Star Trek Game Details Emerge
2 min read
New details for the Namco Bandai Star Trek video game have emerged; including names of actors who will voice the characters, pictures of scenes taken from the game, and which villain will be faced by Captain Kirk and his crew.
For Trek fans, the villain will be one which was seen on an episode of the original series.
Actors Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, John Cho and Anton Yelchin will be voicing the characters which they played in 2009’s Star Trek XI.
“We are thrilled to have these incredible actors, lending their voice to the legendary characters of Kirk and Spock in the video game realm,” said LeeAnne Stables, Paramount Pictures’ President of Consumer Products and head of the studio’s video game unit. “Players are in for a truly authentic experience with the combination of talent we have assembled bringing this action adventure game to life.”
The game’s story was written by Marianne Krawczyk in collaboration with Star Trek 2‘s Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. In Star Trek, “players control both Kirk and Spock in a sweeping journey of epic proportions across unexplored planets and enemy battleships with the latest 23rd century weapons and gear. Kirk and Spock’s complementary personalities result in the most fully realized and varied co-op experiences for this console generation.”
Kirk and crew will be facing a familiar foe, the Gorn (seen in the original series’ Arena). “There are certain elements at the core of Star Trek; insurmountable odds, exploration, villains like the Gorn and heroes like Kirk and Spock,” said Carlson Choi, VP of Marketing and Namco Bandai Games America Inc. “Our goal is to pull gamers as deep into the Star Trek universe as possible and an integral part of that is the talent that make these characters their own.
“Great villains give our favorite characters a chance to become heroes in the process of attempting to eliminate a powerful threat, and Star Trek fans have been eagerly anticipating the moment when the antagonists of the game would be revealed. This is one of those moments and we couldn’t be more excited to give gamers a glimpse at the challenges that lie ahead for Kirk and Spock.”
The Star Trek video game will be released in early 2013 on Xbox 360(R)video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation(R)3 computer entertainment system and Windows PC.
Those attending E3 this weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center will be able to see a demonstration at the game, which is taking place this week at the Namco Bandai Games booth #1637, located in the South Hall.
More photos can be seen here.
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Looks decent. I still want Elite Force 3 though.
The Gorn were not straight villains. Anyone who paid attention to that episode knows that they were mis-understood. They were no more evil then any other nation/race protecting their boarders. But count on JJ-Trek to skip past that and make them straight up evil. Darn you JJ Abrams!
Disagree, the Gorn were always pretty clear-cut bad guys to me. The whole situation may have been a complete mess, and the Gorn may have legitimately been worried that outsiders were trying to mount an invasion of their territory, but instead of sending someone in to assess the situation or even delivering a simple communique to the outpost to the effect of “HEY GUYS, WTF?”, their solution was simply to move in and pre-emptively murder everybody. This was one time when Roddenberry’s kum-ba-yah stuff rang pretty hollow in my ears, ’cause there was clearly no moral equivalence between the Federation and the Gorn (it’s difficult to imagine Starfleet taking the steps the Gorn did if the situation had been reversed). If anyone was misunderstood, it was all the men and women stationed at Cestus III who woke up dead one morning without ever even understanding why.
Hehe. Well, I hate to get wrapped up in the “moral equivalence” thing, but Roddenberry did have a point. If we interact with alien civilizations, how can we judge them based upon human values? You’re talking about civilizations that developed on entirely different planets, with their own, unique evolutionary history. That’s like judging a dog’s morality. A dog has no idea what human values are, nor are they particularly relevant. They don’t think like us and they don’t look or act like us (unless we anthropomorphize). How could we expect an alien culture, developed without any interaction with our own, to share a similar moral foundation?
Look at Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan. These men have pondered interactions with alien species and the conclusions have been that any contact would likely involve aliens treating us no differently than we treat an insect. There’s also question as to whether we could even effectively communicate, since not only our language but our entire way of perceiving things may be incompatible.
So while the “Arena” episode was perhaps simplistic, it’s not unreasonable to assume that an alien species might not only have difficulty communicating effectively, but that their first instinct when confronted by an alien species might be to simply eliminate them. Morality (good and evil) is a human concept and it’s divorced from the reality of evolution. In the world outside the human sphere, morality simply doesn’t exist because there’s no common standard to apply.
Oh, and as to the game? Meh. I’ve rarely, if ever, found that games based upon movies (or in this case their universe) are any good. They’re generally just pretty cash-ins that get middling scores from the reviewers. Maybe this one will be different, but I’m certainly not adventurous enough to buy it.
Nations/races protecting their borders, or their perceived borders, or their interests, can be pretty damn evil.