Ronnie

I'd say at least two weeks with spoiler tags, more like a month ideally?

Same, seems like it was published early by mistake? Nice new ad.

Just seen an ad on tv. You know something is a big deal when an advert finishes with 4 DAYS TO GO, filling the screen in giant letters

UK sales data. These days, it's great to have a third party single player game selling well.

00:00 > 01:45 some of finest music on Mando

One week until the sequel to Breath of the Wild. Crazy.

It's different to what you might expect sure, but I think it works for the role he played in the film.

That looks awful.

I like Cranky Kong's voice in the film. There I said it.

Add another 30 quid to the tally, taking my nephew to see it tomorrow.

Feels like Nintendo are having their best years ever at the moment. Switch selling like crazy, software sales through the roof and now Mario on top

Those are some awesome photos @Julius, great stuff, especially that first one. Glad you had a great time, shame we didn't manage to meet up at some point. Hopefully in Japan?? I was 100% certain it was going to Florida but that was only based on the pattern up to this point. Bit of a shame that 2025 is only going to be three days though! The panel schedule will be packed. You've got Ahsoka (1 or 2 seasons of it?!), Skeleton Crew, The Acolyte, S4 of Mando by then, Visions v2 (and 3?), who knows what else, oh and a film potentially coming out 8 months later. Crazy. The two year gap will be tough but ultimately make it even more special I think. It was weird going from one Celebration to another in 10 or so months. Excited for Japan though. I hope TFA doesn't get lost in all the ROTS stuff. Also, bit of a compromise in terms of streaming the big panels? They didn't stream the Showcase and Ahsoka, but the Sequel Villains, Kenobi and Bad Batch ones they did. So that was a big step in the right direction to be fair. Daisy getting a standing ovation when she came out was the highlight for me. Wonderful. Complete surprise too, even though she did tease it on Instagram a while back haha. I thought the Showcase was incredible. 10/10. We were properly spoiled. 2+ hours long too! I had a good time at the equivalent last year (tough to argue with John Williams and Harrison Ford on stage), but content wise, 2023 was MILES better. Makes sense obv, projects more far along but yeah, amazing. I thought Acolyte and Skeleton Crew looked great. Perfectly produced show, great to have Kathleen Kennedy on stage the whole time too, bit of a message that. Glad you got to see Doug Chiang and as for a photo, that's your mission for 2025 I guess! He seems a great guy, he was wandering around the day before Celebration meeting fans too. I might try and get some of his artwork signed next time. Maybe that awesome Phantom Menace pod-racing shot. I had a reservation for the Store that first day too, got a couple of little bits. I really like the Union Jack X-wing stuff so got a mug and a patch to go with my Anaheim patch. Plus that badge art poster of course. I'm going through the livestream content at the moment and watched the ROTJ panel for the first time the other day, and yeah, bit of a mess. I love Ming Na Wen but, yeah. Did you catch Billy Dee's interview on the Live Stage shortly after that panel? He was 10x better thankfully, he was really great. Awesome ROTJ poster, I managed to blag one even though I didn't make it to the panel haha. Nice to see a modern film poster that isn't just a bunch of floating heads (much as the TLJ poster is one of my favourites ever) LOEVD this when I watched it on the livestream, I can still hear Gwendoline Christie's laugh when i close my eyes though. I wish I'd made more of an effort to try and get in but to be fair instead it meant I got to meet a Lucasfilm Art Director and got into the Visual Effects panel of Andor, a few rows from the front too, which was fantastic. Great energy from the crowd. Ewan seemed to suggest it and the crowd went nuts, then they realised oh he wasn't teasing an announcement lol. Kathleen Kennedy was doing lots of interviews around Celebration and fair play she was really open and honest. Big takeaways are that they'd like to do a Kenobi S2 but it's not in active development atm, also that Rogue Squadron is something they definitely still talk about, and that it might be pivoted to a series? PLEASE, just give us pilot fans something. It's a huge part of Star Wars that's been really lacking, at least on Disney+. The trench run and the Battle of Endor is pretty much what made me a Star Wars fan. Haha I did the same, and I also stole a Press reservation weird that they allocated that much space for the press. It was really weird being shown a teaser for S3 a week after S2 finished, but given how much S2 was delayed, I imagine it's been finished for a while. Hell, S3 might be finished and they're just waiting to release it. This last season of the Bad Batch has pretty much put it as top tier Star Wars for me, something I never thought would happen when it was first announced. The writing is immaculate. Jen Corbett and Brad Rau deserve a ton of praise so it was great to see them shown so much love in that panel. They usually do a question and answer session with Doug after his panel, but I think they were running short of time and had to get ready for the closing ceremony. Shame cause it's usually really interesting hearing his off the cuff insight. Wow great job getting that timeline t-shirt, I didn't see that at all, gutted! I didn't go quite as crazy this year with merch, got 7 or 8 little bits but nothing massive, apart from well, this. I ordered a Wrecker and a Tech online after seeing them on the show floor A few photos I took... (will get to replying to the Mandoverse/Bad Batch storytelling post another time )

@Julius specifically said he doesn't like inconsistent frame-rates and they can give him a headache. Hence my advice that a stable 30fps might be best in that case.

Quality mode (30fps) seems to be the way to go then if you don't like framerate variation.

Enjoy!! Please post thoughts. People seem to be loving it from what I've read (apart from technical hiccups).

Seems Nintendo provided some dodgy B-roll for previewers to use in addition to their own clips. Basically footage looks like it chugs in the footage far more than it actually does. Here's an analysis from direct footage...

Love that!

Haha, silly me. You're right the glorified DLC comes out in a couple of weeks

How do you mean? The BOTW DLC came out in 2017.

Yes that 6 second long cooking animation the first time you cook was agony.

It was in the BOTW DLC so probably given to you pretty early here.

Absolutely! And literally what, 2 hours apart? Similar to Horizon 1 releasing a week or so before BOTW and Horizon 2 releasing a week before Elden Ring. D'oh. EDIT: oh you made that exact point in the next sentence, that'll teach me to keep reading before replying. *facepalm* By all means!! Just don't want it to impact your enjoyment of Survivor.

PS, finished these last week:

Ok phew, I was wondering if I might have needed to revoke your Star Wars nerd card for that mistake.... Isn't "we know where everything is heading" a pretty staple story-telling method for a lot of Star Wars? The prequels, The Clone Wars etc... Obviously you know that, I'm just saying there's a balance to be struck between telling an interesting story in the here and now whilst also setting up ties to later eras. All the cloning storylines in Bad Batch and Mando definitely have their own unique payoffs, but they can still leave a trail of breadcrumbs to the sequels, like you've said. Tough to speculate on an endgame for The Bad Batch. Like you say I don't think it can end on the happiest of terms, hence the need for some kind of far-reaching victory that goes beyond just "rescue Omega/Crosshair". I don't think that would be enough. Possibly crippling the Empire's/Emperor's cloning plans and setting it back a couple of decades (until the time of Mando) would be enough, and by that point Tantiss is operational again. If anything that's probably an even bigger victory than what Rebels did with its finale, but both felt fitting and realistic to the story that those shows told. Interesting, I hadn't really considered that. I'm open to it if it's done well, we'll see. Just the four months to wait though.

Could be the variety of environments. The detail in RDR2 was incredible, but I imagine recreating Coruscant might be pretty resource heavy. Probably a combination of lots of planets with poor optimisation. Thank you! I'm definitely waiting until after I finish with Tears of the Kingdom to play Survivor. Annoying, but oh well. I've not actually read the reviews yet but it sounds like there's a lot of content/busiwork around the main campaign. Might be a case of doing main missions and side missions before Zelda and doing the equivalent of Favours when you get back to it. Still seems crazy to release two weeks before what'll probably be the biggest game of the year.