All the love I may have for the SW franchise comes from Kyle Katarn and the KOTOR saga. The movies never struck me nearly as deep. Then again, I hardly ever like movies, I'm a bookworm.

The first four books (out of 9) of the X-Wing series (Rogue Squadron, Wedge's Gamble, The Krytos Trap and The Bacta War) are very good. These four books tell the story about how Wedge Antilles formed a new Rogue Squadron and how the rebellion (New Republic) took Coruscant to establish themselves as the new legitimate government. You don't get much Jedi stuff because it focuses on a fighter squadron, but it is a good story with good characters.

The next three books in the series are an own story arc. They are ok, but the first four are way better. The last two books... Well... I didn't like them at all.

Well, the "Tales of the Jedi" comics were kinda neat. They were about Jedi knights of the Republic, 4,000 years before the movies. They introduced many elements that would later on play an important role in the KOTOR games. I really like that scenario, so playing the KOTOR games felt like meeting some old friends again, to me at least.

Sorry for a hijack:

I think many Star Trek themed games are far better than the ST movies and TV series, simply because the latter suck so much.

They have been airing the ST: The Next Generation episodes here now for many months, five episodes per week. I've been watching them all in order to get into the lore at last (previously my knowledge of ST was seeing the "Wrath of Khan" movie as a kid, and seeing an odd ST episode from the TV; and some PC games on it), but so far it has been underwhelming. I think I've seen so far maybe 1-2 episodes that I could say I enjoyed (maybe some Borg episode, and also some other episode where they were on the brink of a war, I don't recall exactly).

I usually watch the episodes from my recording hard drive TV box afterwards so that I can watch the episodes with 2x speed, being able to watch one 1 hour episode in less than 30 minutes, skipping also the TV ads. :)

The last I saw was where that irritating Q demigod sent Picard and his merry men to some alternate universe to act as Robin Hood characters, and Q played the eeevil Sheriff of Nottingham. Meh.

I guess I always expected an space opera, while in fact it is some kind of artsy fartsy TV show dealing with important issues of today translated to easily understandable format for common people, like racism, pigotry, democracy etc. And of course the overall worldview in the show is very US centric, as in the Federation (at least the participants from Earth) = US who is the good power of the universe while the other cultures are more or less broken with their odd local customs and unfair policies. The Federation is the good power which invad... contacts new civilizations, bringing peace and prosperity to them.

But I'd let the political connotations fly, if only there were interesting space combat scenes too! Phweee, phwee! That's why I always liked Babylon 5 so much.

And what's with always sending a 2-5 person away team to new hostile places, quite often with the captain too? Isn't that far too risky? Don't they have proper security forces or armies with proper combat gear? Or how about the mechanic and mr Data (or whoever) _walking_ to the engine room, when they were rushing there in order to stop the whole ship from blowing up or something? My god, did they put illogical things like that to the show just to irritate me?

Have you watched DS9? It's got a less clean-cut view of the Federation, and it's more story arc-based than any other Trek show. And it''s got more space battles.

Unfortunately no. I hope they start airing their reruns here too at some point.

And the funny thing is that I originally thought I was watching DS9 reruns, while it was TNG. :) I spotted it when the IMDB descriptions of DS9 episodes didn't sound familiar at all to what I was seeing on the TV. I guess I always just skipped the intro where it said out loud the show is TNG.

That's ... Kinda what I thouhgt when I started watching the Next Generation. Basically, individual episodes are fairly uneventful - I mostly just work while listening to them, and watch when something interesting is happening - buut they genuinely do have very agreeable philosophy and some episodes have very interesting or great plot. To be fair, while not really that entertaining, Star Trek has made me think about many issues on multiple occasions, and on many more it has genuinely surprised me. Shame that good to bad-average episodes ratio is about 50:50, but those that I liked I still remember (Darmok episode!)

At any rate, try to take a look at the newest Star Trek series, called 'Enterprise'. It's got a much more modern feel, someone finally understood how to pace an episode, and from about 2nd season upwards it gets into a continual storyline which is AWESOME.

I am sure more people will recommend Deep Space 9 to you, but I found it rather average. Babylon 5 is just far, faaar better at what DS9 attempts to do.

Ok. Keep an eye out for it. A word of caution, though. As with every other Trek series since TNG, the first two seasons basically represent the show trying to find its own identity. I'm not saying they're all bad. On the contrary, seasons 1 and 2 already have some amazing episodes, and they lay the groundwork for what is to come. However, the really big story arc stuff (including the big fleet battles!) begins in earnest in Season 3. Some would even say that DS9 really hits its stride with the beginning of the fourth season. As always, your mileage may vary.

Please, according to that logic barely any German would like WWII movies. :P
You'd have to be some fucked up nationalist to dislike movies for such reasons.

Zahn later wrote two books that continue aspects of the story of the Thrawn trilogy, Specter of the Past (1997) and Vision of the Future (1998), together referred to as the Hand of Thrawn series. He's also written a few standalone Star Wars novels including some that take place between the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. I haven't read any of these later books and can't vouch for their quality.

After the success of the Thrawn trilogy, Lucas started publishing Star Wars books at a rapid pace. The standalone books and trilogies vary in quality. After some time, Lucas began to primarily publish Star Wars novels as long storylines drawn out over the course of many books. Each successive novel of these longer series is written by a different author (for example, three authors alternating volumes over a nine-part series). Some see this structure as a blatant attempt to force fans to buy every book to avoid missing a part of the "ongoing story" and a model designed to churn the parts out at a faster pace to make more money without regard to quality or consistency. Eventually, the events and lore of the prequels were forced into the expanded universe, sealing its doom.

TL;DR: The Star Wars novels vary widely in quality, becoming worse in general as time passes.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_books
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Zahn

I used to be a Star Wars nut. I was 8 when the first one came out, so yeah, the first trilogy was a large part of my development as a youngster. It was a lot of fun.

But let's face it, Mark Hamill was not the greatest actor (I never thought I'd use the term "doe-eyed" on a male, but there you have it). Yoda was a bit too Muppet-esque, and the Ewoks just seemed like an out-of-control marketing ploy. And I can't believe that after all the death and destruction he caused that Vader would end up repenting.

But anyway, perhaps it may have been a bit different if Lucas had written the trilogy as books first, as opposed to just the first one. After all this time and product, the first three movies are such a small part of the whole thing, even though they started it. There's been so much done that the whole is "deeper" than the start.

I have to say i liked SWKOTR 1 & 2 i am replaying 2 thanks to the mod the recovers a lot of the cut content. As for the films i loved the original trilogy hated episode 1 but found 2 to 3 ok if you forget how they screw up the original trilogy lore.

I was shocked when they said there is now going to be a 7th movie i thought they should have just left the films alone now they have done enough damage as is.

Hm...me, I'm kinda curious as to what Disney's gonna do with the SW property. Since Lucas' role is purely advisory now, I think there's an actual chance that this might end up being good or at least decent. Better than the prequels, at least.

There was always going to be 9 movies as far as i know. The originals are the middle 3. The 3 just done the prequel. I wonder what they will do with 7/8/9 as all the original actors are fairly old now....
Not sure why people would advise to watch DS9. Like you ive already thought and heard from others Babylon 5 was the better of the Babylon 5 v DS9 (pretty much same premise). TNG was always better than DS9 as well....