More Reasonable than Real

Last night's tweets;

The undead enjoy many mindless chores.
Like slaying white werewolves and grizzly bears.
I have no real taste for reflexive wars.
But I do like dark Disneyland affairs.

All four tweets about World of Warcraft. Sad state of affairs, I guess. But I was at Tim's last night and we got the game going on two computers, so we were edging closer to the South Park episode where the kids met entropic doom via WOW.

Tim ran me through an area slightly outside my level fourteen character's abilities and I got a lot of nice swag. Then I went to work on the werewolves and bears, as per quests. It's sad playing World of Warcraft without alcohol, but I'm really loving the Disney vibe--it all feels like Pirates of the Caribbean, Mister Toad's Wild Ride, and Peter Pan. Still, I get to daydreaming about a hardcore, realistic MMORPG, where one arrow could slay someone regardless of level, there were no silly rules about attack range, and the forests were truly dangerous.

While I was there, Tim showed me this trailer for the upcoming Star Wars MMORPG;



I don't know. On the one hand, the fight choreography looks nice. On the other hand, aside from the stupid Zack Snyder random slow-motion bits, it's basically the scene from Episode III where Anakin storms the temple only with more red lightsabres and the Anakin stand-in has a bunch of the Vader gewgaws on his costume already. The Twi'lek looks like she's wearing the sort of hideous jumpsuit one gets used to seeing in the Knights of the Old Republic games and, most importantly, this trailer tells us nothing about the game itself except that it has decent graphics and lousy writing, which are both things one expects as a given for any modern video game.

Mostly, though, I think I'm depressed by the intensely normal looking head on that Jedi guy's shoulders. He makes a koopa troopa look like Christopher Walken.

But the very fact that this is an MMORPG set in the entire Star Wars galaxy makes you think there's got to be a shitload of content offscreen. I would like to be optimistic about this thing.

One thing this proves for me is that there are a lot of people who like the prequels, probably more than are admitting it. For my part, I still like Episode III a lot, and I think it's often overlooked in favour of full throttle bashing that there were a lot of good things about the first two--a lot of the visual design, the costumes, the sets, the makeup, the sabre duelling and John Williams' music. It'd actually be kind of nice if these things were exploited for other media. I still haven't gotten around to watching an episode of that new Clone Wars series . . .

Last night I watched the third episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's third season, "Faith, Hope & Trick", which introduces Faith, the Vampire Slayer. Eliza Dushku looks like a completely different person from the woman she is now, it's weird. She's gotten deeper lines around her mouth, I guess is the main thing. But already she's a far more interesting character than Kendra, the lousiest Vampire Slayer in history, I think. Faith has issues to confront and quirky eyebrows that suggest a complex personality in place of Kendra's broad accent and what's in hindsight a rather sad focus on her work given how bad she was at it.