3/04/2009

3/03/2009

Trekkie, Trekkor, Whatever right?

With the new movie coming out soon, I would expect a lot more Star Trek gaming news and merchandising and collectibles and everything else that goes with the mania. I'm looking forward to seeing the latest addition to Hollywood's current trend of restarting and re imagining every franchise they can; the action looks fantastic. The Enterprise herself, not so attractive. Worlds away from the original Constitution class, but nowhere near the elegant beauty of the "movie era" Enterprise.




Frankly, from what I've seen, the new Enterprise looks like a Galaxy Class got the jump on the movie era Enterprise, raped her and spat out a bastardized version. The sets that I've seen look like SNL got themselves a huge budget, and the uniforms -- well yea for keeping 60's style mini's on the female crew. Still, that negativity aside, it looks like it's going to play well on the big screen.!


Speaking of "play", I started the year out right by dusting off the near ultimate in Starship table top gaming:




Only GamesWorkshop's Battlefleet Gothic plays better for Space Combat. Plus, you just can't beat the look and feel of movie era Trek. The Starship interiors looked functional and plausible the uniforms -- I have to say the uniform design was probably a mistake in their awesomeness because everything before or since, sorry to say, are pajamas in comparison.



Even Picard, arguably the greatest onscreen StarFleet Captain of them all, has that much credibility in the blood red tunic (sans the turtle neck unfortunately)





And the Klingons owe everything they are now to the movie era of Trek. Rebooted in the late 70's and 30 years later, they haven't changed from the look established for them in Star Trek the Motion Picture. And remember the phasers. Like the uniforms of the movie era, phasers before and since seem tame and lame. You hear and see the phasers in Wrath of Khan and there's no doubt those beams are going to punch through a ship's hull. This is the Trek Universe as it stood for Fasa and Star Trek Combat Simulator.

To be fair, the movie era and TOS are "my" Trek. I grew up watching the reruns in the early 70's and the brief run of the cartoon. The movies came out in my preteen and teen years. So my bias is built in. But it'll be fun to see the new version for sure. Looking forward to that. And as it's set before the original series, the old Fasa game holds it relevance for the new era.