Go here and watch Ark. All 9 episodes. It won’t take you more than about 45 minutes.
No…really. Right now.
Go here and watch Ark. All 9 episodes. It won’t take you more than about 45 minutes.
No…really. Right now.
From an episode that wanted to be taken seriously but kinda failed to make the grade, we shift to an episode that was always intended to be silly, one of Star Trek‘s few deliberate stabs at comedy: David Gerrold’s “The Trouble with Tribbles”.
A couple of times a week, not really often enough, I walk a three-mile course on the treadmill. This is not very exciting by itself, so I generally use the time to watch or rewatch something.
Tonight, it was the last significant Klingon episode of Classic Trek, Jerome Bixby’s “Day of the Dove”.
This is a story that actually starts out somewhat promising. Indeed, for most of the first 20 minutes or so, I thought perhaps the rather low opinion my memory held for it must have been mistaken. There’s a real mystery, coupled with the longstanding distrust between humans and Klingons to build tension. Michael Ansara’s Kang shows hints of the kind of Klingon we’re more used to from TNG and after. We even get a glimpse of the Klingon’s rather tangled gender relations, with the appearance of Kang’s wife and science officer, Mara.
Unfortunately, that’s right about when someone–the director, I presume–started telling Shatner he wasn’t chewing the scenery enough. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you who have been living in a Google-proof shelter this week, Google introduced its latest toy, Buzz, this week. Superficially, Buzz operates a lot like Twitter, or like Facebook’s status page, in that you’re encouraged to share your fleeting thoughts with your crowd.
However, in my opinion, it so far has several significant advantages over either Twitter or Facebook. Enough so that it’s already looking like it might overtake both for me, personally, as my preferred source and sink of “short-form” communication. I also think that it scores big over Google’s other collaborative experiment, Wave.
Read on for my pros and cons… To be explicit, in each section, “Advantage” and “Disadvantage” below all are from Buzz’s point of view.
[This was begun before the release; hence the now slightly outdated time reference]
With the release of Star Trek Online due tomorrow, we’re currently working through the Head Start period. This is the second phase of “bonus” time for pre-order cusotmers, the first being the Open Beta period that ended on 26 January.
The good news is that I’ve found a great deal about the general user experience has improved significantly. Controls work more smoothly, and rarely fail to work when expected. The GUI has been cleaned up and streamlined a bit, to good effect. I haven’t once materialized on a planet as a starship, or in space as a person, since toward the end of the Beta. I’ve seen far less rubber-banding and other such network and server lag effects.
The bad news is that the game is still not as polished as it really should be with general release less than 24 hours away. The other bad news is that there’s still whole areas of potential Star Trek content that are either missing or just not done in a convincing way.
That said, I plan to keep on playing, as much to see how it evolves as anything else. Read on for more details after the jump.
From the day I first heard they were going to do a Star Trek-based MMO, I knew two things: firstly, that whoever dared attempt such a thing was extremely brave; and secondly, that I would almost certainly be plunking down my cash to see how it came out. Because, let’s face it: while I’ve gone through periods of denial, debunking, and disenchantment, I am, at heart, still a Trekkie1.
What I did not know was whether it would actually be good, meaning both a fun MMO to play, and decent Star Trek lore.
And now? I’m afraid I still don’t know. Not for sure. There’s a lot of potential here. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’m definitely still rooting for it. I’m subscribing when the release comes up in a couple of weeks.
But the game shows signs of not having quite enough resources spent on its development, which means that I don’t think it will truly be release-quality on release day. Of course, these days, nothing is. It doesn’t bother me, personally, but I know it will turn off a lot of people, which could affect the long-term viability of the game.
I would love to be able to tell you that “The End of Time, Part 2″ redeemed the flaws of Part 1, not only pulling all the right rabbits out of the right hats but giving us a perfect send-off for an extremely popular and successful Doctor. Sadly, I can’t. On the other hand, I don’t have to say it was a steaming pile, either, because it wasn’t.
It was, in the end, the same sort of mixed bag Part 1 was. It was a little more solid, which continues RTD’s pattern of having shaky setups followed by better (but not always spectacular) pay-offs. But really, it was more of the same, for good and for ill, and overall, I think I’m disappointed.
RTD did succeed in handling two key parts in ways that completely surprised me. I’m still trying to decide if I like the surprises, but I like the fact that I was surprised.
The good news is that “The End of Time, Part 1″ is noticeably better than the first half of the Series 4 finale, “The Stolen Earth”. Of course, the problem is that “The Stolen Earth” was a steaming pile of cat feces, so improving on that standard is simply not very difficult.
The bad news is that, as fun as “The End of Time, Part 1″, it isn’t as good as it ought to be. Russel T. Davies has proven time and again (most recently, I’m told, with Torchwood: “Children of Earth”, which everybody seems to rave about), that he actually knows how to write in a non-clunky, non-fanwanky way. And yet, when it comes to Doctor Who finales, he continues to fall back on clunky, contrived, fanwanky writing.
That said, RTD does make good on something he was quoted as saying about this story. In an interview, RTD had said that this story was going to be “huge and epic, but also intimate.” When I first read that, I twitched, because it sounded like a salesman trying to convince us that his product is all things to all people, which never works out.
So I was pleased to discover that he actually succeeded at crafting a story that manages to be both things at the same time.