We can only hope the Wookies don't burst into song.
Star Trek is a franchise that has leagues of adoring fans who know exactly what the trouble is with Tribbles, and why this heading is funny.
You'd think a series dedicated to cool future technology would be awesome translated into video games. Unfortunately, most of the tie-ins have been abysmal and dismal and other sad words ending in 'al'. The first few that came out in the 1970s were actually rather good with their wonderfully simplistic pixels or text-only-driven storylines. Then there was a litany of failures that appeared within an astonishing list of around 10 titles and one MMO - Star Trek Online. Not all of these were total duds, but most of them were met with a limp wave of a Trekkie hand. And the more recent release that ties into the JJ Abrams' revisit of the Star Trek movie franchise - Star Trek -boasts the movie's actors and a script with the same levels of fluffy action porn. What looked like a fantastic foray into first-person shooting fun within the rich Star Trek universe was, instead, poorly coded and depressing. The acting and cut scenes were superb; the shooting and gameplay were not.
Now EA has ambled off with the deal to create the next Star Wars game, allocated to it by Disney, which just bought the Star Wars franchise, and geeks of the lightsaber variety are faintly worried. Will the video game involve football somehow? A lightsaber variant of the tedious and boring EA Football Manager Series, or will we have little Jedi Sims building their ships and needing to pee? This is as worrying as a Disney version of the Star Wars movies where we can only hope the Wookies don't burst into song and dance in the trees with their little Ewok cousins.
Sure, there are video games that capture the essence of a book or a movie and give fans that extra time with loved characters, but usually it's a drunken fiesta of missed opportunities and inappropriate fumbling in dark corners. Now, as Ender's Game is made into a movie, there's speculation as to whether a story about mastery in video games is going to be made into one. Looking back at the depressing list of the games that didn't, perhaps it isn't a good idea, and video games should find their stories from among their own kind.
First published in the July 2013 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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