Just finished playing Star Trek: Resurgence: a game you can't buy anymore. It only came out a few years ago. But you know... licensing.
I actually bought it pretty much as soon as it came out on Steam. But it's been sitting in the to-be-played pile. I started it, but it's a Telltale-style adventure game, and I find those kind of stressful. I haven't really had the bandwidth for stressful.
I still don't but I decided to pick it up again and decided I'd actually roleplay it out without worrying about the outcomes. This is the correct approach. Spoilers after the cut, but yeah, while there are different outcomes, there isn't a huge variance and if you stay true to the Star Trekness, you'll be fine.
Before the cut, tho, I just want to point out the biggest thing that drew me to this game: the hero ship, the USS Resolute NCC-92317, a refit Centaur class ship.
The Centaur class was a kitbash filling out the background of some shots in DS9, with an Excelsior saucer and an oversized USS Reliant roll-bar and weapon pod making up the nacelle pylons and secondary hull. For the game (after a "refit"), the gave it a proper secondary hull with a deflector, although keeping a bit of the look of the weapons pod for rear torpedo launchers. It's great.
They don't use that word. It's "out for tender." But nothing's in production and it's looking like we'll see a pretty clean break from the show as it has been the last 20ish years. And it's unlikely we'll see new Doctor Who before 2028.
I expressed my disappointment with the last couple seasons of the show when it ended a year ago. In the meantime, my disappointment mellowed into resignation, with a bit of trepidation about the upcoming Christmas special. Now that the Christmas special is no longer upcoming, I'm feeling a bit more sanguine.
When Doctor Who went "on hiatus" the first time, I was just getting into the show in a big way. I'd started collecting Doctor Who Magazine regularly. WXXI in Rochester was just starting to get new episodes in a reasonable timeframe. And then it was over. No-one was really saying anything. I remember DWM speculating about the possibility of another series, but nothing ever came.
Then we started getting the New Adventure novels, which I bought religiously. I clung to rumours of an American TV series. I started collecting the VHS tape releases. I read the comics. I became a more enthusiastic Doctor Who fan than when there was new Doctor Who to watch. Probably because there was no new Doctor Who to watch.
I would have loved a season 27, since it seemed like seasons 25 and 26 were really onto something cool, but what we got instead in the Wilderness Years ended up being probably way more inventive, and it was pretty instrumental to making the show that came back in 2005 as good as it was.
So it's sad news, but I can't help but hope that it paves the way for something better to come later. New people bringing fresh ideas to a show that's raised an entire new generation of fans over the last twenty years. I'm confident it'll be back and I'm hoping whoever ends up taking it on takes the time they need to make it as good a show as I know it can be.
I guess I'm just gonna do little reviews of all the videogames I play. At least if I have more than a thought or two.
Miles Morales is basically stand-alone DLC for the 2018 Sony Spider-Man game. And that game's great, so I'm not complaining.
I'm not really a reader of superhero comics, but I have always liked Miles, the Ultimate Spider-Man, as a character. After Peter Parker gets super-old and married and angsty, Miles shows up as an actual teenager and does teenager things. Spider-Man is meant to be a teenager, really.
I feel like the Spiderverse movie (I haven't seen the second one, so I can't generalize) does a decent job of introducing Miles to the masses. (I also love Spider-Gwen, and that movie is beautiful. I should probably watch the sequel). This game, tho, does a better job of making Miles the focus. Spiderverse just has too much going on.
I've got some quibbles about the game. It really hurries you along the story missions, expecting you to ignore the constant monologuing or phonecalls about how you really ought to be going on to the next urgent thing and go around doing the side missions to level up and get power ups. It doesn't hurt you to not have those to finish the story, but I feel it would've been more fun to have the power-ups in the actual story missions rather than in the post-game.
It's also kind of short. Basically DLC. But you don't have to buy the original Spider-Man, which I suppose is a plus.
Spider-Man 2 is reportedly kind of meh. Not bad, just not as good. I'll probably pick it up in a Steam sale.
What's particularly disappointing is Sony's decision to stop bringing their single-player games to PC. Mind you, they've been pretty spotty on supporting Steamdeck (Horizon Forbidden West, for example, is unsupported). But I do enjoy their stuff. And I'm not about to buy a PS5.
