Gaming Review:- Star Trek Attack Wing OP "The Collective" - Month 3, plus overall thoughts.

Ahhhh, after nearly four months since it started (Feels longer) The final step in the "Collective" campaign is upon me/us.

As per the usual format for STAW OP events, the days play consists of 3 rounds.
This month, the battle is themed around the Battle of Sector 001, as featured in "Star Trek: First Contact", as well as the other Battle for Sector 001 that featured in "Best of Both Worlds - Part 2" (nice going WizKids, way to show you understand the source material).


The Fleet Build.

According to the scenario pack, the "90+30" fleet build should be the done thing, however, due to some sort of complete fuck up by the UK distributor of STAW products, there were no bricks of random booster packs left, so therefore for this event we went with a simple "120 point fleet" build.

Once again, I played my tried and tested Federation "torpedo spam" fleet.

The Scenario.

Following on from Month #2, the Cube has managed to reach Earth, and the allied fleets of both players meet it as it makes its final attack run on the home of the United Federation of Planets.

In a similar play style to Month #2, players are expected to work together to stop the Cube from leaving the play area by battering it for as much damage as it they possibly can before either both players fleets get junked, or before time runs out.
However, in a twist to last months immobile "pillbox" Cube, this months Cube moves and can deliver devastating attacks on both players fleets, however, this time round the Cube can be destroyed, simply by inflicting 25 damage points on it.
The Game does not end there though, because when that final point of damage is scored, the Cube shoots out a hidden Sphere, which moves in a straight line as fast as it can towards the farthest table edge, and also, should this Sphere exit the play area before the players manage to inflict 15 damage to it, both players automatically lose the game.

One final point...as both the Cube AND the Sphere take damage, they become even more difficult to destroy, as their evade number increases by 2 for each 5 damage they take.

The scenario winner is decided by who inflicted the final point of damage to both the cube and the sphere.

Opinion.

The 3 rounds i played were as follows:-

Federation & Independent/Borg/Klingon Mashup (Loss by Campaign points - See later)
Federation & Borg/Dominion/Romulan Mashup (Loss by Tiebreaker - See later)
Federation & Federation (Win)




Final place - 4th (of 7)
Overall place in campaign - 5th (of 9)

Ok, first and foremost I will say this...Mashups should not be allowed...it makes no sense in the Star Trek universe to have Admiral Kirk supporting Khan in a Borg Soong type ship backed up by Kronos One, Or captain Picard in charge of a Borg scout ship whilst Weyoun and some romulans back him up in a Borg tactical Cube.
A "second edition" rulebook really needs to get STAW back on track as a miniatures game that has a Star Trek feel to it, instead of an exersize in "Mix & Match".
Some of the combos I saw today were quite intriguing and very well thought out, but it made the game feel less "Star Trek" and more "Warhammer 40k 2nd Edition". (As in, it was combinations of overpowered mix & match "wargear", which were never intended to be used together, that decided the game, rather than skill and good tactics)

That said, the game itself was quite enjoyable. At various points during all three games did the action become somewhat intense as the Cube began to resist damage, and then the frantic chase and attacking that followed once it ejected the Sphere.
It was good that finally a game in this campaign seemed to properly encourage teamwork. Month #2 did this to some degree but not as much as this month, as both players had to actively co-ordinate their fleets to ensure that maximum damage got done once the Cube/Sphere started moving.

One of the first things that became apparent was that there really was no need whatsoever to do the usual "secret" movement, being as both players were working together, it made no sense at all to hide your fleet manoeuvres from each other, in addition, although it was well within everyones power to use crew/equipment to disable/stun your opponents ships, this would have been completely detrimental on the whole, the thought of doing so never even entered my mind when I built my fleet, and seemingly everyone else was thinking along the same lines, good.

The fatal flaw in this scenario did not come from the gameplay restrictions, but instead from the victory point award system....

Game #1 was a total military victory for me, as I destroyed the cube, however, in the end I lost, because even though I destroyed the Cube, inflicted heavy damage on the Sphere and ended the game with my fleet completely intact, I lost because I had a lower campaign score against an opponent who had placed in the top 2 for the previous 2 months....Thats bollocks!, especially as he had lost one ship from his fleet.



Game #2 ended in a draw, I destroyed the Cube (again) and my opponent destroyed the Sphere, with both of us having not lost any ships and both of us tied for campaign points, we ended up settling the match via rolling for "Battlestations"...I got 1, they got 2....That is no way to decide a tournament game, may as well have just saved time and rolled for battlestations at the start and saved ourselves the bother of playing.


Game #3 was a decisive victory for me, as I destroyed both the Cube and the Sphere.

It would have been a much better idea to have tracked which player had inflicted the most damage on the Cube/Sphere and then used that as a reference for deciding win/draw/loss, rather than by external campaign points or via random chance, as far as I am concerned, I won all 3 games fair and square, but once again due to STAW grey area rules, I was cheated, although not as badly as I was during month #1.


Overall Thoughts on "The Collective".

Not good I'm afraid, with 2 out of 3 "chapters" being horrendously unbalanced, coupled with rules problems stemming from the fact that the basic rulebook included in the box game set is in sore need of updating, as newer ships/cards are "tacking on" new game rules which don't fully mesh with the "standard" rules, and then finally a points based campaign system which is totally unforgiving, "The Collective" was a good idea but very very poorly executed.

Final score - 4/10

The follow up campaign, called "Resistance is Futile" makes up the remaining 3 months of the 6 month "Borg" themed Storyline/Sales promotion.
I have as yet to decide if I am going to bother with it.

Pilot erroR - TV Pilots that didnt make the cut.

Before a TV channel wants to spend money on something, its usually traditional for the producers to make an initial episode or TV movie which outlines the basic plot and premise of the program.

However, not all of these projects get the green light and make it as far as getting an actual full series commission, due to the fact that they are poorly timed, excessively expensive, or just being plain old crap.

I'm going to have a look at a couple of these pilot shows that were given the thumbs down from the TV people, and give my opinion of them...oh yes.

ReWind (SyFy - 2013)
Its a bit like- The Time Tunnel,Quantum Leap, Sliders

Premise -
After a terrorist group destroys New York with a nuclear bomb, an international team of  scientists and military types assemble to make use of a top secret time travel device to subtly change history so that "bad" events (usually ones that involve mass death and so on, particularly connected to the US) don't happen. However, the time travellers can only spend a short period of time in the past as the time window created by their machine only remains open for a fixed, but random, amount of time, meaning that if they fail to get back to the window, they will be stranded in the past, and, if they fail their mission, they will not be able to try again without causing a temporal paradox!
The team are aided in their efforts by a computer called the "Panopticon", which can fairly accurately predict the outcome of changes made to the past and what their knock on effect will be in the future, however the machine is not always correct.
Finally, the time travellers and their secret base are protected from changes in the time line by a side effect of the time window, so no matter what they do to change the past, they themselves will not be changed.

Plot of Pilot -
After the nuclear destruction of New York, a team travels back in time to 1929 to kill a street punk who spends the majority of his life committing crimes. This punk will eventually kill the wife of the scientist who built the nuclear bomb for the terrorists in a botched mugging attempt, sending the scientist insane, which eventually leads him to build a bomb.
The team are briefed on 1920s culture and language and given era appropriate clothing and equipment, then they step through the portal, being the first humans to attempt time travel.
they are successful in their attempt, but find that time travel is a fairly gut wrenching experience.
Once back in the past, all of the travellers are tempted to alter events to suit their own personal needs, but decide against messing around with their own personal histories.
Back at time travel HQ, the technicians find that after the travellers have departed, the amount of time they have to get back decreases, this, coupled with the fact that the travellers get lost while trying to find the guy they're supposed to kill, and end up nearly getting killed when they have a traffic accident with a moonshine bootlegger.
Just as they think they are going to fail in their mission, they find the man they are supposed to kill, and discover that he is committing crimes in order to provide for his younger sister. They decide against killing him, instead, one of the travellers poses as the mans "guardian angel", and tells him of what will happen if he continues being a criminal. The man heeds the warning and New York is restored, however the travellers run short of time to get back to the time portal, so it becomes a race against time to get back to their starting point, which is made significantly easier by one of the historians remembering that a hidden road used by bootleggers can get them back much quicker.
With seconds to spare, they make it back to the portal, and are relived to see that New York has been restored.
While they celebrate, the military liaison dresses in a winter coat, loads a gun and steps through the portal while no one is looking, which immediately causes New York to disappear again.....

So why did it fail?
While the basic premise of the show was good, the problem was it has all been done before. Both "The Time Tunnel" and "Quantum Leap" covered the whole "time travelling to change things for the better" trope, while "Sliders" covered the whole "a team of people go about alternate Earths correcting wrongs". With such a well trodden concept, and a large budget required to recreate the past, this show, if it ever made it to a full series, would have to have been really popular to justify itself.
The plot of this initial episode is fairly bland and uninteresting, I knew as soon as it was mentioned that they were going to go back in time to kill someone that there would be a reason found for them not to abuse time travel for the purposes of cold blooded murder, and it came as no surprise whatsoever that at the end someone else found a way to use the machine to fiddle around with history and cause a disaster, so as a series, each week the team of travellers would have jaunted through time fixing problems etc etc, exactly like Quantum Leap and Sliders.

Final Score - 4/10

doorways (sic) (1993)
Its a bit like -  Sliders (see later)

 
The Premise-
Our reality is not the only reality in existence, as Dr. Thomas Mason finds out when he stumbles across a young woman named "Cat". Cat has the ability to find and travel through "doorways"(sic) , which are naturally occurring portals that allow anyone stepping through them to travel to an infinite number of alternative realities. Dr. Mason and Cat travel through these portals in an effort to keep one step ahead of "The Dark Lord", an enemy from Cats home reality who relentlessly pursues her.

The Plot -
Dr.Mason MD meets a woman called "Cat", who is on the run from someone she calls "The Dark Lord", who appears to be some sort of demon/alien from her own reality. Cat struggles to convince Dr.Mason that she is telling the truth, both due to the fact that she can barely speak English, and due to the fact that the police and the FBI are wanting to have words with her.
Eventually, Cat proves she is telling the truth by showing Mason a "doorway" to another reality, which they promptly end up falling through after the bad guys catch up with them.
Cat and Dr.Mason visit various different Earths, including one where there are no petrochemicals left and the towns and highways of America are terrorized by gangs of bicycle riding punks.
Cat has a defense against the bad guys though, in the form of a weapon she stole from her own reality, which is a sort of gun that fires explosive flechettes, or, as she describes it "Fwick!...BOOM!".
Dr.Mason faces up to the fact that he wont be returning any time soon, and continues to travel with Cat hoping that they will eventually find a way for him to get back to his own reality, however no matter where they hide, the servants of the Dark Lord are always able to track them down....

Why did it fail?
Despite the series concept being created by George R.R Martin , its timing was completely wrong. The early 90s were not a good time for Sci-Fi offerings, particularly one which was as weak as "doorways" ended up being.
The pilot episode was poorly scripted and acted (With the character Cat pretty much sounding like she suffered from some sort of mental retardation, and Dr.Mason spending most of the time acting like a confused buffoon) and the special effects were of very poor quality (even by early 90s standards), Plus, the series itself would have been expensive, as each week the travellers would have had to visit an alternate Earth, which would have required a lot of money to be spent on costumes, sets and special effects. In the end, with the main characters being thoroughly unlikable, and the premise being a tad on the expensive side, the series was given the thumbs down.
Interestingly enough though, when you watch this pilot, it has many, many, many similarities with "Sliders", which eventually got greenlit 2 years after doorways had been binned. these similarities did not go unnoticed, so much so that George Martin himself had to issue a statement to say that screenwriter Tracy Torme, the creator of "Sliders", had had no involvement with "doorways" bar his agent applying for a job on his behalf as a writer.
Another interesting note is that doorways starred a young Carrie-Ann Moss , Kurtwood Smith and Max Grodenchik , all of whom later went on to find stardom in other projects.

Final Score - 3/10

Gaming Review:- Star Trek Attack Wing OP "The Collective" - Month 2

So, after a few hiccups concerning getting the wrong OP kit sent, thus delaying the event for 2 weeks...finally, just as most places are running month #3 do we get round to doing month #2.

Again, as is the standard format for STAW organised play events, this is a three round tournament based on the infamous "Battle of Wolf-359", as shown in the ST:TNG episode "Best of both Worlds (parts 1&2)" and mentioned numerous times throughout TNG, DS9 and Voyager, as well as the Star Trek movies.


The Fleet Build.

As per the previous month, the fleet points available for this month are the same, 90 points of whatever you want, plus 30 points to be constructed from whatever you find in your random booster pack.
The booster pack ships are identical to last month , with all the major factions being represented in some way, except for the Borg themselves.

The Scenario

Unlike Month #1, this scenario is designed as a co-op type game, as players cannot attack each other, but may attack a single Borg cube, which spends the entire game stationary on one side of the play area, while both players ships deploy on the opposite edge.
Before deployment, both players deploy 3 "debris" tokens (although I spent all day calling them scrap tokens) anywhere on the board so long as they are not within range 1 of the cube or the edge of the deployment area. Players then deploy their ships in ascending command value order.

The objective of this scenario is to inflict as much damage by any means to the Cube (the cube itself cannot be destroyed or affected by any adverse game effects), whilst at the same time ensuring your own ships do not get blown up when the Borg decide to swat you down like flies.
Play continues as normal, however at the end of each turn, the Cube will make a series of attacks, which increase in severity as the number of ships on the board decrease until one hour has passed, or all ships in play are destroyed, whichever happens first.

The scenario winner is decided by which player has inflicted the most damage after the game ends.

Opinion

As the tournament is a co-op scenario, the normal 1v1 type play does not apply, so in the course of three rounds I played the following:-

Round 1 - Federation (me) & "Rogue" Borg/Klingon
Round 2 - Federation & Federation/Romulan
Round 3 - Federation & "Rogue" Borg/Maquis

Final placing - 3rd.

I was quite lucky that my blind booster contained another Sabre class ship, this allowed me to play a "pure" Federation fleet and thus get priority for movement and combat, although it is a shame that the Sabre class ship has numerous flaws in its game impact, such as only having a forward fire arc, and the "vanilla" ship not benefiting from the USS Yeagers awesome ability to continuously fire its photon torpedoes without having to disable them. As this ship is meant to fill the niche in the Federation fleet for a "missile cruiser" it seems odd that Wizkids would hamstring it by requiring you to spend your ships action for the turn on either attaining the target lock you need to fire, or reactivating your torpedoes...an errata for this ship is sorely needed.

Anyways, this months scenario was much more enjoyable, being as that it was not hideously unbalanced in favour of grey area exploiting combos, made worse by having items and crew members nicked off your ships.
The name of the game this month was to bring as much firepower to bear as possible, which anyone can do without the need for owning an extensive number of prize/rare ships and prize/promo crew and equipment cards.

I was rather surprised not to see some Klingon fleets, being as they can usually be counted on to carry some big guns, but alas it seemed that their place had been taken by the Borg tactical cube, with its high firepower and ability to shrug off damage, but at a high cost the Borg players tended to only field a single well equipped cube or a cheap cube with backup from a sphere.

Final Thoughts

A much better scenario all round that allowed for a decent and less frustrating level of play.
The prize for winning (the USS Raven) is a little lackluster but has some decent equipment cards.
The participation freebie in the form of the fleet captain resource is pretty sweet, and certainly has numerous possibilities open to its use.

SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden

Everyone knows that Osama Bin Laden was a very naughty man, so naughty in fact that this country called the "United States of America" spent over 10 years tearing up the middle east looking for him, along with help from some of their chums from Europe and Asia.
Eventually, the American types finally figured out that Mr. Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan, and not Iraq or Afghanistan (Oops!, all those people dead for nuthin), much to their chagrin being as the Pakistanis were supposed to be Americas chums. So, in order to set things right, they sent in some very angry soldier types to fetch Mr. Bin Laden to see the headmaster for a stern talking to!.

"SEAL Team Six : The Raid on Osama Bin Laden" is a 2012 TV Movie made by National Geographic which serves as both a documentary and a dramatisation of the events leading up to the raid on Osama Bin Ladens hiding place in downtown Abbottabad on a May night in 2011.

The operation, codenamed "Operation Neptune Spear", was carried out by two squads of US Navy SEALs, using two special "stealth" blackhawk helicopters (one of which crashed due to a mechanical error and had to be blown up before the SEALs ex filtrated the area in order to prevent its secrets being looted by some DIRTY FOREIGNERS!1!!!1) in a completely unauthorised incursion into Pakistani airspace.
The films plot shows that over the course of approximately 6 months, the CIA had received various bits of intelligence, both via direct "questioning" (*coughyeahrightcough*) of suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists and via remote observation of Bin Ladens known hangouts and associates.
During this time, the eventual members of SEAL team six are shown being recruited and trained, and at various points they speak to the camera as though giving an interview (This is artistic licence, being as the real identities of the special forces operatives involved in the raid are a closely guarded secret. In total 79 human and 1 canine operatives were involved in the operation).

The film watches like an eclectic mix of a spy movie coupled with an action movie, a bit like a sort of "James Bond lite" type affair, with documentary elements thrown in to fill in the gaps of things that are "Classified".
The quality of acting is pretty good considering that the only people in the film I've ever heard of are Xzibit and Eddie Kaye Thomas , and the film makers go to great lengths to ensure that as many technical details are correct as possible when showing military installations and equipment.
The SEAL team operatives themselves are all military stereotypes, theres a couple of gung-ho patriots, some introspective ones, ones with tragic backgrounds etc, this is to be expected form this kind of film though, especially so being as the real people who took part in the missions identities will probably never be known.

The film does embellish some details, for example, Bin Laden is shown to be carrying an AKSU assault rifle when the SEAL operatives encountered him, when in reality, bin Laden was unarmed at the time of his death although during the examination of the building that was carried out immediately after the operation had ended, both an AKSU rifle and a Makarov pistol were found in the room), the film also does not show that just before bin Ladens death, one of bin Ladens wives was shot as she tried to attack one of the soldiers (the scene instead shows the lead soldier pushing a woman out of the way, with the second soldier to enter the room killing bin Laden).

All in all though, this film is pretty good, much better in fact than Zero Dark Thirty , a film which was released in cinemas in December of 2012 which essentially tells the same story, although with it being a Hollywood film, it embellishes the story a lot and goes more for "general" appeal.

SEAL Team Six is available on DVD and via many streaming media outlets and is a pretty good film if you like military films that concentrate on story rather than pyrotechnic effects and dodgy character building scenes.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (Contains Spoilers)

So, Michael Bay said he wasn't going to do anymore Transformers related stuff after DOTM got fairly negative reviews...but the sweet, sweet money he was offered tempted him back....*face/palm*

"Transformers: Age of Extinction" (aka, Transformers: AoE, Transformers 4, Trans4mers etc) marks the fourth (duh!) outing for the "Bayformers" live action TF movies, which surprised many people as the ending of DOTM pretty much wrapped up the storyline for the Bayformers, you know, what with nearly everyone getting killed off and all that.

The Plot

Set 5 years after the climactic battle which saw Chicago levelled as the Decepticons tried to teleport Cybertron into Earths orbit and then enslave mankind and stuff, coupled with the sudden, but inevitable, betrayal by Sentinel Prime, it seems that humans and Transformers don't get along any more. Although the surviving Autobots are said to have been granted asylum on Earth, and approximately a dozen Decepticons are known to be at large, a secret-ish division of the CIA known as "Cemetery Wind" spends all its time  hunting down and capturing both Autobots and Decepticons (Ratchet and Leadfoot are shown to be both hunted down and killed).
As it turns out though, Cemetery Wind is pretty much just a front for making its commander, Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) a rich man, as he then passes the bodies of the "captured" Transformers on to a megacorporation known as KSI industries where its pompous CEO, Joshua Joyce (played by Stanley Tucci doing a really, really good impression of the late Steve Jobs) then experiments on them in order to develop and manufacture human built "Transforming robots" in order to sell them to the military etc.
HOWEVER!, things go a bit awry when as it turns out, Cemetery Wind and KSI are both in league with an unaligned Transformer named Lockdown, who is on Earth to collect a bounty placed on Optimus Primes head by his "creators" (who, in the opening scenes are shown to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs by cyberforming parts of Earth in order to mine "Transformium" to build more transformer robots for themselves).

So, Optimus Prime, along with Bumblebee and newcomers Hound, Drift and Crosshairs, as well as their new human chums Cade and Tessa Yeager and Shane (Tessas boyfriend) battle against both the cemetery wind, KSI and Lockdown in order to stop stuff from happening that will probably lead to the extinction of all life on earth and so on.
Oh yeah, KSI has unintentionally rebuilt Megatron (Now called Galvatron, but he isn't a purple repaint) as one of their robot drone weapons and he eventually frees himself from human influence and takes over the army of vehicon drones and causes some trouble.
Oh also, some Dinobots make an appearance towards the end of the film to boost the Autobots numbers.

Ooooooooooooh kaaayyyyyyyyyy.
Ah, yeah, erm........
At nearly 3 hours long AoE, when viewed as just another sci-fi action film isn't too bad, it fulfills all that is required of it in order to be considered a standard Hollywood Blockbuster, and uses the following cliches:-

• MOAR EXPLOSUNZ!!! - Standard trope from any Michael Bay movie, it would be pointless to comment any further on this.
• All Chinese people know kung fu! - yes, there is one "main" character who is Chinese, plus a couple of throwaway Chinese characters that feature during the bit set in Hong Kong, all of them somehow know kung fu...you know, because they're Chinese. Also included is a bit of casual racism as the character played by Li Bingbing is told by Stanley Tuccis character that he cannot understand what she is saying.
• "This is important!/No its not!/That is irrelevant!" - Some characters are introduced and seem to be on their way to being a big player in the storyline...then they either vanish for no reason or are killed. Additionally, some plot avenues open at the beginning, then get ignored/forgotten at the end.
• Carry on regardless! - The Witwickys, N.E.S.T and Agent Simmons, all big characters in the previous three films are gone, and not even mentioned...at all, as though they never existed.
• Maguffin-tastic - "Transformium"...dafuq?
• Object of attraction/Jailbait - Right from the very start, male audience members are directed to find Tessa Yeager attractive, being as she spends nearly the entire film wearing skimpy clothing items and being a damsel in distress. however, despite her make up being applied so that it draws attention to her dialated pupils, flushed skin and red lips (all visual cues for female sexual arousal) we are informed that she is only 17, and thus a minor (according to American standards) so therefore can be looked at but not touched, something which is played upon during the course of the film in an attempt at creating "humourous" dialogue. the other two female leads, played by Sophia Myles and Li Bingbing don't really receive enough screen time to be considered "main" cast members, instead mainly acting as "plot filler-inners".

So, did I like it?

Er, ooh, Id say "like" is far too strong a word. On the whole, the film is yet another example of a throwaway sci-fi action flick that includes characters of which I am familiar with, which was designed and intended to shift merchandise in the form of childrens toys.
The plot is ridiculously weak, and the film watches like a series of action and car chase scenes edited together with some "talky bits" that shovel fairly basic character development at you in big, difficult to digest chunks.
As a lifelong fan of Transformers, it is quite uncomfortable to sit and watch in places, namely the bits where the "new" Transformers are shown transforming simply be disintegrating themselves and then reforming into robot/vehicle mode, and also bits where the Autobots openly discuss killing people because they are a bit pissed off with how they have been treated (although given the storyline, they do have a right to be pissed off).
The ending of the film is as formulaic as they come, with a big battle happening, lots of explosions and death followed by a "happy" although ambiguous ending, thus setting up the plot for "Transformers 5 - We aren't Quintessons, Honest!"

Final score - 5/10 - Impressive SFX but ruined by a crap storyline and the desire to shift merch.