Ok, just a real life thing to start with: I had just moved back to my dorm, and our internet sucks. I am paying more to go to a private school; meanwhile my friends who pay half as much have insanely fast internet. God dammit.

So, now the internet connection here is not allowing my two page post on a WW2 board game, Men of War, and Company of Heroes. So I decided to write about another game I have been playing...

Yeah, this is going to be bad

Clone Wars Adventures has just launched, and it's... it is a game... sort of. See, this is not KOTOR online: I shouldn't expect it to be. The problem is that the characters in this game do not go on any "adventures." The entire game is essentially a virtual arcade. It is a good virtual arcade, but I started to wonder why I was playing this. I could simply say "I grew up with Star Wars" which is akin to someone who grew up with Star Trek buying the Star Trek Manga: it is known and familiar, but not at all what you expect.

I thought the game was going to be a lite kids MMO like Wizard 101. I will say that Wizard 101 is an awesome game with a great card combat system. I expected even more from Sony Online Entertainment with this Clone Wars game. I am officially an idiot.

I don't care about canon, this is awesome.

Clone Wars Adventures, which I have a 1 month subscription to, is an online game where you create a character which is framed as a padawan in the Jedi Temple during the Clone Wars. Your goal is to learn Jedi powers, mastering control over your emotions, and going on raids with other players to kill battle droids and get fat loot. I'm sorry, I think I was designing that game in my head as I was playing the puzzle game where you "align crystals" to build a lightsaber; and when I say build a Lightsaber, I do not mean build a Lightsaber.

I want to rip this game apart, I really do. The problem is I like this game. I really like this game. Why is it online? So Sony can make more money by having a microtransaction model. This doesn't upset me, because my favorite online only game is Battlefield Heroes. It handles the balance of earned stuff and paid stuff very well. Kotaku, in their usual non journalistic style, reported that Battlefield Heroes is a pay to play game. Well, then so is every game. Modern Warfare 2 is pay to play, if I want to play on the new maps. difference is the cost of four maps would permantenly buy me three or four guns in BF Heroes, and DICE keeps releasing new maps every couple of months anyways. I digress.

CWA is smart about it's payment plans. If you are not a member, almost every single mini game is available to you. You also cannot buy and equip most clothing and apartment upgrades. Being a member is only six dollars a month, and the price goes down the longer you pay for. There is even a lifelong subscription for fifty dollars. People might get upset at the cost of it, but consider that a used copy of Mafia II is $49.99 at Game Stop. I think that the Lightsaber dueling minigame is worth more than Mafia II.

No Jedi? No Sale