modern America, and how I personally feel about it.  Oddly enough, that novel was a Star Wars book from The Old Republic series called Deceived which takes place 3650 years before the action of the popular films that are so well-known.  I found that book to be extremely relevant to what is happening all across the contemporary earth, particularly in United States politics.  The gist of the book is that the Sith Empire has made a move against the Republic stronghold of Coruscant to destroy the Jedi Temple who are the guardians of peace and justice throughout that fictionalized universe in events that took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.    The villain of the novel utters to the Jedi prior to the Sith attack, “Our time has come.  For three hundred years we prepared; we grew stronger while you rested in your cradle of power believing your people were safe and protected.  You were trusted to lead the Republic, but you were deceived, as our powers of the dark side have blinded you…you were deceived and now your Republic shall fall.”

I couldn’t help but be a little haunted by how relevant, and current some of the drama was in that novel.  It was extremely compelling and I highly recommend reading this fine book, even if science fiction is not the normal preferred type of reading material.  Deceived is a novel that explores what happens to people on the microcosm and macrocosm of political failure and how it affects individuals and multi species demographics across the face of an entire galaxy.  I enjoy most of the Star Wars books for the obvious reasons of big ideas, and fun fantasy, but this Deceived novel was quite impressive.  The novel follows the events of the attack shown in the above video advertising the new MMO computer game from Bioware titled Star Wars: The Old Republic.  And no, Old Republic is not just a simple video game—it cost $200 million to produce and counting, and is the absolute cutting edge standard in online computer game play.  It is stunningly epic.

Ultimately, the novel hit a theme that I spend a lot of time considering, and that is how do you re-build a society once it has crumbled?  What do you do when it is realized that the ship of society that we are all floating on is destined to sink into the abyss?  What is the proper method of maintaining integrity in the face of so much devastation and destruction?  For me, the ideas were explored in the novel Deceived and were wonderfully relevant, and a much-needed vacation from the treacherous events of the real world, and the many plots of destruction that are unfolding upon the American landscape where it is now obvious that we have all been Deceived in nearly the exact way that the Sith characterized in that very good Star Wars novel from the Old Republic Era.

I like the guy in the hat. He has the right attitude on how to deal with the crises that befalls us.  And to learn more about Star Wars and hear an interview that I have done on this subject with Matt Clark on WAAM……….CLICK HERE. 

Don’t forget, Friday, December 14th is Star Wars Dress up day.  Support Katie Goldman.  (CLICK HERE)


 

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

  

Learning what a Republic is: The Continued Lessons of Star Wars

I could not help but notice at my favorite book store that many of the works that I used to only find online, are now in stock, on the shelf. Work by Thomas Paine, John Locke, and all the works of Ayn Rand are easy to find, and this is fantastic news because people are hungry for knowledge. The Federalist Papers are even now stocked on the shelf in abundance. Ten years ago it was only law students who bought copies of it, now it’s an older man in his upper 60’s as I watched him thumb through it’s pages prior to purchase.

Political discussion is often not just about the topics on the nightly news. Recently, a friend of mine gave me a copy of The Original Argument, which was endorsed by Glenn Beck as a way to explain in today’s language the meaning of The Federalist Papers. I enjoyed The Original Argument so much that I read it twice while on vacation recently, and it occurred to me that The Original Argument was not a rule book so to speak intended for lawyers, but it is a political philosophy that speaks a truth established by 4000 years of human history. It does not belong in the political science section in a book store, but in the philosophy section.

But as a friend of mine uttered in frustration the other day, “what are we to do about all this!” The frustration of thinking all their lives that everything was OK in the world, and that politicians were sleazy, but not considered downright evil, and finding out that in fact there are many things that have been going on that people are just learning about because they are reading again, can be very overwhelming. Catching up on 200 years of American history in the span of a year or two like many Tea Party enthusiast are doing can send a person to burn out quick. So it’s important that people remember to have fun along the way. It’s even better if people can learn while they are having fun. Fans of Glenn Beck will notice that Beck is an obvious Star Wars fan. It will also be noticed that there are a lot of Tea Party patriots who are increasingly creating Twitter accounts along the lines of “Jedi Patriot” and “Empire Fighter” in an obvious homage to Star Wars. In our modern age, Star Wars has become a form of modern philosophy, not just simply entertainment. Star Wars is a great way to think about all the things that are going on in the world around us, while also taking a vacation from the intensity of those revelations. After all, the film The Phantom Menace was not about a young boy who grew up and became Darth Vader. That is just one of the sub plots. The Phantom Menace was all about a senator who wants to be emperor, and he uses many people in obscure ways to create the circumstances that will allow him to grab power for himself. It’s all in good old-fashioned fun, but the sincerity behind The Phantom Menace is actually incredibly sophisticated, which is the genius of Star Wars.

The films of Star Wars consist of only 6 two-hour movies and that is what a majority of the fans think of when they hear the name of Star Wars. But for fans who wish to dig deeper, Star Wars tackles many of the problems of our modern times using the language of mythology and the latest entry to that mythology is the MMO computer game called The Old Republic due out later this year and it’s something my wife and I are looking very much forward to.

Glenn Beck uses Star Wars metaphors to explain many of the complicated topics of our day because Star Wars is the only work of art in modern times which attempts to tackle the complicated nature of human failure and evolution as a species. Star Wars is a basic tale of good and evil, but it goes much deeper. With over 100 books, the 6 movies, cartoons, video games, comic books, amusement park rides, Star Wars is a formidable aspect of modern culture which I’ve written about in detail at this article: CLICK HERE

What is even bolder within this Star Wars mythology is this whole new path the franchise is taking in exploring The Old Republic. There are now two novels and two videos games with the addition of the computer game being previewed here, which explores what life was like in The Old Republic which takes place over a thousand years before the events shown in the films most people are familiar with. The idea of the Sith, the villains in Star Wars is to explore the influence of evil and this is done not just in a spiritual way in these stories, but also in a political way. It is the first work of art that I can think of which has mass appeal that attempts to do anything like this. It does not limit itself as an examination of religious influence, or political study, but as an all-encompassing investigation through the story lines of what causes the rise and fall of civilizations.

I am a fan of the works of writers like Thomas Mann and his Magic Mountain, and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and I will state in that context the collected works of Star Wars are every bit as sophisticated and meaningful. In Star Wars the entire galaxy is part of a republic. Not a democracy, but a republic. This is similar to what planet Earth is facing in whose political philosophy will emerge as the world shrinks, will it be a republic like what the United States has had so much success with, or will it be various degrees of socialism similar to what Europe and many eastern countries have experimented with.

The most important contribution is that in the galactic government of Star Wars, it’s a republic that is pursued, and provides an interesting model for how Earth should proceed. It is the Republic of the United States of America that should teach the rest of the world how to be a free people, produce their goods under the umbrella of capitalism, and interact with one another with respect under that accepted philosophy.

What gives me hope is that Star Wars is the best education device that young people have to counter what they are learning in public education, and politicians who crave socialism where the philosophy of a republic is not taught to them. It is entertainment that is providing the best education to society, and because of the popularity of Star Wars it is evidence that many people are learning about it.

Glenn Beck understands that Star Wars is a modern work of political philosophy and science. When people who love freedom want to know how America is supposed to function, books like The Original Argument are fantastic. But it cannot be disputed that free life will always stay within the confines of the United States borders. As the evidence of illegal immigration have shown, millions of people all over the world want to become a part of the Republic of the United States and we owe it to those people in America to help not just open our borders to them, but to expand the freedom we experience to those far reaches of the globe so that there can be a grand Republic of Earth. And to get an idea of how to do that, Star Wars is the best work of art available to help show how that process should look, and what type of hurdles will stand in the way, so that freedom can be experienced by anything that breathes world-wide.

So before going crazy, choking on all this information that has always been there, but is being re-discovered, it is good to have a device that can give your mind a vacation. For me, it’s a love of pirates, and Star Wars. Star Wars allows the mind to swell without limits without becoming lost in the fantasy. And I look very much forward to the age when the kids who are growing up with this expanded universe of Star Wars start to run the country, because that is a time when things will dramatically change for the better, because they will understand that America is a republic and not a democracy and the only hope the entire world has for freedom.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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