The Making of "Sack Trek: Arena"

Pardon a little fuzzy-headedness; I'm running on what amounts to two hours' sleep, and that sleep marked by dreams so vivid and involving it might as well have been wakefulness. Dreams of shifting platforms, flickering menus, pistons, gears, pulleys and explosives, and the constant cycle like a fever-vison: fuckup, undo; fuckup, undo; fuckup, undo. Welcome to the late-nite madness of LittleBigPlanet authorship.

Now, making stuff with LittleBigPlanet's creation tools is easy. Knocking together, say, a functional fire-breathing dragon – or, perhaps more amusingly and certainly more demographically likely, a giant dick on tank treads launching electrified sperms – is the work of a couple minutes. Making an actual entire level, a level more sophisticated than the thousands of worthless “steep hill with ramp” stages clogging up the LBP servers, is more arduous. When my first opus, a cutsey adventure featuring a ride on an owl and a mission to aid a group of deer-worshipping cultists, got vaporized by the close of the pre-release beta period, my heart kind of went out of it; I was content just to meander through the work of others. Yesterday, though, I was inspired to rejoin my worldwide brethren and sistren and get back into the wonder, joy and toil of creation.

Creation... otherwise known as “intellectual property infringement." Unless you move in certain subcultural online circles you may not have heard the howls, but they have been loud and echoing in the hidden chambers: LittleBigPlanet publisher/developers Sony/Media Molecule have been perceived as being hard and merciless in their moderation (i.e. deletion) of LBP levels featuring famous properties. Unfortunately, this means a Pac-Man-shaped portion of the LBP pie is living on borrowed time; seventy per cent of the “community content” – and almost all of the best stuff – has been themed on Batman, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Grand Theft Auto, Sex and the City (?!) or some other familiar touchstone. This is natural and wholly predictable behavior for early-adopting nerds, and its censure pisses them right off. In old-school fuck-you solidarity, I abandoned my original IP, the deer-cult-owl thing, and set to work on a stage based on the original-series Star Trek episode “Arena". The one where Kirk fights a lizard man.

Sleeves rolled up and elbows-deep into the toolkit, and the depth of possibility LBP makes available becomes more apparent as every new idea becomes quick reality, even (or maybe especially) when doing the broad strokes. Hang a big black rectangle, spangle it with stars and a moon or two, and bam: Space... the final frontier. A few swipes with some grayish-white material, and there's a recognizable Enterprise. Hollow out bridge, Captain's quarters, turbolift shaft, transporter room... drop to the “planet surface," pull in the readymade Desert scenery, click three times and there's a passable ruined colony, still in flames from the Gorn (aka lizard man) attack. Bam, bam, bam. I am like unto a God, a Roddenberry in virtual styrofoam.

Ah, but... God's in creation, and the Devil's in the details. Two hours of tinkering to get the turbolifts a) working and b) not crushing the player against a bulkhead. Another two or three puzzling over how to create a beam-down effect before just saying Fuck It and letting gravity (and a transparent tube) handle the problem. Tinkering with the Gorn character 'til 3 a.m., first fussing over the motion of its limbs (there's a fine line between threatening and spastic) then fine-tuning the aim on the deadly boulders he's chucking. Agonizing over a spring-loaded death-contraption where Kirk has to zipline over some flaming spikes – it's not canon, but no LBP level can be called complete without flaming spikes. Now to model Kirk's improvised musket...

And that's just the mechanical stuff. What really traps you is the set decoration, the need to get everything exactly right. As long as I spent modeling the Gorn, I spent at least twice that furnishing my Enterprise. The red-alert lights, the space-plants and astro-tapestries in Kirk's Love Chamber. The bridge decor: Captain's chair, consoles, viewscreen and the alien face thereon, Spock's dialogue, background electronic ambiance. Machinery of the transporter room, Scotty's red uniform, sound effects of the beam-down...

The only way to stay sane is to stop fighting for fidelity and let yourself roll with LBP's lo-fi arts-n-crafts aesthetic – suggest, rather than simulate. A viewscreen? Here's a sticker that looks kind of like a TV; slap it up on the wall and move on. Players will get it. Here's the power and glory of theming your level on an established pop-cult property: readymade context. Build a big, urban level with lots of ziplines and pulleys and a big black hotrod... fine. Begin that exact same level with a tuxedoed gingerbread man saying “Good evening, Master Bruce!” and suddenly those clankity traverses become Bat-Ropes, that car becomes the Batmobile, a narrative is in play, and it's f'n sweeet.

I think Sony/MM will relent on their IP-infringement crackdown; I think they'll have to. Their core audience – which in the case of a crowdsourced-content game like LBP is also their core creative team – are bred-in-the bone fanboys, remixers, nostalgists and payers of homage, and those folks won't play (or make) ball if their work's a moderator's click away from becoming electron dust just because it has a picture of Mega Man in it. Meanwhile, look for “Sack Trek: Arena”, coming soon to a Planet near you... just as soon as I get those goddamned boulders right...

plink plink plonk plink...

Man, this show would have been ten million times better if they'd let Worf keep it this consistently real...

Also... it's weird, but I get such a Mike Winters vibe from Dorn's delivery, here...

I guess this is a Trek blog, now

Snore Trek: Lame-assy

You know what really stinks about Star Trek: Legacy? This is the pretty Xbox version, the one with all five series-starring captains voice-acting including -- thank God -- Kate Mulgrew. She’s just so great, with that really, really old “put me to sleep” cat inflection: “Ensign Kim … Harry, have a seat -- Neelix tells me your emotions haven’t been conforming to regulations lately.” Anyway, what stinks about Legacy is it’s not quite fun enough. So not exactly all that different from modern TV Trek, now in its, what, 438th year? But you know. Fundamentally flawed. This makes me very sad as a nerd. Plot-wise, it’s the newest Trek we get till the rumoured animated series (set 150 years apocalyptic after Nemesis) plops.

Anyhoo, the point of Bethesda’s generation-hopping, hi-res play-thru of the history of the Federation’s self-made woes is to be the captain on deck. But sadly, never to see the captain on deck. In this sense, the graphically strong answer to, “I wonder if V’ger and the Borg are related?” is largely a radio play … with special effects. But, ironically, it lacks a human touch. Honestly, I would have taken stills from the TV shows and shut up about it. A face does so much, especially Bill Shatner’s in his heyday.

Instead, in special features, with no caution of spoilers, imbedded are the crappy, panned-over drawings of the back story surrounding a long-living Vulcan scientist, including the tale’s denouement. So it’s quite easy to accidentally watch the entire narrative, right up to Jean-Luc Picard dusting himself off and summing up the moral about the needs of the many. Yet. Again.

Well, who cares about all that collectible card game trivia shit, right? You just want a wicked fight! Then too bad for you the spaceship dynamics are such a wet bagpipe. Even the Klingon scout ships careen painfully slow on full impulse -- and I know, “you can’t turn in warp,” I hear Geordi LaForge telling his imaginary Holodeck love doll. But a limitless game can’t even match the physical dynamics of one of the greatest battles of all time. If you remember the classic head-on of Kirk vs. Khan, these Xbox babies move with that weight -- but those ships were damaged from the get-go. Still, even that Enterprise could drop straight down. Nothing like that here. In terms of space-battle simulation, it’s a huge crime. In the later TV space battles like the Borg’s massacre at Wolf 359, properly working destroyers are skidding all over the place, firing blindly as the collective hacks them to slivers. I would seriously like to play that game. Quick and dirty, especially against friends. Something with the physics and ping-pong pace of Sega Genesis’ Star Control (see BACKBEEP below).

There’s more. Beyond moving your admittedly beautiful space turtle around its celestial pond, you’re required in the missions to fleet-command four ships at a time. Which is, frankly, hell in later levels. Is it fun to micromanage a ship’s repairs system by system in the middle of screaming space ambush, babysitting three other dumb-ass AI ships who don’t fight back? Well … take every time you press A as shorthand for Kirk riding Scotty’s fat ass, maybe – but even a game starring James Doohan in the Jeffries tube would, rest his soul, suck shit.

To bitch even more, the cosmos are not 360 degrees. Remember the turtle pool? Your little NCC-1701 or spicy Bird of Prey can only poke its nose to the, er, top of space, but no loop-de-loops over your enemy to launch photon torpedoes into his “dirty.” Did the crew of the USS Yamaguchi die for this?

Casting aside the laborious missions, the one-on-one is enjoyable with lots of practise. Though vs. the computer you can’t hand-pick its ship, with a buddy online it’s possible to recreate any battle you like, with the mandatory molasses drive and fire-only-when-locked weapons systems. Unfortunately, Bethesda didn’t have the decency to program a split-screen two-player combat mode for the living room. This is the final straw, a self-destructive snub at the nipple-raising wave of party gaming going on. But even a bridge-screen view would have gone parsecs. And: sighing.

Honestly, I’ve had more fun sitting around at lunch break trying to throw a bolt into a bucket first from a distance, but it’s better than sex with someone you dislike. If the ships could motor or even hit another object in space (they auto-veer), I’d rise up and testify to the power of a good tractor beam. But in too many ways, this game just adds to the legacy of laziness itself. An adequate, fly-by one-on-one with some nerd-candy voices and pointlessly stunning graphics does not the most engaging game make. Score? Half impulse at best.

BACKBEEP: STAR CONTROL II – SEGA GENESIS (1992)
Now this, cadets, is what I’m fucking talking about: Dozens of races with their own theme music and fascinating weapons, including the mermaid power of the Syreen to seduce your crew into space and the “LAUNCH FIGHTERS” attacks of the mighty Ur-Quan! Speed, gravity and witty weaponry like the VUX version of gooey Oobleck made this 2-D descendent of Asteroids resonate to this day - though we did cheat and steroid the game up by blasting the theme music to Wrath of Khan and Sneakers. KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!