Encounter at Frontier Starbase

Still fun but starting to show it's issues

Once again Sega Nite started with only myself and Coxxorz. Xbox Live messaged me that Coxxorz was playing Star Trek. This message came immediately after he signed in. So I switched to Star Trek, launched a game and invited him to join my game and party. Then I waited...

Xbox Live did not follow up with a message about Coxxorz going to have supper, cleaning his garage, rearranging his sock drawer. All those things that left me waiting for an additional 20 minutes. I was left trying to remember exactly why I had bothered to switch game disks...

But finally, eventually, Coxxorz joined my game and then, significantly later, my Live Party. Complete with the complaint about why didn't I invite him to my Live Party? I apologized for only inviting him TWICE!

Star Trek was still fun, surprisingly considering the reviews. But the shine was wearing off this time and a lot of glitches and issues began to show. Keep in mind that we are still planning on playing it more and we played it until 1:00 in the morning last night.

Horrible transporter incident or game glitch?

Glitchs and lockups

All I cared about was the amount of paperwork I was going to have to submit to Starfleet over a workplace injury! This glitch is more than you can see in the picture. This is what I saw on my screen. On Coxxorz's screen his character could still move around and everything was fine. In fact he continued to follow me around and kept asking about the delay. It wasn't until I started a coop interaction that he believed me. He could not join the coop interaction. He would get a prompt but nothing would happen.

We had a countdown mission reset. The radio still reported we were running out of time but there was no count down and no mission pointer. We were stuck in limbo. Two tries at reloading the last checkpoint also failed and we need to restart the entire level.

One complete lock up. By me. Coxxorz game continued and my character was replaced by an AI. The game did inform him of this and he claimed a significant improvement in his Kirk partner.

Gameplay

One checkpoint reload kept putting us on a stairwell with no retreat facing hostile aliens, drones and a turret. It got exciting and took a few tries to survive. Even more for both of us to survive...

The Starbase commander was written to be an idiot but it was still weird to see a Starbase under attack looking to the two visiting officers for leadership and rescue. It was also odd to find their communications run by the visiting Vulcan civilian. I know that Spock and Kirk are the heroes but surely some of the starbase staff were competent. The only practical use they served in the game was as redshirts. Which coincidentally...

Death by stabby, needle drone

and...

Death by shooty turret

The Starbase map got to be repetitive. Arguable I suppose as it was a standardized starbase but there were several moments when we thought we had been turned around "haven't we been here before?" and several where we got lost in the maps as different areas, which looked the same, were blocked off by debris.

Character animations which I commented on before started to get more aggravating. The characters jump feet first. It sounds just as odd as it looks. And it got odder each time I watched Spock skip over gaps and debris. Sometimes he was just jumping around for his own entertainment. My Kirk character, unfortunately, skip/jumped exactly the same way. I gather Starfleet has some interesting obstacle courses in their curriculum.

I found McCoy's lines extremely well written and comedic during the Starbase sequence. He really enjoys picking on Spock. Or really hates him. It was a little hard to tell sometimes.

Saved by the bill

Again Star Trek finds itself saved by the $10 entry price. The story line is good (so far), the character voice overs are great, and their lines are solid. Coxxorz and I plan on continuing the game and barring some unforeseen major glitch I suspect we both plan on finishing it.

If only we could count on being the only two clan members showing up for Sega Nite.