Star Trek Online is going Free to Play tomorrow. I have been looking forward to playing this game for a while now. There is only so much World of Warcraft I can take in a given year, and other MMOs like The Old Republic are not different enough from WoW to give me the break I am looking for. Star Trek Online looks to be significantly different, and they have been updating it for months to get the game ready for the F2P crowd.

What really has me interested in the game is how it has the standard ground combat and character building of most MMOs, but then also has a really deep space combat system that is pretty tactical. So in addition to your standard character building, you are also customizing a ship and crew – way more variety then most MMOs.

While combat in most MMOs comes down to mashing on buttons (in the correct rotation for whatever your fighting), STO’s ship combat is a bit different and much more tactical. One really simple example is that all of the ships have shield segments. The simple tactic is to target a single point on an enemy ship with energy weapons to drop that section of their shields. At that point you can hit the exposed hull with torpedoes. So positing actually matters in Star Trek Online, you need to keep your ship facing weakened points of the enemy’s shields while trying to keep your weak points out of their line of fire.

Check out some of the videos below to see how space and ground combat work:

Starship Tactics Part One

Shields, ship upgrades, and bridge crew.

Starship Tactics Part Two

Power management & Boarding Parties

Bridge Officers

A closer look at crew management

Power Management

A closer look at power management

Ground Combat

Ground combat is pretty awesome as well. They have an optional mode that makes the game control more like a 3rd person shooter and really increases the speed of the game. Its pretty cool.

Free 2 Play Trailer

Now that the game is free to play, there is really no reason not to check it out

Irrational Games has a launched a new podcast series called Irrational Interviews. Irrational Interviews features Ken Levine and Shawn Elliott sitting down with members of the entertainment industry and having a frank and open discussion on a wide variety of topics. For the pilot episode they are interviewing Todd Howard, Executive Producer and Game Director from Bethesda Softworks. Howard has been at Bethesda since 1994, with countless classics under his belt including The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and most recently Fallout 3. Howard is well known for his sense of humor and his drive to make great games.

Download Options:

• iTunes Feed
• Direct Download Episode 1
• Irrational Interviews RSS Feed

I sure hope so.

Apparently it is Matt Atwood. What a bunch of crap. Way to put an inside joke from one episode of your podcast at the end of a series of legit questions. If this is going to be the trend for your “quest system”, I don’t think I will participate. I don’t mind legitimate challenges that test my game industry knowledge and deductive reasoning. I also don’t mind if you create quests full of inside jokes. What annoyed me was putting in time to figure out the other legit answers only to get stumped by the last fake one. I didn’t even know it was fake at first. I spent a good amount of time trying legitimate people. Please don’t waste my time again.

Since this quest is full of crap anyway, here are the rest of the answers:

Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, Ed Boon, Richard Garriott, J Allard

On another note, the website recently turned 4 years old. Hopefully this next year will bring a lot more content. I really need to start reviewing games more often. I am actually playing one right now that has a good chance of being reviewed. Cross your fingers!

According to a new post on the website, Ziff Davis will “indefinitely suspend” FileFront on March 30, 2009 due to the current economic conditions. They suggest that if you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, that you should download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended. This is a pretty big loss to the gaming community in my opinion. Whenever I would download a gaming related file from a list of mirrors, the first one I would go for would be FileFront. The website had a bunch of awesome features, such as hosting user files for free and the ability to download files without logging in at pretty high speeds (something that many other sites charge for). We still have FilePlanet and FileShack, but those websites didn’t really come close to being as awesome as FileFront was.

“We would like to give a warm thank you to all of you who have been part of the FileFront communities we have built together,” reads FileFront’s farewell. “Your support has had a meaningful impact for all of us here at FileFront. Again, we want to give you a sincere ‘thank you’ for your support over the years and wish you all the very best.”

*Update*: It turns out that FileFront was saved just moments before it was turned off. FileFront has been acquired by the original founders of the site and will NOT be suspended as previously announced. FileFront is a completely independent company again and is no longer part of Ziff Davis Media. All previously suspended services should be active and working again.

I just realized that the website is now 3 years old. I started this website on October 17th, 2005 using an old PC is my basement. Initially I didn’t really have any plans for the site. It was just going to be a place where I would make an occasional post. I was mostly going to use it for learning PHP and messing around with various web related things. However, I am really happy with how it came out. Looking back, there is a lot of interesting content on here. I just started reviewing again, so hopefully there will be a lot more to come.