The new Legacy System is a pretty unique addition to SWTOR that a lot of players have really been looking forward to and with the 1.2 patch live, that means we get to see what all the fuss is about.

The Legacy System allows players to create a family tree of characters. Once your character has completed their Chapter 1 storyline, they will be able to choose a Legacy “Last Name.” This Legacy last name must be unique and is shared across all characters on that server.  Once you have unlocked your Legacy, any and all characters on that server will now contribute to that player’s Legacy Experience Points. Much like normal xp, when you reach certain Legacy thresholds, you will increase your Legacy Level. These levels unlock various rewards.

By completing all the Chapter 2 quests you will unlock your classes buff on all other alts. You will also unlock class specific emotes. Completing Chapter 3 with your character will unlock that classes special ability to all classes to be used during Heroic moment. These unlocks have no legacy requirement. Here is a list of class buffs and special abilities you will be able to unlock:

• Imperial agent – Coordination Buff – Legacy Orbital Strike ability
• Bounty Hunter - Hunter Boon Buff- Legacy Flamethrower ability
• Sith Inquisitor – Mark of Power Buff – Legacy Lightning Storm ability
• Sith Warrior - Unnataural Strength Buff - Legacy Force Choke ability
• Jedi Consular – Force Valor Buff – Legacy Project ability
• Jedi Knight – Force Might Buff – Legacy Force Sweep ability
• Smuggler – Lucky Shots Buff – Legacy Dirty Kick ability
• Trooper – Fortification Buff – Legacy Sticky Grenade ability

Some of the bonuses can get insanely expensive: A Ship Mailbox requires Legacy Level 10 and costs 500,000 credits.. Rocket Boost which provides an intense speed burst for a short time requires Legacy Level 8 and 2,000,000 credits! SWTOR needed a good money sink though and I feel like this gives enough incentive to players to invest their time and credits into it. For a fairly good list of Legacy rewards and bonuses check out this post on SWTOR Daily Quests.

So we haven’t really featured a texture pack since we did the Sphax Pure BD pack a while back and that post is still hugely popular. I’ve been running with the default vanilla texture pack for a few patches now because Optifine got behind and I never bothered to download MCPatcher even though it’s available right here on JOB.

This texture pack was featured on Minecraft Forums a few days ago so I picked it up to play with it some. It’s a pretty fun texture pack but like most it has it’s pros and cons.

Right off the bat you’ll see that the texture pack has really great icons and looks very NES’ish. In the screenshot above you’ll notice that the blocks look great from a certain distance and beyond, but up close can be very annoying and noisy.

The trees might be my favorite part of the texture pack. They look very 8-bit while retaining some pretty easy to recognize texture and coloring. The downside is that if you have a good enough computer to run “fancy” graphics – the trees aren’t very transparent.

Creepers look somewhat the same and sand is very repetitive to the eyes as is the ocean/large bodies of water. The sun and moon are round instead of square but fit well with Minecraft’s blocky feel.

The inventory and crafting screen is an eye burning green but is true to old Nintendo games that made a lot of use out of green backdrops to menus and selection screens. The background behind the character in the inventory window is very NES’ish and almost looks straight out of Duck Hunt or Super Mario.

Grass is very smooth and tiles really well. Sand looked fine on the beach but looks a wee bit out of place when you see it in random spots like on top of the stone as seen here. Mobs and animals look good and they did as good of a job as I’d imagine possible to give them a NES type feel to them even though there’s only so much you can do to keep them from looking like normal cows/pigs.

Altogether the texture pack does what it’s set out to do – give Minecraft some retro-Nintendo style graphics. It’s a very novel and fun texture pack but as much time as I spend in caves and in buildings I’ve built I’d have a hard time getting over the noisiness of the textures up close. I did play with it for a while and enjoyed it, so if it’s something you’d be interested in – check out the official Minecraft thread for the texture pack and give it a whirl.

Life as a registered sex offender isn’t necessarily easy. There are places you’re not allowed to live near and places you’re not allowed to visit. Just recently legislation has tried to restrict whether or not registered sex offenders can even have access to social networking sites. I’m not here to debate whether or not sex offenders should be allowed onto Facebook or not, but they’re being restricted from more and more online activities – online gaming included.

New York state law requires convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, screen names, and other online aliases with the state. Companies including Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Blizzard, EA, Disney Interactive, and Warner Bros. are now using this information to block 3,580 users from their networks, according to an announcement made this morning by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.

They say the effort is the first of it’s kind to “ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for dangerous predators.” There have been cases where someone sexually abused a child after having first met them through something like the Playstation Network or Xbox Live, but does that mean we need to ban a swath of people from using the service? There have been people sexually abused at Ice Cream stores and Walmarts but that doesn’t mean we’re going to prevent registered sex offenders from visiting either of those places.

While acknowledging that current game consoles already have parental controls that could protect children from unwelcome advances, Schneiderman argued that “parents often do not realize that gaming consoles have these capabilities.” Should we instead focus more on informing parents that these capabilities exist or should we just keep adding on things that people who made mistakes aren’t allowed to do any more?

Having people out on parole with particular conditions one thing, but I think we’ve gone very, very far in the wrong direction when it comes to permanent, lifetime punishment. It seems like there’s an ever-increasing banning of prior sex offenders from any productive part of society. People over at Arstechnica have argued “You can’t participate in harmless activities just because kids might be nearby (never mind the fact that your offenses had nothing to do with children). You can’t even play video games online because you might be connected to a child and you might use that to lure them in. None of this is productive at all.”

What is your take on this?