TheRetroCritic

You can find a trilogy of Star Trek -related retro game reviews I wrote for  1MoreCastle.com   below:

Ah Nemesis... The last of the "old school" Star Trek movies, Star Trek: Nemesis had the misfortune of following the least liked film of that franchise so it was either going to confirm that Insurrection was no accident and the Picard crew had really gone as far as they could or completely the opposite. And although critics and audiences had nothing too positive to say about Nemesis and the film ended the Star Trek franchise promptly, never even giving the Voyager , Deep Space Nine or Enterprise crews a chance to make it on the big screen, for me Nemesis did exactly what it set out to do and delivered something as good as First Contact , if not better. Now I won't pretend that Nemesis doesn't have its problems, every Star Trek movie does. For one thing, Tom Hardy's villain, a young Romulan-made Picard clone, is a bit more cartoonish than he probably should be and looks nothing like Patrick Stewart. He's not bad, it's a decent, very entertaining

And then things took a weird turn... Star Trek: Insurrection , the ninth film of the franchise, is quite probably the least respected of all Star Trek films, and although it's much more watchable than most would give it credit for, it's easy to see why it is often last on people's Top 10 Star Trek Movies lists. Look out for mine on here very soon, by the way. First Contact gave the Picard team solid ground to build on with a respectable outing full of action, gross leathery Borgs and time-travel. With Insurrection, the idea was to go for more of a Voyage Home vibe: a lighter, more one-setting based, more personal story. Problem is, Shatner and co. could indulge in such a holiday flick after three iconic, more serious efforts but The Next Generation peeps only had the vastly uneven Generations behind them and First Contact, their first decent movie. No time to go on holiday, surely! Time to nip it in the bud, I would say. Alas, right off the bat, Insurrec

Finally free from the clutches of the iconic Original Series , Picard and co. finally got their own movie to play with and delivered this much better, much darker, much less gimmicky outing. This time, we're introduced to the Borgs, a race of soulless, zombie-like drones capable of assimilating people completely. A popular race of bad guys in the series, their Hellraiser -style S&M look certainly begged for a movie! First Contact opens with Picard having a nightmare about the time he almost became a Borg forever and little by little, as the current Borg threat increases, he starts to crack up, feeling a responsibility to sort that problem out himself as he still has a slight connection to them but also wanting a kind of revenge, closure if you will, for what they did to him the first time around. The plot sees the crew of the Enterprise witness the Earth get completely assimilated by the Borgs so they go back in time before Earth made its "first contact" with al

Kirk, Picard, in the same movie. As a kid, it seemed too good to be true. Turns out it was. Back in the day, the entire point of watching Generations wasn't really to see the first The Next Generation Star Trek movie but to see both iconic Captains together in the same place for the first time ever. It was a good gimmick and it totally worked: I loved it. Re-watching this seventh instalment for the franchise years later, though, made me realise just how flawed this entire movie was and how the gimmick I originally thought of as awesome actually hurts the movie more than it benefits it. The film opens on Kirk, Scotty and Chekov showing up on the maiden voyage of the Enterprise-B, then a big macguffin solar cloud in space appears and takes out some of the ship, seemingly killing Kirk, who promptly sacrificed himself to save the ship. I say "macguffin" because that's really all this plot rests on since that's what not only drives everyone's motivation