Author: mdhughes

Nintendo Direct Switch

Presented by Yoshiaki Koizumi, not Yoshi.

Yesterday, Mr Mori the Animal Crossing youstuber predicted there'd be some AC news.

As usual, I bold anything interesting.

  • Fire Emblem N-Gage: Bringing back mobile gameplay from a long-obsolete phone/console. Seriously, 100% gachapon nonsense instead of a tac RPG, everyone involved in this should curl up and die of shame.
  • It Takes Two: Do you like jumpy puzzles and waiting on a switch for someone else to complete their jumpy puzzle? This is a game designed to cause two people to murder each other.
  • Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse: "The Forbidden Story Begins" NO! It is forbidden! Taking selfies to capture ghosts, remake of a 2001 game. This would be interesting if it was remade as an AR game set in YOUR HOUSE, but instead it's the most toothless Resident Evil-without-guns possible.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles DLC again: Pay even more up front, to get the chance to pay more every 3 months, for the game that should've shipped at half the price. Very much built on the mobile MMO model, not quite gachapon but there's no sense of a story or world, just battle to grind up numbers, pay more to grind bigger numbers. Shambling corpse of remake/sequels after remake/sequels from the original Xenosaga games which had art and philosophy.
  • Spoogeboob Squizzpants: I'm sure it's fine for 6-year-olds.
  • Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star: This is the opposite problem. FotNS ran in manga until '88, in English until '95, the appallingly ugly anime until '88 and almost immediately fansubbed & brought over. So the audience is basically, what, pudgy 40-60-year-old men with a (non-Lite) Switch? I mean, maybe.
  • Oddballers: Dodgeball was a horrible, traumatic experience for almost everyone except gangs of hooligans held back 2-3 years and ready to take out some violence on younger kids. Let's turn that into a super fun little game, says Ubisoft! Yeah, no.
  • Tunic: Small fox, isometric action adventure game. Hey, you made a game for me!
  • Front Mission: BattleTech ripoff.
  • Story of Seasons: Harvest Moon devs were fucked out of their title by American studio fuckwits, so renamed it. I love the idea of HM/SoS, but in practice the time-driven rush thru the day, and then thru the seasons, drives me insane with time pressure and I just quit the second I fall behind. I can barely handle Animal Crossing's 1 day per day, and have to time travel if I mess that up. If you're not neurotic it may work for you.
  • "Splatfest": Not actually a porn convention, but Splatoon event. Do not care.
  • Octopath Traveller II: Sequels. Why does it always have to be sequels? Same weird mechanic as the first. I might like these if they were organized traditionally, but I get annoyed at "optimal path" games.
  • Fae Farm: Animal Crossing but faeries.
  • Theatrerhythm: Beat match game with new soundtracks, mostly locked behind overpriced DLC. Did you know you can listen to music and play drums or air guitar to it yourself for free! Nobody can stop you! YET. Coming soon: Air Guitar DRM.
  • Mario+Rabbids Sparks of Hope: Mario in open world: YAY! Fucking rabbids: OH NO NOT AGAIN. Also has DLC/season pass nonsense. Can you just make a game?
  • Rune Factory 3 Special: Farming, fishing, fu… marriage in Rune Factory world. Obviously, Animal Crossing needs in-character marriage with small furry animals to keep up with this kind of amazing innovation.
  • More NES, SNES, N64, Genesis games, latter two only if you pay the super online fee. Goldeneye is fun, right?
  • Various Daylife: Previously reviewed on iOS. Not great, but less gachapon than most daily grinder games. Available now for $28.99! Wait for it to be marked down 90%.
  • Factorio: Grindy factory building/tower defense. Long available on other platforms.
  • Ib: RPG Maker CYOA with artpunk/just plain incompetent graphics for everything not from the RPG Maker tile set.
  • Mario Strikers Battle League
  • Atelier Ryza 3: "The Final Summer Begins": Well, yes, global warming means the world will at some point quit having other seasons, just endless dying in heat. BUT ANYWAY, the game looks really nice, running around a pre-apocalyptic island collecting magicky bits? No mention of DLC, might actually be a real game.
  • Sports.
  • Shigeru Miyamoto-San!!! Theme parks, eh. Pikmin Bloom is a smartphone Pokemon Go ripoff, great. I live in the middle of nowhere and don't go out, doesn't help much. Pikmin 4 on Switch in 2023, no gameplay video. Can't say if it's any good until we do see some video.
  • Just Dance: Just sit on my ass on couch.
  • Harvestella: JESUS GREEN THUMB FUCKING CHRIST why is every damned game a life simulation/farming/Animal Crossing ripoff? FATE OF THE WORLD FIGHTING DOOM / gotta get my carrots planted you know.
  • Bayonetta 3: Bay is wearing clothes. Has now done a complete heel/face turn, is a heroine and not a creepy assassin boob witch. Zero out of 5, do not want.
  • Raincode: Gloomy corporate dystopia. Adorable chibi child detective with sexy gothic lolita ghost sidekick. "Master detective", and even more goofy carnival-ride "solve the case" realm. WHAT. It's like they saw Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and thought "how can we make this even less plausible"?
  • Resident Evil Village Cloud: RE7 DLC but streamed from Stadia because the Switch can't run a high-res game, even if it's a really shitty, undeveloped game.
  • Sifu: Kung fu fighting game? Oh, this is the one where every time you lose, you get older and a compensation skill. Lose a few times because you practice that way, and game over of old age.
  • Crisis Core FF7 Reunion: Remake of a FF7 side story game on the PSP in 2007. Pretty lame, you basically got missions and ran down corridors, did a top view shoot-em-up, got a few bits of dialogue as Zack (remember Tifa's real boyfriend?) Not a bad little game, but it's been a long time.
  • Radiant Silvergun: Galaxian ripoff yet again.
  • Endless Dungeon: SF roguelike shmup ripoff of Diablo.
  • Tales of Symphonia Remaster: Absolutely unnecessary, and minimal effort, remake of a good PS1 RPG but cliché quest. Characters still look like LEGO minifigs with slightly better hair. Sets are not even that good, maybe Playmobil quality with badly-placed decals.
  • buncha remakes. Don't touch.
  • Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe: Orko arrives on a spaceship and follows a local cute flesh-eating blob. "Everyone can play as Kirby!" I mean, it's a Kirby game. So fun but silly.
  • Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom: Sure, probably. Maybe you'll go kill the evil Queen and her whole country will shut down in mourning so you can break all their pots and steal their "rupees" (taken from the kingdom they conquered & robbed). All we see in this video is some hang-gliding and such, could just be an extra map for Breath of the Wild.

What I'm Watching: Free Guy

Deadpool is a nebbish bank teller NPC "Guy" in Knock-off Grand Theft Auto Online, who becomes self-aware. Knock-off WildStyle (Jodie Comer, the knock-off of Liz Banks) is looking for the SECRET DATA that will FREE THE SYSTEM. There's a lot of idiot players running around shooting things, which is OK, but there are very few good action pieces for the protagonists. There is a meh kiss, otherwise entirely rated T for Teens, simulated violence and limited profanity, but no nudity. Almost everything this film needs to be interesting, is what it doesn't do.

There's a few unrealistic/terrible for plot things, to say the least.

  1. In MMOs, levelling fast by ignoring quests is not plausible. If there were high rewards for being "good guys", other power-gamers would do it to cheat up to max level, then go bad again.
  2. You can generally nuke or spawn any NPC or knock specific players offline from an MMO's management console. This "ghosting" accounts thing makes no sense.
  3. You don't keep servers physically in your corporate/dev headquarters, they're at some ISP on a main Internet trunk, spread around the world, managed by professional sysadmins and not a petulant man-baby with an axe.
  4. Even if you stole the code of some indie game, you wouldn't keep the original terrain running, wasting CPU/RAM.
  5. We've had "life simulators" where you just watch characters, all the way back to Little Computer People; they don't sell well, they're ignored after a few hours. Games need either a task, or sandbox you can screw around in.
  6. Hot girl realizes that she loves the personality of the ugly bobble-head-lookin' dude (Creepy Steve from Stranger Things) she worked with, even without Deadpool's face & body. Realistically, she'd obsess over her hot CGI guy and congeal into her chair over the next few years.

Everything in this has been done better in TRON (literally the core plot), Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor (especially the hot girl & simulated guy), The Matrix 1-4, and The LEGO Movie (literally the Special and WildStyle). It is better than the abomination of Spielberg's Ready Player One movie, but the book was of course far better.

★★★☆☆ generic movie fails to execute a much better idea.

What I'm Watching: Nope, Everything Everywhere All At Once, The One

Nope (2022): Jordan Peele's latest is fine. It's a better Twilight Zone ep than his Twilight Zone eps, but never gets as "Nope" as Get Out or Us. The "alien abduction is something else" story is adequate, OJ's (Daniel Kaluuya) borderline-ASD behavior and animal training focus are useful protagonist skills, as is Emerald's (Keke Palmer) perky extrovert energy, the actual thing revealed has a great design. Angel's (Brandon Perea) backstory is zero, he's there to be slightly useful and trail behind Keke (who wouldn't?), and make us nostalgic for Fry's Electronics RIP. "Antlers" Holst (Michael Wincott) is Werner Herzog but even more reckless. Sadly, the entire Jupe/Gordy plot is repetitive, slow, copied from Bojack Horseman (not really, but kinda?) and doesn't illuminate anything you can't learn from OJ. This could be a nice breezy 90-minute movie with flabby B-plot cut out, but instead it drags on over 2 hours. ★★★½☆ You know what would've improved this? Sightings/abductions start all around the world in the credits. This shouldn't be a one-off, but the beginning.

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): Almost precisely a remake/ripoff of Jet Li's The One but with Michelle Yeoh, a laundromat, a kinder ending. Michelle doesn't do much/any of her own fighting or stunts, which is much of the pleasure of a kung fu flick. There's some really good special effects, a lot of fun jokes. I like it for what it is, but I don't love or need it. Michelle used to be one of the best kung fu fighters/actresses ever, go watch Police Story 3: Super Cop, Supercop 2, Wing Chun, or Holy Weapon to see her at her peak (CTHD was a little past that). Ke Huy Quan (Short Round, Data from the Goonies!) is great to have back, he should've been the New Indiana Jones in Crystal Skull. ★★★½☆ but the ½ is only out of nostalgia.

The One (2001): Jet Li has to play himself and a super-villain version of himself, with different martial arts styles, generally done by him and his stunt double switching places mid-fight! Romantic plot with Carla Gugino is OK. It was savaged by dumb-ass American reviewers who'd never seen a high-speed wire kung fu movie, they shat themselves because actual skilled fighting is scary, racists didn't like Jet Li as the lead, and uneducated mooks didn't understand "multiverses", but 20 years later everyone loves excruciatingly slow tai chi with multiverses and CGI cartoons drawn on top. Fucking amazing film, reject conformity, watch good kung fu. ★★★★½

Unearthed Like a Graverobber

A few more thoughts on Unearthed Arcana

WotC is doing "physical/digital bundles" for the Dragonlance stuff. Are they finally doing PDFs like every other game company?! Fuck no, it's a "D&D Beyond" gulag access code. Can't use your ebook without gigabit Internet access. That's how they get you. "One D&D" will just update your ebooks to the official standard forever. Print and ownership are dead.

Excuse me while I go hug this little GOZR book and PDF instead. I'll review GOZR soon, it's cool.

Humans:
Size: Medium (about 4–7 feet tall) or Small
(about 2–4 feet tall), chosen when you select
this Race

Dwarfs with Dwarfism? NO. Big Halflings or Gnomes? NO. Humans range from 2-7' tall, no change in stats (but then, Gnomes are as strong as Humans now). Warwick Davis approves, I'm sure.

Also, Orcs are now 6-7' tall. Back in the day, they were smaller than Humans, just heavier. Steroid abuse.

ROLLING A 20
A player character also gains Inspiration when rolling the 20, thanks to the remarkable success.
CRITICAL HITS
Weapons and Unarmed Strikes* have a special feature for player characters: Critical Hits.

Reddit's going crazy over this, but it doesn't say other attacks don't get crits, just these do. And every NPC is a player character to the DM. Ain't no problem if my favorite Goblin Chuck gets a crit and guts your Ardling Paladin open, screaming for his momma on the dungeon floor. Gotta teach the punks respect.

The DM determines whether a d20 Test is warranted in any given circumstance. To be warranted, a d20 Test must have a target number no less than 5 and no greater than 30.

Yes, this avoids the "5% chance to jump over the Moon" problem, but a hard rule prevents awesome bonus characters from doing great things, too. Very badly written/thought out rule.

UNARMED STRIKE
… On a hit, your Unarmed Strike causes one of the following effects of your choice:
Shove. You either push the target 5 feet away or knock the target Prone. This shove is possible only if the target is no more than one Size larger than you.

Great! You can just push an Ogre down, it has no resistance, it loses its action, buddies curb-stomp it while it gets up. Grapple is nearly as good, you can just move the target around anywhere. Every edition's unarmed rules are dumber than the last.

Nth Edition D&D

Was Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast bought by Microsoft? They're calling the next edition of D&D, 5.5 in any reasonable terms, "One D&D", just like Xbox One (third of that line).

To some extent I don't care, I don't do 5E, it's 1000 pages of rules to do what retro games do in 64 or less. But I keep up with the news!

I will note, I tried to sign in with Apple, and it failed on their end, untested crap code. So I signed in with Twitch, which makes no sense at all. That they can't manage their own sign-in and need oauth, eh, fine, but at least test every one!

"Unearthed Arcana" (the shittiest AD&D book, revived for 5E!), "by Jeremy Crawford, with Christopher Perkins and Ray Winninger". Well, Ray's a bright point, at least. But I'm guessing there won't be anything like Underground in this pablum.

Right now there's Character Origins up.

Superhero monster races, but now nothing mentions that your culture is mostly chaotic or evil. Human, Dwarf, Elf, Gnomes, Hobbits alflings, as usual. Dark Elves are only called Drow, and nothing mentioned of the ALL ARE EVIL except for unspoken reasons these jerks "shun":

Drow. Known for their white hair and dusky- gray skin tones, drow typically dwell in the Underdark. Noteworthy exceptions include DRIZZLE DOO-WAH-DIDDY and JAR-JAR BINKS [ed.], two drow adventurers of the Forgettable[ed.] Realms who shun their subterranean homeland.

I often forget just how Disney-level singing-and-dancing treacly sweet official TSR/WotC/FR stuff is, the "Halflings" are all happy farm workers, not the grubby, thieving, murderous, sawed-off, shoeless scum of Mary Gentle's Grunts or JD's Finieous Fingers. Oh, under "many worlds":

For every sequestered halfling shire tucked away in some unspoiled corner of the world, there’s a halfling crime syndicate like the Boromar Clan on the world of Eberron or a territorial [ed: cannibalistic] mob of halflings like those found on the world of Athas.

Ardling (animal-headed god-spawn):

An ardling gains a measure of magical power from their celestial legacy, as well as the ability to manifest spectral wings. An ardling’s moral and ethical outlook is self-determined, however, not fixed by ancestry.

Fucking Dragonborn. I hated DragonNewts in RuneQuest, clearly Stafford just powergaming and almost jerking off into the page over his immortal lizard-babies, and they're just the worst PCs or NPCs in any game that's picked them up since. Why don't people steal Ducks from RuneQuest?! Ducks are awesome, hilarious and petty and venal little shits, and not OP fan-wank. Anyway, I get distracted. Fuck Dragonborn (except scalies, quit fucking Dragonborn).

Orcs. As previously mentioned. Heroical but not nice background somewhat implied, which is about as strong as WotC can be anymore:

Young orcs are often told about their ancestors’ ancient conflicts with elves in forests, dwarves under mountains, and invaders from evil planes of existence. Inspired by those tales, young orcs often wonder when Gruumsh will call on them to match the heroic deeds of their ancestors, and if they will prove worthy of the One-Eyed God’s grace.

Tieflings. Like the Ardlings:

This connection to the Lower Planes is, for better or worse, the tiefling’s fiendish legacy, which comes with the promise of power yet has no effect on the tiefling’s moral outlook.

While I don't like the monsters-only-party tone of this stuff, I have nothing against Ardling & Tiefling characters for high/stoner fantasy games, they're OP but they fit. We all liked Thundercats. The wussing out of Orcs & Drow is, sigh, sadly necessary, to quit giving shelter to actual fucking racists.

I just adamantly oppose making a monster race like Dragon-spawn into PCs. That's a KOS (Kill On Sight) monster, as in Dragonlance. OH! They're doing Dragonlance (Railroad Choo-Choo!) as next year's campaign setting. Awk…ward. Run a few Draconians ("DRAGONMEN" as DL1-Dragons of Despair called them) up against the party, see how they feel about hanging out with a scaly traitor. And KENDER! Oh, here's a nuclear hand grenade character to throw into parties of unsuspecting 5E noobs. Suddenly the railroad becomes more of a trainwreck, and I'm keen to watch it explode.

None of the "races" (which term they should abandon for "Species" as I do, or "Kindred" as Ken St. Andre does) have any stat mods, but most do give advantage on saves for 1-3 stats, which is like a +8 stat mod (giving a +4 bonus, equal to advantage) mechanically, so it's far far worse. Total fail on toning down the species superiority complex.

Backgrounds are careers, and give ability score bonuses, proficiency bonus to some skills & tools, feats, and equipment. They're like a whole second class. There's a weak version of these in the 5E rules, but much more powerful here. Who cares if you're a Human or an Orc, when Gladiator or Laborer makes you a tank; I will say at least they mostly paired one useful stat with a dump stat (WIS or CHA), but several add to two primary stats, and have a synergistic feat. Laborer's trivial, right? No, it gives +2 CON, +1 STR, Feat Tough (+2 HP per Level), for a total of at least +3 HP per Level. Cultist gives +2 INT, +1 CHA, Magical Initiate (+1 Arcane 1st level spell/day). Backgrounds just went from optional cute story thing, to more meta than race.

Feats are pretty standard, but several are extremely easy to abuse and get too much power from, at least on an OSR-scale. Against other 5E stuff, it's probably nerfed a bit, but getting a free Feat from background is the problem.

Spells are now merged into just 3 lists, Arcane (magic-users, spoony bards, etc), Divine (useless clerics & racist paladins), and Primal (hey nonny nonny dancin' skyclad in the woods rangers & druids). That's actually a good change, back to the simplicity of OSR. Of course, what's even simpler is deleting Clerics and having one spell list, but WotC's not ready for that yet. "Two D&D" in 2030, perhaps.

MineTest skins

So I hate the default adventurer skins, even if it's usually covered by armor and I use first-person camera. I have my own skin. But MineTest has no built-in config for skins! Mods to the rescue.

On your world select, hit Select Mods, Find More Mods, and search for skinsdb, and smart inventory, install both.

Back to menu, select each of those and Enable. Save.

Now in terminal:

cd ~/Library/Application Support/minetest/mods/skinsdb/textures
cp ~/Pictures/My-Minecraft-Avatar.png character_whatever.png

This only seems to work with MC 1.0 avatars, even tho skinsdb says it works with MC 1.8; if you have multiple layers, remove those and resave without them. I tried installing the 3d_armor mod, which might enable that, and it has broken dependencies. 🙁

Play Game, and in game, open inventory, click the skin icon, and at the bottom of the big new Smart Inventory screen, skin icon. Select, done.

(The skin was originally a Spider Jerusalem skin, which I wanted a Nine Inch Nails shirt on, but there's only room for NI, which makes it even better.)

What I'm Playing: MineTest, MineClone2

So, ever since Microsoft bought Mojang, they've been boiling the frog, and finally with the "Xbox accounts" and 1.19.2 the Java edition has reached surveillance state nightmare (however ludicrous that sounds for a game… it's still a game we play) parity with Xbox Live Arcade (aka "NAMBLA") and the inferior mobile/"Bedrock" edition, and it's really time to look for alternatives.

One such is MineTest, which is an open source blocky game engine, with easy modding in Lua. The base MineTestGame is a very simple peaceful/creative mode, which isn't that interesting, but mods change everything. One of the mod packs ("games") is MineClone2; it aims to recreate MC 1.12.2 with some improvements, while MineClone5 (I guess 3 & 4 fell into a swamp) is a much less stable fork that chases current features. Other games aren't concerning themselves with MC-like-ness at all, I'll look at some of those later.

Download the client from the MineTest page, then at the bottom bar hit + and type in MineClone, hit + on MC2. Back on the Main Menu, select the 2-grass-block icon from the bottom, the screen should change to show a MC2 logo, hit New to make a new world.

When I started testing MineTest, it was very laggy, the Mac display & input was completely broken. In 5.4, it got up to usable but not fun, with a really horrible input lag. In 5.6, just released on the 4th, it's actually playable! FPS rate is a little low (15-30 instead of the 30-60+ I expect), picking up/moving inventory can be sluggish, but the game is on par with any older edition of MC now.

MineClone2 can have some remarkable terrain, tho there's something a little off, I get broken Nether portals every few hundred meters in plains. The mobs are dumb but as dangerous as MC and I'm less skilled here. Villagers work, I don't have a proper screenshot of the village I've started trading with, I need to clear some land and fence it off, after I set up my next base near it. Animals are a bit odd, they're persistent but spawn in randomly on grass when you enter the area, there's a river below my base, and it's constantly splashing with sheep & llamas that fall in; I should build a lava blade trap for them. I've made a map, but it's uselessly small and can't be resized, but does point back home. The built-in minimap (hit M, repeatedly to cycle views) is very useful.

By default there's no access to debug. You can open the console, but no command shows coords AFAICT.

So edit ~/Library/Application Support/minetest/minetest.conf (probably ~/.minetest on Linux, WTF knows on Windows):

keymap_console = KEY_F5
keymap_inventory = KEY_TAB
keymap_minimap = KEY_KEY_M
keymap_mute = KEY_F10
keymap_screenshot = KEY_F2
keymap_toggle_block_bounds = KEY_F6
keymap_toggle_chat = KEY_F7
keymap_toggle_debug = KEY_F3
keymap_toggle_fog = KEY_F8

Or whatever keys you like for those. Now I can hit F3 and get a teeny text status of FPS & pos, hit it again and get full debug/lag spike data.

What I'd like is a bit more of Life in the Woods, or Super Hostile type modpacks, make survival hard and more complex, but with a gentler introduction than Feed the Beast etc. There is Exile in the ContentDB, and I kind of glazed over looking at the wiki, my one test of it I punched some sticks but couldn't make anything, then got blown up, but I'll run at it again.

There's not a lot of Youstubes or Twitches of MineTest yet, but there's a few "punch wood" demos, and a lot of what you know about MC just works in MineClone2.

Gone from Suck to Blow

Want to move a URL or other text between your local computers, and they're not all Mac/iOS where universal pasteboard mostly works? There's smart ways, and then there's how I do it:

# note: needs Apache turned on. sudo apachectl start
mac% cd /Library/WebServer/Documents
mac% sudo ln -s $HOME/Sites
mac% cd
mac% cat bin/blow
#!/bin/zsh
pbpaste >$HOME/Sites/suckblow.txt

raspi% sudo apt-get xclip
…
raspi% cat bin/suck
#!/bin/zsh
curl -s "http://mac.local/Sites/suckblow.txt" |xclip -i -selection clipboard
xclip -o -selection clipboard

And in the reverse set, pbcopy is the Mac equivalent of xclip -i. In practice, I don't run a server on my RasPi but I rarely need to paste the other way, just sometimes scp files.

Now on the Mac, I copy some text, type "blow" in iTerm2. On the RasPi, I grab terminal and type "suck". It can take a few seconds, and then the text is in clipboard.

Without running Apache (or other web server, but I'm a caveman), you can use scp to grab the file, then cat it into xclip -i.

Happy blowing & sucking!

[Update 2022-12-03: Some update on raspi changed the default in xclip from clipboard to primary (X11). So I've added -selection clipboard to them all.]

Star Trek Ranked

In the tone of The Last Star Wars Movie, every Star Trek thing ranked:

  1. The Original Series. Star Trek is, in short, Horatio Hornblower in space, the final frontier, exploring strange new worlds, and new civilizations. To boldly go where no (Hu)man has gone before. You know what works? Paying good SF writers to write good scripts about Science Fiction Ideas, and then getting good actors to read those lines, with adequate special effects to say "you are in space". They didn't always manage any of that, there's a reason it barely made 3 seasons, but when it hits the right points, it's the best art Humans have ever created. (Preferably pre "digital remaster", but the CGI shit does improve matters in a few episodes, inoffensive the rest of the time.)
  2. The Animated Series. Yes, the "animation" is sub-Hanna Barbera level. The matte paintings are gorgeous. They could do real alien aliens since they didn't need makeup. They continued to get real SF writers (including Larry Niven!) like TOS, unlike any other Trek show.
  3. Star Trek novels/novelizations by James Blish, John M. Ford, and Diane Duane. How Much for Just the Planet, The Final Reflection, and My Enemy My Ally are top of that group. I don't remember the Greg Bear book, but he's a great writer, should be acceptable if he didn't phone it in.
  4. Star Trek Movies I-IV,VI. I'm not gonna nitpick which is better, I honestly like I and VI a lot more than the usual rankings, but all 5 of these are great. Why didn't they make a movie V? Weird, huh?
  5. GalaxyQuest. This is the series finale Star Trek classic deserved.
  6. Lower Decks. Yes, it's a very silly-looking cartoon. And there's parts that are slapstick comedy… and parts are the kind of awe-inspiring, the Galaxy is a great place, let's go explore, heroism that Star Trek used to be about. It's like the lighter TOS eps, compressed to 22 minutes.
  7. Strange New Worlds. I'm already very tired of "Gorn" (they're not Gorn as we know them from "Arena", but knockoff Alien xenomorphs) eps. But I like most of the crew, the plots are generally good enough, they're not trying writing techniques far beyond their ability, it's just a good Trek show. Not best ever, but good so far.
  8. Star Trek Continues. Often exactly as amateur as you'd expect, and other times really manages to make A Star Trek Episode. Give it a try.
  9. Star Trek novels/novelizations by almost literally anyone else. I must've read dozens or hundreds of these, and most are junk, no better than slash fanfic.
  10. TNG. Not generally good, or well-written at all. It sort of finds the characters after 2 seasons of absolute crap. But there is occasionally exploration, adventure, Human spirit, all that. Eh.
  11. DS9, I guess. No sense of wonder. Very little exploration. Once in a while, it has a Science Fiction Idea and explores it for one ep, then forgets everything about that and hits the sitcom reset button. Implausibly promotes Miles O'Brien, most useless Human in the Galaxy, to a major character with a hot wife. Mostly it ripped off Babylon 5, and poached actors, because they had no writers, no direction, no ability to plot ahead. Later on it just got repetitive, then wrapped up a war with deus ex machina "let's all be friends because we're amorphous".
  12. Garbage, do not watch: VGR, ENT, STD ("better dead than Disco"), PIC, all of the other Star Trek movies. Just has nothing to do with Star Trek at all.
  13. Crimes Against Humanity: JJ Abrams' "Star Trek" movies. People who hate Star Trek and are soulless husks motivated only by explosions and lens flares shouldn't be making Star Trek-named shows.

I'm not too familiar with the Star Trek comics to put them on this chart; as opposed to Star Wars, where the Marvel comics are among the best material. The Gold Key & Marvel comics were mediocre, gap-between-series fillers. I didn't see any of DC, Malibu, or Marvel II's runs. Wildstorm's run was awful (and I liked their superhero comics, but they were bad at SF). The Tokyopop manga were hilarious, very off-model, off-character, not at all Star Trek except in the Futurama parody sense. I've only seen a few of the IDW comics, and while they're a solid publisher, they do goofy crossover shit a lot.