Lots of Monkeys

The earliest memories I have of Star Trek, are of me watching The Original Series.

I remember the lazy Sunday afternoons where the Channel 6 would air Star Trek.  They were reruns, but I watched it every Sunday.  Occasionally, it would be back to back episodes of Star Trek followed by a Godzilla movie.  Those were really good days.

I remember Spock’s Brain, and the creature made out of silicon.  Mudd’s women and Charlie and his crazy powers.  I remember the Pon Farr and crazy goateed versions of the crew.  And then there was the Nazi Germany episode.

Yeah.

Most prevalent in my recollections is the fight music.  I recall hearing that quite a bit in Trek “Classic.”  Bum bum BUM BUM BUM BUM BUMBUM bum bum.

Star Trek was my first real introduction to the deeper themes that could be explored in science fiction.  The people who were white on one side and black on the other hating the other “race” of people that were white and black on the opposite sides.  Not too subtle, but probably fairly controversial in the late 1960s.

Kind of similar to how BattleStar Galactica managed to have an entire season based in Palestine New Caprica.

Ahem.

But Star Trek, the new movie has none of that.  That’s not a strike against it by any means.  What it does have is a solid plot, characters that manage to be both faithful and new at the same time, and they manage to do a little trick which works it into the canon while managing to act as a reboot.

And I bought that bit, which was astonishing to me.  I mean, they presented it in such a way that I couldn’t stop from chuckling in the theater, but I still gladly suspended my disbelief and had a great time with the movie.

This is a day one purchase for me, with a showing at movie night that week.  It’s that good.

I’ve been playing City of Heroes, fairly regularly for five years now.

What keeps me coming back?

I think part of it has to do with the setting.  Superpowers in a modern day city.  Hero or Villain, you can choose either side.  Its comic book sensibilities appeal to me in many ways.  There is an insane amount of customization, so I can get characters to look the way I want.  A space for you to write the character’s biography in game that other people can read.

Then there’s the fact that I can play the game and not be bored.  The combat, while simple, is just fun to play.

I guess another aspect that keeps me coming back is that I’m often entertained by the other players, as opposed to fed up with them.  Every now and again, I’ll meet another Hero or Villain with a real background to them.  I’ll look at their carefully constructed character bio and they act in game accordingly.

And now they’ve announced the second full expansion to the game, Going Rogue.  Now characters have an alignment system and can fall somewhere between Hero and Villain.  Additionally, in true comic book style, they reveal a mirror universe as an entirely different game world.

Looks like there are a few more years in the City of Heroes for me.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Really there’s not much to say to all of the mothers, expectant mothers, mothers of mothers and everyone else that falls into this category other than people really should be treating them better every day.

I know that we all grow up and leave the nest, but we don’t need to regress into our former roles as child and parent.  Maybe we can, through dialogue and our actions show that we are coming int0 our own.  We are, in fact becoming equals in our society and should be treated accordingly.

That is, if our mothers let us.

This is an announcement that will probably surprise no one following the twelve (12, that’s a dozen, over a decade) year development saga of Duke Nukem Forever.

Executive summary:  3DRealms is shut down, finally killing the project, although Take-Two holds the publishing rights to the “title.”

Analysis:  One would think after ten years in development, this project would be scrapped.