May 15, 2009

• New Games, New Movies, New Matches

  A few things happened the other day that delayed my planned post… So, I’ll make this one on three topics: a new Lunar game for the PSP, first of my summer movie reviews with Star Trek, and the Indian Premier League.

  Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star

   

   

  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m one of the foremost experts on the Lunar RPG series. Well, just this week, Famitsuu announced a new Lunar game for the PSP–or, more accurately, a remake of Lunar: The Silver Star / Silver Star Story (the first ‘story’ created for Lunar) on the PSP, titled Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star.

  So, this brings the total number of distinct versions to 4: TSS (Sega CD), SSS (Saturn/Playstation/Japanese & Korean PC), Legend (GBA), and now HSS (PSP). Yes, most people are sick of remakes, but many others are still thrilled that the series is definitely not dead (despite Lunar: Dragon Song, released for the Nintendo DS in 2005, doing so poorly).

  So we’ve been abuzz with news of this since it broke. Here are some of the highlights:

  • It’ll be produced by GungHo Works, but developed by GameArts
  • It’s slated for a Fall 2009 release on the PSP; no word yet on an American release
  • New storyline events will be added to the PSP remake

  I’ve translated the original Famitsu article and posted that on LunarNET. For more information, check out the article:

  LunarNET – Famitsuu on Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star
  

  Star Trek
  Overall: thrilling, enjoyable, and worthwhile for anyone–fan or no

  

  Now, I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was 10 years old. I grew up watching The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 is my favorite, and I’m one of the few who likes Enterprise. I also really like some, but not all, of the movies (notably Wrath of Khan, Voyage Home, Generations, and First Contact). So when I heard J. J. Abrams was directing a new Star Trek movie, involving the original Enterprise crew, I was definitely ambivalent. And by all rights I shouldn’t have enjoyed it, but… it was really, really good, and I left the theater more than satisfied.

  Spoiler-Lite Review:

  The good:

  • Action sequences–in space (the first 10 minutes with the USS Kelvin), on-the-ground, and in between (orbital skydiving!)
  • The casting–particularly Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scotty
  • How Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekhov retained the best parts of their original character
  • How Kirk, Spock, and Uhura got a much-needed upgrade to their characters
  • Occasional lines and events that called back to the series (“Are you out of your damn Vulcan mind?”, Sulu’s hand-to-hand combat, Chekhov’s trouble with Vs, the redshirt on the orbital skydive)
  • Leonard Nimoy

  The bad:

  • The main villain, Nero, for being a genocidal monster on the order of Khan Singh, has really lousy motivations
  • The interaction between Spock and Uhura
  • Angle-shots and shaky-cameras. I hate these two techniques, yet why do directors insist on using them? I thought Battlefield: Earth proved how completely awful angle-shots can be.

  The confusing:

  • “Did that just really happen?”

  Now, I saw it with two other people. One had little to no familiarity with Star Trek, and the other was, like me, a longtime Trek fan. All three of us really enjoyed it. So, if you don’t know a thing about Star Trek, you’ll have no problem following it and enjoying the movie all the same (they also keep it very light on the technobabble, and have basically excised all the elements of The Original Series that were rather… irksome). If you’ve been a Trek fan all your life, there’s still plenty to love about this movie. And in either case, the bad doesn’t detract enough from the good to keep you from thoroughly enjoying it.

  

  Spoiler-Heavy Review:
  (Just a warning: don’t read this if you plan on seeing the movie and haven’t yet.)

  The more I think about it, the more I actually appreciate what J. J. Abrams did here. My guess is his thought process was something like this:

  • If I make it overly ‘true to the original’, then there’s no way to attract new fans
  • If I branch out and do something totally new, then I piss of 40 years’ worth of fans
  • Since I’m not Gene Roddenberry, there’s no way I can make it feel just like the original Star Trek
  • So, I need a way to let me branch out, without being obligated to stay within the established 40-year history of the shows.

  While the alternate universe / time travel deal is a bit of a trope, it ended up working brilliantly here in that it let the story take a completely different and unknown turn, without sacrificing the presence of the characters or similarity of events, and without disregarding the last 40 years. Bold move. And it paid off.

  I do admit that I was upset when I first found out that time travel was a part of the plot this time. I’m really tired of time travel in Star Trek, since it forms way too common a plot device (…despite how I like both Enterprise and the First Contact movie). Reason being, time travel plots nearly always end with a “big reset button”, where something disastrous happens, but by the end of the show/movie they’ve gone back in time and fixed it all. It’s the sci-fi equivalent of a dream sequence.

  Any Star Trek fan will tell you that, once Vulcan got destroyed (I said spoilers, didn’t I?) they fully expected the crew to go back in time and undo those events before the end of the movie. And, when the Enterprise was about to get sucked into a black hole near the end, I fully expected them to go through the black hole, appear 25 years in the past, and undo everything that just occurred. So, imagine my surprise when the credits rolled, and I’m left thinking “Wait… Did that just really happen?”

  Again, bold move. And I like how this has revitalized interest in the series. I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more along these lines…

  Cricket Week – Pt.2

  More accurately, the last 2+ weeks of cricket, since it’s been a little while…

   

   

  (Source: DLF/IPL)

  This post has gone on long enough, so I’ll just summarize some of what’s been going on in the DLF Indian Premier League as of late… The Rajasthan Royals aren’t doing as well as they did last year, but at the very least they narrowly won a victory earlier today against the Mumbai Indians, and are now at #3 on the points table. The Delhi Daredevils, however, have been in outstanding form for this entire tournament: it appears they’ve learned to work together and put their talent to use. Unfortunately, the Kolkata Knight Riders are just like they are last year: lots of talent, but lousy at putting it all together into a workable team.

  It should go to show you: it doesn’t matter how good your players are–it matters how well they work together. You can see this with Rajasthan, how captain Shane Warne is constantly directing and encouraging the men on his team–which, I suspect, is how he manages to pull some great talent out of previously-unknown cricketers. Meanwhile, Kolkata has Ajantha Mendis, one of the greatest up-and-coming bowlers, and they’ve put him in something like 3 matches (out of 11) so far.

  Anyway, the final is on May 24th. I’ll try to make another update before the Semi-Finals, before the Finals, and after the entire tournament is over. …if I’m lucky, I’ll get 2 of those 3. ‘Til then. KF

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