EPISODE I - THE SCORER MENACE
MEXICAN FOOD, COFFEE AND WORLD DOMINATION
Kuki: Hello Mr. Scorer! Good Morning!
Scorer: Mr. Kuki! Good Morning! How are you?
Kuki: Good, thanks! What about you, did you manage to fix your bathroom?
Scorer: Yep, or at least the plumber did. The only thing I did was trying to close that valve, which was stuck and cut into my fingers. Let me see if it shows. It's hard to see on camera, but it feels like I rubbed my fingers over a cheese grater. Obviously the 2 fingers that got cut up are the once I use for almost everything, including flying.
Kuki: Yeah, it's always like that, isn't it? Happy you got the stuff fixed. As you know I prepared some questions for this interview, and to start it off nice and easy, could you please tell us where you're from?
Scorer: As many already know, I'm from Mexico. I was born in Mexico City and lived there until I was 35 years old. Then I moved to a very nearby city named Puebla when I married my wife.
Kuki: What would you say is your favorite thing about Mexico?
Scorer: There are a lot of things I don't like … especially in the political area, but I guess that goes for many of us, there's always things we don't like about our countries. Looking at the nice things though, I would say what I like the most is the food. We have some things here that I cannot find anywhere else. Of course I like food from around the world, but we really have some special stuff, especially the not so well known foods like Chiles en Nogada, Mole Poblano … and then there's something called Sopes. Oh my God, those are delicious. It's made like in a fried tortilla-ish thing that is called a sope, it's made from the same dough but it's slightly different. It has Mexican Chorizo, which is way tastier than bacon (sorry USA, it just is!) and potato, cream and sauce. My God, that's just … it's one of those things that you can eat one after the other, just amazing!
Kuki: That does sound tasty! Since we're on the topic of food, is any of those dishes your favorite food?
Scorer: No. I like sopes a lot, but they're not my favorite. My favorite is the one I shared the other day on Discord which is called Tacos Dorados. I usually eat like four of them nowadays, but when I was a teenager my record was 21!
Kuki: Wow!
Scorer: The thing with Tacos Dorados is you take a standard soft tortilla, you put a little bit of pulled chicken strips on the tortilla, you roll it, perfectly. You need to have very good technique because if you don't do it right, once you put it in the pan with the oil, it's going to open up if you didn't do it right! Then you let it fry for a few and that's it! It's stupidly simple, but then you can put sour cream and sauce on it, and grated cheese, you could put lettuce, but I'm not a fan of that, because then it gets messy rather quickly since it pulls the cheese and the cream with it. There's another type of taco where instead of all that, you put slices of tomato, slices of avocado and a little bit of salt and sauce. Those are also delicious. Ah, I could eat a thousand of those! That's my favourite food!
Kuki: Sounds good. You're making me hungry! What about your favorite drink?
Scorer: As you may have noticed, I'm not an alcohol guy, unlike some of our friends. I have a box of beers that my wife and I bought probably 2 years ago, and we just used up about half of that, so that kind of tells you we're not into it. My favorite drink by far is coffee! Which you can see I have here in my hand
Kuki: Oh waw, awesome AT-AT cup!
Scorer: Is it showing? Oh yes. I drink coffee all day. My wife sometimes tells me "it's 3 pm, why are you drinking coffee?"
Kuki: Haha! Same here! I would even drink it at 8 pm but she also doesn't like it.
Scorer: Yeah I could drink it before going to bed and I still sleep perfectly.
Kuki: Tell us, what do you do in your daily life?
Scorer: Well, my main work is to be a Google Quality Rater for the search engine. Which means I mainly have to watch the results that would appear on a search on google and rate how useful they would be to a user who launched that query. And that locally for Mexico. So if someone were to google "Tacos Dorados" I have to check the results and see whether they're useful. Recipes and images would be great, but a location for Taco Bell restaurant in Alabama would be completely useless, so that's where I help the AI to take over the world, uh … I mean give us a better experience.
Kuki: Check. I note down "help the AI take over the world".
JOINING THE REBELLION
Kuki: Ok, down to serious business! When did you join TRA? I did some research which would indicate 1999.
Scorer: That's correct. You did your research well. That's March 1999. I came into X-wing first. I'm not sure, but I think I first got a demo of X-wing and I was blown away! Many people like Star Wars because of Han, Luke and Leia, or because of the lightsabers, but for me it has always been the ships. I know many won't agree, but I don't care. I like ships, I have always liked the ships. So when I saw that game I was like "THIS IS THE GAME!". As you can see, I love those games. So when the first rumors started circulating of XvT (X-wing vs. Tie Fighter) coming along, I was like "Oh God, that's multiplayer, I have to get in a team so I can play multiplayer, I wanna be the bomber that destroys frigates and star destroyers!". I'm still the same! So I went looking around and I found this group that had a very tight structure. They were like, "join in and we'll get you set up, what do you want to fly?". I said "I wanna be a bomber" and they signed me up and put my name there. But then uh … the game came out and nothing happened with them. I went like "what happened?!" and so I started looking again. And that's how I ended up in the Microsoft Gaming Zone, I think it was called, and I saw a lot of people from EH, TFA and TRA. What stood out to me is that most players were TRA or TFA. I contacted TFA and they explained they were the Tie Fighter Alliance, but that they had a sister group for the rebel faction. That's when I went "Aha! That's me, I'm rebel! I'll always be rebel!". And that happened in March 1999. I was 18 years old at the time.
Kuki: So the main game being played was obviously XvT, what type of events were going on and how was the gameplay like with the clan at that time?
Scorer: It was very different, especially because I came from X-wing and Tie Fighter, so I was expecting to play missions. My first shock was to see everyone just doing melees, dogfighting, stupidly, endlessly for 10 minutes straight. I was like "What?! Why are you doing this? There are missions over there …". But slowly I started to realize the value of the dogfights. So the events were mostly these dogfights events called weekends of war, which then expanded into week of war, originally hosted by TFA. Around that time, the DJO developers were working on Battlestats and built the first version, which was completely different than what we have today. That's when WOW was born. The week of war lasted for a week. I know that sounds obvious, but it doesn't last a week anymore, it's a little bit more now. And it was held every month. The numbers were through the roof! Even though it was held every month, there were a LOT of games to play. To give you an idea, in my second war I was able to play 105 games! And that's just … consider that in those times we had dial up internet, so it's not like I had internet all day and I still reached 105 games. That's how active it was. And not only that, but you had the luxury of choosing what to play. You had rooms that read "Tie Interceptor 2v2" or "gunboats" or … so I would go through all those rooms and say "Am I in the mood to play gunboats? Yeah! Let's do some gunboats!" It was great fun, although not optimal, because I rarely played interceptors and tie fighters etc. Still, to this day, it's not my best ship.
A few months later, they decided to make an internal event that was also played every month called DJO cup, which TFA recently abandoned for unknown reasons … As you know, the focus is more on the Squadron, as in week of war you cannot play against your own club, in DJO cup you can, but not against your own squadron members. Unlike WOW, DJO cup was hosted sometimes by TRA, sometimes by TFA, each in turn, in a very informal way. It was not really an official BSC event like some people think today.
After that, mission gameplay finally started! There was an unfounded belief at the time that missions created more lag. However, the game works in a way that it actually calculates all positions, it throws the player input in the mix and all the clients make the same calculations so every player gets the same thing. It checks for errors now and then, but it does not add lag. So it took probably like a year before missions were played on a constant base, but I was very glad they were! And that's probably how things were when I joined TRA!
Kuki: What do you currently enjoy most about TRA?
Scorer: Probably what I enjoy the most is designing things. Things like events (edit: think about HEX) or ToQuest Hangar, that the community gets to enjoy and have fun with after I made them.
Kuki: You probably have a lot of them, but what's your favorite TRA memory?
Scorer: Ohhh, Interesting! I mean, I have a lot. Uhm, I remember the day I was invited to the Jedi Elite, I remember the day Daymaster asked me if I would be willing to be Fleet Admiral, which was mind blowing. But probably, what I remember the most, was a very particular thing that happened back in the day, with the Pink Flamingos. I know this is not strictly TRA, but it was so funny! Back then DJO was starting to expand into other games and creating new clubs. The person in charge of creating the club for StarCraft decided to name the club "Flaming Pink Flamingos". That was not in the spirit of the rules according to the DJO HC back then. So they asked him to change the name and big drama emerged from that. I remember that very fondly because I was very, very much a part of that. I also played a lot of StarCraft, and I'm Mexican, so my English was much worse than now at that time, so for me Flaming Flamingos was literally about Pink Flamingos that were on Fire, and that sounded so awesome! I didn't know it was like a double meaning thing, suggesting other things, so I was like "what's the problem with the name?!" And I was all into that fight. It was so ridiculously stupid, but so much fun. After a lot of drama, the guy left DJO and created his club somewhere else. DJO created its own StarCraft club called "Black Crescent Alliance", and I participated in one week of war, but it was not as successful as XvT. Obviously StarCraft had much more players than XvT, but still the Week of War never really took off there. So that's my favorite memory there, Flaming Pink Flamingos.
IS THERE A WORLD OUTSIDE OF TRA?
Kuki: What's your favorite hobby outside of TRA?
Scorer: Is there something outside of TRA? Let me think … probably the main thing I do outside of TRA is play video games with my wife and mother in law. We go to her house and we play Nintendo Switch. We play a lot of Mario Party, Super Mario, … you know like standard Mario games, but the latest versions. And also some indie games, like Very very Valet where you are a valet and you have to pick up cars from clients and park them and get them back to them. It's fun! It's ridiculous in the sense that sometimes you fly the car and crush it into a store then the owners still come pick it up and head off. We play a lot of Overcooked and now I'm playing, or rather making levels for Super Mario Maker. I want to create a complete world, mainly for my brother in law. He asked for the Mario Maker game for his birthday, but he has no modding skills, so he tried to make a level and it didn't really work out. So I asked him if he would let me make some levels for him and then he can play them and so I'm doing that right now when I'm not busy with TRA.
Kuki: Do you have a favorite type of music?
Scorer: I like orchestra music, classical, or movie soundtracks, electronic, a little bit of heavy metal, but just a bit. I like video game music of course and anime, all the nerdy kind of music. I really despise Reggaeton. I hate it, I hate it!
THE GREEN LIGHTSABER
Kuki: At what age did you see your first Star Wars movie and which one was it?
Scorer: That's a good question, because I have no idea. I grew up watching Star Wars. It's one of those things you do so much of that you don't really have an idea of when you started. I do remember I watched A New Hope and Return of the Jedi a lot. I never really saw Empire Strikes Back because my dad didn't have the tape. I was probably around 5 years old. I watched those movies again and again. Those 2 Star Wars films, Star Trek 3 and Back to the Future. I probably know all the lines from memory.
Kuki: That's funny, because for me, my mom had borrowed tapes from a colleague, and I only saw the Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but I didn't see A New Hope. So I had no clue what happened in the first one.
Scorer: "Hello. This guy. Who is he? Where did he come from?" Yeah, I get it.
Kuki: Exactly, I saw Ben Kenobi's force ghost and I had no clue who he was, I had never seen him alive.
Kuki:Which of the movies is your favorite?
Scorer: I have to say, I'm divided. I like Return of the Jedi a lot, but I'm aware Empire Strikes Back is a better movie. I do enjoy it, but … at the same time, A New Hope is the one that created 90% of all the esthetics and designs … but I'd still say Return of the Jedi. I mean, it has a green lightsaber!
Kuki: So is that the color of your Jedi Elite lightsaber?
Scorer: Yeah, I'm green, all the way green! It ain't easy being green.
Kuki: Were you also part of green squadron or were you in all of them?
Scorer: No, initially when I joined I wanted to be on green, but I was assigned to Grey and was part of that for years, until TRA started losing numbers and they decided to make just one squadron: Rogue Squadron, which is still there today. I was in Rogue for quite a while until the emergence of Squadrons, when the new squadrons opened up. I went back to Grey, until a new Squad Leader was required and Daymaster asked me if I wanted to be one. Of course I wanted, so he offered me the option to chose a color. There was Red, Gold … I first thought about Red as it's featured in the movies, but then I decided I really wanted Green. And then I got picked to join HC so …
Kuki: Who's your favorite Star Wars character (Expanded Universe included).
Scorer: Aaaah, probably Thrawn. Uhm, yeah.
Kuki: Good choice! I have a feeling he will be popular, even with the Rebels.
Scorer: Yep. I met Thrawn in Tie Fighter. I'm aware that Thrawn should be acquired from here [holds up Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn], but in Tie Fighter he was … just overwhelming. I think they did a good job portraying what he is. It's like: "Wow, this guy, he's one of the bad guys, but still, wow!" I always admire smart people, because that's what I aspire to be.
Kuki: And what's your favorite Star Wars movie scene?
Scorer: Thats easy, Return of the Jedi, all the ships going into and out of that Death Star. There is no comparison with anything else, nothing comes close.
Kuki: And your favorite headcanon moment (outside of the movies)?
Scorer: My favorite moment is the one in which they go back in time and say "Ah, look, Palpatine was really dead, all this trilogy is nonsense". Yes, that would be it, if it existed …
Kuki: What's your favorite real life Star Wars moment?
Scorer: Mexico is not really a geeky area, Star Trek and Star Wars are not very known here. So there's not much … but not so long ago, I met a friend. I studied theatre and when I was still in Mexico City, I did some theatre stuff. I met a woman who was a friend of a friend and we were setting up something to promote independent creators who don't have much support. So we tried to make a network between venues and creators and that woman turned out to be a super big fan of Star Wars. That's very rare for a woman in Mexico, I mean, besides all of you (TRA) she's the only one I know who likes Star Wars that much. I met her slightly before the release of Rogue One, so we went to see it together, which was a great experience. It was nothing romantic because I was already engaged with my wife, but just seeing the movie with someone who likes Star Wars that much was a curious experience. So I think that would be it.
PEW PEW !!!
Kuki: Would you please share with us your Top 3 Star Wars video Games?
Scorer: Ah that's easy: X-wing, Tie Fighter and XvT! I think I'd have to put XvT on top because of the social component and the nice feature that Battlestats has where it accumulates all the scores in the Hall of Fame. But that'd just be slightly above Tie Fighter. The interactive music in Tie Fighter is the best thing ever in video game music. There's nothing that I've heard that even comes close to it.
Kuki: What's your favorite non Star Wars video game?
Scorer: That's either StarCraft or the Marvel Fighter Series, from X-men Children of the Atom till Marvel Capcom 2. It's pretty tight, but I probably StarCraft.
Kuki: Favorite Rebel ship and why?
Scorer: Depends, visually, the design of the model? That would have to be the X-wing. No doubt, Sir! But flying it? Either the Y-wing or the B-wing. My playstyle is to have this heavy, slow ship that can take a lot of hits and pack a big punch. So yeah, obviously the B-wing or the Y-wing. Not the Squadrons B-wing, no, no, no, no! More like the XvT B-wing. Like this one [shows a miniature].
My brother gave this to me as a present. These are literally my only two Star Wars toys [shows a Tie Fighter model].
I'm not really into having much stuff, not because I don't want it, but because I don't have enough money to buy them. This one (Tie Fighter) was a gift from my wife. Sadly, she doesn't know the difference between white Tie Fighters, that do not exist, and the real types. I always imagine it is a real one.
Kuki: And your favorite imperial ship? The bomber?
Scorer: The assault gunboat! I know it's not exactly from the movies but I like the ship a lot! The gameplay is very similar to the Y-wing. Also the shape of the gunboat, I really like it. I guess because it resembles the shuttle from Return of the Jedi. I like the fact that the wings close, like the - what is it - F18?
Kuki: Most hated ship in Squadrons?
Scorer: Uh, probably the Reaper. Obviously the U-wing, Tie Reaper and Tie Defender were not in the original movies. The defender was in the X-wing games, so yeah, that's nice. I think they did a better job with the U-wing to make it seem like a part of things, it has like stolen parts from other ships, which is cheating, but it looks less out of place than the Reaper. I do not mind the way it flies, but more the visual aspect.
Kuki: Last question, is there anything from the Expanded Universe you would recommend to other TRA members?
Scorer: Well I asked for this [Heir to the Empire] last Christmas. I really enjoyed the first pages I read, but look where I am.
I really struggle to pick up a book, open it and start reading. There is always something else that attracts my attention. So I don't want to be a hypocrite recommending these books to people because I have a hard time reading them myself, but I think that these 3 books are it if you want to enjoy something which is not the 6 movies that exist plus Rogue One. This should be what people should be reading. And the other thing I would recommend to people is to play through the X-wing, Tie Fighter and X-wing Alliance storyline, mostly Tie Fighter, which is just awesome.
Kuki: Well that wraps up my questions …
Scorer: Oh wait! Wait, wait, wait! I just remember I have one more toy! I don't have it put together now but I'll send you a picture, it's a Tie Defender from Lego. And you'll see in the background I'm on the TRA website haha!
Kuki: That's super nice! I really like Tie Defenders and LEGO! I want to thank you a lot for this very enjoyable chat! I hope the rest of TRA will also enjoy it. I wish you a nice continuation of your day and hopefully see you later for some actual flying!
Scorer: No, not at all, all thanks to you! See you later!