Carl Williams writes, "To say Star Trek is a popular, even years and decades after it stopped airing new episodes, television series would be quite an understatement. The problem with this phenom of an entertainment product is that it is stupidly hard to please the majority of the fans. That has not stopped companies from trying over the years though. Thanks to indie developers, a new take on the show, Star Trek the Next Generation, is being attempted. This is a tech demo of better things that might come, all in nice pixelated art."
Spoony: "Final Fantasy XIV is new and improved! And thats really, really sad.
I quit after 20 minutes. I quit because they wanted me to kill squirrels ladybugs. I quit because my first quest was delivering pie. Way to suck me into the action, guys. By this time in DC Universe I was blasting my way out of a Brainiac invasion ship. By this time in Star Trek Online I was fighting off a fucking Borg cube. By this time in Final Fantasy 14 I was handing off a fucking pie. Fuck the pie and fuck this game.
I quit because after all this time, its a dirt-average fantasy MMO with nothing separating it from the thousands of others."
An American actress who has appeared in video games as diverse as Super Mario Galaxy, Star Trek Online and America's Next Top Model takes a quick time out from her hectic schedule for a 15 Minute Interview With Gamevoices John Armstrong.
VRFocus - Indie developer Thomas Kadlec has released the first Unreal Engine 4 powered videogame to support virtual reality (VR). Kadlec has recreated the bridge from the USS Voyager, featured on the popular sci-fi TV series, Star Trek Voyager. Users can strap on an Oculus Rift VR headset and tour the setting as well as interact with the environment. The software can be downloaded for free over on the official Oculus VR Developer forums.
Thats right, just mere minutes into his interview with Disruptor Beam CEO Jon Radoff, iTZKooPA hit the genius behind Game of Thrones: Ascent with the divisive question. Youll have to watch to catch that reaction and so much more juicy information on the just-announced multiplatform title.
Star Trek fans are among the most loyal and passionate in the entire spectrum of pop culture aficionados. That makes it all the more shameful that they've had their hearts broken by video game adaptations over the years.
A fan of the property himself, Disruptor Beam CEO Jon Radoff knows that it hasn't always received the most love and care from game designers.
"Too many games have been made where they take some existing title, re-skin it, add a little Star Trek dust on top to make it look like Star Trek, and they ship it," Radoff said to Gamezebo at PAX East. "Frankly, I think fans rightfully have some cynicism about these poor licensed products."
Dali Dimovski writes:
From Star Trek to Game of Thrones, to every subject in between, Disruptor Beam is made of passionate fans of many geek series. They're translating that devotion toward the upcoming Star Trek Timelines.
Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut is pushy. This space shooter all but wrecks its occasionally thrilling dogfighting action by never, ever knowing when enough is enough. The game is a prime example of kitchen-sink game design, assuming that if one white-knuckle tumble against a dozen enemy spaceships is good, then waging that exact same battle many times in succession during each and every mission must be flat-out fantastic. In reality, of course, this relentless approach chafes. It wears at your patience almost from the very beginning, to the point where the monotony soon makes you long to do something livelier.
The premise is a traditional space opera saga. The year is 2299, and you play a voiceless spaceship jockey named Adams, who gets into the civil war raging between Earth and rebellious human colonies just as the colonials are about to go all Death Star on the homeworld. The story is intriguing; not everything is spelled out in the beginning, leaving a lot of open questions about the mysterious alien tech that sparked the war, as well as about your fascinating allies, one of which is an enigmatic humanlike AI. There is no shortage of tension created by the threat to Earth--tension dramatically underlined in the fiery remains of a planet that serves as the backdrop to the campaign's second mission.
Transformation brings the fun to an immediate halt.
Most of Strike Suit Zero is stripped down in comparison to more lavish space shooters of days gone by. There are no extravagant load-out option screens, no recreation decks to relax in with your fellow pilots, or even animations during the mid-mission visual transmissions from allied vessels (in the future, everyone is apparently a ventriloquist). The main plus here is being able to play from either a first-person cockpit point of view or from an external trailing camera. Ship models are bland, with little in the way of detail, and mission backdrops are mostly static scenes that are stylish and atmospheric, but still limited in impact, like the matte paintings in old Star Trek episodes. This is a plain Jane game made up for the prom.
Only the soundtrack rises above the waterline of mediocrity here, thanks to futuristic tunes that come off like mash-ups of the musical scores from Blade Runner and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. There is a vaguely Eastern vibe to the music, along with echoing choral odes and never-quite discernible chants of exotic words. The only odd thing about the music is its slightly distant sound. Instead of being front and center in the mix like the usual game soundtrack, the score here is somewhat buried, as if you were cruising around listening to the universe's top 40 station on the FM dial.
Sometimes, simple is better. Maintaining focus on frantic space battles that move quickly and wrap up before you have time to regret what you're playing would have made Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut more energetic and compelling. Piling on enemies and tossing in the Transformers-inspired ship just clogs up what could have been a charming, if deeply predictable, space shooter.
