The New Star Trek Series Looks Amazing!

Seriously, I can't wait:

Post Mortem Review: Star Trek the Computer Game

Hey look, I played another movie tie-in game all the way through to the end. Unlike Aliens: Colonial Marines, the general dislike for move tie-in games hit Star Trek with a soft glove, rather than a heavy mallet, but Star Trek took some hits, just as they all do. Unlike A:CM there may not be as much deserved hatred here, although Star Trek is far from perfect.

Star Trek TVG is effectively an episode of the adventures of the new Abramsverse Star Trek that slots in between the two films. It's also the unholy love child of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Mass Effect and Gears of War; if you've played any of the above titles, then you will find Star Trek to be extremely familiar territory.

One thing this game isn't is a triple-A budget title. When I got to the finish I was pleasantly surprised to see a credits roster that lasted maybe two minutes at the most, and was considerably shorter than the credits roll in most games I've played in the last three or four years. This explains, among other things, why the game has a lot of odd little glitches on occasion, but it's also commendable that they got a game like this to work so well without having a thousand people on staff. To contrast, sit through the credits on Max Payne 3-it felt like I was scrolling through the phone book of a modest city!

So who is Star Trek TVG for? It's at least partially for fans of the movies, of course; the J.J. Abrams Star Trek universe if actually rather well-suited to video game logic and plotting. It's definitely not for fans of the older Treks, as like the current movies this one takes very little time to slow down and think about what is actually going on. In many ways the Abrams take on Trek is about misrepresenting the extent to which Star Trek is or was an inheritor of classic pulpy space opera; it's about grabbing that "western in space" feel that Roddenberry mentioned and ignoring all the other stuff Trek was about. But hey....if you're enjoying it (and I do enjoy it, with the caveat that it feels more like parody and fanfic than a real inheritor of the Trek legacy) then this game could be fun to play.

The game has several strong points: it's got the crew from the movie doing all the voice acting, and it really lends to the quality of the game. If they had used substitute actors or relied on read-only dialogue the game would have suffered for it. The game also plays very well, and occasional glitches aside it's a competent chest-high-wall shooter ala Gears of War, with a huge dollop of Mass Effect-style run and gun mixed in, occasionally broken up by Uncharted-style wall climbing and platform jumping. Kirk and Spock occasionally like to jump out of airlocks with some handheld rocket packs for some Dead Space-styled flying sequences, too. At no point does any of this feel uncomfortable, although as I said earlier, older Trekkies might start to wonder at what a dangerous universe this iteration of Trek portrays.

The game's plot focuses on the founding of New Vulcan, as a planet is chosen for possible terraforming using an enigmatic plot device (the sole purpose of which appears to be to open wormholes in space and blow up) which becomes the target of the gorn, who pop through one such wormhole and decide to wreak havoc. Despite not having been encountered by humans or vulcans before (to go by what the game stated) gorn are nonetheless well versed in alien physiology and have these robots which inject people with a zombie-mutagen, turning Starfleet personel and vulcans alike into rage monsters who are out of control. The game gets momentarily ethical with it's secondary goals, which include disabling and knocking out victims of this injection rather than phasering them into oblivion.

Once the gorn invade, the Enterprise arrives in time to beam down it's Captain and Commander into the thick of the party, after which Spock and Kirk single-handedly carve their way through a mound of zombified personnel and an endless array of gorn, in locales which include New Vulcan, the Enterprise, the gorn warship, the gorn homeworld, a starfleet space station and occasionally the depths of very debris-cluttered space. In the end, you will have single-handedly neutered the gorn navy, although it does feel like a majority of the remaining vulcans and Enterprise officers in this universe have now been subjected to zombification (don't worry, they get better) in the process.

In a very disappointing scene, two redshirts appear and do not die.

Aside from the rollercoaster plot which propels itself along at a breakneck pace, the game pulls out plenty of movie-quality stunts and makes a complete mess of the previously messy but now totally FUBARed physics and internal consistency of the Star Trek lore. Star Trek has always been about inventing lots of imaginary particles, subspaces, and other nonsense in the past to help justify its stories, but previous efforts usually (with mixed success) tried to maintain some level of internal consistency, if only for the sake of the fans who take this stuff very seriously. The new Trek does this, but tends to do so with a complete disregard (some might say "lack of respect") for what has been previously established. The game is pretty much no exception, and in all honesty, much like the movies, you have to accept that things work the way they do in this version of Trek because it's Unified Theory is "Rule of Cool" and not anything remotely related to real physics, logic, or even prior Trek canon.

Why, for example, do Kirk and Spock regularly jump out of fast moving objects to sprint with handheld jet packs to another distant ship or location, despite the fact that no one mentioned whether or not the transporter is working, or even that they could transport them to within meters of their goal, at which they could use the handheld jet packs to travel safely a few more meters for entry? Rule of Cool.....it's not as fun as jumping out of one space ship to fly through a debris field to another ship.

The gorn get a major face lift here, the first one as best I can tell (unless they showed up somewhere else that I am unaware of). They are now apparently multiple species....or one species with multiple different subtypes (no one comments on or notices this in the game, best as I could find). The gorn are basically what happens to a rubber-suit lizard monster who's job is to fight Captain Kirk in the California desert for a 45 minute TV show when the core nugget of lore is extrapolated forward into a post-Halo, post-Covenant, Post-Gears of War Locust universe in a video game world where enemies must fit different types. But hey, good news....it was an excuse for the developers of the game to get the requisite odd variety of exotic weapons into the mix, all freshly reskinned from Mass Effect 3 and Halo.

Star Trek TVG is actually set up so you can play it as a two person co-op adventure, with one person as Kirk and the other as Spock. I played it single player, and admit that it would have been more fun with a second live person, if only because Spock's pathing as an AI was awful, and on occasion I would have to restart due to the AI taking him somewhere to die quietly. Once, and only once, I got to watch him sink through the floor and disappear, then die later. Sigh.

There is also a multiplayer option, of which I can say little because each time I tried to get into a game I could find no other players (go figure).

So, having finished the game, was it worth it? Yes, if you fit the following profile, as I did:

1. First, find the game on a very nice discount. If you may more than $20 for it you may feel buyer's remorse.

2. Second, you liked the movies even though the Rule of Cool physics and inherent plot monstrosities they actually are still vexes you. Double plus if the movies didn't bother you like this at all, or you can't see what the big fuss is all about.

3. You like adventure games of this sort, and want to support the industry by showing them that an audience does exist for games which involve guys in space suits running around and doing stuff, and not always just shooting things. Actually this game is a relatively poor example of "games that require more than just shooting" but in it's defense most sequences include a non-violent "do this stealthfully or quietly" option which is an extra reward if you succeed; it just so happens that shooting your way through the game is the easiest solution most of the time.

4. you want a co-op game to run around in with a buddy.

5. You freakin' love Trek and are exceptionally forgiving, and you happen to think Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine make an excellent Spock and Kirk.

Why the new Star Trek is more consistent than you may think - and the parts where it dives into the deep end of crazy

I caught Star Trek: Into Darkness Friday night and it was a real fun movie to watch. Like it's predecessor its more of a spiritual successor to the franchise, lacking some of the grace and philosophical introspection Trek has sometimes been known for in the past. Like Trek in general (and the first Abram's movie in specific) it's full of pseudo-science, science gaffs, and some occasional plot holes you could pilot the Enterprise through. It has an early reference to a "cold fusion bomb" that was such a bad choice of name for the actual device they deployed that I felt like the screenwriters were deliberately screwing with us, for example.

I'll take a moment here to give you my grade on this movie before the spoiler-laden rants below: A solid A+ for general enjoyment, with a C+ for coherence; to contrast with the 2009 Trek film, I'd have given that an A+ for fun and a D for coherence. So in some regards this film is an improvement. I'd also add this caveat: if you are a hardcore Trekkie, the kind who is bothered about why the new movies don't properly emulate the look and feel of the tech from the 1967 series, then you probably already know you hate this movie but that's okay because it's not really for you. It's for Trekkies like me who feel that the rigid adherence to canon had made Trek a wallowing mass of nonsensical contradictions over the years, have accepted that fact, and moved on.

Spoilers ahead, just a warning!

Despite all this, there's an interesting internal coherence going on in the movie that is surprisingly decent, although it may not seem so to non-Trekkies unfamiliar with some of the tenets of the franchise universe, or hardcore Trekkies blinded by the trees and thus missing the forest. For example, in the first Trek movie in the new universe we saw most of Earth's armada devastated by Nero's planetcracker while it was destroying Vulcan. Cut to three years later, roughly, and we find that Earth's fleet is nowhere near up to speed, and a lot of private or hidden resources are being sucked into a defense program to build a Dreadnaught, all at the direction of the Grand Admiral himself. So when, at the film's end, we see that same dreadnaught fighting the Enterprise, some people have wondered where the hell Starfleet's other local ships were. The short answer: the Admiral probably ordered everyone away, to give him breathing room to polish off the Enterprise. Later, when the dreadnaught is piloted by Khan and plows into San Francisco, it's probably not shot down precisely because the ship has all of the Grand Admiral's "stand down and ignore us" protocols in effect.

Now, it's the movie's fault for not at least tacitly addressing this (a simple scene in which Admiral Marcus tells Earth's defense forces to stand down would have sufficed) but it makes sense to me in the context of what happened. A second explanation is that this dreadnaught is pretty tough, and no amount of planetary defenses would have sufficed to take it down. A third, and even likelier option which is implied by the movie's own story is that Earth doesn't really have a very weaponized defense force....given that the flagship of the fleet, the Enterprise, is rendered to swiss cheese by the dreadnaught, I have to say that makes a lot of sense. What we're seeing here is a weird mix of the conventional technology of the Enterprise vs. an unholy union of the pre-war tech info brought to the table by Khan, plus the scanned future-tech taken from Nero's ship in the last movie. The fact that they made this new vessel reminiscent of a mix of Enterprise D and E just made it even more interesting.

So why the advanced technology? This is all way beyond the TOS era tech from the original era, right? This technically was already answered by the film makers, who indicated that the presumption was that in the first movie Nero's ship was scanned and details recorded, opening up Starfleet's eyes to a wide range of technological options not previously imagined. I, however, would suggest a different (or amended) answer, which hinges on the whole time travel element: this isn't really even the same universe rewound; Spock and Nero from the first movie slipped backwards and sideways in time, to a slightly different universe, one with slightly different laws of reality and history that extend well beyond the scope of the original series.

Transporters work differently in this Trek. Seriously, they do; aside from the visuals, which actually imply people being surrounded by an array of circulating particles rather than just being disintegrated, transporters seem to be a lot more fidgety, and have trouble picking people up if a bug is walking on them, or there's atmospheric trouble, or any number of other issues. Simultaneously, a very specific portable device (the Scotty super-transporter) can transport a target light years and even his a moving target in Warp. Is this inconsistent? I have a hard time working this one out, and my gut tells me that the problem here is screenwriters who went for Rule of Cool first and "this will mess with our universe's implied assumptions" ended up ignored.

If, however, I try to apply some logic to the way transporters work (and fail to work) I arrive at the conclusion that it's a suggestion that the technology works very differently in certain key ways from the way it worked in Old Trek. I'd postulate it's using some sort of strange quantum entanglement to get the job done, and that the device is "repopulating" the target at a new destination rather than its current location. This becomes trivially easy to do when you know the speed and distance of a target, but something as simple as a ladybug in your hair could screw things up, because now you have another observer and a whole bunch of additional variables to account for. Something like that? Ah, I got nuthin' on this one.

At least they acknowledged the staggering significance of Scotty's transwarp teleporter device as a distinct thing in this movie, being sequestered away by Section 31 for weaponization.

Another thing that I find head-scratching is the whole "Qo's'Nos" (alias Chronos) event. There are a lot of things we can interpret from the event in which the Enterprise warps to the Klingon Homeworld, as follows:

First, the klingons appear to have already destroyed Praxis. Notice in the one space scene with the disintegrating moon in the background? Now, in the implied new history Nero supposedly was captured by klingons and locked away in Rura Pente for twenty odd years before being freed, and after his escape he destroyed the prison world....but going by Star Trek VI Rura Pente was not a  moon in the Klingon system, best as I could tell. This means that Praxis was already mined out and blew up, a couple decades early. This help explains the next issues.

Second, the klingons have a lousy detection grid around their homeworld. Maybe they used to have one but Praxis blowing up fried it. Maybe Chronos (because I refuse to keep retyping the klingon spelling) has been thoroughly mined out and is now effectively a slum planet, and the bulk of the klingon interests have shifted to other worlds, and resources along with it. Maybe they just aren't as technologically advanced. Remember, in Trek VI the Enterprise-A slipped through the neutral zone and only got picked up by a listening post with a very bored guard. The newer Enterprise (which, as I'll discuss below, moves a lot faster) might have just gotten lucky, or been using coordinates provided by Admiral Marcus which was a known dead zone in Klingon monitoring posts. So this doesn't bug me so much.

Finally, klingons do appear to have effective sensor shielding, and maybe even stealth tech by now, given that the Romulans are out there selling arms to the klingons. As such, even if we didn't see the klingon defense ships in stealth mode its reasonable to assume they had either sensor-defeating stealth tech or actual romulan stealth tech that kept them from being picked up by the Enterprise's sensors. As for the intel that they acted on (that the sector on Chronos was abandoned)...nothing in that scene suggests that info was fresh, and assuming Starfleet got that info from its own stealth probes, could be a bit out of date anyway. So this seems like a problem on the surface that goes away quickly.

Now, a quick bit about Khan. Why did Admiral Marcus think finding a sleeper ship of genetically enhanced humans from the eugenics wars was a good idea? This seems like a no-brainer, although it relies a bit on the assumption that this universe is a retcon timeline: Khan and his people were true super soldiers, genetically engineered not just to be the smartest and most cunning leaders of the world (as the TOS Khan was) but to be true killers and super men. Admiral Marcus realized that in the current era humankind was made of survivors that had operated under a clause of nonviolence and peace for more than 150 years now, and that he needed someone who was a product of the tumultuous and vague wars which wiped out most of Earth from the old days to help him conceive of what could be done with the weapon's technology stolen from Nero's ship.

The movie obliquely references Khan's origins as being from roughly 300 years ago, without being specific (i.e. 1996), and this is a younger less factually-focused crew, so it would be nice if the new Trek universe was one which held even less certainty about exactly when and how everything went down in Earth's past, including exactly when the so-called Eugenics Wars happened. Call me a fool of a Trekkie but I still like the idea that Trek postulates a potential future history that spins off from out own, rather than one which spins off from 1967's conception of such. The scene where Khan kicks the crap out of a small army of klingons lends credence to this whole notion.

The bit where Kirk calls up Scotty? Not an issue. The only reason we didn't see more of that in TOS and the old movies was that we didn't have cell phones back then. Other than that, Kirk and crew took plenty of direct phone calls across vast distances, just usually sitting down in front of a vidscreen. Trek has had a long and established history of instantaneous communication, and this is just the new series continuing the trend in a way more modern and familiar to us.

Some of my unanswerables:

1. Why did Khan hide his crew in torpedoes? What possible benefit did he think could come of this action? Did these torpedoes have such a small payload that they had that much room in them, making the idea seem sensible, or did Spock, toward the end of the movie, have to add in explosive charges to the torpedoes as well after removing their stasis-tube contents? I do not feel the movie explained Khan's actions on this, or the full nature of the torpedoes well enough here.

2. What the hell is a Cold Fusion Bomb and why would they call it that? What that bomb did was more of a energy-sapping device.

3. The entire "Enterprise hidden under water" scene struck me as 100% Rule of Cool and not at all feasible. Assuming the Enterprise can sustain itself under water (I reasonably expect it could) I still question why parking it there made any sense. Also, why were Kirk and McCoy faffing around in the alien temple in the first place? WHY???? I assume it was to provide a distraction from the shuttle gliding into the volcano's mouth.....but....still.

4. So they know Khan's blood can regenerate dead tissue. There are 72 additional supermen in the ship's hold that can be used as well, right? Well, I do have a partial answer for this, as follows: McCoy determined that it was only Khan's blood which would do; his other genetically enhanced followers weren't subject to the same level of modification he was. Given that in Khan's TOS and Trek II appearances his people were all closer to sheep and cult followers than genetic supermen like himself, this makes sense to me. It would also explain why Admiral Marcus left them in cold sleep rather than wake them up, because they were more useful as bargaining chips than actual agents of Section 31. That said, my real question is: WHY DOES KHAN'S BLOOD REGENERATE DEAD TISSUE....including radiated tissue? WHY?!?!?!?

5. When the Enterprise starts to fall into Earth orbit, I can't help but notice that that entire scene started closer to the Moon, but rapidly seemed to move closer to Earth, despite the fact that neither vessel was under power. This is an example of Sci Fi authors have no sense of scale. Another example: the fact that as best I can tell it took the Enterprise maybe 20 minutes to get from Earth to Chronos. Even assuming that this timeline's ships had benefited from improved warp technology thanks to Nero polluting the timeline, that's very damned fast.

6. More evidence this is an alternate universe and not just a timeline reboot: Carol Marcus was a weapon's researcher and not the much more green-friendly physicist she was in TOS.

7. Is it just me, or do Trek shuttles still not have a proper airlock?

Hey look someone got some Dead Space in my Star Trek

Starships & Spacemen 2E

I grabbed this today, one of "Dad's Xmas gifts" to himself: Starships & Spacemen, 2nd edition from Daniel Proctor and co. at Goblinoid Games (PDF here). It's the official second edition to a game which came out back in...ah...1979? And which Goblinoid Games bought the rights to and rereleased in all its typewriter-font glory a little while back. The 2nd edition is a classy revision, with the rules heavily upgraded and made compatible with Labyrinth Lord, although it looks like the rules, while compatible, aren't sacrificing SF-flavor just to be easily meshed with LL.

Anyway, it's a rip off...um, homage to Star Trek, and even includes things like a random alien forehead bump generation table so you can find out what your alien of the week looks like. Great stuff, I feel like running a campaign with this By The Book already, set in the mysterious parallel universe of Space Fleet!

It's also gotten my mind off of the horrendous tragedies of late, so another big plus. Goblinoid Games continues to deliver fun stuff that prays on nostalgia but in a good way....Rotworld was my last purchase from them (also a great game), and I have been waiting to see what was next from them, and S&S 2E was well worth it.