Eruditorum Press

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Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (NES)

Faeces on Trump 3

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Or ‘These Theses on Faeces and Fasces’

 

First some very important business.  There’s a new podcast in town, Wrong With Authority, created and starring myself and my friends, familiar to you all, Daniel Harper, James Murphy, and Kit Power.  It’s yet another movie podcast… but it’s also about History.  So that’s exciting then.  Specifically, it’s about movies about historical events, and how full of shit they are.  Our first episode is just out and it covers the movies Murder by Decree and From Hell (adapted from a graphic novel some of you may have heard of) and their relationship to the historical ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders.  Download our first episode here.  And please feel free to recommend and share.  We won’t mind, I promise.

 

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As you probably noticed, the word ‘fascism’ is being thrown around a lot in response to Trump and his election.  I don’t happen to think terminological issues are unimportant.  I think this issue is worth investigating.

For instance, I agree with Phil that the term ‘alt-Right’ cannot and should not be reduced to ‘neo-Nazi’.  Just to be clear (as if I haven’t made it clear where I stand): this is not in any way to defend the alt-Right, who I think are just about the most contemptible rabblement of toxic shitbags on the planet.  But they’re their own distinct flavour of toxicity, and the emergence of this flavour helps us know where we are now, and why.  Terminology is important precisely because it enables us to get a grip on complexities like this.  The intentions of many who are saying that “alt-Right = Neo-Nazi” are, no doubt, honourable, in that they are trying to expose a dirty truth that is being concealed.  And the claimed equivalence has more than a germ of truth in it.  However, the conflation is potentially damaging.  The alt-Right do, no doubt, share much that is crucial in common with Nazis, whether we use that term specifically or colloquially.  And I’ve referred to both Milo Yiannopoulos and Davis Aurini as Nazis in the past, with justification I think.  However, the alt-Right are a distinct phenomenon. 

This terminological issue is why I took a post to (roughly) define fascism in what I think are the correct objective terms.  There is a risk when you take this approach of falling into pedantry for its own sake, which won’t help anyone.  But I hope I have more to offer than just doing the equivalent of quoting the dictionary during a debate.  I’m going to try to test Trumpism against my definition.  Not in an attempt to decide whether Trumpism ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ fascism in some simplistic way.  As I said at the head of my last post, fascism shouldn’t be reified and essentialized into an alien thing squatting outside the real world, a distinct and discrete entity that can be identified in the same way as a specific variety of phage or bacterium.  Political realities may have lineages and heredities and families but they don’t have DNA fingerprints.…

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Flight Simulator: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (NES)

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I must be some kind of glutton for punishment.

By 1989 there were a diverse selection of Star Trek games available for various consoles and home computers, including the first title based on Star Trek: The Next Generation; an MS-DOS adventure game called The Transinium Challenge where you play Commander Riker in charge of a team investigating terrorist attacks in the Aquila system. It was one of the first games to showcase the format that would go on to characterize many of the Star Trek games I remember, such as plotting a course in stellar cartography and leading an away team comprised of party members of your choosing, each of whom has their own unique skillsets. The Transinium Challenge was also interesting because of its emphasis on diplomacy and puzzle-solving instead of space tactics, and its original extraterrestrial culture, which draws heavy influence from Celtic mythology and folklore.

But no, I had to pick a game for the NES based on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

To be fair, it’s not strictly a red flag when you get a game based on a mediocre, unsuccessful movie. Sometimes passionate and tenacious video games based on licenses can rise above and beyond their source material to become well-loved and effective in their own right in spite of their roots: Gremlins 2: The New Batch for the NES and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay for the XBOX are both considered classics, while the movies they were based on…aren’t. Simply being Star Trek V: The Final Frontier does not doom this game from the outset. If anything, Star Trek V should work *better* as a video game freed from the constraints of the linear narrative structure of the Hollywood blockbuster. What is somewhat concerning, however, is the fact this game was never actually released and is only available as a reproduction cart or through particularly creative means. Also, that it was designed by Bandai Games. That name may not ring a bell for a lot of you, but it had me both completely astonished and incredibly apprehensive, because this is the exact same team responsible for that godawful Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. game for the Famicom Disk System.

And yet even so, this was *still* easier to find and get actually running than an old DOS game would have been. I’ve reached the age where actually having my video games *work* out-of-the-box is a requirement for me to invest my time, so this was kind of a deciding factor for me. So, having something of a baseline set of expectations for what I was in for, I braced myself for the worst and fired up Star Trek V: The Final Frontier to see what this crew came up when given a far less coherent film to adapt.

Well, it’s pretty. Parts of it.

Well, the good thing is that the overall production values are much higher this time. The graphics and sound, while nothing really to write home about, are actually somewhat appealing and have a measure of artistry about them that Project E.D.E.N.…

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