I already wrote briefly about Star Trek Online during its open beta period.  Back then I promised I’d write a Let’s Play series using Star Trek Online; beginning with this post, I am going to attempt to do so.  I’ll post one per week, if all goes well.

The majority of everything I write after this paragraph will be from my character’s point of view; if I have something to say I’ll set it off somehow so you know it’s me, rather than my character.  All of the missions I describe will be real, but my characterizations of various… characters… is usually completely fictional – after all, nobody wants to read a literal account of the game.  So, with no further ado, let’s play

The year is 2409.  The Federation and the Klingon Empire are at war, the Romulan homeworld has been destroyed, the Cardassian sector is in turmoil in the aftermath of the Dominion War, and… oh  yeah.

The Borg are attacking.

I’m Ensign Jason O’Malley, a recent graduate of the Starfleet Academy of Engineering.  Welcome to the mess hall of the U.S.S. Innovation.  I’m off duty, despite the Borg attack, which suits me just fine.  It has given me time to tweak my phaser.  That’s basically how I spend my free time… I’m always fiddling with one thing or another.  Last night I improved the efficiency of the food replicator in my quarters by twenty percent, and there aren’t any really bad side effects.  Unless you ask for banana pancakes.  Please don’t ask my food replicator for banana pancakes.  Or anything made with bananas, really.

But other than that, it’s perfect.  Just like this phaser here – it works perfectly.  I’ve only made minor modifications.  At any rate, it doesn’t matter.  I won’t get a chance to use it.  I’m the most junior officer on board, so it’s not like they’re going to ask me to go on any away missions or anything, and the Borg probably won’t beam on board to attack us.  Why would they?  That cube there is a thousand times the size of our little ship.

(more…)

There has been a lot of nerd rage and fanboyism on both sides of the “is the iPad actually interesting” debate.  Of course, that means I’m going to subject you to my opinions on it. So, without further ado…

I have always had a love-hate relationship with Apple’s products.  They’re generally shiny and easy-ish to use, but they aren’t really meant for half of my computer usage (gaming), and it’s much cheaper to just build my own desktop myself.  Their “PC vs Mac” commercials anger me.  I’m very much against intrusive DRM.  All told, I’m simply not in their target demographic.

… Then I got an iPhone.  It’s a gorgeous little device.  The interface is intuitive and responsive.  The built-in apps are slick.  The App Store, while technically DRM-laden, does not intrude with its DRM (as I only own the one Apple device, and even so, apps are transferable to other Apple devices).  The App Store itself is extremely convenient.  It’s handy having an internet connection available on-the-go.

So what does that all mean with respect to the iPad?  Probably nothing.  I still don’t like Apple any better than I did before I got my iPhone… but they do make sleek products.

A lot of people are saying that the iPad is merely a giant iPod Touch.  Others are outraged at the implication, and go out of their way to point out every single minute difference in an attempt to show that the two devices are completely different.  The intent of this post is to show that I fall somewhere in between those two extremes, and to explain why my opinion falls there.

The first question to get out of the way is, “How is the iPad similar to the iPod Touch?”  Here is a short list of the similarities I see:

• The iPad’s look and feel was deliberately designed to be similar to the iPod Touch and iPhone, both in software and hardware.
• The iPad’s operating system is largely identical to that of the iPod Touch and iPhone; it merely contains some additional functionality suitable for a device its size.
• The iPad is capable of running unmodified iPod Touch and iPhone apps straight from the App Store.

You could, in effect, use the iPad as nothing more than a giant iPod Touch, and you would see virtually no change in usage.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we want to make a device that is, literally, little more than a giant iPod Touch.  We take the existing device, and enlarge it to 10″ diagonal.  We upgrade the internal hardware appropriately for its new size, and we redesign the UI to take advantage of the additional screen space.  (We’ll say that these upgrades merely make it faster, rather than adding new features, so that it really is just a large iPod Touch.  Upgrading from 802.11g to 802.11n would fall within the scope of these changes, since no new functionality is obtained, but adding a built-in SD card slot would not.)  Let’s call this hypothetical device the iGiant.

The question now becomes, how is the iPad different from the iGiant?  (Stating the question in this matter actually addresses the crux of the issue – it lets us see whether the iPad is in fact an innovative device, or whether it is simply a giant iPod Touch with some UI polish.)  I’m going to further narrow down the question by explicitly discussing the wifi-only iPad, since I do not intend to purchase a 3G-enabled iPad.

So let’s see if we can figure out the differences here between the iPad and the iGiant.  UI differences are irrelevant, as the iGiant would, hypothetically, make virtually all the same UI upgrades.  Let’s see if we can list any features of the iPad that wouldn’t be on the iGiant:

• Increased bluetooth capabilities.  The iPhone and iPod Touch are only capable of pairing with headsets or with other iP* devices, whereas the iPad is capable of also pairing with keyboards and, theoretically, other bluetooth devices, though a mouse is not supported.
• Video output capabilities.  The iPad is capable of connecting to an external display.  Natively, the iPad will only mirror its display onto the external one, but the SDK allows for using the external display as a *second* display, which opens interesting possibilities for using the iPad as a control panel for whatever is being displayed on the external monitor.
• Local file storage.  This makes it far easier to use the iPad as a writing tool.  While it would technically be possible to do word processing on the iGiant, its lack of local file storage would make the prospect cumbersome at best.  This can be seen in existing iPhone and iPod Touch apps (mostly for jailbroken phones) which attempt to enable local file storage by using the app’s configuration storage as file storage.
• iBooks.  The iPad will come with an integrated eBook store, which presumably will not be available for iPhones and iPod Touches.  Some people will find the iPad’s screen to be better for reading than (for example) the Kindle, but that’s mostly personal preference, but the iPad will also enable additional content in eBooks like color pictures and video, which could make for some very interesting educational eBooks.
• A few hardware peripherals.  The camera adapter is an interesting addition, allowing you to use your iPad as a photo organizer (the iPod Touch can’t do this without using your computer as an intermediary), and the same goes for the SD card adapter.  The keyboard dock is also interesting.

I can’t think of anything else, really, and Apple’s tech specs on their iPad page don’t give me any other ideas.

So based on this list, I would conclude the iPad is more than just an iGiant, but not by much.  Edit: You might be wondering why I dismiss the features I’ve listed as “not much”.  The reason is that the iPad doesn’t do multitasking, making real desktop-class usage impossible, and that in my opinion disqualifies it from being “completely different” from the iPod Touch.

Does this mean the iPad isn’t an interesting device?  Hardly; the larger touchscreen is by itself significant.  People have innovated quite a bit with the smaller touchscreens on the iP* devices we already have; I imagine we’ll see even more creativity when people get their hands on a larger interactive area.

All in all, I think the iPad is an interesting and tantalizing move by Apple, and it does have a lot of potential as a platform, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near the world-shaking innovation some fanboys seem to think it is.

Do I plan to get an iPad?  Probably.  The cheapest one.  It will be fun to play with, and I have some interesting ideas for apps that will be fun to tinker with even if I never sell them.

I’ve been playing the beta of Star Trek Online over the last two days, and let me tell you – it’s really fun.

When the game was announced, I was worried that Penny Arcade’s comic would reflect the gameplay; that is, I was worried the missions would feel contrived to prevent you from using the types of technology that make Star Trek what it is.

More recently, I’ve been worried that the writing would be terrible; the reason for this worry was that the developers, Cryptic Studios, did an absolutely atrocious job of writing in Champions Online.  (The fact that I still liked it despite the writing and terrible balance speaks volumes about how entertaining the gameplay can be.)

Instead, what I find is a surprisingly well-written, non-contrived set of missions.  Indeed the game refers to them as “episodes”, and that’s kind of how they feel.

Space battles are quite entertaining, especially when they get large – two dozen player ships fighting a bunch of NPC battlecruisers makes for an epic battle scene – and the little touches make the battles that much more interesting.  When an enemy ship explodes, you need to get out of the way; I’ve been destroyed more than once when my shields were low and I was too close to a defeated enemy when his warp core exploded.

Ground battles are, similarly, well done.  I had been worried because in a lot of MMOs you just stand there trading blows with the enemy; that’s not how Star Trek portrays ground combat.   Instead, you get a personal shield, and you can dive and roll out of the way of incoming shots, and you have an away team to help you.

I also like that group missions are automatically grouped for you.  Say you’re patrolling the Risa sector; the game automatically matches you with other people also patrolling the sector so you don’t have to sit there waiting for people in chat to say they need to do it too.  It makes perfect sense, and it’s so convenient.

The beta has some bugs; sometimes missions won’t complete, or the graphics glitch and you spawn in ground areas with the ship model instead of the player model (or vice versa, in space).  But these things should be expected during a beta.  In fact the most annoying aspect of the beta so far has been players complaining about bugs.  Guess what?  If you want a bug-free game, the beta is not something you should be playing.  There is a price for early access.  (The other annoying thing has been players not reading mission text, or not looking around.  The answer to “where is the Admiral’s office” is “right where you beamed onto the station, under the big sign that says Admiral’s Office“.)

As a result of the entertaining time I’ve had playing the beta, I pre-ordered the Star Trek Online Collector’s Edition from Amazon.  Now I just have until the game launch to decide whether I want a lifetime subscription; I’m leaning toward “yes”.  I’m having far more fun playing this than I had playing Champions or Lord of the Rings or any other MMO I’ve tried.

At any rate, once the game is officially released and (hopefully) the beta’s kinks are worked out, I’m planning to do a Let’s Play series with Star Trek Online in the spirit of Shamus Young’s Let’s Play Champions Online series (which itself was in the spirit of Rutskarn’s Let’s Play Morrowind series).  I’m hoping it will be an epic story of a young Starfleet officer’s efforts to defend the Federation, rather than a story about how a young Starfleet officer retired at age 30 due to nonsensical plots (as Shamus’ series ends).  This will be an experiment which may fail completely, but nonetheless I’ll try.

Enough said.  Edit: Here’s another.  And another.

Someday I’ll write a longer post about this.

I don’t want to repeat everything I said in my review of the Left 4 Dead 2 demo, but there’s a lot to talk about.

The weather effects in the Hard Rain campaign are quite well done, and the hotel fire at the beginning of the first campaign actually makes you feel like you’re in a hotel fire – you feel the urge to run through as fast as you can to escape the flames, though they don’t actually ever cut off your path (at least not that I could tell).

There are two types of ammo that you can deploy: explosive, which stumbles special infected, and incendiary, which sets things on fire.  That’s the fun one

There are also laser sight upgrades, which increase your weapon’s accuracy.  They only apply to your currently equipped primary weapon, so if you change weapons you lose the upgrade.

As for the Infected, there are obviously the new Specials that I mentioned before – the Spitter, the Jockey, and the Charger – but there’s also a female version of the Boomer.  I haven’t confirmed this, but the word on the street is that the female Boomer can move while she, uh, vomits at you.  (She’s also supposedly louder, making her easier to locate.)

I mentioned the armored CEDA agents when I talked about the demo; there are also clowns (who make noise and attract more common infected), there are mudders (who crouch low to the ground and like to hide in muddy water), and there are guys in fireproof suits.

The new Scavenge game mode is extremely fun, and Survival and Versus are still just as awesome; Realism mode is extremely involving.  I was so immersed that I actually ducked in my chair when a Tank threw a chunk of concrete at me.

My only gripe thus far is that today when I logged on, my achievements had been reset (I had 20-some already).  It’s not too big a deal, but I guess that’s what happens during launch week.  Maybe there were some cheaters and Valve couldn’t tell who had cheated and who couldn’t.  I have confirmed that the reset was widespread, but I don’t know if it was global.

I’m going to echo Ars Technica’s review – Left 4 Dead 2 is well worth the money.