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Star Trek Legacy Review
Since late last month, I've been playing with the Xbox 360 title Star Trek Legacy. The fact that it is not a great game should be no surprise. Despite some entertaining plot elements, the title's gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. What is confusing, and troubling, is that this is just the latest in a long line of disappointing Trek games. Looking back on the history of Star Trek gaming, games like Elite Force or A Final Unity stand out from a disturbingly large field of titles that over-promise and under-deliver on the well-loved Trek universe. Why is it so hard to make a good Trek game? Why do developers keep trying and failing? Why is there a Vulcan leading the Borg? Read on for consideration of each of these questions, and a review of Star Trek Legacy to boot.
As so often happens with a Trek title the premise, at least, is compelling. Commanding a task force of up to four ships, you follow a fairly coherent plot from the "Enterprise" era all the way through to the time of Jean-Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko. You can choose between a number of ship classes to include in your fleet, and gameplay consists of real-time ship-to-ship battles. The actors who portrayed the captains in the various eras make a return, offering their vocal talents and a feel of authenticity to the proceedings.
What sounds like a can't-miss formula, though, inevitably flies past the target at full impulse. Ship and fleet control is the most notable failure, and results in individual combat moments requiring more effort than feels right. I found fleet combat most frustrating, as it is so variable how your actions are interpreted. When you begin a mission, all four of your ships are taking orders from you at the same time. Selecting a enemy for combat (by hitting the right shoulder button and cycling through the available options) is intuitive and quick. When all four ships are following your orders, this results in a focused barrage that effectively neutralizes targets. The problem comes when ships begin 'thinking' on their own.
It was never clear to me what prompted this, though I know that giving individual ships orders via the overhead tactical display (available via the 'select' button) always 'broke up' the fleet's command. This is problematic, as the 2D overhead display is the best way to keep track of the action on the sometimes dauntingly large 3D space maps Legacy uses. Indeed, the z-axis is used in the game (unlike in the show), making it hard to keep track of enemy ships on occasion. These are challenges, though, to be overcome: the frustration sets in when order-less ships choose to sit dead in space and absorb phaser hits without retaliating. That's some extremely poor decision-making on the part of the AI, and can mean the difference between success and failure in a large and frantic naval battle.
Another, subtle frustration is the pathing your friendly ships use when circling a target. While sometimes ships do 'the right thing' and orbit their prey at an appropriate range, trying to keep weapons locked on the target at all times, that's not always a given. Often, ships locked onto a target attempt something I can best refer to as a 'strafing run', where they move directly at a target, allowing firing on the enemy for a brief period of time, before overshooting and swinging around for another pass. Overshot on targets can sometimes be quite some distance, resulting in a long delay between assaults on enemy ships. This style of attack is particularly frustrating when attacking immobile targets like space stations and asteroids, as AI-controlled ships tend to fly right into their prey and sort of bounce off. Given the finicky targeting you're allowed to use, this greatly reduces an AI-controlled ship's effectiveness against such a target. In a pitched battle, which is almost all of them, it just becomes frustrating to have to keep so many balls in the air.
That's a shame, too, because combat is actually a lot of fun when things are moving in the right direction. It's extremely easy to jump from ship to ship within your fleet, simply by pressing one of the four directions on the D-pad. This can (generally) allow you to keep all four of your ships active and flying straight. Weapon use is as simple as right trigger for phasers, left for photons. The game does a good job of informing you when weapons can be used, both via visual HUD elements and vocal alerts. Legacy also does a great job of switching up who you're fighting, and what exactly you're doing in combat. Sending away teams onto a space station in the middle of a pitched battle, for example, or using a sensor scan to detonate an explosive keeps you on your toes and stops things from getting overly monotonous.
The plot that strings these combat elements together is all the Trek you can stand, and more, crammed into a disappointingly short timespan. There is time travel, Klingons, Romulans, Borg, and one very weird Vulcan. The plot itself is explained in detail in a comic included as an 'extra' on the game's main menu. To give you a horrible taste, it mentions V'ger, from the first Star Trek movie, in connection with the Borg's origin. Looking back on the whole story from the last mission gives you an 'ohhh' moment, but it's not that great a payoff for the amount of time you spend in the dark. Just the same, overall the story is coherently told and entertainingly written. The dialogue written for the captains is especially entertaining; even the stuff written for Shatner (who, predictably, gets the most 'screen time') is enjoyable in a scenery-chewing kind of way. Getting to hear Avery Brooks intone new lines as Benjamin Sisko was especially enjoyable, and the role DS9 gets to play near the game's end allowed me to forgive a lot of smaller oversights.
Visually, Legacy is a competent 360 title. It's certainly not Gears-pretty, but the ships are all well modeled, and it's hard to make space look ugly nowadays. Ships and stations explode nicely, though larger objects tend to look a little odd when breaking apart. Audio effects use official FX from the show, and the score consists of forgettable Trekesque tracks that back the game's sometimes-tense moments adequately.
Star Trek: Legacy, then, allows the dedicated Trek fan to experience ship-to-ship combat in a way that's never quite been captured so well before. Trekkies are sure to appreciate that new experience, as well as the vocal work of the actors-turned-captains. As a game, though, Legacy leaves a lot to be desired. Gamers are going to find the inexact fleet control and inept AI frustrating, with some missions being bang-your-head-against-the-desk annoying. The first Next Generation-era mission, Revelations, is particularly hair-pulling, and makes the lack of in-level save points sorely missed. If the lack of a new Trek show on TV is leaving you anxious, I would readily recommend Legacy as a balm to your Trekkish needs. Likewise, the game might be worth a rental of you're a 360 gamer who has already tired of Gears of War. It's just not that great a game otherwise, and can readily be given a miss for other, better games.
This leaves us with the question I posed above, though: Why is it so hard to make a good Star Trek game? It could be the difficulty of making licensed games satisfying to players outside of the 'fan' population ... but Star Wars titles like Knights of the Old Republic and Jedi Academy transcend fandom as truly great gaming experiences. Heck, even Spider-Man 2 is a better game than any Trek game I've played, and Spidey's history with gaming is a lot shorter than Star Trek's. Given the dialogue and narration-heavy storytelling that Star Trek uses, it is possible that the Trek universe just isn't a good fit for videogames? What does the lackluster performance of these latest Bethesda titles mean for future trek games? Star Trek Online, specifically, seems to have a Herculean task before it. How do you bring a license that's never seemed to be quite right for gaming to one of the most finicky of all genres, the MMOG?
What do you think? What would it take to make a great Trek game? Are there any Trek games that you think have really succeeded? What will Star Trek Online need to include in order to satisfy you?
- Title: Star Trek Legacy
- Publisher: Mad Doc Software
- Developer: Bethesda Softworks
- System: 360 (PC)
As so often happens with a Trek title the premise, at least, is compelling. Commanding a task force of up to four ships, you follow a fairly coherent plot from the "Enterprise" era all the way through to the time of Jean-Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko. You can choose between a number of ship classes to include in your fleet, and gameplay consists of real-time ship-to-ship battles. The actors who portrayed the captains in the various eras make a return, offering their vocal talents and a feel of authenticity to the proceedings.
What sounds like a can't-miss formula, though, inevitably flies past the target at full impulse. Ship and fleet control is the most notable failure, and results in individual combat moments requiring more effort than feels right. I found fleet combat most frustrating, as it is so variable how your actions are interpreted. When you begin a mission, all four of your ships are taking orders from you at the same time. Selecting a enemy for combat (by hitting the right shoulder button and cycling through the available options) is intuitive and quick. When all four ships are following your orders, this results in a focused barrage that effectively neutralizes targets. The problem comes when ships begin 'thinking' on their own.
It was never clear to me what prompted this, though I know that giving individual ships orders via the overhead tactical display (available via the 'select' button) always 'broke up' the fleet's command. This is problematic, as the 2D overhead display is the best way to keep track of the action on the sometimes dauntingly large 3D space maps Legacy uses. Indeed, the z-axis is used in the game (unlike in the show), making it hard to keep track of enemy ships on occasion. These are challenges, though, to be overcome: the frustration sets in when order-less ships choose to sit dead in space and absorb phaser hits without retaliating. That's some extremely poor decision-making on the part of the AI, and can mean the difference between success and failure in a large and frantic naval battle.
Another, subtle frustration is the pathing your friendly ships use when circling a target. While sometimes ships do 'the right thing' and orbit their prey at an appropriate range, trying to keep weapons locked on the target at all times, that's not always a given. Often, ships locked onto a target attempt something I can best refer to as a 'strafing run', where they move directly at a target, allowing firing on the enemy for a brief period of time, before overshooting and swinging around for another pass. Overshot on targets can sometimes be quite some distance, resulting in a long delay between assaults on enemy ships. This style of attack is particularly frustrating when attacking immobile targets like space stations and asteroids, as AI-controlled ships tend to fly right into their prey and sort of bounce off. Given the finicky targeting you're allowed to use, this greatly reduces an AI-controlled ship's effectiveness against such a target. In a pitched battle, which is almost all of them, it just becomes frustrating to have to keep so many balls in the air.
That's a shame, too, because combat is actually a lot of fun when things are moving in the right direction. It's extremely easy to jump from ship to ship within your fleet, simply by pressing one of the four directions on the D-pad. This can (generally) allow you to keep all four of your ships active and flying straight. Weapon use is as simple as right trigger for phasers, left for photons. The game does a good job of informing you when weapons can be used, both via visual HUD elements and vocal alerts. Legacy also does a great job of switching up who you're fighting, and what exactly you're doing in combat. Sending away teams onto a space station in the middle of a pitched battle, for example, or using a sensor scan to detonate an explosive keeps you on your toes and stops things from getting overly monotonous.
The plot that strings these combat elements together is all the Trek you can stand, and more, crammed into a disappointingly short timespan. There is time travel, Klingons, Romulans, Borg, and one very weird Vulcan. The plot itself is explained in detail in a comic included as an 'extra' on the game's main menu. To give you a horrible taste, it mentions V'ger, from the first Star Trek movie, in connection with the Borg's origin. Looking back on the whole story from the last mission gives you an 'ohhh' moment, but it's not that great a payoff for the amount of time you spend in the dark. Just the same, overall the story is coherently told and entertainingly written. The dialogue written for the captains is especially entertaining; even the stuff written for Shatner (who, predictably, gets the most 'screen time') is enjoyable in a scenery-chewing kind of way. Getting to hear Avery Brooks intone new lines as Benjamin Sisko was especially enjoyable, and the role DS9 gets to play near the game's end allowed me to forgive a lot of smaller oversights.
Visually, Legacy is a competent 360 title. It's certainly not Gears-pretty, but the ships are all well modeled, and it's hard to make space look ugly nowadays. Ships and stations explode nicely, though larger objects tend to look a little odd when breaking apart. Audio effects use official FX from the show, and the score consists of forgettable Trekesque tracks that back the game's sometimes-tense moments adequately.
Star Trek: Legacy, then, allows the dedicated Trek fan to experience ship-to-ship combat in a way that's never quite been captured so well before. Trekkies are sure to appreciate that new experience, as well as the vocal work of the actors-turned-captains. As a game, though, Legacy leaves a lot to be desired. Gamers are going to find the inexact fleet control and inept AI frustrating, with some missions being bang-your-head-against-the-desk annoying. The first Next Generation-era mission, Revelations, is particularly hair-pulling, and makes the lack of in-level save points sorely missed. If the lack of a new Trek show on TV is leaving you anxious, I would readily recommend Legacy as a balm to your Trekkish needs. Likewise, the game might be worth a rental of you're a 360 gamer who has already tired of Gears of War. It's just not that great a game otherwise, and can readily be given a miss for other, better games.
This leaves us with the question I posed above, though: Why is it so hard to make a good Star Trek game? It could be the difficulty of making licensed games satisfying to players outside of the 'fan' population ... but Star Wars titles like Knights of the Old Republic and Jedi Academy transcend fandom as truly great gaming experiences. Heck, even Spider-Man 2 is a better game than any Trek game I've played, and Spidey's history with gaming is a lot shorter than Star Trek's. Given the dialogue and narration-heavy storytelling that Star Trek uses, it is possible that the Trek universe just isn't a good fit for videogames? What does the lackluster performance of these latest Bethesda titles mean for future trek games? Star Trek Online, specifically, seems to have a Herculean task before it. How do you bring a license that's never seemed to be quite right for gaming to one of the most finicky of all genres, the MMOG?
What do you think? What would it take to make a great Trek game? Are there any Trek games that you think have really succeeded? What will Star Trek Online need to include in order to satisfy you?
You need Kirk in a fist fight with a torn shirt and some scantily clad lady aliens. It's that simple, defy authority, destroy property and take people's clothes off.
DESU DESU DESU
There's only one I can think of: Star Trek... Courtesy Sega.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It also has to be delivered on-time and on-budget.
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Because Trek is ultimately about dialogue and not action.
Tension is created through plot devices and not physical violence.
And because Trek is about large (non-nimble) vessels.
Add fast action and its no longer "Trek".
Keep it "Trek" and it's just not that fun as a video game.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
... it's so much EASIER to make a game that everyone will dislike, than one which 10% will love and 90% will outright hate! It's a fine line between fandom and idiocy, so the game-makers straddle it equally.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary was _excellent_. It felt like playing episodes of the old series. The puzzles were logical and TREK STYLE. The best Star Trek game I've ever played. The sequel, Judgment Rites, was not nearly as good but still, shares the place of second best Trek game with Elite Force.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Why is it so hard to make a good Trek game? Why do developers keep trying and failing?
Maybe if they made a game based on Kirk banging green chicks, they would succeed.
Why is it so hard to make a good Trek game? Why do developers keep trying and failing?
What's odd is that it is possible to make a good, licensed game. Take KOTOR for xbox, as an example.
However, most studios seem to see a content license as a "get out of work free" card, and expect that the game will sell on name recognition alone, regardless of whether or not it's any good.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Star Trek would probably translate better into an adventure game series (like Space Quest) since the shows revolve far more around talking (philosophy) than battling foes (action). Star Wars and Spider Man involve a lot more action. There's no shortage of villians that need to be killed in those series where in Star Trek it's all about negotiation/talking with very little death.
In short, if you want a good Trek game they're going to need to switch game genres to match the show genre more closely.
Work Safe Porn
That's not the problem. As the submitter mentioned himself, although most Trek games are horrible, there were some winners, such as A Final Unity. It might, however, restrict it to some genres. You take the Star Trek universe, and make a game where you just take ships back and forth and shoot at each other, and you're eliminating 90% of what makes trekkies like Trek. I can say the same thing about making a shooter out of it, which is why I for one didn't like Elite Force.
The problem is that no one seems to like adventure games anymore. Why can't we have more games like Judgment Rites and Final Unity? Star Trek episodes, although they do contain some action which should not be ignored, are mostly about solving puzzles and making choices that influence the outcome of some event. That's what gamers do in adventure games, and that's why every trek gamer remembers A Final Unity as being so great.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Super Star Trek anyone?
God I loved that game from the moment I checked out the floppy from the local library...
Oh, I dunno. I seem to recall tons of starship combat sequences from the movies and various series which involved exactly that kind of maneuvering. I couldn't tell you why it seemed appropriate to have spacecraft the size of cities dogfight like they were just slightly clunky fighters - maybe those inertial dampeners work better than you'd think.
Or maybe the firing arc of the weapons isn't as wide in the game as it is in the series? The Galaxy class phaser arrays could fire with a pretty wide arc.
Rather than say that this is a defect in the game AI, I'd say that it's an accurate representation of the odd combat sequences from the entire series.
(Hey, know what would have been cool? Port and starboard mounted photon torpedo launchers, so we could have heard Riker saying, "Give 'em a broadside.")
(Hey, know what else? I'm a big dork.)
The article asks for an example of trek games that succeeded. The best, or at least, most enjoyable and replayable one I've found was written 20 years ago.
It was a PC game called 'Begin:Tactical Starship Combat'. It ran first in 80x20 text and later in EGA, but unlike most trek games of the time (which were variants of the old "You're in a 'sector' with 12 quadrants. Press P for phaser" theme from the PDP-11 days, this one put you in charge of a ship (or a fleet) with detailed systems, a need to excercise tactics (instead of just pounding on a 'Fire all' button), and clever (or at least difficult) AI.
You gave it commands using a quasi-english that you could shorten. "Pursue Krager at warp 6" could become "purs kr 6" for instance, as long as it was distinct enough.
Phasers, torpedos, warp engines that could overheat, especially when they had taken damage (limiting your performance or making you sacrifice repair times for temporary speed), power systems management, shield management, all sorts of details but you weren't FORCED to micromanage 'em.
Ship battles could be 1x1, or massive fleets. You can play hide & seek with a Romulan warbird, or escort a convoy and protect it against Orions.
I made a web page about it a couple years ago, and there's a Yahoo groups with a few hundred people that STILL play it today. Someone has even hacked together a multiplayer version with clever use of assembly and a debugger.
THIS is the kind of game that works with trek. It puts the player in the game as themselves, not as Kirk or Archer or Picard. The original Toy Story didn't have Barbie because Mattel was worried that Barbie on film wouldn't match the Barbie that kids have in their imagination. The same thing applies to Star Trek games. If the game doesn't let someone really feel like they're in control of things, or uses so many graphics that it gets into uncanny valley territory, then it'll disappoint at some level.
Keep it simple while keeping it flexible. Configurable complexity, less graphics, more monkey.
Here's a page I made about the game, with screenshots and downloads.
http://hallert.net/misc/begin/begin.html
for the first I don't know how many missions, more than I was willing to wait through. You really shouldn't lead off with a weak spot, even if it was chronologically first...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
That's the part that saddens us hardcore gamers/star trek fans. The fact that you have a rich palette to work with, but it never seems to work. The games either sound really nifty but suck when it comes right down to gameplay, or the game play is excellent, but they use a lackluster plot and/or poor storytelling
The gameplay side of it seems to stem from the fact that the designers love to put in all the bells and whistles of life on a starship, but they put in way too much. They make you micro-manage every last living detail. Sure, it's fun to have to have the challenge of re-routing power to keep the shields up, or to do triage in sickbay, or to try to get the ship to fly between the enemy ships in order to get them to shoot each other, but all at the same time during the same combat? Seriously, a game that "puts you in the center seat" as Captain shouldn't make you do your job and Scotty's (and Chekov's, and Uhura's, and Sulu's, etc) as well.
The opposite side of this is where they get the game play right, but bore you to tears with the story. Star Trek Voyager Elite Force is a great example. It's Quake 3 Arena with phasers...how could they screw up the gameplay? But the story was repetitive. Beam over and shoot this, beam over and shoot that, stay here and shoot the funky thing with all the eyes. Rarely was there something other than "Shoot, Collect, and flip the switch" missions.
In fact the one that was really fun was the mission where you had to sneak past all the Klingons without letting them know you were there...and even then you had to get the isodesium and blast your way out.
If they could do something akin to the later Wing Commander games where there was a story (a real honest to Goddess plot) and a wide array of missions where you play different roles, you'd be a step or two in the right direction
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
I've played hundreds of hours of a little known turn based Trek game called Birth of the Federation. I wouldn't say it was successful, (the company went out of business), but my friends and I have had many long nights battling as the different races. It is by far my favorite trek game.
...for the PC version. The view appears to be that the game was forced out the door by the publishers before it was ready, and as a result it's full of bugs - but if it weren't for that, it would be a good game. Unfortunately a lot of games seem suffer this fate. I would assume the 360 version is in a similar position.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
- I
want to be the one in command of a starship or a battle group. I don't care about hearing Kirk or Picard have an original adventure - it's my game, not theirs. That's why KOTOR was fun - it put you in the center of a unique Star Wars adventure, not a re-hash of the movies using the characters we all know. Most Trek gamers would be happy with an updated version of Starfleet Command that doesn't suck.Starfleet Command 2 http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Starfleet-Command- Empires/dp/B00004TSX7/ref=pd_sim_vg_1/002-4057135- 8454451 was an excellent Star Trek game. Of course it helped that it was based on an already fully-fleshed out pen and paper wargame called Starfleet Battles
Geeks spend a few million in a secondary market for Star Trek stuff(I wish I had numbers to back it up). So I suspect they figure it's a "build and they will come" sorta thing. Except no one has come since A Final Unity, and no one plans on coming.
Star Trek games probably have some off curse like even (or is it odd) numbered Star Trek movies. Except this curse uses like mod1 or something.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
I dunno, I always thought the best Trek game was Netrek :) It definitely made time in the computer lab go by much faster.
While these certainly are pressing questions, a more important one may be this. What kind of knuckle-dragging retard gives a fuck? Get some perspective FFS!
The game was developed by Mad Doc Software and published by Bethesda Softworks according to MobyGames. (The review has the roles reversed as of this posting.)
Like a fool I got Legacy for the PC. Yes, I am jonesing for some Trek, so I picked it up. Sucks. I bought an Xbox 360 controller to play it, and it still sucks. The controls are unusable and the space battles make no sense -- the AI is moronic at best and you have to love a space sim where you BOUNCE off solid objects. Anyway, what about a Trek MMORPG. Think of the base of players you would have right off the bat. You have the class system already set up (Command, Medic, Engineer, Communication and Red Shirt) and quests would lend themselves more to the Trek style than these big fighter Trek games. Just a thought... now all I need is to learn how to program and $15 million in development costs. :)
And that's the 360 version. The PC version is just appalling, and barely usable out of the box. At least wait for them to add configurable controls. Yes, you read that right.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The only real success I can think of in the Star Trek gaming world would be the Starfleet Command series. It's only slightly less complex than flying a 747, but it's as close to operating a real starship in combat as anyone will ever get.
One game series that I fondly recall was the Starfleet Command series. While based off of the Starfleet license, which is distinct from the main Star Trek line (mainly due to the presence of Mr. Niven's Kitties), it did a god job of implementing Starfleet Battles gameplay in a modern PC game. Yes, there were differences (it was realtimeish, while SFB is anything but), but it was quite an enjoyable game.... if you could actually get to the game to begin with.
Everything about the game was buried behind a ton of buggy, useless, and invasive menus. Trying to play LAN Multiplayer with a friend was *excruciating* due to the menu system in the first two games.
It's really reasons like this that highlight how hard it is to make a good game -- in the case of SFC, the gameplay itself was great, and it could have truly been something special... had it been easier to actually, you know, get to the game.
If by success you mean longevity, Netrek has been around since the early 70s.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
8/10
- Are there any Trek games that you think have really succeeded? I tend to define the success of a Star Trek game by how many times I've gone back and played it over the years. I feel like Birth of the Federation succeeded, although Microprose died. It's a real shame, for such a great, complex, and true to trek game to have not been followed up. However, I'm afraid if it is ever followed up, as we've seen once again with Legacy, the bottom line will be more important than quality of the game. Other trek game I like to re-visit: Armada II SFC III Away Team (don't laugh) Bridge Commander Now, if someone could just merge Birth of the Federation, Master of Orion II, Bridge Commander, Away Team, add in a good story line about the Iconians, allow all known trek races including minor ones, great cut scenes, dynamic star systems, ships, and heavy mod capabilities... then I could sleep at night.
As others have pointed out, the problem is that they're using the wrong game genres. Star Trek the series was about exploration, diplomacy, and solving problems. Combat was limited and used a last resort. Therefore, it doesn't make much sense as a flight sim or FPS. Star Wars translates well to combat games, because it was about WAR. Trek doesn't translate as well because it was about TREKKING. That is, exploration and discovery, not so much with the fighting.
My favorite space-sim game of all time was Starflight, originally for the IBM PC, but I didn't play it until it came out on the Sega Genesis. I think a Trek game using the same concepts as Starflight, updated for 2007, could be great. The game was 90% exploration, solving puzzles, and managing the resources of your ship and crew, it behooved you to handle encounters with different alien races diplomaticly, and there were lots of puzzles to solve and an intriguing plot to uncover.
This could make a great Trek game. You're the captain of a ship, you're given a puzzle to solve, and sent on your way. Through the course of the game you encounter a myriad of worlds and races as you gather clues to help you solve the big mystery. In the meantime, you solve other, smaller, Trek-like problems, sort of like in an RPG fashion. An open-ended game like this sounds much more like a Trek game I'd like to play.
If I just want laser blasts and dogfights, I'll play a Star Wars game.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Did Kirk also like Earl Grey Tea, hot? Darn. I don't think the joke works, then.
The reason it feels so unfulfilling is because the whole industry is making a mad dash to the "Looks great, less filling", 7 hour game play, maximize profit while minimizing creativity effort product. There MBA's, PHD accountants and marketing analysts have refined your demographics to an angstroms width of profit maximization vs loss and are laughing all the way to the banks at your expense.
This is why so many games being produced are pretty much rat scat!
Maybe I'm reading too much into the review, but it seems to me that the problems are issues that might be correctable by an appropriately implemented patch. (I don't have a 360, but from what I'm told it can download patches and install game patches.) With the exception of some frustrating level design, as Zonk mentioned, it sounds like the primary source of frustration comes from AI. AI logic can be tweaked. Game companies have been releasing AI modifications in game patches for years.
I understand that reviews should be "out of the box" reviews, which this is, and I wish more games were rock-solid right off the shelf; but I wonder if this is a game where those who are hesitant to purchase, particularly on the PC side, should just wait a little while until patches are released and the game is no longer "bleeding edge". I don't appreciate the "release-and-patch" approach, but it is unfortunately a common practice in gaming any more. I'm just wondering if this is a situation where an AI patch and minor level adjustment might be what could help to cure this ailing game. Of course, that all depends on Bethesda understanding this and releasing a patch.
In fact, does the PC version suffer from these same AI bugs? I would assume that both versions are based off the same code base.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I played the PC version and finished it. The game felt rushed out the door, as others mentioned the space flight did not seem to be like the space flight shown to us on Star trek over the years. The ships colliding, going at all sorts of weird angles when attacking, and the regtangular prism universe (x and y have tons of space, but Z axis has not much). The story to me felt like it jumped around too much as well, going from one area to another with little explanation. It was great to get to command the ships and have Picard, Kirk and Sisko's voices responding or narrating. The ships looked good and sounds were good. The photon weapons lock was horrible, definetaly nothing like in the show. It felt like a flight sim getting a missle lock.
I remember SUSTAR (SUper STAR trek) with a lot of fondness. It was especially cool when I got to college and could play without going through a 300 baud modem and printing the entire board on a teletype for each turn. A friend got an $5 / hour (under the table), 84 hour / week summer job at a local greasy spoon to buy a 48K TRS-80 with a cassette drive: porting Super Star Trek from DEC to Radio Shack BASIC was my first "group" project, and still the most fun.
I was/am addicted to Star Trek: Birth of the Federation. It's pretty much MOO with some improvements, but in the Star Trek universe.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
The one great star trek game I've seen was the one I planed in high school and in college - on a VT100 terminal connected to a mainframe, with the little tic-tac-toe like grid showing you where your ship was.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Star Trek was always more about naval battles, but in space, than a star fighter games like Star Wars.
Can anyone name a good naval game where you controlled destroyers and battleships? There are next to none and what do exist are almost always bad.
What i think could do a good Trek game for naval combat would be to focus on the more "fighter"-types ships of the latest shows. We would have more fun maneuvering some kind of shuttle that can only fire in front of itself than maneuvering a huge and slow ship that can fire anywhere it faces because the guns/phasers are mounted on turrets.
If you want to focus on story, do an adventure game, or a game that focus on the characters themselves and not the "ships" like Legacy does. Or put BIG cutscenes between missions, like Origin did with their Wing Commander series.
Legacy wouldn't have been half as bad if all that combat was a bit easier. I am not some kind of a super-duper mouse twiddler, and I suspect most normal people aren't either. So why is it that you have to fight forty something Romulan ships in the second mission? The mission that is supposedly still a part of the tutorial when people are just learning the game, and yes, I'm on the easiest difficulty level. Yup, I can get eight kills there after three days of practice. I might try it one more time, but it is really such an incredible turnoff. Come on, game designers! Give us some slack! An average person ought to be able to play the game, if only on the easy level. Especially the average person who wants to hear the story more than just fly around endlessly shooting enemy vessels arriving from some inexhaustible source. At the very least, give us cheat codes or something, because as things are now, I have very little desire to die yet another time for no good reason.
It's been all downhill since trek73...
Now, I haven't played Legacy on my 360. I was hoping to download a demo last weekend, but it wasn't available. Still, it's getting bad reviews all over the place. So... *shrug*. But there is a free alternative.... I know, nobody cares about netrek any longer. But I remember first seeing this game on a Sun 3/60 back in 1987 or so and was *very* impressed. It's still a fun game... probably a whole lot more fun than this 360 Trek game. Especially if you're into military strategy gaming.
IMO, that's what a lot of these recent trek games is missing. They focus on the characters, interior imagery of the ship, and blah blah blah. I would love a game that focused on presenting a realistic 3D galaxy with various groups fighting over borders and resources. A kind of MOO Axis and Allies in space, if you will.
Just - please - no FPS type stuff set in Trek-Land. Feh.
As far as the difficulty of making a decent Trek computer game goes, there are at least two major problems. The first of these also had a hand in sinking the show itself.
a) The single most overwhelming problem (which has also hamstrung *every* series and film after TOS) is the question of how much you should try and simply appeal to the established fanbase vs. how much you should try and do outreach to new audiences/go in new directions. Rick Berman's inability to balance this issue was, more than anything else, the single main thing which killed Voyager and Enterprise in the end. With Voyager to a large degree he simply ended up adopting an attitude of, "screw the base," and focused purely on trying to draw new audience, whereas with Enterprise he tried to appeal more to the base at times, but was still unable to balance the issue. I think also the problem is that a balance isn't really possible...you basically have a scenario where the earlier/more conventional series had a philosophical basis of fairly heavy pacifism on the one hand, but where there was a transition period during DS9 in particular where violence started being incorporated more and more as a regular part of the show, until you got to the level of around fifth to seventh season Voyager which regularly had episodes that played like low-budget versions of the Lethal Weapon movies in space. Elite Force in particular was able to use that to its' advantage, and that alone is probably the main reason why that's been one of the only two Trek games (the other having been A Final Unity) that could be called an unqualified success.
Looking at it now, I think the lesson is that because each series had such a fundamentally different approach to the issue of violence, in a game or movie you can't mix series. If you're going to do a Voyager game for instance, you can make an FPS and have it as violent as you want. A Voyager game also wants a heavily postmodern, gritty, and also fairly multi-ethnic feel, with adolescent sexual angst between Tom and BE'lanna, comic relief from the Doctor, Chakotay doing his stereotypical Red Man schtick, and lots of Janeway's trademark moral ambiguity and gleeful abuse of authority.
A TNG game on the other hand *has* to be something like A Final Unity; an almost entirely non-violent puzzle-solver. A TOS game could have some degree of violence, but it has to be 60s oriented and cowboyish in nature, which means unarmed fisticuffs for the most part. The Utopian/"universal peace" vibe doesn't have to be as strong for a TOS game as for TNG either, but a certain amount of it doesn't hurt. I thought Starfleet Academy got it right in terms of having an Andorian as one of the students, as well. That sort of unobtrusive in reference helps to keep the autistic geek base happy, and won't upset normal audiences *too* much if it isn't overdone. Of all of these, DS9 is probably the trickiest to get right, which probably also explains why it hasn't been done successfully in a game. A DS9 game could have a certain amount of violence, but it needs to be kept restrained a subtle way. (Odo's restrained use of martial arts with carefully and clearly performed hand strikes are a good example of what I'm talking about, here) The idea with DS9 is that of a society which has traditionally been pacifist, but which is in the process of discovering that violence is something of a necessity on the basis of self-defense. The seventh season episode, "The Siege of AR-558," is probably the best example of what I'm talking about, there.
b) I get the feeling that in some cases, game design houses possibly (if only subconsciously) had the attitude that because they were doing a Trek game, it probably wasn't going to achieve more than cult popularity anywayz, and so therefore there wasn't much point in making sure that it was a truly quality game. If you're going to do a strongly character/story oriented Trek game, then yes, there is a fairly strong possibility that you're not going to hold much appeal outside the base. Howe
...was that damn asteroid mission. Picard gives the order to use the tractor beam to toss chunks of debris into the path of a huge planet-killing asteroid, but the AI of other ships kept automatically attacking the debris I was towing! To make things worse, there wasn't enough time to do it using only one ship. The solution I found eventually was to send the AI ships to different areas of the map simultaneously so they'd be out of weapons range of each other, have them each pick up an debris chunk, and one by one, place the chunks in front of the asteroid.
Of course, there were no in-mission saves, so having to do this part over and over was pure torture. I don't know if they patched this later or not. As soon as I finished the game, I couldn't uninstall it fast enough.
On a side note, did anyone else notice Janeway sounds like she did her voiceovers over the phone?
The best Star Trek game I ever played was in the pre-PC era - Starfleet battles, played with chits, pen, and paper, with diagrams of the ships to mark off areas that were damaged. Used to play this in study hall back in 1980.
What's to apologize for? When TOS series was still on the air, everybody (audience, writers, critics) agreed that Spock/Nimoy was the #1 babe magnet for the show. Women found the whole supercool hyperlogical scientist schtik thoroughly sexy. And when they started do scripts where he had to battle his inner illogical human, it just got more intense.
Or maybe you're apologizing for the image of Kirk with the torn shirt. Well, most video games with benefit from a little honest homoeroticism...
The first two major Trek games that I played on PC were Armada and Elite Force.
Armada was a decently made RTS, though the single player was far stronger then the multiplayer, but even MP had its moments.
The game tied together many elements from the series, The dominion war aftermath (DS9), Insurrection, The Omega Particles (VOY) and the Borg. The voice acting by Patrick Stewart (Picard and the cloned Locutus), Denise Crosby (Sela) and the dynamic duo of Michael Dorn and JG Hertzler was top-notch. The four campagns tied together reasonably well.
Elite Force (made by Raven (SW:JKII)) was its sister game, set in the Voyager 'verse. Again, single player was unique (the first real Trek shooter), with a storyline that actually 'fit' Voyager (the opening 'mission' was a clever bit IMO), and actually made more sense then what happened in the show itself in the later years (sad, sad). multiplayer was the only downside, as the game used the Quake III engine, MP was basically Q3 with Trek skins.
Since then, meh.
Whenever people mention good Trek games, no one seems to mention DS9: The Fallen Anyone that has actually played it, however, tends to acclaim it! Startrek-gamers gives it extensive praise in their history of Star Trek gaming.
.ocx files it warns you about when you try to start it in XP).
;) (I haven't tried myself since I'm running AMD64 on my main Linux install, which, umm, doesn't make cross-platform emulation that easy, heh).
Honestly, I was taken with the game from the moment I played the demo. Granted, I played the demo far after it had come out (as far as I can tell it wasn't nearly as well publicized as it could have been). But when I did! Even just the level of detail in the weather they had added (realistic snow falling, Sisko leaving footprints on the ground) was pretty impressive, especially for the time, and in general it had a solid and true-to-Trek feel to it in contrast to the glitchy, floaty and "mod tacked on to a game engine" nature of most licensed games. And there was a level editor! Yes, that's right, even the demo includes the brilliant UnreadEd package for creating one's own levels. Naturally this has led to some rather impressive fan-made expansions to the game, Convergence being perhaps the most notable. Alas, the oldskool UnrealEd 1 is a bit tricky to get working with newer versions of Windows, but I have it working just fine on my XP SP1 comp (the trick is compatibility mode combined with a working 98 install somewhere that you can copy missing
And hey, with everyone buying Macs nowadays it's worth noting that it was officially ported to the Mac long ago (from the official website, "OS 8 or higher (NOTE Runs in OS 9.1 emulation mode in OS X)"). And of course the game is old enough that running it under one form of emulation or another isn't too taxing on a system...in other words, yeah, I'd bet it'll run on Linux
I'd recommend anyone who enjoyed DS9, or just feels like playing a well-made Star Trek game, to at least give the demo a chance. It's free-as-in-beer, after all, and to a large degree the openness of UnrealEd and it's access to the scripting underneath the game makes it closer to free-as-in-speech than most games. And keep your eyes out in bargain bins, it shouldn't be too expensive if you find a copy! (I found my copy really cheap years ago already in an EB games store while I was visiting Monroe, Michigan.)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Three dimensions were used in the show, they would set headings of "mark" , allowing for all vectors in 3d space. Rick
Making something out of nothing : MD5 ("") = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
IMHO, "ohhh" moments are the biggest reason Star Trek is unsalvagable. Too many people who write for the Trekverse think they have to explain some stupid little detail from TOS or the early movies. In fact, most of the issues that "need" resolving are there because the premise kept changing (remember the United Earth Space Probe Authority?) or because the writers didn't even understand the premise (the author of "Balance of Terror" obviously didn't know that the show was about interstellar travel, and probably didn't even understand the word "interstellar").
When they resurrected Star Trek back in 1979, they made the very logical decision to simply abandon the details of the Trekverse that were there for no compelling reason, such as making all the aliens look like humans in weird makup. But then literal-minded fans insisted on an "explanation" for the Klingon Head Ridge Mystery and other such bullshit.
Face it trekkies, Star Trek is dead — and you killed it.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgement Rites are, for my money, the best Trek games ever made. And quite possibly the only good ones. Outside of having all the original crew voicing the CD-ROM, the games were well-designed and brilliantly written to fit in with the TOS mythos. They were *clearly* designed by fans doing everything they could to be true to the show. Yes, the ship-to-ship combat was a little clunky, but all they had to work with was Wing Commander 1-era technology.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
See the only Star Trek game I liked was Starfleet academy, it had for the time really good graphics (there stil lnot that bad), the movie sequences added to the game and while much of the game was flying around firing things there was a lot of decision points which did effect the gameplay, you could effect your teams scores, an extra mission opened up if you took anouther route, sometimes you would have to destroy someone if you said the wrong thing in negotiations. There was a sequel known as Klingon Academy but i never saw it in the shops.
As most people here have said Star Trek lends itself much more to that style of gameplay, one where you have a mystery to solve and that mystery might be solved by increasing power to your sensors, or by blowing the ship out of the sky. I think thats why so many trekkie games fail, Star trek is as much (if not more) about morality, investigations and story than just blowing things up.
"What is confusing, and troubling, is that this is just the latest in a long line of disappointing Trek games."
It seems like they are just mirroring the actual shows pretty damn well.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
http://outguard.sourceforge.net/index.html
Can the open source community do a better Trek game?
Nah, probably not.
That bit of fanciful storytelling (that the machine intelligence Voyager VI encountered was the Borg) has been explored in Shatner's "The Return" series of books.
There's also a possibly apocryphal account of Gene Roddenberry suggesting something similar, though Roddenberry had descended into smiling at passersby and shitting on himself by the time the Borg made it to TV.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
I've always wanted to find a Star Trek game that lets you play a certain position on the starship. You could pick one of several positions, such as "Engineering Ensign", "Chief Engineer", "Chief Tactical Officer", or even an Ensign at the Helm or Conn. There could be 2 settings, 1) Easy - where most functions are fairly straight forward or 2) Hard - where most functions are as realistic as possible and may require multiple steps. The hardest part would be creating a detailed training manual to advise users on how to use the systems and what potential issues to watch for (ie. frequency of plasma stream from Matter/Anti-matter reaction is out of threshold or something like that). Of course, everyone will have a station they like to place - like myself, I'd prefer an engineering task as I like technical things, but others might want to be the captain and just deal with making decisions. This would also open up some really great multiplayer possibilities as well. I could see there being at least 7 stations that could be filled in a multiplayer experience. I know that they did something similar in "Star Trek: Bridge Commander" which was an ok game in my opinion, but it wasn't nearly technical enough for my taste and has gotten a bit outdated.
My God have you all lost your mind? The best "Trek" game was EGA Trek. Simple interface. Blow little blips up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGA_Trek
William Shatner wrote a book, The Return (I believe it was his first Star Trek novel too) which dealt with two things. Kirk (because you just can't kill him by killing his body inside a space warpy thing!) and the Borg along side V'ger. I suspect that they were just expanding this idea
Leg Godt!
The PC version has got to be the worst game I've ever played, and it is a reminder why it is prodent to read reviews before buying. When I first installed the game, I completely lost mouse functionality within moments of playing. I found out that this was fixed, along with a completely nonfunctional multiplayer, via the 1.1 patch that was released at virtually the same time as the game itself. Unfortunately the control scheme is poorly documented (the manuals and the in-game tutorial are both woefully inaccurate) and is unworkable. For example, pointing towards a target and holding the "F" key brings up a menu that allows you to interact with that target (i.e. scan, tractor beam, etc). Unfortunately the "F" key doubles as the "goto" command, so when you release the "F" key to dismiss the menu, the game will then initiate a goto command. Even worse, this usually overrides whatever command you selected on the menu, making the menu mostly useless. The controls are not customizable, gamepads are not officially supported, and the developer up to this point has refused to change this. The AI is horrible and there are all kinds of glitches with visuals. One of the most annoying ones is that sometimes, though my ship is the Enterprise, I get voiceovers from a different ship, while that other ship's voiceovers are those that should have been used for the Enterprise. In summary: Legacy for the PC is very poor quality.
I'm going to the casino. Don't gamble.
Bridge Commander becomes a lot more than okay when you start adding free mods that enhance the Quick Battle mode.
Start with NanoFX--among other things, damage to warp engines now appear as plasma trails instead of "smoke in space."
Granted, many mods are visual improvments to stock ship models and effects, or add new ships. Some others though allow beaming to an allied ship, or separating saucer (and other, if available) sections during combat.
Actually, I have to confess I've never played the "normal" game; it's always been Quick Battle with mods. It's a great tactical game using capital ships that move like the monsters they are.
When I first read up on this title months ago, I was estatic! But like so many titles before it, the game didn't come through on execution. It reminds me of most Star Wars games (excluding some great titles) where the premise is excellent, but when you play it, you feel a little sadder for doing so.
At the time of its release, I was absolutely blown away by the Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Game. In an era of classic adventure gameplay, it combined the story telling and feel of TOS with some exciting space combat moments.
But thinking about that game's date of publication makes me feel my age a bit.
A game where you have a half-dozen things to say to a half-dozen people is NOT a good dialogue game. Honestly, good dialogue games must be really hard to make, because I've never even HEARD of one. Oh, and they're expensive per gameplay - because if they're about dialogue and not speed, then once you do a mission right you'll have zero problems with it again. MUCH of Trek is about the "reveal" at the end of the episode, where something is not as it seemed at the beginning and it's amazing and cool how clever the writers were or weren't about it.
Star Wars, by comparison, had basically just one "reveal" in the whole series, involving who was related to who was related to who.
To a large extent it's also about teamwork and team interactions - where people involved in the mission have subtly different goals and you have to work out what they are. That has some definite MMORPG possibilities, if they do it right.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I've won about 2/3rds of the achievements in the game so far.
But... even though the difficulty is set at the CAPTAIN level, it's rather disappointingly easy, once you figure out where certain "snatch" points are in the game. There are parts of the game that do offer more difficulty, such as the mission where you must keep the Borg "busy" while a rescue operation commences to move transport ships off planets being taken over by the Borg.
However, the No. annoying thing in the game is the difficulty in torpedo targeting! It almost seems random when you can get a torpedo lock on anything, even when you try to orient the ship so the portals are clearly pointing at the enemy, you are close enough, and there's been enough time for ship's crewmen to load the torpedoes. It seems even more bizarre to get them to fire even all the way up to the USS Defiant which is supposed to have homing devices so you don't even have to orient the whole ship to fire them.
I'd say adventure/MMORPG/squad/RTS with a blending of human and AI in order to reduce boredum, and micromanagment issues.
"It just doesn't seem too free-form unless everyone is a privateer (in which case, Star Trek is more of a gimmick.)"
It would work not because everyone's the Chief, but because of the interaction with others, top-down (squad). The captian handles the diplomacy. You handle keeping him alive (red shirt).
You must mean Leisure Suit Larry.
As its been pointed out, very few games have been good. What other licensed games have been good? Ignoring sports and racing and john deer American farmer type games. Personally I actually enjoyed Armada. As an RTS at the time I found it to be quite good. Especially since it allowed you to steal enemy ships and buildings, or steal construction units and actually build their stuff. I liked elite Forces 2 and the 25th anniversary game. What game is going to work best?
Massive CRPG combining:
1)The tactical combat of Silent Storm but with Phasers, including destructible environments
2)The dialog and complexity of of a game like Fallout 2, Kotor, Baldur's Gate.
3)Highly detailed space combat that allows a variety of play styles "From the bridge", "tactical over-view" and even the ability to grab a small ship and pilot it yourself.
4)It needs to stay the hell away from any console
5)they need to pay bioware a shitload of money to do nothing but focus on this game for about 2 years and have complete veto on a release date if its not ready.
6)It should be moddable
7)it shouldn't be a goddamn mmorpg.
8)You should have an option of wandering around the many decks of whatever ship you're on and doing stuff during travel time and a generic "pass the time" button for quick travel if you want. Including say a holodeck where you could practice combat scenarios or other things.
Were unlicensed open source projects in the early days of computing. Something like netrek or Conquest or even earlier text mode games on the mainframes were a blast to play. Hell, I spent many (MANY) an hour in the Vax lab playing Conquest. I also spent many an hour on a Linux-running 486 playing netrek. Simple competitive gameplay seems to be key. Perhaps if Microsoft made a netrek downloadable client and put some servers up they'd have a winning Trek game.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"I'm just saying stop using the big slow ships and use the faster ones."
Why not? It worked well for Nexus: The Jupiter Incident
TW2002 was a great BBS door game from the late 90's. I never met a trek fan who didn't love this game. You primary task was to trade at stations, get better ships, colonize and arm planets, and attack other players. I only remember it having the Federation and the Ferengi. You could even conquer the Ferengi homeworld called Ferrengal (not Ferenginar).
It had a wide and dynamic galaxy with secret routes, large planets, and big honkin' space guns. As a developer now I think back and overall it couldn't have been that hard of a game to design and write.
Even though the game hasn't changed it moved out of the BBS world a few years ago. You can run your own copy of Trade Wars 2002 via the Trade Wars Game Server on the internet.
I disagree. It ties in perfectly with Dukat and Sisko. The main point of the whole story. In other words the Dominion was just the stage for those two.
Klingon Academy (KA) is a really great game. Many times over better than Starfleet Academy. It was released in 2000, and still holds a pretty good following. They actually reworked the engine to get the game to run on Windows 2000 ( which was released about midway through the development cycle ). I had the pleasure of being part of the forums for a few years leading up to it. It was Interplays last game before they lost the Startrek license.
KA still has as pretty good following though the MOD community for it isn't nearly what it use to be there are still some people working on projects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_Academy
http://klingonacademy.3dactionplanet.gamespy.com/
There's a link on the second site to the game if you wish to download it. Since Interplay is gone that's probably the only chance you have to get a copy of it.
It has to have a good plot...
I disagree. If I want a "good plot," I'll read a book. Part of the reason why Grand Theft Auto 3 was successful was the fact that its plot was incidental -- most players ignored it, and just drove around exploring and killing and blowing stuff up. It was amazing because it was a fully developed world where you could do (almost) anything.
I love playing the Ace Combat flighter-combat games for PS2. They all have plots, but I couldn't tell you what those plots are because I click through the exposition. I don't care about the stupid story; I want to fly a plane and blow shit up. The programmers spend a lot of time creating cinematic storyboards, when frankly, I'd rather they added a dozen more missions. I quit playing RPGs altogether because, while the original Final Fantasy was fun, its PlayStation sequels choked on storylines. I swear, during one I spent 10 minutes watching a bunch of CGI characters jumping off a train and breaking into a building and riding through a window on a motorcycle -- and meanwhile, I'm watching. Enough already, with the alien and the spaceship and my character's background...I just want to fight some dragons.
Go back to the paradigms, either Donkey Kong or Super Mario Bros: "The story is, there's a princess you need to rescue. GO!!!" Nobody played the game because they honestly gave a damn about rescuing the princess; they played it because it was fun. Imagine if some programmer applied the GTA3 dynamic to, say, TIE Fighter, and you could just randomly fly through space and attack squadrons, convoys, planets, whatever. Ditto here: How cool would it be if, instead of gluing your gameplay to a predetermined plot (probably culled from some rejected script), you could explore space with your starship and find new planets, encounter new species, decide to "tease" the Romulans around the Neutral Zone or decide to warp over to Delta Quadrant and start busting on the Borg?
I'd buy that game. Definitely knock off the A-list voice actors, and stop nailing everything that happens to some linear plotline. Fire all those people, and instead spend the money on innovating the gameplay.
Please don't read my journal
Why has nobody mentioned ST:TNG pinball? It is rated as one of the best machines ever made and is still very popular, 13 years after it was made. There is still a thriving community making aftermarket and replacement parts for it. I enjoyed playing it so much at a local arcade that I bought one for my basement. It's got great sound, nice voice cues, and is overall an excellent game. I highly suggest it to anyone.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
It is my understanding this game was originally designed for the PSP. The PC, and XBOX 360 ports are closely related, and doesn't really add anything beyond what the PSP has.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" -- George Orwell
Haven't checked it in a while, because the ASR-33 tape reader is broken and I haven't enough mains power to fire up the old XDS Sigma 7.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
This is tons of BS. There's always been this myth, by very defensive B5 fans for some reason, that Paramount had to steal everything from JMS because, apparently, no one had talent or creativity at Star Trek. It's funny that many of these same B5 fans have jumped on the Battlestar Galactica bandwagon when the showrunner, Ronald Moore, was a writer (and producer) for DS9.
5 2102171339).
DS9 was designed as a reaction to TNG. B5 was never in DS9's thoughts as DS9's 'competition' was from TNG the first two years and Voyager afterward. TNG writers were annoyed how the characters on TNG got along so nicely, how there were little repurcussions so DS9 was designed for friction and repurcussions. There was no actual planned 'story arcs' (like JMS did with B5) as DS9 was more spontaneous. For example, the Klingon War came from nowhere in the 4th season. When TNG went off the air, the DS9 writers 'owned' the Federation and would come up with things no one was expecting (Section 17, the Changeling Virus, etc).
The idea of story 'arcs' were nothing new. TNG was filled with several of them. Before B5 was on the air, DS9 was slowly building up story arcs starting with the Bajorans such as the Circle to subties of the Dominion in Season 2. Then, each season, the writers intentionally ramped the story arc higher and higher without fully knowing where it would go. The seeds for DS9 were already well planted in TNG in episodes like "Ensign Ro" or the episodes with the Cardassian War. But I suppose TNG miraculously stole those from B5 in the late eighties too.
One could point out that JMS copied from Star Trek more with B5. At the end of B5, JMS creates as Federation (*cough* I mean the Alliance *cough*) raises all the characters to almost near saint-like levels (*cough* the Blessed Sheridan *cough*), time-travel paradoxes (Valin) and ends the great war between Shadows and Vorlons with Picard like dialogue and diplomacy (talk about lots of speeches!). Babylon 5 was a good show. But there's a reason why it isn't aging so well.
(And why is it that JMS never makes a mistake? If there is a bad episode, bad plot move, or something a fan complains about, JMS seems to always point his finger at "the network" or some other entity messing up his 'Hamlet for the 21'st Century' or whatever. JMS does get a little full of himself...)
Star Trek was one of the last vestiges of classical theater you would see on TV. There were episodes that bested "The Best of Both Worlds" such as "The Visitor" and "In the Pale Moonlight". The major difference with B5 and DS9 is that JMS knew where he wanted B5 to end. To him, the show was all the 'interesting stuff in the middle'. But with DS9, the writers had no idea how the show would end which made it more spontaneous, less predictable, and, IMO, interesting. Very unique to DS9 was how the secondary characters (Garak, Dukat, etc.) grew so three dimensionally that they rivaled the main characters. You never saw that in B5 (since that show was plot based).
Even if B5 had bigger budgets, better production, etc. that would not have helped. As Voyager and especially Enterprise proved, big budgets are nothing without the writing. As Battlestar Galatactica has proven, good writing, despite the budget, can work wonders. DS9 went on for seven seasons, and is still being watched today, not because it stole from Babylon 5 but because there was talent behind the show (it helps when all the actors, except for Dax, were Shakepearan actors. One of the requirements to be a klingon, for example, was to be a shakespearan actor to have that 'intensity').
JMS is nowhere near as talented as his cultists wish to believe. You can find the same exact plot of Babylon 5 in the video game "Star Control 2" (including similiar uses of Hyperspace, Third Space, the 'great war', and so on). Is this because Reiche III and Fred Ford stole from JMS too? No! It is because both drew from the same SF stories. What a surprise!
Don't let the JMS Cultist mentality rob you from enjoying one of the best sci-fi... no, television shows... that came on television (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=27468731
Why is there a Vulcan leading the Borg?
Inquiring minds want to know
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
On the PC it feels like a completely different game... Especially with the recent patch - everything runs swimmingly.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
For the same main reason that every other game based on a major name license will be less fun than a generic non-licensed game (witness the overall suck factor of all the LOTR games for another example). After all the markups and indirect costs required to bring a title to market, the studio actually get surprisingly little from each copy sold. Take away a few dollars a game for licensing a major brand, and that has to come from somewhere in the budget. These games can't afford to sell for MORE than the other games, $70 is already a shitload for much of the target audience. They have to therefore skimp somewhere, and because they spent so much on the license it won't be on the artwork, audio, or 3d models. Therefore it will be in coding, story, gameplay, playtesting, etc. Not only that but they can count on a certain amount of sales based solely on their big name license, so they have less incentive to perfect the game.
What... Exactly... Were they thinking?! How could any form of quality control allow the sort of thing that is Star Trek Legacy to happen? Did they let ANYONE play test the thing before putting it in the box? It's one thing to have shoddy A.I. or make bad choices about interface - but to LEAVE OUT controls or have them marked like you're on a console... Ouch!
And what was with the top down tac view anyway? You use the mouse to move around, but trying to actually TARGET a ship... Well, that was an exercise in frustration. I had this reserved at an EB but declined it after playing it. Such a missed opportunity for a great game. How could they do this to themselves? SHAME!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Bathesda's SHODDY port from console to PC sucks more than than a soochow hooker! to be able to target you must either have an xbox controller(WTF!) or a joystick. the game is BUGGIER than a termite mound and i have heard not a good word about it from ANY of the real trek heads i know. i am not a trekkie myse;f but i am one of the leaders of a gaming community that has many trekkies in it. i personally was hoping for something like freelancer with a trek slant to it but bathesda release a total mess. there wasa patch out BEFORE RELEASE FFS! the trek guys are all saying... "well maybe the modders will be able to make something out it"... but why the hell should they be the ones to make a game out it? it should eb ready to rock and roll out the box! the article is right on aboty trek games sucking arse in general. to the best of my knowledge SFC3 was only made stable by the unity mod, otherwise it blew goats in the stability department. the game buying public want games that work and play well and are truly absorbing thing to behold, not a buggy half arsed port, albeit with prettier gfx than the ones before, but by general gfx standards.... pretty standard! all the delays....alll the hype and for what? a buggy piece of shite that EVERYONE moans about due to it's generals shoddyness. IF ONLY THEY HAD ACTUALLY RELEASED A FINISHED PRODUCT! but no... as long as the xbox boys got a playable9even tho the game is still shite on xbox from all reports and the one above. also bathesda in their lack of wisdom released a pc game with ABSOLUTELY NO COPYRIGHT PROTECTION AT ALL.... NONE....NIX...NADA... NULL BUGGER ALL! and they moaned in advance about the game being copied! a half arsed effort from a half arsed team at a half arsed company all in all half arsed! Pax
What do you think? What would it take to make a great Trek game?
Well, what was it that made Star Trek so satisfying to watch - and still does, despite the frankly awful actors of the first series? I think it is because they are not only about flying around, beating up people with funny hairdos ('aliens'); there is a huge amount of cameraderie, deep feelings, grand themes (along with a humour that makes it bearable), exploring the unknown and a lot of other 'soft' things, and I don't think it is at all easy to implement those things in a game.
If it doesn't allow you to reroute the tachyon matrix through the warp coil, it can't possibly offer realistic gameplay.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
- License and agents' fees compete with the development budget
- You generally have a rigid deadline, because marketing is shared with the DVD launch or something, so the game has to be launched even if it's not debugged.
- Design is harder. Many of your best ideas won't exactly fit the original property. If you use them, reviewers complain. If you don't use them, the game is weaker.
- Artwork is harder. Artists have to spend time making Kirk look like Kirk, or whoever, instead of creating cool action effects.
So why do it? Because marketing a licensed game is *much* easier than trying to promote an original concept. Most sales are at huge discounts to big retailers (think Walmart and Book/Game-of-the-Month Clubs), but a good license is as close to a sure bet as anything in gaming.Reduce, reuse, cycle
"it helps if you don't blow half the budget on licensing voice actors though. "
Not as much as having proof for an argument instead of going with a stereotype. But I guess it gives one an ego boost to believe that everyone else is greedy and we're not.
WTF? The borg queen cannot be killed, and she is not species 3295 (Vulcan), but species 125.
I have been a Trek fan (but not a hard core Trekkie) for more than 20 years and reading about what Star Trek Online hopes to do makes me hopeful it will be everything I ever wanted in a trek game. Maybe I am just a little off, but I actually want to be the 'engineer' down in the engine room during a battle monitoring the engines, shifting auxiliary power, overriding safety limits, re-routing power past damaged systems. Combine that with working as part of a 'crew' of real people all working together would be great.
I just hope Perpetual is up to the task.
I'm selling my old copy of Armada II (another Mad Doc title) and anyone who has the PC version of the game can point out the Armada II C header files, and code in the game that says //"COMMENT THIS BEFORE RELEASE" which is left uncommented. Also a picture of one of the developers with his pet goats, and the background nebula of one of the stages who's texture is a direct RIP from the movie Star Trek Insurrection.
Mad Doc seems to have blown their budget on voice actors, hookers, and on their overly elaborate opening logo video.
"To work for libertarianism -- to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual -- used to be
...I thought the SoA (Sacrifice of Angels) mod for Homeworld was an excellent game.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
My vote is for the classic Mac game Rescue!
http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=14030
Sure they had to change all the name for licensing reasons so it's not an official Mac game, but it's the most entertaining Trek game I've played.
I'll give a close second to Elite Force and the Star Trek game for the NES.