Knights of the Old Republic EP44: Somebody’s Butt

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jan 21, 2016

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 51 comments

Here’s the latest episode of Spoiler Warning, in which we have a surprise guest!


Link (YouTube)

When Mumbles mentioned dragging dead women to her hideout, she was talking about this gem from the Fallout 4 forum, on NeoGaf, by way of Twitter, now shared on my blog:

The stuff Chris brought up about butts vs. anuses vs. WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS is a reference to our fourth anniversary episode.

 


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51 thoughts on “Knights of the Old Republic EP44: Somebody’s Butt

  1. Warclam says:

    Never mind varied underwear. I’m waiting for game developers to realize that people actually wear clothes under armour. If you take off the armour? Yeah, they should just be wearing goddamn clothes. Why is this so hard to figure out?

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Man,can you imagine wearing a chain mail on naked skin*shudders*

    2. Kai von Eggenburg says:

      Have you heard of Kingdom Come: Deliverance?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWQn10s_QJM

      1. Wide And Nerdy says:

        Why are they advertising “Dungeons and No Dragons” as a selling point?

        Its like “YES, filthy mildewy stone corridors and nothing else. Its what I’ve always dreamed of.”

    3. Hermocrates says:

      They knew this. Bethesda even knew this. Way back in 2002. In Morrowind, shirts, pants and more could stack with any armour or robes, and would be visible underneath (overtop) if there were gaps (clipping).

      Apparently they forgot in the intervening time.

  2. Benjamin Hilton says:

    As far as the breakout goes, I always found it to be a lot more interesting when you play as stealthy Mission, or as T3, where you have to use computers and traps to take out or avoid the baddies. Then it does actually feel like an interesting change up of pace. Unfortunately Canderous and the other combat-oriented party members have a much more standard fight.

  3. Wide And Nerdy says:

    I assume this is a joke. Even if you were interested in doing this, it would be incredibly tedious and time consuming.

    . . . Unless, as I’m just now realizing, you use your settlements to draw the women to you. Huh. Fallout 4 actually made this pasttime convenient.

    1. Raygereio says:

      Oh, my sweet summer child.
      That NeoGaf post could be a joke, but there actually are people who devote an absurd amount of time and effort into turning Bethesda-engine games into torture dungeon simulators.

      1. Wide And Nerdy â„¢ says:

        It feels good being a sweet summer child.

      2. Phantos says:

        This is something I’m curious about:

        It’s easy to assume that someone who does this in video games must be a psychopath in real life, but what if the opposite is true?

        What if the people who play games like a deranged person are actually more well-adjusted in reality? Because like, they have a digital outlet for that sort of thing.

        Maybe we should give that guy more panty options for his digital victims? It keeps him off the streets, right? Maybe the solution is to give serial killers a virtual distraction.

        1. Wide And Nerdy says:

          Not that this is proof but the evidence doesn’t really oppose your idea. Violence overall has been on the decline since about 1993 which is right around when Mortal Kombat and Doom were released. Some of the earliest games to get parents worried about violence in video games came when violence was just starting to decline. Also this from Wikipedia.

          A 2011 study by the Center for European Economic Research[97] found that although violent video games might increase aggression they also have a paradoxical effect of reducing crime. This is possibly because the time spent playing games reduces time spent engaged in more antisocial actives. The study states that violent video games “paradoxically may reduce violence while increasing the aggressiveness of individuals by simply shifting these individuals out of alternative activities where crime is more likely to occur.”[97]

          From what I’ve read, the increased aggression is brief, and persists only a short time after a play session.

  4. Hector says:

    I get caught-off-guard with these suddenly-solo-segments. I always seem to end up playing a character I haven’t equipped well, or whom I built as a complete sidekick-support-specialist. And that is really, really annoying. At best, it turns into a grinding slog as a character whose entire purpose is to help a party has to fight alone.

    1. 4th Dimension says:

      Most egregious example is in my opinion the Atton Rand fight in KOTOR2.

  5. Benjamin Hilton says:

    Just to be pedantic, Han solo was technically inside an exogorth (the Giant worm thing) inside the asteroid. That still doesn’t fully explain survive-ability but there it is.

    1. ehlijen says:

      Tie fighter pilots clearly wear space suits.

      So either space suits are a thing in star wars, or only good guys get to breath space air. The latter would mean Regina & Co needed the suits to fool the flying by sith fighters, not to survive in space air.

      1. Joe Informatico says:

        Are TIE pilots wearing space suits or G-suits? Finn and Poe didn’t need breathing apparatuses when they stole the TIE in Force Awakens, so that one had a pressurized cabin. Do the TIEs in the original trilogy have pressurized cabins too, or is that a feature the First Order added in the past few decades? And if they did, why do TIE pilots wear breathing apparatuses in the OT? In case of cabin breach? Does it deliver some kind of inhaled stimulant to the pilot? Is it to keep the pilot alive in case of a crash until a search & rescue team finds them (that doesn’t sound like something the Empire would prioritize)?

        1. Lachlan the Mad says:

          The cutaway books I read as a kid said that the spacesuits were basically there because the Empire was too cheap to fully pressurise the cabins. Finn & Poe’s may have been a different model, because the OT TIEs aren’t two-seaters. Also, they did only fly it for a short hop, so they could have just held their breath :)

          1. Dovius says:

            I’m relatively certain it’s a different model. Various other sources in the (new) EU and stuff in movie supplemental stuff indicates that the First Order has a lot less men than the Empire (Due to being a splinter group that just nicked everything they could take with them when the Empire fell then fecked off to the Unknown Regions) and thus follows more of a “Quality over Quantity” doctrine, hence the better training and more varied equipment for Stormtroopers, larger and better armoured TIE fighters, tech to convert a planet into a sun-munching hyperspace-crunching death star knock-off.

        2. Alex says:

          “Finn and Poe didn't need breathing apparatuses when they stole the TIE in Force Awakens, so that one had a pressurized cabin.”

          Yeah, but literally everything about that was an ass-pull. Abrams couldn’t even be bothered to make it a bigger ship (like a special forces derivative of the TIE bomber) so it would have space for the second seat, the turret, the shields and the hyperdrive.

          1. ehlijen says:

            Yeah, as a stormtrooper, Finn should have been able to get access to one of those landing shuttles much more easily.

            But these aren’t the old TIEs we’ve seen before either, they’re colour inverted! Clearly that means they’re the opposite. No life support becomes yes life support etc.

        3. ? says:

          In current canon TIE Fighters always had pressurized cabins, since characters in Rebels fly one without helmets multiple times. The real reason TIE pilots have masks is to dehumanize them for the audience and make them look sinister, but that’s out-of-universe. In universe, maybe TIEs have life support, but maintaining it during combat is low priority or even turned off to save power for engines and lasers. Or maybe all this time we assumed Empire doesn’t care about it’s pilots because their spacecraft has little armour and no shields, but it’s the Rebellion that would rather have their ace pilot suffocate rather than be captured?

          1. ehlijen says:

            It’s the dehumanisation, but also an emergency backup: if life support fails, the suit might well keep you alive until the rescue shuttle gets you.

            Conversely, the only reason the x-wing pilots don’t have full face helmets is so the audience can tell them apart. They are clearly wearing similarly bulky getup to the TIE pilots otherwise.

    2. krellen says:

      There’s a simple answer, really, and there’s evidence for it everywhere, because all the spaceships in Star Wars make noise: the Star Wars galaxy has an atmosphere. All of it. Its space is not a vacuum.

    3. Atarlost says:

      The exogorth just needs to provide atmospheric pressure and not be corrosive since the non-droids in that sequence wear oxygen masks.

      Still not exactly plausible, but not as implausible as a space monster being full of oxygen.

  6. WILL says:

    Oh man they’re almost done with the game! Then they can play the sequel!

    Right?

    1. Gruhunchously says:

      You REALLY want these guys playing KOTOR 2? Really really?

      It’s got the same combat as this game, drab and confusing level design, tons of bugs for Josh to unearth, and a really not very good ending. Much of the good bits are in the dialogue, which will inevitably get talked over, and the atmosphere, which is really hard to maintain with the aforementioned talking.

      I mean, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be fun, just that anyone who actually likes KOTOR 2 would likely find it insufferably painful.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        I actually like kotor 1(as do the cast),and I dont find this season painful at all.Why should it be the case for 2 then?

        1. ehlijen says:

          And yet we’ve just had one member of the cast scream murder at the suggestion of talking to the crew on the ebon hawk. Clearly, the potential for tension exists.

          And KOTOR2 depends even more on the dialogue to make at least a shred of sense.

        2. Raygereio says:

          It would probably end up being a repeat of Dead Money.

      2. Felblood says:

        There are things that I like about KOTOR2 and things that I HATE HATE HAR|T+|||

        Okay, I blacked out for a second there, but the point is that I’d love to hear the SW discuss both those categories of things.

  7. Wide And Nerdy says:

    Just want to reiterate (as I stated several months ago) that KOTOR is my primary Star Wars canon. Anything that contradicts it is not canon. Even the movies. Because why should Disney get to make that decision? They own everything and its time that stopped. They’re the ones responsible for the damned Mickey Mouse laws.

    And they get away with it. They aren’t even resented the way Microsoft is. People love Disney.

    So KOTOR is the primary canon and Disney can suck it.

    1. Ilseroth says:

      You know how you know KotoR is canon? Chrome Stormtrooper in the new movie. They are bringing it back.

    2. nerdpride says:

      I missed it several months ago, but I really like this. Not so much because Star Wars reasons, just because Disney is some kind of content patent money machine blob. Sign me up for whatever protest activities you have in mind.

      I’d dedicate a good chunk of my life to a thinly veiled Star Wars clone satire thing (or generic movie science fiction even) where Disney were like the empire. I’d promote it too. Make the characters cosplay-able and I’d dress up like a hairy man-beast with tentacles or cheddar monks or whatever.

      1. Wide And Nerdy â„¢ says:

        I’m just butthurt because Disney bought my soul a while back. The DRM is excruciating.

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      People love Disney.

      How can you not love this friendly face?

      1. MichaelGC says:

        Aaaah.

        Or, rather, AAAAH!

  8. keldoclock says:

    Rutskarn should watch the Auralnauts star wars edits if he wants to see space party.

  9. Gruhunchously says:

    Man, that Bridge battle was one tough son-of-a-bitch. I distinctly remembered that it was one of three times in the game where I got so frustrated I started crying (I was very young at the time, almost Rutskarn’s age, actually), the other two being the Darth Bandon fight and the Star Forge slog. The fact that I wasn’t allowed to bring my favorite party members with me just rubbed salt into the wound. Bastilla was fine, sure, but why did I have to lug Carth’s sorry but up there instead of Jolee, or Juhani, or Canderous. Couldn’t we just have the “yeah I killed that mentor guy your really wanted revenge on while you were gone, sorry” conversation back on the ship when the danger was over?

    And since we probably won’t be seeing him for much longer, this is probably a good time to give some respect for Robin Sachs, Saul’s voice actor, (also Zaeed, Sarris, and Ethan from Buffy) who died almost three years ago. Rest in Peace, husky British man.

  10. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Im really annoyed how none of the cast are familiar with William Gibson and his work in the awesome mad max movies.Seriously people,learn your sci fi.

  11. Daemian Lucifer says:

    People complain so much about the inventory system in skyrim and fallouts(and mass effect),but dear god look at this?What is this tiny tiny box?

    1. Raygereio says:

      It doesn’t help that KotOR’s UI doesn’t scale. It should be less tiny if you play at 640×480, or whatever the standard monitor resolution was back in 2003.

      1. Wide And Nerdy â„¢ says:

        There are ways to fix that using third party tools.

        Plus KOTOR 2 seems to just work now as long as you download the Restored Content Mod which is now supported on Steam Workshop. Or maybe there was a residual on my computer from the last time I had it installed.

      2. Duoae says:

        2003? I definitely had 1024×768 by then!

        1. GloatingSwine says:

          Yeah, but the difference between that and 800*600 (which is where the UI is happiest IIRC) is pretty small.

          When you’re trying to bully the game into playing at much higher resolutions you get a UI so wee you can’t see any of it.

          Also game does not support widescreen at all, and even the allegedly working widescreen fixes the UI doesnt reposition and can’t go above something like 1600*1200 which was the highest the base game offered so it’s got elements in the middle of the screen.

  12. Grudgeal says:

    That bridge fight is one of, I think, five fights in the game where the game switches gears from ‘hordes of disposable cannon fodder shoot ineffectually at you for three minutes while you instakill them’ to ‘blink and you’re DEAD!’ mode.

    Amusingly, WHICH five fights fall into the latter category seem to vary between characters, excepting the bridge and Malak at the end. It also highlights the problems with buff spells in this game: The buffs last 20 seconds, that is to say 4 combat rounds, and you spend a round to activate each one. In normal fights, they become redundant. In the actually hard fights, you’re dead or in a nigh-unwinnable position by the time they’re on, and then you have to renew them again after about 1 round of having them on. Also most of those fights start with a cutscene so you can’t boost yourself and then basically go vail on the boss from a good start-point.

    1. John says:

      I almost never bother with passive Force powers other than Energy Resistance and Force Speed. Energy Resistance is the only passive power that lasts for more than a few rounds and Force Speed–which gives you a bonus to defense and two extra attacks at the highest level–is just too useful not to take. The others are only situationally useful. For example, Force Resistance is convenient in the fight against Malak but not worth bothering with at all for most of the rest of the game.

      1. tremor3258 says:

        Force speed is pretty much the go-to force-power for me in these games (though I use the ones that also boost saves because they affect the party… so at least someone’s shooting while I’m buffing)

        1. Atarlost says:

          The valor chain is also a party buff. I think everything but speed and protection are, but I only ever use speed and valor.

          Quite aside from combat applications where a wasted turn actually costs something, the valor chain is useful for skill checks. Conversations are too long for it to be useful for persuade, but you can get through computer hacking or droid repair if you hurry and the HK repair checks are early enough in his dialog to get the bonus on them. Security and mine disarming are single actions and easy to do within the buff duration.

          And, really, what else will you do with your force powers? The other light side powers are worse and there are only six good neutrals. You can’t stretch Taris longer than 8 levels so you need to pick a minimum of 12 jedi powers.

          Sure, you could be dark side, but if you’re dark side why is buffing even up for consideration? Why are you putting up with all the stupid pointless trashy darkside options if you’re not going to spam force lightning or force choke?

  13. Galad says:

    Having just watched the Machine for Pigs episode, this most recent SW episode was extra funny :))

  14. Alden says:

    Well, I’d just figured Mumbles had taken the cannibal perk and was keeping a larder, but that makes sense too.

  15. Kelhim says:

    I like how Josh states how the difficulty for this segment of the game is way too low, and then his party gets easily killed in the end fight on the bridge!

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