Video Game Round-Up! - October/November/December 2018

Welcome to the new and super fat Video Game Round-Up! Or more accurately titled, Redemption Cannot Be Earned: A Red Dead Redemption 2 Essay. Just kidding, I will talk about other games before we get into the weeds with RDR2 (especially since this is going to be a two-months-in-one situation because I took so dang long to write this stupid essay, though I lay most of the blame at Facebook Mobile’s feet because it doesn’t allow access to Notes for some reason), but really, there’s going to be a lot about RDR2 here. So much, in fact, that there will be some story and gameplay spoilers, so if you are still playing, or plan to play it in the near future, don’t read the essay. There will be a warning after the non-RDR2 game write-ups letting you know you should go hang out in other, non-RDR2 places on the Internets. Okay, here we go!

Video Game Round-Up! - September/October 2018

Welcome back to Video Game Round-Up! This is a bit late this month as I was trying to finish up Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (PS4) before I wrote this up, but that game is damn long! I’ve played almost 70 hours, and I’ve still got like three chapters (out of nine) of the main story to do, so this is going to be a 100+ hour game, you guys.

Anyway, let’s talk about games!

#TNGWatch #SeasonTwo #WrapUp

With one notable exception, this season is a lot better than the first season. There are still some pretty dumb and terrible episodes (friggin’ clip show and that horrible "Up the Long Ladder"), but there are also some amazing episodes, which Season One had like none of. The crew is pretty much who they are supposed to be at this point, and we get Guinan, Ten Forward, and the Borg.

Romulans, Klingons, and Ferengi all show up again, but a lot of new races get introduced as well (though we won’t see most of them ever again).

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, though. That notable exception I mentioned earlier is of course Dr. Katherine Pulaski. And her presence marred pretty much the entire season. She was written as bigoted from the very beginning, but in such an unsympathetic way that you couldn’t help but dislike her from the word go (if you want to see how a sympathetic bigot might be written, you need only look at Chief O’Brien and his hatred of Cardassians, which I think starts to develop while he’s still on TNG). I’m legitimately surprised that Roddenberry allowed such a character to exist. He was notorious for not allowing these kinds of things to exist in his utopian future because he firmly believed we would have grown out of that shit by the 24th century (that said, Roddenberry’s progressivism was colored by the fact that he was a straight white man who grew up in the 30s and 40s, so it only went so far, especially where women were concerned).

This season started terribly, and it ended terribly, but it had some pretty awesome things in the middle (and also "Up the Long Ladder"; good Lord that was fucking awful).

Onward to Season Three!

#TNGWatch #S02E22 #ShadesOfGray

Last episode of the season! Which also means last Pulaski episode! Huzzah!

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Ah! Riker’s fever dreams have him shaven again! I don’t like!

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Wait! Is this a clip show?! Of season one?!

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Oh my God, they’re showing all his conquests now! Jeebus.

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Man, how you going to end a season on a clip show?! I understand the behind-the-scenes reasons for this (the show had to save time and money somewhere thanks to the Data-as-Sherlock and Borg episodes), but why make this your season finale? As a viewer in the 80s, I would have thought this was the final episode of the show, never to return! And clip shows are just damn lazy, man!

Basically, Riker gets sick and has to go through his memories while comatose in order to fight off the infection because the medical science on this show makes no damn sense.

Can you tell I hate clip shows?

Still, this is the only TNG episode to feature pretty much every major character introduced thus far on the show (even if most of them were only in the clips, including Worf and The Boy), and the only episode to have both Pulaski and Crusher (but Crusher only in clips).

But still, ugh.

#TNGWatch #S02E21 #PeakPerformance

Sirna Kolrami and wargames! Whee!!!!

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The TOS whistle on Riker’s 80-year-old ship is ❤ Also, I forgot how sassy Sirna Kolrami was! Yas, Queen!

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"It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose. That is not weakness; that is life." - Picard

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This was a very fun episode! Riker and Picard have to wargame against each other because Starfleet said so (Picard is super against it because Starfleet is not a military institution, but he understands Starfleet has to be ready as they now know about the Borg and the threat they represent [first mention of the Borg since their first appearance earlier in the season]), but while Picard gets the Enterprise, Riker gets the 80-year-old Hathaway, complete with TOS bells and whistles (literally). Sirna Kolrami, a Stratagema grandmaster and all-around tactical genius is aboard the Enterprise to observe, and oh man is he one sassy sumbitch. He’s like a meaner Tim Gunn with the same amount of amazing skill to back up his trash talk.

Riker and his hand-picked crew (including Worf, La Forge, and The Boy) have to resort to trickery and outright cheating to even have a chance of beating the Enterprise, but then the Ferengi attack (I almost forgot about you guys!). Because of the wargames, neither ship has any offensive weaponry, but being tactical geniuses in their own right, Picard and Riker band together and beat the Ferengi by tricking them as well.

The subplot of this episode concerned Data losing to Sirna Kolrami in a game of Stratagema, and then having an internal crisis because he thought he’d made a mistake, which meant that there was some internal problem that his diagnostics weren’t picking up. Both Troi and Pulaski try to cheer him up, but they treat Data like a human, which doesn’t work. Then Picard shows up and gives him that awesome quote and Data is back on the horse! At the end, he has a rematch with Sirna Kolrami in which he decides to go for a stalemate instead of winning, which infuriates Sirna Kolrami until he quits in disgust.

I love this episode! It’s so good! I want to be Sirna Kolrami when I grow up! But I do have questions about Data and the continued insistence that he doesn’t have emotions. He very clearly does. He feels satisfaction and dissatisfaction, he feels assuredness and confusion, he feels some sense of camaraderie, and he feels loss; these are all very real emotions. They are not the big, showy emotions of anger, sadness, or joy, perhaps, but they are facets of them. In fact, I think Data would be better described as on the spectrum. He feels emotions, he just maybe doesn’t process them as well as humans do, and in turn humans don’t know how to interpret the emotions he does show. Data might actually be an early example of autism on TV, even if nobody ever called it that.

#TNGWatch #S02E20 #TheEmissary

The Emissary?! What?! I don’t remember Benjamin Sisko ever showing up in TNG?! That’s a little joke, obviously :D

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I love it when they play poker :D

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Oh shit! It’s Worf’s ex!

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This was a pretty interesting episode with various things going on.

First, the Enterprise has to pick up a special emissary who’s being sent to them via a class-8 probe, which just barely fits one person (the horror I felt at knowing that this person was hurtling through space in what amounted to a coffin was very potent). The emissary turns out to the the half-human/half-Klingon K’Ehleyr (pronounced “kay-laar”), who has a history with Worf. The reason she has to come aboard so quickly is because a Klingon sleeper ship from the 23rd century (when the Klingon Empire was still at war with the Federation aka TOS time) is coming back with the crew about to be come out of cryosleep.

K’Ehleyr and Worf of course have sexytimes after a particularly vigorous exercise holoprogram (the last time we saw this holoprogram, Worf and Riker were exercising together, so does that mean they also...? no, don’t be silly, Adan; that’s just your headcanon talking), but fight about it afterwards because Worf wants to marry her and she’s like, “Dude, it was just sex. Ease up, hoss.” Worf is not happy, and he’s very cold towards her again.

When the sleeper ship T’Ong shows up, it immediately fires on the Enterprise because it’s a Klingon ship still at war with the Federation. Worf and K’Ehleyr trick it by pretending to be the captain and commander of the ship, and K’Ehleyr beams over to take command of their ship and welcome them properly to the 24th century. Before that, she and Worf make up, and she tells him she won’t be so easy to get rid of the next time she shows up (irony!).

I liked that the image of the T’Ong is reused from TOS with a few added effects. Also, the actress who played K’Ehleyr also played the Vulcan Dr. Selar in the Ira Graves episode, and goes on to play a Q in Voyager and an Andorian in Enterprise. The only reason I know this is because the girl said the actress looked familiar, even under the Klingon make-up, so we looked her up :D

#TNGWatch #S02E19 #Manhunt

Lwaxana’s back, y’all!

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I think Lwaxana is the only person in the galaxy that can make Picard feel as uncomfortable as he does this episode. Even Q doesn’t faze him this much!

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Patrick Stewart should just get it over with and star in a 1940s noir detective show. He’d be so good at it!

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Ha! Lwaxana just asked the computer where Riker was, and Majel Barrett talked to herself!

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An entire episode devoted to Lwaxana! Yay!

This was quite fun, and Lwaxana basically ran around making Picard, Riker, and her daughter Troi feel super uncomfortable thanks to the fact that she is undergoing "the phase", a time in a Betazoid woman’s life when her sex drive quadruples. She even sizes up The Boy (too young) and Worf (not human) as possible mates. Picard, being the consummate professional that he is, ducks her entirely, first by having Data crash their date and regaling them with his "wonderful" anecdotes (Data was so excited), then by literally hiding in a Dixon Hill holoprogram until she left the ship.

Having been rebuffed at every turn, Lwaxana saves the day by identifying two assassins who were posing as delegates to a conference she was going to, thereby saving the conference and the Enterprise’s reputation.

Nothing really happened in this episode, but it was fun, and I can’t wait for Lwaxana to come back :)