If you pay attention to entertainment news headlines even just a little bit, then you’ve noticed the name J.J. Abrams quite often lately. Whether it’s his upcoming mega-sequel Star Trek Into Darkness, the recent announcement that after Trek he’ll hop over to Star Wars Episode VII, or various other bits that may be reported, it’s a name we see often.

Now Abrams is adding to this run in the spotlight and looking to fortify his status amongst the geeks of this world.

At the D.I.C.E. Summit for video game designers and developers in Las Vegas recently, Abrams and Valve Software co-founder and president Gabe Newell announced that they are working on movie adaptations of two massively popular Valve games, Half-Life and Portal.

I remember in 1994 when George Lucas announced he was making the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. The announcement opened a door to over a decade in which I was able to channel my obsession with Star Wars into hunting down any and all tidbits of filming news. It was a fascinating and exciting period, and one of the things I learned from that time was an ability and skill to filter the facts from the rumors from the horseshit.

Star Wars was somewhat breaking new ground on the internet during that time, and it was the fans that were leading the charge. Sure there were many basement-dwelling neckbeards who became elitist trolls, but on the positive tread of the tire, it was the Star Wars fans who popularized the meme phrase "spoilers" in that early internet phase – and while there are cited examples of the phrase being used pre-internet, it truly was the Star Wars addicts that pushed it from web meme to culturally recognizable phrase.

Consequently here we are in a new exciting era in which we get to follow news and rumors and speculations on what we could possibly expect from Star Wars: Episode VII and the other chapters of the Sequel Trilogy. Having said that, we are in a completely new era now, with a lot of newer and younger fans out there, so I thought I would ramble on a bit about what we can expect, and the likelihood of certain elements arising.

Permit me to preface the list below by saying that I’ve held off from doing this article for some time. I wanted to wait until we at least had a confirmed director. And now we have, in the form of J.J. Abrams. But this also emphasizes an important aspect of Star Wars fan lore when it comes to new movies: EVERYTHING is rumor or speculation until confirmed by the official Star Wars site. This is almost biblical canon or Force Holocron or karma sutra or something to the hardcore SW nuts like me, and I can almost see the Prequel era speculators nodding their heads at this.

So here we go. Bear in mind, these are early days, and there are some only basic fundamentals we can ascertain right now. But at this point, in 2013, what can we possibly expect from Star Wars: Episode VII?

Yesterday we reported that Disney and Lucasfilm were ramping up their long-term grand plans for Star Wars with the announcement that they would be developing a series of movies set apart from Episode VII and on that would focus on individual characters from the Star Wars universe, including a possible Yoda movie.

Entertainment Weekly today broke an exclusive addendum to that revelation with the news that both Han Solo, the roguish but lovable space smuggler that helped make Harrison Ford a star in the original Star Wars movies, and Boba Fett, the masked intergalactic bounty hunter who had little screen time in the original trilogy but has since become a huge fan favorite character, might also be headlining their own standalone movies.

Paramount Pictures has used this year’s Super Bowl as the perfect opportunity to kick off – pun very much intended – the television arm of the marketing campaign for Star Trek Into Darkness with a snazzy and explosive new TV spot.

You can watch it here below.

There’s a lot of mighty purty imagery packed into those thirty painfully brief seconds, a few swatches of which have not been released before. In particular we get to see Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and the movie’s villain John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) have a tense exchange, which is then followed by lots of explosions and people looking quite unhappy.

A new app has been released on Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play for the upcoming J.J. Abrams sequel Star Trek Into Darkness.

The app is being toted as a “first of its kind” offering. Developed by Qualcomm Incorporated, users will access to plenty of materials related to the new movie, as well as the opportunity to earn points and complete missions to unlock more content, win valuable prizes, and work their way through Star Trek Academy.

Continue reading for more info.