Video Game Review: "Star Trek"

You know, I wasn't even going to finish this shit. I was fully intent on never thinking about this piece of electronic sod again. It was a transient horror, and I could take solace in the fact that I only rented it, and returned it with weapons-grade satisfaction. But I can't avoid it, because an innocent girl handed me a poster advertising it today at Free Comic Book Day. And that girl told me, not knowing my horribly unsatisfactory experience in renting it, that I could try out the game in the trailer parked outside the comic book shop. I cannot possibly replicate the noise I made in print.

The problem is that bad video games aren't nearly as enjoyable as bad movies. Bad movies, even the worst of them, you can laugh at them because you are detached. You are not required to participate, only to observe. At the end, you can still laugh at their poor lighting, or writing, or acting; it takes Godzilla-sized offenses in film-making to push your hatred over the threshold whereafter you cannot possibly enjoy the experience.

But video games, by their very nature, require you to play an integral part in every proceeding of the story. Not only that, they require you to act out every mundane circumstance in between. Therein lies the first failing of Star Trek, which is catastrophically overpriced at $59.99.

As per the U.S. Constitution, I am now obligated to explain the plot of this game. Except...no. The plot is "Aliens called The Gorn who are big scary lizard things steal a powerful thing that was ours/we have to kill them until we get powerful thing back".

It's not so bad it's good...it's not even so bad it's terrible. It is so bad that it is frustrating like you wouldn't believe. It just doesn't care.

The first clue that it doesn't care is that the gameplay consists of perfectly generic third-person cover-based shooting, perhaps the most-imitated form of gameplay these days. And it doesn't even do it right. It does it clumsily. Actually, if one word could sum up the game, it would be “clumsy”. It's annoyingly unpolished, from the gameplay mechanics to the graphics to the basic menus. My roomate and I spent minutes trying to figure out how to continue our co-op game before settling on a solution that one could only describe as “jury-rigged”. I didn't experience too many honest-to-god glitches (which I define as places where the game's code actually broke down) but the one thing that absolutely infuriated me was that the game doesn't tell you a GOD DAMN THING.

In every situation where a normal video game would say, “Hey, you should do this!” or “Ay, I know we never told you that it was possible for you to jump this far, but you should totally jump across that gap” or “Hey...so...every time you'll hack something you'll have to do this minigame. So here's how you do it,” this game says FFFPTHBBBBBBBBBBBBBBFEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

The game is so frustrating BECAUSE it has the potential to not suck completely. Here's the thing: I actually like parts of this game. The animations can be wonky, but sometimes they're quite good and god bless Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine for actually putting effort into their voiceovers. Hell, the cover-based shooting wasn't terrible...it was serviceable. But good lord...the “space battle” mission...I'm sure the developers intended it to be fast-paced and exciting...but it ended up being HURR fuck WHAT DO I DObwaaaaaaaaah. Because not a single goddamn thing was explained and the game didn't even tell you what kind of button to press and when.

But honestly, all of that shit would have made for a merely BAD game. This game was offensive.

I'm not the biggest fan of Gene Roddenberry's (the creator of Star Trek) utopian future. Don't get me wrong, the amount of ground he broke in the 60's for minorities and for the science-fiction genre in television was staggering and inspiring. His vision of a future humanity collaborating is inspiring and transcendent. But as he got older, and as he still had influence on Star Trek: The Next Generation, he continued to paint a picture of Happy Future People Holding Hands, whose conflicts were only over big swirly anomaly things. And to me, if the principles and ideas behind The Federation, the perfect future society, can't stand up to scrutiny, then maybe they aren't so perfect after all. One of the things I love about Deep Space Nine (you best BELIEVE that review is coming) is that it questions just how much of a paradise the Federation is, and prods the audience into thinking how Federation principles might break down in the darkest, poorest sectors of the galaxy.

Like Detroit!

THAT being said, an established Federation principle (and the most endearing to me) has been the fact that the Federation will never resort to violence unless absolutely forced. Jean-Luc Picard, played by Professor Xavier, was the patron saint of this. Example: the Crystalline Entity. An alien the size of a fleet that ate life by the planet-load. Even after witnessing this, Picard, while he hated seeing people killed, acknowledged that, hey, this thing, even if its attacking us, still has a right to exist. More damning example: even after he got assimilated by the Borg (read: abducted and forcibly mutated into an abominable cyborg and arguably mind-raped), when he was given the opportunity to infect the Borg with a catastrophic virus, he decided not to. Whether it's because he realized that the Borg were not the monsters he wanted them to be or whether it's because he realized that the virus would never do as much damage as the individuality the Enterprise crew taught their captured Borg is open to debate.

In contrast, the Picard in Star Trek: First Contact (we'll call him Conan the Barbarian) decided the Borg deserved to be CRUSHED. HE WAHNTED TO HEEAH DEH LAMENTATIONS OF DAYAH QUEEN.

But hell, even James T. Kirk, the hard-punching, full-phasering, dick-womanizing Man's Captain of the Alpha Quadrant would extend a helping hand to the greatest of enemies in the name of understanding. Even in the ORIGINAL SERIES there is an episode where he refuses to kill a Gorn (yerp, THE ONLY BAD GUY IN THIS GAME) even though it's done nothing but go for his sweet, tasty innards all episode. Even after Doc Brown killed his son, and the time-traveling Klingon bastard was about to fall into the molten mantle of a planet, Kirk reached out to him, and offered to save him.

"When this Bird of Prey hits 88 miles an hour...you're going to travel back in time to pick up humpback whales. What?"

Which is why this game seems so disgusting. I don't want to say “xenophobic”, because all the xenos in this are purely fictional. But it's very disturbing for a game that purportedly takes place in the Star Trek universe to have a Starfleet where they just decide to fucking murder an entire alien species because “DEY SHOT FURST”.

It's even more disturbing because the aliens “infect” humans and Vulcans with a virus that makes the Vulcans and humans just as bloodthirsty and violent as the Gorn. And yet, every time the player attempts to shoot the infected humans or Vulcans with their phasers set on “kill”, Kirk or Spock angrily admonish the player and tell them to use only the stun setting on the characters that look like white people.

I--I MEAN FEDERATION CITIZENS! I MEAN...SENTIENT...OH GOD HOW DO I DELETE THIS--

You can say that they're humanoids, not all white people, but it's still kind of space racist. It's really disheartening in a franchise where the norm is that despite the crazy, horrifying shit its crews have to deal with daily, they still advocate peace and understanding. And it only adds fuel to the fire that this new Star Trek continuity is nothing but action schlock. I don't believe it is! I genuinely loved the most recent movie (not counting Into Darkness, which I haven't seen). 

It's just particularly disturbing when killing the mean-looking aliens by the god-damned truckload elicits not a peep from the supposedly enlightened and compassionate Kirk and Spock. Mainly because dey don't look lahk us. It just gives you this really unsettling feeling, like when your good friend is throwing a party, and one of their friends says something catastrophically racist, but you don't want to LEAVE because you really like the friend throwing the party, only THEIR friend keeps saying really offensive stuff. Well, I did leave Star Trek. I returned it after one day. And even though it was a rental, I regretted it. It ascends alongside X-Men Origins: Wolverine to the halls of “Things I Experienced for Free/Cheap That Still Weren't Worth My Time”.