Basilisk

Larian isn’t especially big though, even with the success of BG3, a purchase like this is likely would be well outside what they could hope to afford.

I’ve been playing Star Ocean the Second Story R since my fiancee bought it for me at Christmas.

I feel like in the best case it would have been a catastrophe that somehow manages to fall together in a way that actually works, and in the worst case it would have just been bad to the point of being offensively bad, appealing to neither regular filmgoers whole also pissing off established fans.

… But it also feels like giving a chainsaw to a bear: You know whatever’s gonna happen you’re not gonna like, but also you kinda want to do it just to see what it is.

I really enjoyed Starfleet Academy for the SNES. It wasn’t particularly difficult or long, but there was enough interaction with your “crew” outside of space combat that it felt pretty well-rounded, especially for a SNES game.

Yeah, I spent a ton of time with that. It had a terrible memory leak, though, which made it unplayable slow after an hour or so. I was really hoping that Star Trek: Infinite would fill that void, but it’s basically just Stellaris.

Tim Russ also showed up in Dragon Age: Origins, like it was a mini Voyager reunion.

In no particular order:

Steamrunner Miranda D’Deridex Magee Constitution

Hearing his experiences on Voyager, you really have to feel sorry for the guy. The higher-ups really seemed to have an axe to grind with him. It’s kind of startling how you go from TNG where even now the cast gets together like family, to DS9 where it was like “It was a good job and the people I worked with were wonderful and professional and we produced something that we can be proud of,” to Voyager, where the cast largely describes it as a cesspool of passive-aggressive resentment and largely only mended fences years later.

Trek actively gave opportunities to its actors in the TNG-VOY era to learn and try directing. The number of Main Cast actors who’ve got directing credits is pretty significant. The full list, along with the episodes they directed, is here: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cast_members_who_directed

Of the TNG cast though, Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden and Patrick Stewart all have at least one director’s credit in the series. Michael Dorn would also later do some DS9 and ENT episodes.

The ENT mini-arc “explaining” the difference between Klingons “then” and “now” was absolutely unnecessary, but I do have to admit to finding it cute that the reason why Klingons became smooth-foreheaded instead of bumpy-foreheaded turned out to be a combination of all three of Bashir’s guesses in that scene.

I guess I just fundamentally don’t agree with the need for a “backsplanation”. I am of the camp that I’m totally OK with the Klingons looking different in TMP than in TOS because it wasn’t a 1960s TV show anymore and they wanted the aliens to look more alien, and that’s all the explanation that I need. The Enterprise is different between SNW and its appearance in Discovery because it’s a different show and they wanted to tweak its appearance some to make it more of a “hero” set. Spock and Sarek never mentioned his having an adoptive daughter/sister in spite of being in two series and a half dozen movies because Michael didn’t exist until Discovery and the writers thought it would make for an interesting tie-in.

I have enjoyed the series since TNG in the 80s, and I’d love for it to come true some time in the future. But it’s a TV show, it’s not a history book. It’s fine if there are inconsistencies, none of it is real anyway.

I mean, I do like so-called “Nu-Trek”, but at the end of the day this is kind of a tail-wagging-the-dog response. You can explain just about anything in lore after the fact, but when the rubber hits the road the real explanation is that someone in a Hollywood design team said “We want it to be BIGGER,” and then left it to the people who cared enough to find a reason why it would be justified.

Far easier to just suspend your disbelief a bit further, I think. Yeah, Discovery is weirdly big. It also flies through space by a man infused with a giant tardigrade’s DNA sending the whole ship from place to place through willpower and a mushroom trip. If you can accept the second one, it kind of feels like the fact that the ship is a larj boye isn’t that much of a stretch.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and RDR2

The premise is interesting, and the mystery of “what’s happening to Tom” as he gets this weird body horror transformation is actually fairly well done. But any time that a scriptwriter types the word “evolution” into a keyboard there’s should be an automatic spray bottle that pops out of the computer that spritzes them in the face and shouts “No! Bad!” Because any sci-fi script that mentions evolution is inevitably going to completely fuck it up.

A truly great line from “The Ultimate Computer”

M4 to Daystrom: “I am great. You are great. We are both great.”

I’ve used gummy bears as tokens and maps thrown together in 30 seconds with Sharpie on wrapping paper and it works fine too. Players generally are pretty happy with whatever you throw at them.

I’d still expect better than that from a product that a major company is expecting you to trade money for.

My parents did a lot of business trips when I was a kid and it was pretty common that we’d spend time at the airport where they had one of these in the arcade/lounge. I sank a lot of money into those machines. I’ve never really been very good at pinball and don’t generally care much about pinball simulators, but this might convince me to pick this up, just for the sake of nostalgia.

an episode that passes only because Beverly and Crusher have a quick exchange in a meeting.

Ok, I know this was probably meant to be Troi and Crusher, but in Star Trek it’s not impossible, so I found it funny. Riker had the transporter duplicate, not Crusher!

The Aldeans, from TNG’s first season “When The Bough Breaks” are close, though they don’t necessarily treat their advanced technology as “sacred”, though they certainly see it as infallible. The whole setup of the episode is that they would hide the planet away from the universe at large and have only appeared before the Enterprise to steal their children as the now-deteriorating technology is causing the Aldeans to become sterile.

Try that on a small planet, I guess.

They seem to be bookending the season with flashbacks to Pike’s expedition to Rigel VII. His decision to withdraw there cost people their lives and led to Zak corrupting the local culture. Now he’s back under fire, under seemingly unwinnable odds, and forced to make the call to leave people behind again.