I picked up this game in a Playstation sale and then as it was Star Wars Day, figured it was exactly the right time to dive in and play. I’d forgotten that the LEGO version of Star Wars has its own style of humour (have previously tried watching some of the animations and not particularly enjoyed them) but it only took a minute to adapt to. In the game it’s not so irritating!

I liked this one even more than the previous, as this time the threat was all targeted on Starlight Beacon, a huge Jedi sanctuary-style space station. It was like a disaster movie on a ship, things gradually going wrong until it was unreversable, and then having to desperately try and find a way to save as many people as you can. As before, I listened to the audiobook, so great voice work, excellent sound effects and the occasional musical theme I recognised from the films.

Not a bad Star Wars book this one, carrying on from the first in the High Republic with the threat from the Nihil. This time, there’s a big expo about to happen but the terror from the enemy brings chaos and carnage from start to finish. I listened to the audiobook and really enjoyed it - there were great sound effects, well used, and that classic Star Wars music underneath, and great voices considering how many characters of completely different styles and backgrounds. Also found the other storylines interesting - Jedi’s getting too close to other people, wrestling with their feelings, etc. Good stuff.

I was a bit dubious about this - it’s always hard going into a Star Wars piece where you don’t know any of the characters yet (although Yoda gets a couple of mentions!) but I should have trusted the process, you’re quite quickly in the zone and cheering on the various Jedi. I like how this starts, with a collision in hyperspace that causes massive chaos and destruction and more importantly, some big questions around why it happened. That’s the problem with using a science that you don’t fully understand! And then the deeper nefarious plot is gradually revealed, and it seems to be setting some seeds for further stories in this new Star Wars timeline. A very enjoyable read.

The third novelisation of the original trilogy and another new writer in the series. I liked this one just as much as the second, maybe slightly more, but I have to admit the alien languages being written out was a bit annoying. We know Artoo boops and beeps but we don’t need to read whole sentences of it, do we? What’s the point? But outside of that, it was interesting to dip into the motivations of other characters - hearing about what Vader was thinking about as he was dying, and things like that. A good read!

After reading the novelisation of the first (fourth) Star Wars movie, I quickly moved on to the next, and this one I found slightly less engaging. The writing is still good and it’s just as effective at painting the picture of the various worlds, but I felt like some of the emotion was missing. The ‘I am your father’ piece just didn’t work so well in the novel as it does in the movie - although potentially that’s just because it’s so iconic. Sitll a good read though.

I’m always intrigued by a novelisation of a film and this must be the ultimate, no? It’s really well written, considering it’s in a galaxy far, far away where things aren’t quite the same as here on Earth. It’s pretty close to the film, scene by scene, but it does expand occasionally to give more substance to moments. It does suffer slightly, however, from leaning too much to the now-not-correct Luke’s father content, and attraction between Luke and Leia. But ultimately, I really enjoyed reading it.

As a category, this kind of game should be right up my street - it’s third person player, it’s a story-driven action/adventure and it’s an offfical Star Wars game. Sign me up! This was in the January sales for the Playstation, so picked it up with the intention of getting completely stuck in once I was done with Spider-Man. Of course, the webbed one took a bit longer than I’d thought but once I got through saving New York, I headed over to a galaxy far away.

I’ve collected quite a few of the Star Wars books (since they rebooted the ‘canon’ ones anyway, I’ve not really dipped into Legends at all), and I believe this is among the first of the new legitimate stories. It was great! It has that traditional Star Wars story at the heart of it, the Empire creeping their way to commit atrocities and a plucky bunch of resistence fighters trying to stop them. But it also has the added element of telling the story of Kanan and Hera’s first meeting, before they became a formidable part of the Ghost’s Crew. Good stuff.

Season three of The Mandalorian wrapped up last month to very mixed reviews, and it’s taken me a while to decide how I feel about it. Overall, I liked it. I don’t think it quite lived up to the hype and quality of previous seasons but there was plenty in there to amuse.

This week, the final episode of Andor streamed on Disney+ bringing to a close a 12 episode season that is one of the best Star Wars creations since Rogue One (not counting Baby Yoda, obviously). Whilst I have my obsession with the Mandalorian firmly in mind, I have to admit that the quality of this series of Andor really shone through from start to finish. Okay, not quite the start, I did already mention that the first couple of episodes were slow, slow, slow. But since then it has only gone from strength to strength.

While dreaming up ideas for potential 30 day challenges, I pondered whether thirty days of Lego would be something that could work. I love the sets they do featuring elements from popular culture - a lot of fun and nostalgia all in a handful of plastic bricks. It didn’t take long to drop the idea because have you seen how expensive these sets are? Maybe one day in the future but for now, I had to settle for just browsing the online store.

The latest Star Wars TV offering, Andor, reached its sixth episode this week on Disney+, and that’s the halfway point of the series. It seems like a good time to take a moment and review what we’ve seen so far because, boy oh boy, it’s been a rollercoaster of a ride. Firstly, I totally understand why three episodes were released at once in the first week… because the first two were dull, dull, dull. If it wasn’t Star Wars and the lovely Diego Luna, I don’t think I’d have carried on watching. I’m not sure if they just took too long in the world-building, or if the characters just weren’t that interesting, but it wasn’t until Cassian had left the planet and started on his current adventure that things picked up. And let me tell you, it’s a significant fail to make the fantastic Fiona Shaw a weak link in a show.

I didn’t know a six-part documentary charting the beginnings and growth of Industrial Light & Magic was in the works so when the show arrived on Disney+ last month, it was a pleasant surprise. I love a glimpse behind the scenes at how the magic is made in the film industry, and watching creative and brilliant people do what they do just fills me with inspiration and joy. So, as it turns out, this show was absolutely made for me.

A new trailer for the upcoming Star Wars series Andor was released this week and it looks so good. So very good. Rogue One was such a good film that it’s been a long time coming for a spin off of the spin off. The Disney+ blurb says the series ‘focuses on Cassian Andor’s journey to discover the difference he can make… the tale of the burgeoning rebellion against the Empire and how people and planets became involved."

The excitement and hype for this six-part Star Wars story featuring everyone’s favourite Jedi (except Yoda, and baby Yoda, and maybe Ahsoka too), was incredible. I was right there. I wanted to know what Obi-Wan had been up to in the time between the prequels and the original movies, and the trailers only served to make it an unmissable event.

And we’re done, 30 days of comic books done and dusted. Have I learnt anything? Quite a lot actually but I think the main result of this thirty days is to prove that the Marvel comics are too complicated for me. Brilliant but hard. However, the Star Wars reboot - with that hard cut off between current canon and previous legend - is much easier to deal with.

The Book of Boba Fett has been a ride, hasn’t it? The reaction to this show has been so fascinating right from the start, with claims that it’s boring, that it has robbed people’s joy of a beloved character, that it relies too heavily on Mando, that it spends too much time on Tatooine… if there’s an aspect of the show you can name, you can also find people loving it or hating it in equal measure.

Now that I’ve finished watching the second season of The Mandalorian, I’ve been catching up with some of the news surrounding it. Whilst the show is on, I try and avoid articles because of spoilers, even if we were all watching at the same weekly pace. A story I read recently made me think about how great this second series has been for women - strong characters, great actors, and all those behind the scenes as well. Here are three things that have stood out to me:

The good thing about the first series of The Mandalorian taking so long to come to the UK is that we didn’t have that long to wait after watching it for the second series to begin. The bad thing is, now we’re going to have to wait ages for the next installment. However, series two did come to an impressive conclusion this past week, with a guest appearance that seems almost impossible to have kept secret this whole time. And yet, they managed it! I won’t dig into the details too much here because I’m still toying with writing more in depth episodic reviews, but overall, what an incredible show.

It’s felt like a really long time since there was a new Star Wars thing coming out that people were really excited about and then when it came out, they actually liked it. Usually all you seem to get is moans from the hardcore fanbase about how it doesn’t work or doesn’t fit the canon. I feel like that’s not the case with The Mandolorian, and all I have heard about it is good. I can totally see why. I was gutted we had to wait such a long time to be able to watch this in the UK, particularly as it was impossible to avoid the Baby Yoda memes and I could only see from a distance the cuteness that was in store for us.

It was good! I’ve been trying to avoid most things Star Wars in anticipation of the film so I hadn’t realised there was such a negative reaction to this movie, I can’t really see what’s wrong with it? Good story, great characters, huge respect to Carrie Fisher, fun new creatures, interesting twist to the Rey story, and a big battle scene at the end. Sounds pretty Star Wars to me.

It wasn’t that great, really. It introduces all the characters we need to know for the movie, and of course opens up a lot of questions in terms of timelines, but it’s fine. I thought there was too much fighting and not enough story, but I did like the relationship between Anakin and Ahsoka. There were a good couple of twists at the end too, I suppose.

The negative reviews that this film has garnered had me a bit nervous about what on earth I was going to watch, and that’s why it’s taken so long to get round to viewing it. But actually, it was an alright film. There wasn’t really anything wrong with it as films go, the problem is just that it didn’t really add anything to the Star Wars story.

Such a weird one, this. I have seen this before, quite a few times, but I watched it before I’d ever seen Star Wars, so how did it ever make sense? Why did I like it when I hadn’t seen the source material it was spoofing?

In my adventures with Swift programming, I mentioned the R2-D2 toy/gadget that you can bring home and programme yourself. When I wrote about it, it was a delicious want rather than a need, but somehow over the course of a sunny few days off, I ended up with the very same Artoo bluetoothing himself to my iPad. I’ve only been playing for a little while but first impressions are: This is the cutest thing ever! It bleeps and bloops, the tripod wheel comes in and out and it whizzes around making that scream noise that R2-D2 is so famous for. You can control it via a Sphero app, which makes it more of a remote control style toy, or you can actually sit down and programme it.

So, I mentioned Swift Playgrounds recently and thought I would share more of my experience with the app. I tweeted a summary that basically covered my history with trying to learn Swift.

There was something different about it compared to the other films, in that there wasn’t such a clear distinction between good and bad. It wasn’t just ‘believe us, there’s still some good in him’ like it was with Darth Vader. In Ben/Kylo, we’ve seen it with our own eyes and that makes a difference. And Luke’s moment of madness shows that even good people can do/consider doing bad things.

I was worried about this one, after the endless reports about having to re-edit it and change the tone of the movie and stuff, but thankfully it delivered. It was a difficult challenge, I think, to create a story with just the guidance of ‘stealing the plans’, and knowing you have to fit in between two already existing films.

A while back, at the height of my new-found Star Wars obsession, I realised I needed to find a way to watch the Star Wars Rebels TV show. I discovered the DisneyLife iOS app, which allowed me to watch the series, and as long as I watched it within 30 days (which I did), then I could cancel the subscription and only have been charged for one month’s use. I did all of the above and then forgot about the app, until it was updated just ahead of this Christmas period. The price was lowered from £9.99 to £4.99, the app migrated to the Apple TV, and more content was added. With the knowledge that the festive period means lots of time spent at home, I signed back up to watch some more stuff.

I’ve been obsessed with novelty mugs for many years, and occasionally have taken time out to blog about some of my favourites. In fact, I’m surprised to find that I’ve written five posts before, and that it seemed to be an annual event up until 2013. Given that it’s been a couple of years since I had a look at what’s available on the hot drink container market, I figured it was time to break out the mug post again, so here goes. It’s too late to buy any of these as gifts for Christmas, but if you’re looking for something to spend your holiday gift vouchers on, then look no further!

You know that meme where celebrities read mean tweets about themselves? Well, app developers have picked up on this and started reading one star reviews of their products. The end result is brilliant, if you’re slightly geeky like me. Love the people that are confused and say really nice things but then award one star. And poor Marco who gets all the personal comments and nothing about the actual app in question. Hope there’s more of these in the future, although of course I don’t actually hope that developers keep getting one star reviews!

It felt like an incredibly long wait, but finally, a couple of weeks ago, I got to see the new Star Wars film. Actually, it emerged onto my chosen digital media platform about four months after it graced the cinema screens, so whilst it felt like the anticipation went on forever, that window is thankfully getting smaller. I managed to avoid all but the most obvious spoilers - and for the most part they were things that only made sense after you’d seen the film anyway. (There are no spoilers in this post, btw.)

It feels like forever we’ve been waiting for this to be released in iTunes. After vaguely pondering the idea of going to the cinema to see it to avoid spoilers, we somehow managed to avoid anything remotely like a spoiler. I saw a couple of things here and there but until you’ve seen the film they don’t really mean anything. So, thankfully, went into this fresh and oh so excited.

This so nearly could have been the best of the three prequels. Hayden seemed to come into his own, picking up his acting skills and it was incredible watching his character getting darker and darker - physically and mentally. The descent was almost unbearable, but brilliant to see.

If you put to one side the fact that Hayden is a bit wooden for about 80% of this film, I actually really enjoyed it. Padmé lost her accent and gained some kick-ass skills, getting completely involved in the action. I liked the mystery of tracing the poison dart, through the Jedi Archives and then to discover the clones - great reveal, that one, especially when you see their uniforms.

When discussing the order to watch the Star Wars films in, many people suggested leaving out the prequels altogether. That was hardly likely to happen, not least because I bought the digital box set and didn’t want to waste my pennies. So many people don’t like these three films though, I don’t think my expectations could have been any lower.

Finally, the one and only scene that I remembered! And actually there were a couple of other scenes that rang weird bells in my head, so perhaps I have seen more of Star Wars previously than I thought. Regardless, it was only this time that it made any sense.

We decided to binge watch the final two episodes of the original trilogy, which means they sort of blend in to each other a little bit. However, I was surprised that this was the one with the big father reveal, I would have assumed that came in the grand finale at the end. Also that it’s one of those quotes that is done wrong all the time just like ‘if you build it.’ Kind of annoying.

Somehow I managed to get to a respectable age without seeing Star Wars. Of course it seeps into the consciousness, and there are a gazillion cultural references to it everywhere, but I had never seen it. I had one scene in my head, where there’s some kind of hole in the sand that sucks people in which I think had to do with Jabba, but I couldn’t have told you much else about the plot or the point of the whole thing.