Video Games

There is a new important strategic location in the galaxy and that is the Novare Coast. On it, players will find three turrets that belong to the enemy. The idea is to take over these turrets and use them to your advantage, but it won’t be easy. There are a ton of factions that have the same idea and so you’ll have to work together with your team to take control of this valuable asset.

That is the general gist of the new PvP warzone in Star Wars: The Old Republic, coming in the 1.2 update. It is basically a free for all where Jedi and Sith will use their powers of the force, their blasters and their light sabers to fight their way to the other side in the get-the-flag variation. Whatever team has control of at least two of the three turrets will be victorious, but there is a time limit and so moving quickly is a plus.

Now you aren’t just out on a flat surface fighting, as if you were in that scene in Phantom Menace where the Gungans were all lined up against...

With an April 3rd release date, details are coming in fast and furious, so we thought we’d look at some of the latest information from the latest video that has been released from the publisher.

The new trailer out is called “Depth” and we have to admit, that it is chuck full of the goodness that we’ve been waiting to see from the game. Well, mostly what we wanted to see. It was actually painful to watch Boba Fett reduced to a dancing fool. But then anyone who has been to Star Wars Weekends in Orlando will attest, villains certainly can bust a move. No really, just check out Darth Vader on YouTube to see what I mean. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, things we’ve been wanting to see.

Well the first scene in the trailer is an epic space battle that brings me back to the days of Tie Fighter versus X-Wing only with far more ships and stunning graphics, although I have to admit, I felt a bit tired after just watching those kids playing. Other scenes include theatrical...

For those of you who have yet to take the plunge into the world of Star Wars: The Old Republic, have they got a deal for you. Bioware is offering a free weekend to get your feet wet and hopefully bring more members into the dark side (and the light side too). But supplies are limited and it’s only for people who never played the game before at all.

The trial begins on Thursday afternoon March 15 at 12:01 CT and will require the player to sign up and download the game client, which I’ll be honest, is pretty huge. While the Star Wars official site says several hours, those with faster connections probably won’t take that long, but it’s still kinda brutal a wait. Then you’ll have until Monday March 19 at 2:00am CT to play for free, with some restrictions, but certainly enough to get an idea if you want to continue. All servers are available including Player Versus Environment, Player Vs. Player and Role Playing.

During the trial, you will not be able to push your...

This edition of quick news includes the death of concept artist Ralph McQuarrie, the success of Star Wars: The Republic according to EA and the Jake Lloyd has some whine with his fame...

Sad news this week for Star Wars fans. Ralph McQuarrie, who designed much of the look of the Star Wars original trilogy, has died at the age of 82. McQuarrie, originally a tech artist for Boeing and other space oriented projects, was the perfect concept artist for George Lucas, who was looking to flesh out what his characters and his world would actually look like. The two would meet about every few weeks and George would give him a rough description of what he wanted and McQuarrie would draw him up something and they would hash out the details in what the artist described as a very good relationship. Lucas got so comfortable with him, that whenever he couldn’t put his thoughts into words, he’d show McQuarrie’s artwork and tell them to do that. The concept designer was...

Star Wars fans really love to get into the immersive environment of George Lucas’ world and now Kinect Star Wars gives them a chance. In this new gameplay video, we actually get to see this first hand, and it’s actually kind of cool, despite what I’ve said in the past.

The first thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of the game seems to have to do with Jabba directly or indirectly. Course we all know the Hutts have their grubby little hands in just about everything in the Empire, so this isn’t a big surprise. There are the pod races on Tatooine where you get to use your body to control Anakin’s podracer against opponents like Sebulba and others. This is just like you did in the game Star Wars Pod Racer, if you ever played that, only with more action. In this one, you get to nudge your opponents and throw things at them in an attempt to disable their pods to win the race. Revenge for slamming you is always fun.

Speaking of revenge, or perhaps why Jabba had...

If you are a collector of all things related to the Force, you may certainly be interested in this high end set of gaming peripherals for the new MMO from LucasArts, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The set, which Razer actually doesn’t market as a package, but as individual items, is sure to excite your senses and your friends with these cool gadgets. You won’t even need any Jedi mind tricks to get them to see the wow factor in the mouse with the metallic lines reminiscent of the Death Star, the Sith/Jedi insignia on the headset or the cool mouse mat that lets you choose which faction (dark or light side) that you fight in.

The mouse is based on the Razer Naga, which is power packed with buttons galore. 17 in all to be exact. There are 12 buttons on a 3x4 thumbpad grid on the left side and 5 other buttons on the top (including of course left, right and middle). Using the software that comes with it, you can configure these to just about anything you would want...

We’ve had a little bit of fun and a little bit of apprehension about Kinect Star Wars over the last few months, but we are glad to hear that it has a release date now of April 3, 2012, which will include not only the game, but the Star Wars Xbox 360/Kinect Bundle.

The game, in a statement by LucasArts and Microsoft, will include a few key events as you make your way through the adventure.

A month out of the gate and Star Wars: The Old Republic has seen over 2 million copies sold and 1.7 million currently playing. That spells a pretty good start for investors to hang their hat on for now, but the biggest test is still yet to come. You see, people haven’t started paying the subscription cost yet as it came with a free trial.

During the grace period, Bioware hopes to show their stuff with already one update and another one coming in March. These updates will not only create new content, but will hopefully fix a lot of the glitches that still hound the game. If you check out the forums, there is a lot of early criticism, although no one I think really expected the game to go smoothly given the amount of content and the possibility of problems just about everywhere. What is good is that the developer is trying to stay on top of it and being as transparent as possible in doing so, which is not a bad thing. Although there have been anecdotal...

I am almost starting to feel bad for the developers of this game. Either they’ve just given up after numerous delays or they are letting marketing go crazy with no rhyme or reason towards their audience. Either way, they certainly don’t seem to be taking the fans, who would play the game, to heart in their latest moves. Of course, Lucas has said basically that the input from the large community doesn’t really matter, so I guess he can basically throw anything in the mix and expect people to lavish in it, even if it is kind of smelly…

Case in point, the new “trailer” for Kinect Star Wars. Now I’m not the kind of fan of Star Wars that dresses up as a stormtrooper at Comic-Con’s, but I do appreciate a good storyline and strong characters, something I believe A New Hope had in droves. And so I hate seeing those characters messed with in a way that downgrades the scenes they are in. Yes, Star Wars Uncut was pretty funny and forgivable in its inherent hokeyness...

Just a little less than a month out of the gate, Star Wars: The Old Republic developers are seeing where the cracks are and as we speak are putting the final touches on the January 17, 2012 update that has a ton of new things, some changes in game play, and of course, some bug fixes that will hopefully not fix one thing while breaking something else.

Well for some lucky souls, yesterday marked the opening of Star Wars: The Old Republic’s early access, but only if you were the chosen one. But we knew that. EA/Bioware has always said that the pre-opening launch will be a tiered affair. That they would be letting people in slowly so as to ramp up their servers in a more controlled manner to avoid what has plagued some launches, and that is downtime because the servers couldn’t handle the load. The problem is that for some, they will get around 6-7 days of play, while others may only get 1, which is sure to leave a bad taste for those who get the short end of the stick.

But not getting a first day look isn’t all that has those who pre-ordered a physical copy of the game upset.

After a year of hype, the opening of Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG is almost here and for some of us, that date is even closer than others.

For those holding pre-order codes, now is the time to redeem those codes at the official Code Redemption Center. How fast you do this will determine how much early access time you’ll have, so you want to do it as quickly as possible if you have one.