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!
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!
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!
The folks that run Star Trek Online are doing their best to keep us from becoming bored and to draw gamers in. Now they have added some new weekly episodes, plus some daily repeatable missions that involve fighting the Breen. On the ground, the Breen use freeze grenades and things to slow or freeze you, while in space, they are tough cookies. They are also introducing each episode with a Star Trek-looking title as you warp into the system. Pretty nice! The first episode is up now, and I’d guess the next will pop up in a few days, so I’m looking forward to it!
I also has a fun mission against the Borg last night with lots of fun ground combat. Somehow, fighting the Borg in ground combat seems more fun than fighting Romulans or Klingons. Perhaps it’s that they keep beaming in more to fight!
The new demo of the Unreal Engine running on the iPad and iPhone is pretty amazing. It competes with engines like that of Morrowind and Oblivion for detail and the reflections seem even better. Take a look.
A game that I’ve been playing on and off for a few months is Star Trek Online. Because it is Star Trek, I signed on early, during the beta period, and even bought a lifetime subscription. Even back then, the space combat was quite good, though it is only partially 3-axis. Remember that these are big starships, not little fighters, so they turn slowly and it is really a game of “facing” (which weapons can be brought to bear on the target). The ships can’t roll over or flip upside down, which is different from many space games, but consistent with the Star Trek universe, where ships are always facing “up” unless they are drifting.
Because it is an MMO, some missions are played with other players, so together, you can split targets or gang up on one. Each player only has a single target at a time, so half the weapons may be idle because of facings (certain Bridge Officer powers allow multi-target firing). All in all, the space battles are fun and look good.
In the early days, ground combat was horrible. Since then, it has vastly improved, but is still much weaker than the starship battles. In ground combat, you and four of your computer-controlled Bridge Officers (BOs) go up against groups of enemies spread throughout a mission area. You fight Klingons, Jem Hadar, Cardassians, Romulans, Borg, and more, and each has their own characteristics that affect how much damage they do and how much damage your weapons do. The ground battles can get quite frantic and are sometimes fun, but are usually a chore. But they are somewhat Star Trek-ish, so it’s okay.
There are also a few large group battles both on ground and in space, and, as with other missions, the space ones are mostly fun, while the ground ones are a pain. The exception is a mission to defeat a Crystalline Entity (remember that from TNG?) – this is a terrible space mission that I have never succeeded in. Just stupidly hard, particularly when other players make mistakes that heal the damn thing.
Overall, I like Star Trek Online and think it is good fun. If you have any interest in Star Trek, check it out. The price on Steam and elsewhere has dropped to only $20, I think, then there’s a monthly fee after the first month.
