Gouge, Kudos, and a Rant

Playing Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, I found a lot of great gouge on the internet with lots of pretty color pictures and videos. Now, playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, it's thrown in a few new things here and there, and the internet knowledgebase just isn't as robust as it was for LSW II.

I went on a quest looking for information about the blue cannisters.

You see, for each level of LSW, you have to play the level once through in "Story" mode using the characters that are given to you. After you've played the level once in "Story" mode, then it unlocks the ability to play that level in "Free Play" mode. In "Free Play" mode, you get to choose any character you've unlocked on other levels or purchased in the Mos Eisley Cantina with the points you've earned playing so far. Different characters have different special capabilities that enable you to reach or access different hidden parts of the map.

As you play the game in either "Story" or "Free Play" mode, there are ten white cannisters hidden throughout each level. When you find all ten white cannisters, it gives you like a 50,000 point bonus and a vehicle you can use in some race later on.

So far, everything I wrote above was the same from LSW II to LSW CS. Now in LSW CS though, after the "Story" and "Free Play" it has added the "Challenge." The "Challenge" mode is ALL about finding ten BLUE cannisters hidden throughout the map. You have a 10 minute time limit to find them all. There are no studs (coins) to be found anywhere in "Challenge" mode, but all the same bad guys are there to thwart you that were there in the Story and Free Play. It's pretty... well... challenging.

In my search for hints on the internet, I found lots of discussion forums, and I clicked here and clicked there and through some untraceable series of links, I ended up at THIS site. I don't know why it didn't pop up as the FIRST result on the list when I googled it. It SHOULD have.

Now, this guide is technically written for the Wii version of LSW CS, but it's all good gouge for playing on the XBox, too. It's not pretty and doesn't have any color pictures or other frills, but it is very well organized and logically laid out.

For the sake of anyone who hasn't played Lego Star Wars before, I wanted to share this "hint" from that website, because I thought it was a surprisingly simple synopsis of the game:

Shoot.  Freakin'.  Everything.  If it's made out of LEGO
bricks and not obviously part of the background, gun it
down, or saber it down, or whatever you have to do,
because a lot of stuff to move ahead in the game requires
you to go on a destruction frenzy.

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PT Update: I got my trophy back! On my Polar F11 heart rate monitor (HRM) watch, it keeps track of my workouts. I set up a plan for how many and what type of workouts I'm going to do each week. If you reach at least 75% of your goal each week, then it displays a little trophy icon for the rest of the week. I had lost the trophy over the holidays from holiday laziness. Thanks to getting back into my regular weekly routine last week, my watch gave me my trophy back on Monday.

Unfortunately, a shipyard fire drill prevented me from joining my crew with the PT Nazi over at Bloch Arena this morning. I'm really disappointed I missed it. I hear he had the guys running quarter mile sprints out on the bike path.

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Proud of my Tiger Scout: Last night at our Cub Scout Pack meeting, ES earned his first awards as a Tiger Scout. He earned his Bobcat Badge, six beads toward his Tiger Badge (there are 15 total to earn the badge), the Geography belt loop, and the Swimming belt loop. I know during the week or so before the pack meeting as I was quizzing him on the Cub Scout Promise, the Law of the Pack, the Cub Scout Motto, etc (all things you need to know for the Bobcat badge), he got a little frustrated or annoyed with me. I think when he got the awards last night though, it really gave him an ego boost and made the effort worth it. Now he's excited and wants to start earning more belt loops.

It was interesting to see the difference in awards last night though. Most of the other boys in his den got the basketball, soccer, baseball, and other sports belt loops. Not only did ES not get any of the sports belt loops that the rest of his den got, he was the only one to get the geography belt loop. I think that's more of a reflection on his non-athletic nerd of a dad though.

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CBS Rant: LW and I were REALLY excited to watch the season finale of The Amazing Race on Sunday. We plopped down in our chairs and clicked on the DVR, and... found... nothing... Our DVR did NOT record the finale of the Amazing Race.

So you say to yourself, "Self, WHY on EARTH would the DVR NOT record the finale when it has recorded EVERY Amazing Race episode before this?!?!?" Well, I'll tell you. Some IDIOT at CBS decided to change the official NAME of the show in the electronic listings that go into TV Guide and Dish Network and everywhere else. Our DVR was set to record every episode of "Amazing Race 12," and that worked for the entire season, because that's what it showed up as in the Dish Network guide. For some reason, they changed the name to "Amazing Race: The Season Finale" or something like that. So NOBODY's DVR recorded it if they had it set up as an automatic "record-all-episodes" function. Turns out the same thing happened to my Mom, too. She isn't using Dish Network, so it's not a problem unique to Dish.

I read the recap of the final leg of the race, and it sounded pretty intense. It's a real bummer to have missed it. Why do they offer to let you watch full episodes of all their other shows on their website, but not Amazing Race? To CBS, I say, "Thbbbbbbt!" >:-P