Ronnie

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.

Excellent reviews, 8's and 9's. I'll take that! Alex from Star Wars Explained loving it should mean the storyline is great. Some choice quotes from Opencritic

Sounds like a preview session centred around the abilities gameplay demo from Aonuma. All sounding pretty incredible so far though from what I've read. The ability to summon builds you've Ultrahand-ed before sounds great. I imagine it'd get tedious to constantly build the same rafts or flying machines piece by piece so if they limit your actual build time to new builds? Great stuff.

Yeah it's good to have some level-headed #insight into this, thanks @Choze

Red Letter Media are nostalgia fanboys, averse to anything new and different, so they were always going to love S3. I finished it last night, I thought the last episode was stupidly over the top and silly in terms of the action but overall it was a fun season. All the fan service was a pretty cheap way to get fans onside but after the dreadful first couple of seasons, who can blame them really. But yeah I didn't need to see the ship turn into the Millennium Falcon. That whole sequence was cringeworthy. What I'd suggest to the writers in terms of the action is that less is more. All these new Trek shows seem obsessed with over the top spectacle, which usually manifests itself as big epic fleet shots with a million torpedoes and phasers everywhere. There's just no need. I love a good fleet shot but it's happened in Discovery S2, SNW S1, Picard S1, Picard S2 and now Picard S3, combined with the poor visual effects and it doesn't really land imo. Also less impressed with them walking back every decision the series has made up to now. My favourite part of the finale though... In terms of the future of Trek, I think they really need some brand new original series like Discovery to avoid the franchise stagnating under the weight of legacy characters. The appeal of a series of brand new characters will diminish the more legacy characters become a thing imo.

You also missed a fourth dot at the end.... I wouldn't be so sure of Mount Tantiss figuring into the Thrawn storyline much, even if it played a big part in the books. The Bad Batch S3 needs a bit climactic victory, and a clone uprising destroying Tantiss in the series finale seems like a safe bet. It could come at a heavy cost so it's not a fully happy ending, but there definitely needs to be a win and sabotaging Palpatine's plans there I think would fit. Similar to how the Rebels last episode centred a victory on Lothal. Re: adapting new characters into the book versions, I imagine if this will all be building for another few years that's plenty of time to introduce a Mara Jade type into the story. But yeah, Ahsoka seems likely to take the Luke role, even though I'd be amazed if we don't see a deepfake Luke in the various series/film at some point. Not a huge role but he'll definitely play a part. Woke up in a great mood yesterday because I loved Mando S03E08 from the night before so much. It put a much better perspective on the whole season for me, a season that really seemed to sideline Din and Grogu, until then. I'm not sure Favreau is ever going to win any awards for his writing, but it was a lot of fun regardless.