Star Trek Online F2P Tomorrow
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
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
It is hard to believe that it has been a little over 10 years since the release of the first Halo. In that time the series has accomplished a lot: successfully launched the Xbox, sold tens of millions of games, and crossed into other forms of entertainment including comics, novels, and movies. Halo is the game that Microsoft built their Xbox empire on, so it’s no surprise that the game is getting treatment the remake treatment for its 10 year anniversary.
In the past there was generally two different ways to do these re-releases. You could take the approach of games like Resident Evil 4 HD and Beyond Good and Evil HD and just port the game to modern consoles, upscale the textures a bit, and call it day. Or you could go the full remake route of games like Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes and completely remake the game on a new engine. This is the more impressive route to take, but you lose the nostalgia factor when you do it. Halo Anniversary takes a different approach, and ends up somewhere between the two.
At its core, Halo Anniversary is the exact same game everyone played a decade ago. The game engine is still around and running the show. This means that all of the gameplay mechanics are exactly the same as they have always been. All of the weapons and vehicles handle the same, and all of the AI remains unchanged. For better or worse, the Covenant, Marines, and Flood all behave as they used to. Co-op is still around as well, and this time you can play over Xbox Live.
So the Halo “combat puzzle” is still intact and as fun as it ever was. Each encounter provides a great challenge, with the game’s iconic selection of weapons providing the tools to solve them. Despite the game’s age, it still provides some of the most fun and challenging firefights in the series, especially on the higher difficulty settings. Halo: Combat Evolved on Legendary difficulty is certainly the most challenging of all in the series, and without ever feeling unfair. Those that played the game in the past will have a great nostalgia trip, while those new to the game will find what still is a surprisingly modern gameplay experience.
On the outside though, we have a brand new graphics engine and art assets. Everything visual in the game, from the smallest rock to the largest Hunter, has had a pretty impressive makeover. Since the old game engine is still running behind the scenes, it is actually possible to switch back and forward between old and new, allowing you to actually play the original game with its original graphics. It it offers a great opportunity to see how far graphics technology for games have come in the past ten years. I had a lot of fun just switching between the two in each new area to see what they changed.
All of the graphical changes are just superficial though. For example, while the elites have many times the polygons and texture resolution then they used to have, they are still the same height and width. Every rock, tree, and barricade is exactly where it used to be, the same size and facing the same direction. Everything just look a whole lot nicer. This means that the levels themselves also remained functionally untouched. The Silent Cartographer is as great as everyone remembers it, while The Library is every bit as annoying as it ever. The updated visuals do help a bit, as there is more variety in the previously monotonous hallways of Covenant ships, and some arrows added to the floors in the Library help you stay oriented. Overall though, the levels in Halo were well designed and had a good amount on non-linearity to them that modern gamers have come to expect.
All of that graphical fidelity has come at a price: frame rate. The game runs at a shaky thirty frames per second most of the time and can dip pretty low when things get frantic. Occasionally it was bad enough I actually switched back to the old visuals which runs smooth as butter. I am not sure if it is a result of running the two graphics engines or not, but it is a bit disappointing that they couldn’t have locked it down. Halo deserves better.
In addition to the graphics update, the sound effects and music also got some attention. They really should have left well enough alone though. The new gun sounds are hit and miss, with some sounding truly awful. The same can also be said for the new music. As someone who played a lot of the original game, it was really distracting at first to not hear the same music and weapon effects that I remembered. It really messes with your nostalgia until you get used to the new sounds. Thankfully you can swap out the new music score for the old one. It’s too bad you can’t do the same for the weapon sound effects.
The only real major disappointment in the package is the lack of Halo: Combat Evolved’s multiplayer. Instead of recreating it, we get an add-on pack for Halo Reach that consists of six maps (and one new firefight map). They have given a number of reasons for excluding the original’s multiplayer, but it really feels like it was cut due to time and budget constraints. The map pack consists of both Halo and Halo 2 classics such as Beaver Creek and Damnation. Since this is Reach multiplayer, the maps have been tweaked a bit to accommodate the various gameplay changes over the years such as jetpacks. If you already had your fill of Halo Reach online, there is not much here to bring you back.
Still, Halo Anniversary is an enjoyable single-player focused remake of one of the most iconic games of the past decade. It really shows just how right Bungie got things the first time around. If you have fond memories of the original or never got a chance to play it the first time around, Anniversary is absolutely worth picking up.
Top 3 Albums of 2011
Here are my top 3 albums of the year, in no particular order.
Nero -’Welcome Reality’
Nero, an electronic music act from London, England released their debut album this year on August 15th 2011 to much success. The album is filled with great dubstep beats and catchy tracks. Spin wrote, “Alana Watson gives Nero’s robotic skronk a rare injection of humanity, and the U.K. producers are smart enough to build most of their debut full-length around her husky voice, skipping the sampled spasticity of Skrillex in favor of Daft Punk’s melodic big beat, ’80s-inspired electro-pop, and stadium-sized mash-ups of squealing guitar and windy synths.”
Stanton Warriors – ‘The Warriors’
Stanton Warriors, a breakbeat duo from Bristol, England released their 7th album in March of 2011. In the mix wrote, “Dom and Mark have certainly crafted a solid offering of radio-friendly ‘songs’ on The Warriors, full of catchy hooks, vocals and clever musicality. Importantly, though, they haven’t cashed in their breakbeat credentials in the process. The beats and grooves are water-tight as always, but musically they’ve pushed themselves beyond simply crafting effective DJ tools. The different elements just interlock so cleverly, with the Stanton’s clever use of samples complimenting their songwriting, rather than being the groundwork on which the tunes are based. ”
Camo & Krooked – ‘Cross the Line’
Camo & Krooked are a Drum & Bass duo from Vienna, Austria. They released their second album, Cross The Line, on October 3rd 2011. Kmag wrote, “Following the success of 2010’s Above and Beyond, Austrian duo Camo & Krooked brought their second album to the table this year, the monumental Cross the Line. Aptly released on Hospital, their trademark mix of serene vocal-lead liquid, punchy electro, and filthy tear-out featured the likes of TC, Jenna G, Futurebound, and Ayah Marar to devastating effect.”
The Hobbit Trailer
Since I am in the mood to post trailers, here is one more for you guys. The trailer for Peter Jackson’s upcoming film The Hobbit. I am pretty excited to see it:
Prometheus Trailer
Prometheus began life as a prequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, but became something different in production. It still clearly takes place within the Alien universe though. The first trailer for the movie is here:
I can’t wait to see this when it comes out on June 8, 2012.
