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Former Interplay Dev Talks "Disastrous" Old Star Trek Games
In a podcast recorded at PAX, a former Interplay developer named Thom Robertson talks about the problems he encountered while working on the company's Star Trek titles. In particular, he was the lead designer of the canceled Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, and mentioned how incredibly ambitious initial plans for the game were. "Just one of the many reasons why that project was doomed to failure was because the team and the management had really no concept of exactly how expensive a proposition they were imagining when they set out to do it. I saw the plans. They were looking at four to six hours of created video, and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie. Something did not connect." He also discussed how Interplay was "too close to Hollywood," and the problems they ran into while filming for Starfleet Academy The full podcast (MP3) is available from 1Up; Robertson's interview begins 42 minutes in.
Hmmm. I'd call myself fairly up to date with technology -- I even have a linux box that will play full screen flash video -- but I'm yet to actually understand what is meant by 'podcast'..... I'm going to assume this is a good thing. For some reason, the very sound of the word is enough to make me decide it is something I don't care about -- a little like twitter.
"Podcast" means an MP3 of people talking. That's all.
that is it should be played with an iPod.
Is this it? http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/levels/m-o/ncc1701d.zip
You know, "Old" Star Trek games by Interplay, which captured the spirit of the Original Series perfectly all the way up to the end-of-episode's philosophical discussion and/or ragging Spock.
Wikipedia links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_25th_Anniversary_(1992_video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Judgment_Rites
If you can find these on somewhere and like adventure games, get'em.
Having worked an engineering job for an entertainment company, I can attest that life in the more fluffy parts of such companies are a completely different world with entirely different priorities. There's a continual "glam-factor" you have to deal with that's entirely counterproductive to producing a technically challenging piece of technology. At Disney their HR and Marketting departments were like professional cheerleaders. They always had some party going on--something they were planning. After a while it was a serious distraction, regardless of whether you were invited, and everything was catered. After a while I began to wonder how companies like this could stay in business... turns out only a few could. Oh and who could forget that any nontechnical jobs are stuffed with people who just want to be close to entertainment in the off hopes that while the secretary is performing some lounge-singing jazz number off the balcony (because the acoustics are so great) right next to where your cubicle is... (while you're trying to code a state machine in Verilog) that some movie exec will hear her, and she'll be made a star--hollywood movie fantasy! Ugh... No thanks.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
The point is that with lightsaber battles you can parry and dodge. With phasers you either hit or miss, and you aren't likely to miss at point blank range against a stationary target. You shouldn't have to shoot someone 100 times with a phaser to kill them. If that means that you can't both stand out in the open waiting for your superior stats to grind the other player's health down to 0, so be it. The gaming world would be a much more interesting place if people couldn't rely on the fact that they've played for a zillion hours and collected the superior goat cheese infused medallion of awesomeness to save them from having to actually use their brain and dexterity.
which is totally what she said
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, a first person shooter built on the Quake III Arena engine, was a huge success.
Unfortunately, its sequel sucked and was a massive failure despite moderately improved graphics.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
If you listen to the podcast that the summary is talking about the 'Christmas Party' referred to in the summary was actually the production of a high production value 'Christmas DVD' which apparently served no purpose other than to hopefully get a few members of staff noticed by one of the many hollywood types that were around the studio.
There was a fun Quake 1 Star Trek mod too. It had phasers (including a phaser rifle) and a few hand-to-hand weapons, like a Bat'leth, and you could set phasers to overload. One of the weapons slots was taken up by the communicator, which would transport you to the nearest transporter room, and from there you could transport to most other locations in the ship. If the warp core took enough damage then there would be a radiation leak and everyone would die unless they were in the biosuit (there was one in the shuttle bay). A great way of irritating everyone was to shoot the core a bit then leave a phaser set to overload next to it and activate your com badge. Once you materialised in the transporter room, set the destination for the shuttle bay and transport there, getting the biosuit just in time not to die (while everyone else did). There were some other nice touches, like two holodecks, one containing Data doing a stand-up routine and one containing some of the Quake monsters (holodeck safeties disengaged, of course; and some missing code meant that they could also leave the holodeck and chase you). As I recall, Data used the zombie model but with a different skin, and if you attacked him a bit he'd start throwing brains at you...
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