The endurance run never quits, gang! Brono, Brog, and Bobo have a sorcerer to bring down, but are his machinations what they thought they were? Will they even get to Bagus, or will they finish up today on Ozzie and Flea? Watch and see!

This is it, guys, the best moments and music of the game: The gang assaults Bagus’ castle!

Torvalds finds your lack of faith disturbing.

Guess what, guys? The Old Republic came out, so I did nothing but play it all week. All other media fell to the wayside in the face of the biggest MMO (soft) launch in years. According to Raptr I played something like 53 hours of The Old Republic this week, so I’ve got plenty to say about it.

We’ll start with the bad, since it’s short:

- Travel decisions don’t make a lot of sense: Let me clarify this, because it involves a lot of minutia. After you finish your second planet, your character gets access to his/her own private ship. They chose to make these ships their own zones for mechanical reasons, I’m sure. Why load the assets for each player’s class quests for every player, right? Well that makes sense, but it also makes short trips to your ship next to impossible. Every time you click that hangar, a cinematic of your ship takes off into space and you hit a load screen. Whenever you decide to leave the ship, another cinematic and another load.

- Related: There’s no fast way to teleport to your ship. You can teleport to the fleet and run to your hangar (and hit another load screen) or you can fast travel to the spaceport and run to your ship, but there’s no way to just, BAM, teleport to your ship…yet.

- When you wipe in a flashpoint (think dungeon/instance) and you hit the button to go to the med center, you load into the Imperial Fleet. Then you can run back in (another load screen) and you’re back at the last boss you beat. Too many load screens. It’s the same number as WoW, I guess, but why not put a med center within the instances? I guess it doesn’t make sense for the mythology, but who cares!

- While we’re on the subject of flashpoints, Hammer Station is pretty boring. The other flashpoints have interesting encounters and neat little crew skill shortcuts, but Hammer Station is yawn-inducing and pretty easy. Even the Black Talon is more fun to do.

- This is a nitpick, but the characters that speak alien languages are all subtitled, right? Well why don’t they make alien sounds as long as the average subtitle read times are? Instead aliens all talk with big spaces in between lines.

Now all the goods!:

- The best part about working with Lucasarts is access to their vast Star Wars sound library. Everything in this game sounds sharp. Blasters, lightsabers, spaceships, etc. They even have these Star Wars-y “Duel of the Fates” type music that starts blasting when you’re facing elite mobs. Pretty fun. The little touches are great, too. Wear a mask or electric breathing apparatus and your voice changes appropriately!

- CLASS QUESTS! Oh my god class quests. These are so much fun! I can’t tell you how great it is to have a lore reason why my character is wearing that sick mask above (it belonged to my ancestor, Lord Kallig) or how cool it was to found my own cult on Nar Shaddaa by causing an “earthquake” beneath a rival cult’s building. This is the biggest thing that TOR is bringing to the table. The marketing speak of KOTOR 3-10 feels pretty accurate so far (maybe more like 3-7 when all is said and done)

- Aside from Hammer Station, most of the Flashpoints have cool and interesting decisions to make (and neat shortcuts!). They flow differently based on what you do and you can get dark/light points from those decisions. The other neat thing is that your crew skills come into place. I have high scavenging, so I can activate broken medical droids to help us or use a drill to punch a shortcut through a wall. Min’s high slicing skills allows him to hack elevators to skip trash mobs. It’s all very neat.

- Most of the planets after your capital have large, overarching storylines that have nothing to do with your class quests. On Balmorra, Torvalds, Evaclyn, and Nerius (mine, Min, and Jason’s characters, respectively) all helped the Imperial War Effort and drove back the Republic. On Nar Shaddaa I’m working with the criminal elite to push back a rival gang and garner favor for the Empire. It’s all pretty neat stuff.

- Datacrons are these permanent stat bonus things that you can find in hidden places on each of the planets. Hunting for those has been tons of fun. The devs stuck them in some pretty devious places. My favorite one so far was embedded in a droid factory that I had to jump down pipes to reach. A close second is one behind a forcefield that requires two players to simultaneously deactivate. Great stuff.

- There’s lots more cool things, but I’m gonna leave it there for now. This game is pretty awesome so it’s too bad I have to put it down for a week (unless I sneak it onto a parent’s computer) for Christmas.

I'm Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Bounty Hunter!

Don’t you love it when a plan comes together? The Endurance Run restores the Masamune!

More Prehistoric shenanigans with Byla!

Looks like it’s time to meet Byla!

I’m the wind! Woosh! Looks like today is the day that half of the Basabune will be recovered!

So this is Naughty Dog’s big new secret? The music at the end echoes some of the banjo musical cues of L4D2 as do the running zombie types. The overrun NYC reminds me of Enslaved. The young girl reminds me of a younger Drake (and also a little Ellen Page) while the old guy is a little Drake meets Bill (from L4D). It’s easy to think it’s derivative and dated now, for sure, but I’m genuinely interested to see how this turns out. Naughty Dog proves in about a minute that they’re excellent at building characters. I wanted to know a bunch more about these two and why they hang out with each other. They seemed cool.

Anyway, it’s supposed to be a survival horror game and (especially if it’s co-op) I think I’m already sold on it. Nice work piquing my interest, Naughty Dog.

Oh man, is this the Brog backstory episode? Will we learn about how he used to be Blen? Will they get to the awesome Bagus encounter? I doubt they will. I bet they stop after they get Basabune.

Movies are back! (Photo courtesy adonismens)

My brief movie vacation wasn’t willingly imposed, guys. I was just waiting for Netflix to finally send one of the movies at the top of my queue to me. Let’s see if they can keep this up…

Movies

Our Idiot Brother – Paul Rudd was surprisingly good in this. This movie is not laugh out loud funny, but it’s pretty great in a low key laughs kind of way. Rudd’s three sisters, Emily Mortimer, Zooey Deschanel, and Elizabeth Banks, all play troubled/damaged women who could all use a little folksy advice from their too trusting, semi-naive brother. It’s better than it sounds plus it features Rashida Jones in dorky glasses playing a lesbian in a relationship with Zooey Deschanel. Pretty good stuff! Only nitpick is that Emily Mortimer’s American accent is a little thin. It wouldn’t make sense for her to be English, but it wasn’t as natural as it could be.

TV

Glee – Sectionals! I like that music gets most of the focus for this episode because that’s the only good part about Glee right now. At least we’re done with all of the storylines going into the Christmas episode and the rest of the season in January/February

New Girl – Would this show be half as funny without Schmidt? Gotta admit, I don’t love the stupid way Jess acts around sex. She’s not coming off as “adorkable” (shoot me for typing that), she’s coming off as idiotic.

Up All Night – Best line: “Ga-goosh? Oh, I’m sorry, is that a penis sound?” It may not be the best show on TV or the funniest, but it’s got solid construction and the principals make me laugh when they interact with each other. Sounds like what you want from a comedy, right?

Community – Great skewering of Glee. I mean, the ridiculous focus on regionals? Brilliant. Mr. Rad? HILARIOUS. The best number of the night for sheer ridiculousness was the Annie regressive sexpot role. Just hilarious.

Parks and Recreation – Great episode, but it was pretty unfocused. Upon second watching I actually dug that about it even more. The marshmallow Ron Swanson was the best.

Persona 4: The Animation – Rise and Teddy persona episodes! Not as hilarious as the camping or Kanji episodes, but still good. I guess next week is the DQ homage dungeon, but I wish they’d slow down a bit and do some more social link stuff.

Childrens Hospital – Party Down AND the return of Dr. Jewy McJewJew! Why isn’t Lizzy Caplan in more things?

Music

So much stupid dubstep this week! If it didn’t have wobble bass I didn’t want to listen to it for the start of the week. I spent the weekend listening to Janelle Monáe and The Root’s new album, Undun.

Undun is quite good and Amazon was selling it for super cheap. Unfortunately it’s a little on the short side, but it’s still worth the money.

Books

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (AKA Men Who Hate Women) – I started this book like a year ago. I pick it up and read a few pages here or there. The Swedish movie was good enough and close enough that I feel like I got the gist of it already, which makes this read a slog because the writing is kind of dull. Dunno if I’ll finish it this year, haha. I’ll definitely see the new movie when it comes out, though.

Video Games

Expect this section to dwindle to OMG THE OLD REPUBLIC! next week because that’ll probably be all I do.

The Binding of Isaac – All I’ve got left to do is beat Sheol game as ??? (and then a few no damage runs that will be near impossible). It’s been a lot of fun and I think this game is spectacular. I don’t think we’ll be getting any more add-ons, but man was it the best $5 I’ve spent in a while.

Civilization V – This game is the most addictive and awesome games out there. I played about 17 hours of it this weekend and I’ve got 40 turns to finish before tomorrow (assuming I get into the early access for TOR tomorrow). Gonna be a long night, folks!