My Science Officer Admiral has maxed out the level cap in Star Trek Online, which means he won’t advance in rank any more, but it also means he doesn’t earn skill points. Now if he were already maxed out in skills, that would be fine, but he’s not even close to being maxed in all the relevant skills. Sure, I could replace all the ship’s weapons with Polaron beams, for example, and respec his skills to ignore anything other than Polaron weapons. That would help, but is annoying and lame, particularly as enticing Tetryon or Phaser weapons pop up occasionally.
Now that I’ve hit the cap, I am a little disappointed and the fun of playing that character is diminished. Perhaps I should try one of my other characters, but that’s mostly repeating ground I’ve already covered. My Admiral still has missions he hasn’t done, yet he won’t get points for them. Kinda reduces the incentive a bit.
I will still play the Deferi/Breen story episodes, but the daily missions don’t buy me much, because of the skill cap. Maybe a good weapon will drop, but probably not. So I really will have to think about either starting a new character or playing one of my low level guys.
I’m really enjoying Star Trek Online’s Weekly and Daily missions dealing with the Deferi and the Breen. The Breen ships are quite a challenge, and they’re nearly as tough as the Borg on the ground. So far, the plot is moving slowly, but it has a lot of potential. Most of the missions can be done in an hour each, and this weekend’s one took less time, but was quite a change of pace to play doctor (though not with an Orion green girl, I’m sorry to say). If you like Star Trek, give STO a chance – it’s pretty fun!
So I posted a glowing article about the X series games, which I really do love and have great fun playing. But they do have faults. The most glaring fault is the voice acting. X2:The Threat had lots of voice acting and it was terrible, but (I think) done in a tongue-in-cheek style that knew it was terrible. X3:Reunion had even worse voice acting (the worst of any game I’ve played, I think), but it didn’t detract enough that I worried about it. X3:Terran Conflict continues the lousy voice acting, but due to a bug that played station announcements over half the “mission accomplished” speeches, I didn’t have to/get to hear it. No big deal.
Why do X series games have such dreadful voice acting? Well, Egosoft is a small, independent developer that can’t hire big name talent. And, I think, they get their buddies to do it for cheap or free. And, they are in Germany, so their buddies have German accents. But, frankly, the games are fun enough that all of that is okay. And the best news: the real baddies, the Xenon and Khaak, don’t talk at all, so you don’t have to worry about bad acting there.
The X series of games from Egosoft are some of the best space combat/building/trading games you can play. They are exciting, fun, have a plot that you can follow or ignore, and are very open ended. I started with X2:The Threat, then played X3:Reunion, and am still playing X3:Terran Conflict. In all these games, you start out with a wimpy ship and knowledge of one sector in space, as well as a mission to help somebody or another. Over time, you acquire more powerful ships, explore many star systems, and save the universe in various ways. How you get those better ships and what kind they are is up to you. You can fight and destroy enemies to the various races, thus getting bounties and fulfilling missions; you can trade cargo, eventually building up a trade empire with trader ships working for you; you can capture enemy ships and use them or sell them; or you can build factories and complexes of factories to make and sell goods to others. Or you can do all of the above, which is what I enjoy. One of the great things about the X series is that you can have many ships, including fighters, fast scouts, battleships, carriers, corvettes, and more, and you can fly each of them, depending on your style or your need at the moment. The enemy, too, has a variety of ships, so you will need to match their firepower.
The fighting in the X series is usually done in a fighter or Corvette, with you aiming and pulling the trigger. The weapons vary from projectile launchers to plasma throwers to other types of energy weapons, each of which has a range and a travel speed to the target. You can use assisted aiming (once you have bought it) to help you hit fast moving and maneuvering ships. You choose which weapons to activate at any time, so you can choose lots of damage to destroy a ship or mostly shield damage to convince the other pilot to bail out (so you can take the ship as salvage!). The fighting is the most fun part of the game, in my opinion, but there are others that really like the empire building or trading aspects more.
The X series has the most amazing forums with great people there willing to help with troubles in a mission or give suggestions for places to trade. It is by far the best user community I’ve seen. Egosoft is also pretty amazing – they continue to update their games a year or more after it is out. Their games are available on Steam and the most amazing thing is that I could enter my X3:TC serial number from the disk version into Steam and now I have the Steam version and all the achievements available! I don’t know of anyone else who has done that for their customers.
I have uploaded two videos to show how beautiful a game X3:TC is, but I have somewhat failed. As an experiment, I set the bitrate lower on my Hauppauge HD PVR, and the videos are quite muddy and indistinct. Darn. But you can still get an idea of the beauty of the game. These are 1080p videos, so please view them at full screen if you have a good computer.
In the first video, I jump from Argon Prime to Kingdom End and fly around a bit. I fly near a station to give you an idea of the size, and I’m in a pretty good sized corvette class ship.
In the second video, I give a tour of some of my fleet in Argon Prime. First I fly my little scout near a couple of corvettes, then to my transport, which is huge; then over to my destroyer, also quite large; and finally to my carrier, which currently holds 43 fighters and scouts. At the end, I order the carrier to launch a fighter and fly around with it to show how attractive it is.
Overall, I really enjoy the X games, and X3:TC is the best of the bunch. Get it and have a great flight!
Warpgate HD is a nifty space game for iPad. It was the first game I bought when I got the iPad and it has been lots of fun. The game is filled with exploration of many star systems and wars between six factions that control various regions. By the end, you will work for and betray each faction at least once. You start off with a small ship with minimal weapons, shields, and cargo space, then you fight and trade your way to a big, studly battleship with powerful weapons and shields and enough cargo space. You can also set up mines on various asteroids.
Navigating around the attractive 2D but drawn in 3D space is normally done in a zoomed out view, as shown below. Tapping sets your destination, and zooming and rotating are very intuitive with multitouch controls. The warpgate shown in the image is the travel mechanism between systems.
You can also zoom in and see details of your ship and others. Some pirates are visible in this view. The green arrow lines show the path to your destination.
In battle mode, fighting pirates here, you can use your weapons by tapping on them. Here I have 10 weapons (which is a lot). You can also recharge your shields and select targets by tapping.
There are lots of systems and many missions. You collect cargo from destroyed enemies and can trade among planets and space stations. There are many grammatical and spelling errors throughout the game, which is disappointing, but does not detract from game play too much. Overall, a fun game for any iPad owners that like space games.
I thoroughly enjoyed Witcher Enhanced Edition when I played it a couple years ago. It is an RPG with seamless battles and lots of action, including fighting (fist fighting competitions), loving (sexy time!), and killing of many, many creatures and people. The plot was fine, but forgettable, but it kept the game moving. You play a “Witcher” a badass, but sterile warrior whose job is to right wrongs and screw all the eligible women. You have a number of powers that you attain by increasing your level, but the actual killing will be done with your swords. Yes, swords, plural. It turns out your regular sword is good for killing people and animals, but you need a silver sword to kill monsters. You also choose a “style” based on the number and abilities of the enemy you’re fighting. And while you are fighting, it is important to carefully time follow-up attacks to maximize their damage (it isn’t too hard, so don’t be overly concerned). All these choices have to be managed during the battles and they turn out to make the fighting really fun. It never got old chopping enemies’ heads off. The game is quite violent and graphic, but it really connects you with the action more than most other RPGs (Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights) do. This is a game where you can’t just play on autopilot, because skill and timing matter and are woven well into the gameplay.
Witcher is also quite the bargain these days. It is often on sale, and I see it is only $20 on Steam. Well worth it!
In this Star Trek Online battle, my ship, the USS Ampere, is protecting a damaged ship from waves of alien attacks. Since my ship is a science vessel, it doesn’t have very powerful weapons, but does have good shields, so my hull is well protected. You can see that the battle is generally turning and worrying about firing arcs. The enemies are not very tough in this battle, so they don’t do too much damage. Against the last battleship, I call in a “photonic fleet” of helpers that take the heat off me as we weaken the enemy’s shields and I pump quantum torpedoes into it. This is an HD video, so be sure to view it full screen and at 1080p resolution if your machine can handle it.
This video shows sector map navigation in Star Trek Online. My ship, the USS Ampere, is in the galactic map sort of near DS9 and Bajor. I turn around an enter the Rolor Nebula, an area with randomly generated missions that you can repeat over and over again (and must if you want to rise in the Diplomatic Corps ranks). Once in the nebula, I head over to an anomaly, which in this case is something to scan. Then you see the scanning mini-game where I match the waveform of the scan and get bonus materials. Note: This is an HD video (1920×1080) if you go full-screen and choose 1080p in the video size options.
I’m still really enjoying the battles and exploration of Star Ocean:The Last Hope. I was also getting into the plot, thinking how imaginative and interesting it was, until last night when the plot took a right turn to reality. Whichever game designer thought up this moronic scheme to deny the SRF existed is severely stretching the bounds of credulity. And this criticism is coming from a Star Trek fan, where all sorts of crazy plot devices are used all the time. Anyway, that crazy idea has not ruined the game play, but it does make me wonder about what other silliness will be forthcoming…
Monopoly for iPhone was only 99 cents at the App store, so I bought it. I’ve wanted it for a while, but couldn’t justify the $5 that it normally was.
The game seems pretty good. It has nice animations for movement. The dice roll animations are a bit much and tedious, but we can all probably live with them. Many App store reviews claim the AI player cheats. In my experience playing the game for about 20 minutes last night, I’d agree. The AI player got many double rolls, while I got none, and it seemed to get better rolls and positioning in general. It was still fun anyway. Well worth a dollar!
