Old Republic storylines

Well, I reinstalled Old Republic, but the launcher still won't start.  I probably need a new rig, sadly.  I'm not interested particularly in getting a new rig, but I probably need to.  (My wife appropriated our newest laptop, but it didn't have a graphics card anyway.)  My old Desktop is old, and still has Windows XP.  And my work laptop is probably pretty nice and would run it, but I'm locked out from installing software on it.  I might be able to run it on an SD card that's just copied to that, but I don't know.  Maybe I'll try it, maybe not.  Either way, I decided that actually playing the storylines probably won't happen, barring the game getting an offline version that I can get and just play like I did Knights of the Old Republic back when I played that three or four times on my old Xbox.  Even if I get the game to run, I'll probably lose interest before I get far enough into it.

Of course, you don't really need to, because you can get it pretty good by watching one of the many, many playthroughs on YouTube.  This last week, I watched an edited (but mostly it just cut out a lot of the side quests, the running around planetside, the flashpoints and space missions, etc.) playthrough of the Sith Warrior, along with some commentary by the player.  He not only made the character look pretty good (at least once he started wearing helmets) and picked a lot of conversation options that aren't too different from what I'd have picked myself, I think.  To the degree that CRPGs, especially in the Star Wars setting, scratch the same itch that watching Star Wars movies or TV shows do, then this is pretty decent way to find some new material.  It's sometimes debatable how good it is as a substitute for good movies and TV shows, but what are you going to do?  The TV shows and movies aren't that great anymore.  In fact, most of them outright suck.

I've just watched the first chapter of the Jedi Knight storyline too, but it's not as good—mostly because the character is a boring idiot, and the light side and dark side split is moronic.  If the player had picked more of the cocky conversation options, then the story would have been better, but I already know that he'd be told off literally every single time, and it'd get really, really old.

The way the story is written, with so much r-selection, doesn't help either (Am I really the only one wondering why it is that liberals are so insistent that it's evil to give traitors the death penalty?  Makes you wonder.  That particular choice rankled me quite a bit, that it was supposedly "dark side" to advise the legal ruler of a Royal House execute a traitor who had caused the death of many, many people.)