Lit MACLUNKY -- The Lit Forum Maclunky Thread, v3

Another great one. The only star wars game I played more to death was X-Wing Alliance.

I especially liked that you could play just about every humanoid model in the game in multiplayer.

Also that you could skip one mission per set, cause there was always 1 mission in a set I couldn't beat, usually one involving a big monster that 1-hit killed you.

 

I keep pausing the Coruscant levels to look at speeders and buildings, lots of neat designs there "just" to flesh out the scenes. Outland Station was awesome too.

 

I've owned a used PS2 copy of Bounty Hunter for about six years now and still haven't gotten around to playing it, but I'm saving it for a big chronological binge of the prequel era, probably late this year or in early 2025.

Jedi Academy is great fun. I highly enjoyed my first playthrough just in the last several months. I'm still slowly working through my saved game of KotOR since 2018, but I plan to dip back in and finish it off probably by the end of this month.

I used to keep up with every new Star Wars game in the '90s, but I was already dropping off by the time X-wing Vs. TIE Fighter came out. Since then I have just dabbled here and there and I missed out on a lot of console-only stuff on GameCube and PS2. I think Battlefront II (2017) was the first Star Wars game I played on the day of release since TIE Fighter dropped in 1994.

 

Word is ObiWan and Andor are the next disc releases.

As they look to be doing paired releases, we might get BoBW-Mando S3.

 

2002 was 22 years ago. Bush Jr. was president. Tony Blair was PM. The first Spider-Man movie was in theaters. I was 7 years old and deeply enchanted with the creatures in the Geonosian arena, to the point where I printed out faded pictures of the Nexu and Acklay and used them in a collage.

The more you think about time, the more insane you'll go.

 

It's been nearly ten years since the Force Awakens was released. It still feels like a new movie to me, but its been nearly ten years.

How is it that at a certain point in life time just jumps to hyperspeed?

 

I met my wife right before TFA released, and we married two years later. It doesn't feel like I've been married for just over 6 years, even when considering our daughter is about to turn 5.

 

It's crazy to think that next year, the amount of time that has passed since TFA will be the same amount of time that passed between ROTS and TFA. My memory of seeing ROTS at a drive-in theater felt ancient by the time I saw TFA in theaters, yet that feels just like yesterday.

I wonder if this is what long-lived aliens like Yoda or Chewbacca go through.

 

Ow, this realization broke my brain.

 

My first video games were Dune 2 and Monkey Island 1-3. Watching a friend play Dark Forces: Jedi Knight was mindblowing to teenage me. But on the other hand it's funny how completely different gaming paradigms can be around at the same time: e.g. "Bounty Hunter" came out in the same year as "The New Droid Army" for the Gameboy Advance, where the boss fights look like this:

 

I've still never played a Monkey Island game after all these years! I have very fond memories of other SCUMM games from the first LucasArts Archives box, though, like Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Sam & Max Hit The Road. I keep promising myself I'll delve into Monkey Island...eventually.

Dune II was so fun. Other than vague memories of the Lynch movie as a kid, that was basically my intro to the Duniverse. I have fond memories of staying over at my buddy's house in high school and staying up until 3:00 AM while listening to Foo Fighters and playing that and X-wing Collector's CD. Another friend later borrowed the Sega Genesis port and I was surprised as to how faithful it was. It was still another eight years before I would read the KJA prequels and original novels (at least up until Heretics, which I got stuck halfway on in '08 and never finished), but I still credit Dune II for piqueing my interest in that franchise.

 

...I didn't think drive-in theaters existed since long before 2005.

(Though I hear they made a comeback with the pandemic, for obvious reasons.)

 

Yeah, I think the one we had gone to was like the last one still standing by that time. The quality of the screen wasn't that great either, so it was probably on its last legs already.

 

Drive-Ins definitely still exist, though obviously in more limited quantities than in their heyday. We have two here in the suburban Buffalo area - one has been in continuous (albeit seasonal) operation since 1957, the other since 1959.

 

I actually still have a drive-in near my house (mid-Michigan). As far as I know it's never actually closed down. At least, other than seasonally. They still get all the big movies at release too.

 

I remember seeing Beetlejuice and Rambo 3 at a drive in double feature. There's been a Wal-Mart where that drive-in was for over 20 years. Probably 30 years.

 

Everyone talks about "Barbenheimer" but one of our local drive-ins paired Barbie as a double feature with The Meg 2, and for some reason that continues to strike me as absolutely hilarious.

 

As long as we're sharing our drive-in stories, I've only been to one about a decade ago where I saw The Amazing Spider-Man (which I actually enjoyed, though it's not my favorite) and one of the Ice Age movies. I don't remember much about it, but it had Peter Dinklage as a giant monkey and at the time I thought that was funny.

 

There's a drive in about 20 minutes from where I live, and they still do pretty good business during the summer. In the winter they use the lot as a flea market.

One of my best memories as a kid was seeing Atlantis: The Lost Empire on the big screen at the drive in.

 

My local drive-in was a very popular destination for my family for several years between '88 and about '96. I caught about 20-25 movies there, mostly in 1993-94 (for whatever reason.) Everything from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, and Speed, to Demolition Man, True Lies, and Forrest Gump. It was about $1.00 per person. My and my cousin used to lay on sleeping bags outside the car and share the one clunky mono speaker with my mom and sister inside the car. These days, the few remaining drive-ins tend to use a local radio station to tune into and get true stereo/surround sound.

There was another drive-in, about 90 minutes from my area, and I went a handful of times. They closed in 2019, but surged back with the pandemic and stayed open another few years before closing again last year. I saw Guardians of the Galaxy there, as well as TMNT, Halloween Wonder Woman 1984, Godzilla Vs. Kong, and Halloween Kills.

 

I recently replayed TNDA, it was far, far easier than i remembered lol.

 

Was just playing this WWII arcade flight game on Steam. There's a mission where you're flying a PBY Catalina (a slow fragile reconnaissance floatplane) on a search-and-rescue mission, and you've got some friendly fighters (F4U Corsairs) to protect you. So basically an inverse of those escort missions. And when I started taking fire from enemy fighters, in my head I'm yelling "Rogue Squadron, where's our cover??"

 

Random thought that occurred to me just now: as the owner of two dogs, when they come up to me and stare longingly when I'm eating, I can generally safely assume that they're not admonishing me, they're mooching for spare food.

So in that scene in TLJ when a bunch of sad-eyed porgs surround Chewie's campfire... are they actually guilt-tripping him for eating one of them, or are they cannibals?