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Razer Give-Away Contest

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Mos Eisley Radio Razer Give-Away

To help get ready for the imminent launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, Razer and BioWare are giving four lucky people some brand new Razer PC peripherals. While these are not the ultra-cool SWTOR-branded products, Razer always delivers high-quality mice and keyboards to take your game to the next level. MER has four exciting gifts to send out to those listeners who follow us around the ‘net this week and here’s how to find them:


Razer Goliathus Extended Mousepad: Follow @moseisleyradio on Twitter and tweet out the official contest announcement from the website, including url and hash-tag “#merRazer.” The winner will be randomly selected from all valid entries.

What To Tweet
Hey, @moseisleyradio is giving out a bunch of razer gear to kick off #swtor. For info on how to win visit: www.moseisleyradio.com #merRazer


Razer Mouse Bungee: ‘Like’ Mos Eisley Radio on Facebook, drop us a Comment on the official contest post, and we’ll randomly select the winner. No, overly complimenting will not increase your odds.


Razer Orca Headset:

Razer Naga
UPDATE
After launching this contest we were informed that we would not be receiving an Orca headset to give out. The good news is Razer is giving a Naga to give you. The contest for the mouse is the exact same contest for the headset. Anyone who emailed us the correct answer for the headset will automatically be placed in the drawing for the mouse. We apologize to anyone who really wanted a headset.

Watch (or re-watch!) Open Bounty Episode 10: Flashpoints and send an email to moseisleyradio@gmail.com with the correct answer to the following question:

What was on Zach’s shirt in Open Bounty E10: Flashpoints?

Be sure to include “Razer Contest” in the subject line. A random selection will be made from amongst all entries which have the correct answer. Episodes of Open Bounty can be found at the Mos Eisley Radio homepage (www.moseisleyradio.com), Vimeo, and YouTube.


Razer Anansi Keyboard: Jump over to the official Mos Eisley Radio Community Forums, click over to the new and improved Episodes & Posts section, find Mos Eisley Radio, enter the thread titled “Razer Give-Away” and leave us a reply telling us why you need a new keyboard! Maybe your cat spilled coffee on it (true story), or you threw it against the wall playing Witcher 2. Just leave a reply, and, once again, we’ll randomly select a winner from eligible entries.

Just take note, we’ll announce the winners on the following week’s podcast (to be recorded 12/19, released 12/20), so you can enter for all of them, but if you happen to win once, you’ll be ineligible for another. If you hear your name announced during the episode, email us pronto! That way we’ll make sure to get your new gear out to you in time to enjoy over the Holidays.

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Welcome To The MER Media Network!

Welcome To Mos Eisley Radio: A SWTOR Media Network and Fan Community!

For over two years, Mos Eisley Radio has been bringing its own brand of high quality discussion to the Star Wars: The Old Republic community. An overwhelming sense of gratitude goes out to the community members that have made MER one of the top podcasts on iTunes, as well as having given fans of BioWare’s game a safe place to call home and meet so many new friends with whom to enjoy the adventure.

Out of this community, came many more independent web projects which are of a high caliber in their own right. One of these projects was Alan Shot First, formerly known as 90 Seconds With Alan, brought to you by the dedicated, and already hard-working, forum moderating Alan Nauman. Alan’s vid-casts have themselves become a staple in the weekly diet of the SWTOR fan while the countdown clock continues towards December 20th. Alan regularly brings to the community his own take on the big news of the week and always encourages input from the forum-goers.

While MER has tried to breakdown the upcoming game from multiple angles and for various play styles, there is another podcast which knows that there is another voice that often goes unheard: the casual one. Sunny’s Diner has, in its short tenure, provided a “podcast for the rest of us,” which not only gives voice to the busy gamer of today’s world, but brings a level of cool-headedness to often hot-headed debates. Every week, hosts Sunny Ravencourt and Radicool serve up a four-course helping of SWTOR goodness that leaves you satisfied, but always craving more.

Today, Mos Eisley Radio is proud to announce that both Alan Shot First and Sunny’s Diner will be joining forces with MER founder Zach Brown and co-producers Evan Lewis and Leo Andrie to create the MER Media Network and make this every SWTOR fan’s favorite stop for news, entertainment, and camaraderie. If there had been any worries that the game we have all been waiting for might keep productions like Alan Shot First, Sunny’s Diner, and Mos Eisley Radio from appearing as frequently as they do, rest assured, you haven’t seen anything yet. Stay tuned to www.moseisleyradio.com for the latest news and updates on all of your favorite shows. There is more new and unique content yet to be revealed!

Thank you again to all the fans of Star Wars: The Old Republic and of the podcasts that you make possible.

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TK-726 JOURNAL ENTRY 11.82.11

The following journal entries are those of Stormtrooper TK-726, a struggling, low-level attorney stationed on the first Death Star. They largely depict his trials and tribulations as a last-resort Imperial attorney. Found floating in space by a band of smugglers, Mos Eisley Radio acquired the journals and has set to work on translating and documenting the content. Though his fate is still shrouded in mystery, at this point, one thing is strikingly unclear: Who knows why TK-726 even bothered to record his these things?

JOURNAL ENTRY 11.82.11

Up until yesterday, it had been a pretty boring week. The kind of week where you wonder if starting your own practice had been a good idea at all. It’s times like this when ridiculous stuff starts happening, as though the laws of averages just can’t bear to see you bored. Enter my latest client, TK-9724.

This clown was eating in the cafeteria on level 17, sector 5, and decided to order the biggest bowl of soup they offered. That day the soup was Tatooine Bean (which is sort of grainy and leaves a completely inexplicable dry aftertaste in your mouth that won’t leave for days). Why anyone would order this is beyond me, but there you have TK-9724 walking around with an enormous bowl of the barely edible slop, just ready to chow down. Sure enough, he steps on a mouse droid the second he’s done paying for it.

So he doesn’t just spill it, because that would be too easy. He chucks it about three feet in the air and tries to catch it with… his body. I’m sure he thought he could go pro in huttball or something, but catching a bowl of soup in your body is dumb. You know that little gap where a trooper’s chest armor meets his abdominal plate? Yeah. Scalding hot soup got in there.

Here’s where you ask, “Wait a second. Doesn’t he wear a thermal suit underneath?” Of course he does, but this is where the real genius of this guy begins. He cut it out in that section.

“Why the hell did you cut out your thermal layer there?” I asked.

“To keep me cool in the summer.”

???

Ok. I have no idea where this moron was stationed before here, but it could be nuclear freaking winter outside and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference here on the Death Star. It took me a good minute to formulate my next thought, which was, of course, that this guy had to pay me up front for whatever he wanted.

Now I wish I had a lot more time with this guy because no matter how hard it is to make it as an attorney on Tarkin’s toy, your life is surely too short to miss opportunites to gather stories from idiots like this. Unfortunately, what he said next was a complete deal killer. I don’t mind suing the Empire for worker’s comp. I don’t mind if you include a couple Imperial officers while you’re at it to let them know you’re serious. But guess who this guy wanted to include in the suit.

Vader.

Wrong answer. Nice knowing you, thanks for stopping by, be sure to have your chromosomes counted on the way out because I’m pretty sure you’re missing more than a few. This guy could have paid me in lightsaber-grade crystals and I wouldn’t do it. So, I wish him well, and out he goes. Sure enough, I read about him in today’s paper. He got some fresh-out-of-law-school lawyer who must have had his helmet too tight to go ahead and file it and guess what happened when they called the big guy up to let him know?

Yep. Vader choked them out over the holocall. Bang. Dead. Both of them.

Man. I know I didn’t do well at Imperial Law in law school, but I remembered the cardinal rule. Unbelievable. Oh well. Slow week, but I wouldn’t have missed this one for anything. Maybe next week’s idiot will actually pay me before he goes and corpses himself.

TK-726 OUT.

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Still Waiting for X-Wing 2

Still Waiting for X-Wing 2

When I think back throughout my long history of Star Wars gaming, no experience was more amazing than the first time I sat down and played X-Wing. This game was followed up by TIE Fighter, a game which I played even more than X-Wing, and to a lesser extent I also enjoyed X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. Then there was X-Wing: Alliance, but the less said about that game the better. The point is, ever since TIE Fighter, I’ve been waiting for another Star Wars flight sim game to come along and blow me away. The inclusion of space combat is always the number one thing on my wishlist every time a new Star Wars video game is announced. So I was obviously excited when space missions were announced for The Old Republic. It was the number one thing I wanted to try out and eventually I got into the beta and was able to try my hand at space combat. And now that the NDA is down, I can finally share my experience with the rest of you.

I knew going into this that I wasn’t getting the free-flying X-Wing-style space combat that I really wanted. No, those hopes were quickly dashed by the words, “rail shooter.” For those unaware, rail shooters are those where your ship follows a predetermined path (as if it was riding on a set of rails) and you really only have control over targeting and firing your weapons. Despite my disappointment, I have been so starved for Star Wars based space combat that I didn’t really care.

When you first get your spaceship, there are three missions available to you. These three missions are fairly easy to complete and and are intended as training and introduction to the whole space mission mechanic. However, they are so easy that I found them to be somewhat boring, particularly the escort mission. Eventually, you do unlock missions with a higher difficulty and things do improve from there. The ability to upgrade your ship is also a welcome addition and really helps complete those higher level missions. And as a rule I enjoy whenever MMOs add “twitchy” elements to their gameplay.

The environments look really beautiful as well. Even if you play with your graphics on the lowest settings, it’s really something to see. And buzzing along the surface of an Imperial cruiser blasting away at its shield generators and turbolaser turrets is pretty damned awesome. Completing space missions give very nice experience awards and can be a really good way to level up.

Sadly, this enjoyment can quickly turn to tedium. Thanks to the rail shooter style of gameplay, every time you play the space mission it’s exactly the same as the last. The replay value of these missions is essentially zero. Still, they do offer a nice diversion from questing and another for people to level their characters up. And as long as you play each mission only once, you’ll never notice the repetitiveness. So, no, I didn’t really get what I wanted out of the space combat in SWTOR, but it at least gives me some way to pass the time while I wait for Lucasarts to release X-Wing 2.

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TOR Lore 101: The Hutts

TOR Lore 101: The Hutts

The Hutts have often played a major role in Star Wars lore, and seem to poised to do the same in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Yet, for many of our listeners, Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi is their only exposure to this race.To remedy this, Mos Eisley Radio’s two local lore hounds, Evan and Leo, discuss the Hutts, their homeworld, and what to expect once we are all in the game.

“I know that laugh…”

Evan: If we’re gonna talk Hutts, we have to start with Jabba and where he came from creatively. Originally, the character was said to have been greatly inspired by the characters played by film actor Sydney Greenstreet, particularly in movies like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Although this might have been the case with regards to the deleted, and later re-done, Docking Bay 94 scene, for those seeing Jabba’s first official on-screen incarntion, I think the Jabba we all know and love owes more to Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone in The Godfather. This wouldn’t be surprising given the friendship between Lucas and Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola

Leo: Everybody knows that gangsters gotta be fat, and Lucas came up with the name “Hutt” as a derivation from the Arabic word for “whale.” Jabba, however, isn’t really the best representative of his race as a whole. Most people remember him as the big fat slug who had a thing for half naked Humans and Twi’leks. His love of alien women was considered a bit of a strange and sick fetish amongst other Hutts. Not all Hutts are as fat or immobile as Jabba either. Those among the lower castes can’t afford to have a repulsor platform to carry them around everywhere and have to move under their own power instead. For this reason size is considered a measure of one’s status in Hutt society. Of course, a small Hutt is still pretty damned big by our standards.

E: Wasn’t there even a bizarre story from Tales From Jabba’s Palace about him and, who was it, Ephant Mon beating up Stormtroopers? In any case, for some the only other Hutt they might know is Ziro the Hutt from The Clone Wars. Whether or not you like the show, they at least took this Hutt in a different direction and didn’t just make him a clone (insert joke) of Jabba. His character was based on Truman Capote and it shines through in the accent. Unlike other Hutts, Ziro speaks mostly basic, though that may have had more to do with making it more TV-accessible than anything else. His episodes in the third season give us more Hutts than I think we’ve ever gotten before.

L: Pfft. Much like everything else on that show, I hate the Hutts on Clone Wars. Although I do remember reading an article somewhere speculating that Ziro was the first openly gay Star Wars character. An amusing proposition when you consider the fact that all Hutts are, in fact, hermaphrodites. They possess both sets of sexual organs, and so whatever gender an individual Hutt associates themselves with is a matter of their own choice. So some Hutts always think of themselves as male or female, while some switch gender roles throughout their lifespan. For example, it is quite common for “male” Hutts to consider themselves “female” while pregnant and raising a child.

E: *Sigh* Yes, exactly. Ziro can’t be gay in terms of how we use the term since they’re all hermaphroditic. But having purple body paint and talking like Truman Capote certainly does make you wonder what direction they were going. Though there is a third season episode where we learn “he” had a romantic relationship with Sy Snoodles.

But we’re getting WAY off track here. Point is, we haven’t seen too many Hutts that were not anything more than Jabba clones. The Han Solo Trilogy gave us a small look at how they’re organized as their own crime entity within and yet separate from the Black Sun organization, run during The Saga by Prince Xizor. We also get a taste of that in both KOTOR games where the Hutts you deal with (and even dance for, depending on your character design) enlist your help to get a leg up on The Exchange.

NalHuttaNarShadda

The Glorious Jewel and the Smuggler’s Moon

L: Hutta and its moon, Nar Shadda, are two areas that are relatively unexplored in much of Star Wars lore. There are several comic books that give us a view of Nar Shadda but very few novels have ever visited these two places. The novel Fatal Alliance, despite it’s many many many flaws, was nice simply because it’s gave us a look at Hutta and it’s culture.

A little known fact is that the Hutts are not actually native to their “home planet” of Hutta. Hutts originally evolved on the world of Varl which was destroyed at some point in ancient history. One story (the one commonly accepted by the galaxy at large) is that they fought a massive war across the planet which utterly devastated the ecosystem. The Hutts, however, tell a tale of their two suns, whom the Hutts worshiped as gods, being destroyed in a cataclysm involving a black hole. Since the Hutts survived when their gods did not, many Hutt feel that this has elevated their race to god-like status and has certainly led to the Hutts feelings of superiority regarding all other races. After this, the Hutts claimed the world of Evocar as their own, enslaved the native Evocii, and renamed the planet Nal Hutta.

E: The relationship between the Hutt overlords of Nal Hutta and the enslaved Evocii is actually brought up very early on in the stories for those classes which start on Nal Hutta, the Bounty Hunter and Imperial Agent. I really did not know much about Nal Hutta apart from what little they told us in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords while you roam around Nar Shadda. I guess I am glad that we’re seeing more Nal Hutta than perhaps we will see of Nar Shadda, at first at least, since the latter has already been used in two well-known SW games, the aforementioned KOTOR 2 and Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight.

I’m not sure which would be a more interesting place to explore, actually. In Hutta, we have a swamp world gone industrial; kind of like as if someone went to Naboo and turned all the bog regions into dumping plants (though I don’t think anyone would mind the locals being forcibly removed). For Nar Shadda we’re looking at almost a REALLY dirty version of Coruscant. We’d mentioned how Corellia is a slightly-less-polished version of the Galactic Capitol, but this city world (moon), sometimes referred to as the “Vertical City,” is likewise huge, but also just plain nasty.

L: So little has been seen of Hutta that it will be cool to see, but I’m more partial to the cityscapes that Nar Shadda will offer us. The city moon of Nar Shadda will be a really cool contrast to Coruscant’s city. I’m looking forward to seeing how Bioware differentiates the two worlds that at first glance seem so similar, but are really quite different. The moon should have quite a few Evocii, since that is where the Hutts exiled them to after taking over their homeworld. I’m particularly excited to explore the undercity of Nar Shadda, which is full of mutated, violent Evocii.

E: Alright, well, we obviously have lots of ground to cover with just these two worlds. Hopefully, as the Bounty Hunters and Imperial Agents are running around Nal Hutta and while everyone gathers on Nar Shadda for Huttball, they’ll stop and smell… wait. No. They really shouldn’t smell ANYTHING on either of these planets. If they learn one things from this, it’s this: Hutts are gross. Also, don’t go anywhere with one of them, even if they offer you candy. I’m sure metal bikinis chafe.