Star Trek –a review from the midnight premiere

In short: Did I like it? Oh, yes. Did I love it? Doubleplus yes.
Reboot? Well... it does not ignore the events of the 700+ episodes and 10 other movies. Instead, we get a time travel story which changes the *whole* timeline. Original Series continuity? Gone. The Next Generation? Gone. Deep Space 9? Gone. Voyager… gone too. I frown at the thought that the only thing that seems unaffected is Enterprise which never lived up to its premise till season 4. As an avid fan, effectively erasing that much continuity to evade the words “reboot” is, well, a tad bit too much. As much as I hate reboots, I wish it was one.
Nero was an ok villain. I would have definitely liked to see more of him onscreen. He got a Star-Trek style explanation of his motives (which is: he is not just an evil megalomaniac genocidal creep), but we never really got to know him better, he remains too much in the back. I little more interaction with him would have served the movie better, because apart from his back story which takes up about one minute in the movie, he is never really more than your generic genocidal maniac. He doesn’t seem to have any doubts about his goals, any reflection on himself. Pity. 
The Vulcans are much, much more emotional than ever before, and this includes Spock (well, that’s one case I can understand) it just doesn’t really feel well with me, supposing we are talking about the same Vulcan from TOS.
The characters are all likeable (well, we know them already, don’t we?), the acting is generally solid, and the humor never fails short. The pacing is fast, but good, and you never start pinching in your seat. The effects are also very well done. 
I still don’t like the all-too sterile Enterprise bridge, or neither the redesigned ship itself. She just doesn’t seem to have good proportions in my eyes. The one from the TOS movies looks better any day (or for that matter, the 1960’s one too…)
Verdict:
8/10

A Question of Origin

Going back to Shakespeare, who is usually claimed as the greatest playwright ever born. But why is that? He hardly used any original plots! The plots were used and abused and in literacy terms, probably raped to death and then used a bit more. Is it the filling that made his work great? The composition? The new levels of character relationships, emotion, troubles and so on are what distinguish Shakespeare’s work? Just how important is it to be original? Is it merely enough to be able to form a pre-existent story mass into a beautiful final form? It is said that there are only seven archetypical stories that can be told. If it’s true is it pure delusion if we claim something to be original?

Pulp, Fiction?

It would be curious to see if we could go a few hundred years into the future, what would be treated as high art, a lasting value and quintessential of our era.
Superman? 12 Monkeys? Citizen Kane? 
And why is something treated as a lasting value today? Let’s see Shakespeare. Master drama writer. Comedy expert. The epitome of dramaturgical achievement.
Shakespeare, among other things, was a real crowd-pleaser. His works are filled with crude farce all the way through. The grave-diggers from Hamlet? The drunken doorkeeper fro Macbeth? You could write it off as pure pulp to keep the plebs from throwing apple cores on the stage. But what is Shakespeare only wanted to write a blockbuster without any deeper implications?

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. S.U.C.K.S.

***Warning: Ranting and Spoilers follow***




I finally managed to play Stalker to the end, and I honestly can’t recall when I last felt so disappointed in game after all the excessive waiting and all the praises I heard about it.
Bugs:
The game, even after the latest patch installed, tends to crash to the desktop-or do horrible swapping on every damned level despite the fact that the graphics were set to minimum and my machine has 1 Gb of RAM installed, in company of a GeForce Go 7400. After Googleing it up, it seems I was not alone with this problem. At the duty farmstead after the camp elimination and at Prijpaty following the squad of Stalkers the leader both got shot down- yet the game showed I should return to/follow them even after them being dead… and the problem remained after reloads, too. Ridiculous. Sometimes enemies tend to disappear after being shot down, and my favorite bug is when I save just after eliminating an enemy… it simply respawns every time after I load the savegame, to the effect of I getting shot in the back unless I manage to kill the zombie bastard turning aroud madly and shooting without aiming, only hoping to be faster in killing him than he does me. I also almost run out of ammunition after turning off the Brain Schorcher, despite the fact that I loaded up totally with ammunition at the bar… most enemies tend to drop about 8 pieces of ammunition for the “big guns”, and it forced me to clown around with my knife during the onslaught… pathetic. And I didn’t even mention how all the time my marker disappeared from the map randomly, only to come back after restarting the whole game, and how jawbroken-looking NPC’s tended to be during talking totally out of lipsync. At least it brought back nostalgic memories from Commandos 1, back from 1998. 
At entering one level, the game simply spawns you in front of 10 enemies, only to be shot down unless you are lucky to grab the right second to run after the intensive loading…way to go, dear level designers.
Many levels of the game feel rushed, and the overall feeling of the game is too linear and short–despite the side missions- the fact that the game is divided into smaller maps was pretty disappointing, I was expecting something like in Morrowind 3. More so, I felt the story to be unepic, incoherent and badly told which leads to my last and biggest problem…

The ending.

So I climbed to the Wish Granter (after running around in circles on the damned last level, and wished, only having a perfect reputation to end up being blind.

WHAT?

Oooooh yes, my friend told me what I was “supposed” to do to get a proper ending.
The game is simply being a total dickwad expecting you to pick up a totally uninteresting looking, and pretty damn hidden quest disguised as a side mission to get to the “happy ending”.
What on Earth were the developers thinking?

This game is the biggest letdown in recent years for me.



Overall score: 73%