Thirty*9

LucasArts has hired Tim Longo (previous Tomb Raider creative and franchise director) as Creative Director on an unannounced game.

Longo has a working relationship with LucasArts which includes Lead Designer on Star Wars: Starfighter and Jedi Starfighter, Creative Director on Star Wars: Republic Commando. His recent projects include Tomb Raider: Underworld and Anniversary. His hiring could be the intial step towards a number of game, assumably Star Wars-related such as another starfighter based game (personally I think another Rogue Squadron would be a dream) or finally the long-awaited Imperial Commando (the long spoken of sequel to Republic Commando).

This aside my inital hopes and dreams did not jump to either of these but rather a Tomb Raider-inspired Indiana Jones game. That IS the dream. A third person, puzzle based adventure game would be absolutely mind blowing. Think back on recent Indiana Jones games - LEGO Indiana Jones and it's sequel are strong, as are all the LEGO games but they are lacking in obvious areas in regards to their audience. Indiana Jones and the Staff of King's that hit Wii was a promising game until you hit the shooting portion of the game and it lost all balance and was unusable. The Indy game that showed the greatest promise (which I only played the demo of) was Indiana Jones and the Emporer's Tomb, released back in 2003. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (1999) was also along these same lines.

That's nearing the 10 year mark, I think it could be time to explore these grounds again, but we can only hope. There hasn't been a decent Star Wars starfighter game for years either, so if they are pursuing either franchise it would be a welcome development.

The Future Begins

I saw the new Star Trek film the other week and must confess that I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I am by no means a Trekkie in fact best a self-confessed Star Wars nut, which is perhaps why I liked this film more than its predecessors.

The main issue that I have had with Star Trek is that there is far too much talking and technical jargon that unless you are familiar with the universe there is no chance of your understanding completely what is occurring and taking much from the film. The generally agreed upon difference between Wars and Trek is that Star Wars is ‘cooler’ because it is for a wider audience and Star Trek is just too nerdy.

In my opinion the latest Star Trek film is far more a Star Wars movie than your typical Trek adventure – fast paced, a lot of action and no getting bogged down in unnecessary scenes that involve the characters talking about doing something that they should really be doing right there and then.

The story was solid, the special effects were amazing (ILM out did themselves once again) and the sound and score worked very well. The moments of silence I the space battle scenes as crew members were sucked into the vacuum of space (where there is no sound) worked perfectly as a quiet moment, allowing the audience to regather their senses from the overload of the initial fight sequence and take a quick breather before again diving headfirst into the action.

Chris Pine’s performance was reminiscent of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo or Indiana Jones as it was William Shatner’s Kirk (Pine has stated that he looked to Ford for inspiration on how to make the character his own) and Zachary Quinto finally stretched his acting talents beyond Heroes and proved that he is (as we thought) a talented actor who throws himself completely into a role (shaved his magnificent eyebrows for the role, as well as cutting his hair to Spock-styling). Oh and Eric Bana!!! I think I’ve said enough there.

Since I have not seen enough Star Trek films to perform an adequate comparison, this film is definitely better than Star Wars Epsiodes I-III but not quite to the standard of IV and definitely nowhere near V and VI.