Author: Imperium Romanum

In 2015 Electronic Arts, the sole licensees for Star Wars video games, released a Star Wars game that was completely crippled by insultingly expensive loot box mechanics to unlock your favorite characters. As an example: unlocking Darth Vader, while theoretically possible in normal gameplay, would require an enormous investment of time, or alternatively you could buy a couple of loot boxes and hope he pops out. The game I’m referring to is, of course, Galaxy of Heroes, because Battlefront II 2017 was released in 2017.

Side note: Why couldn’t they just keep up the numbering on the Battlefront games? It’s not like there’s an evolving plot to stay on top of. Calling Battlefront 2015 just “Battlefront” (we had to append the year ourselves) rather than Battlefront III didn’t signal a reboot of the franchise or anything. There’s nothing to reboot. You’re either a rebel soldier or a storm trooper, you fight battles on different planets, go. Every release is going to cover the same plot in the same eras, with possibly the exception of newer games including Resistance vs. First Order in addition to Rebel Alliance vs. Empire and Republic vs. Confederacy. Maybe you add some new units or game modes, but there’s not an ongoing story to reboot. Every single one of the games is already its own retelling of the Star Wars octilogy (and counting).

Whining aside (note from ed: this is a filthy lie, whining will remain front and center for the duration of the post), Galaxy of Heroes bugs me because it seems like it might actually be a well made game with a reasonably fun (if blatantly pandering) premise, but then it does the usual mobile game thing where actually playing the game at a reasonable pace requires blatantly extortionate amounts of money.

Continue reading “I Hate EA So Much” →

Usually when I throw something together in an afternoon just to fill out the buffer, I don’t much like it, but I had quite a bit of fun with this one.

Osea is one of the major powers of the Ace Combat setting of Strangereal. Once Ace Combat 7 releases, it will have fought a total of three major wars in just 35 years. That’s a generation and a half, and in that span Osea has fought the Belkan War in 1995, the Circum-Pacific War of 2010, and the Osea-Erusea War starting in 2019. I can’t decide if it’s ridiculous that Osea has fought so many massive, continent-scale wars without any sign of long term damage to its industry or economy or if this is just a natural side effect of all Strangereal wars being decided in about two dozen sorties and thus lasting like six months.

Not to mention that Strangereal is a world where fighter pilots either fly perfectly uneventful patrols or else just sit around the airbase playing video games all day until there’s a major battle to fight. No one ever seems to fly a perfectly ordinary air patrol and actually encounter something. This is true even though it’s standard in the first mission to dogfight a small number of enemy fighters in order to get anyone new to the series used to the basic controls. That would seem like the perfect situation to be on a totally random patrol when you find an enemy patrol and they engage, but it’s usually “enemy bombers are going to blow up our airbase and finish us off completely, Player One, you’re our last hope for survival!”

So here’s the 5e Monster Manuals description of how Chaotic Good djinni view slavery:

The djinn believe that servitude is a matter of fate, and that no being can contest the hand of fate. As a result, of all the genies, djinn are the ones most amenable to servitude, though they never enjoy it. Djinn treat their slaves more like servants deserving of kindness and protection, and they part with them reluctantly.

Look, I realize that D&D alignments don’t correspond with specific, coherent philosophies, so something like “the Lawful Neutral perspective on slavery” doesn’t make sense because Lawful Neutral isn’t just one perspective, it’s a grab-bag of different perspectives, some of which are radically opposed to one another, and exactly which set of perspectives it even covers isn’t even easy to nail down.

All that being said, if your Chaotic Good society is a slave state, we’ve reached a point where alignment doesn’t mean anything at all.

It’s become fairly clear to me that creating a complete adventure in a week is not easily doable in the way that creating a short hex adventure often takes me only a couple of hours. I can still stay on schedule if I finish up the three and a half remaining adventures sometime within the four Sundays left in January, but I’m looking at a reasonably high probability that I will have to push this back to Ostara. I’m not super concerned about that because no one is awaiting the conclusion of this series with baited breath, but it does leave me without anything to post this Sunday. So you get this instead.

So I saw the Last Jedi the day before the writing of this article (December 26th – the holidays have obliterated a decent chunk of my buffer, so this will go live only a few days after). I mostly liked it, especially since unlike the Force Awakens it didn’t have such interminable unoriginality (I am deeply afraid of how Episode IX is going to play out with Abrams at the helm again) but it does have a single fatal flaw that undermines pretty much all of its plot, which is spoilery and will therefore be discussed below the break.

Continue reading “The Last Jedi’s Fatal Flaw” →