You may or may not have noticed the absence of this weeks podcast. We at apt-t have decided to make the podcast every other week, rather than every week. We just had trouble finding enough content to make an hour out of every week, and instead of dropping to a half hour or 45 minute format, as we discussed on the previous podcast, we will simply move it to every other week.

I'm sure this will pain some of you, but you don't know real pain. Real pain is having to cram yourself into a tiny room with Phil every week and listen to him talk for an hour.

Dude.





















Duuuuuuuuuuuude.

Reasons I don't like Star Trek Online:

Your first encounter in the game is with the borg, and they are easy as shit to destroy. Granted they are rogue borg, but I don't care.

Within an hour of starting the game, you are given a starship. Not a shuttlecraft, a starship. You retain the rank of ensign, but you are given a command.

It is not an effective starship simulator, which any star trek game featuring space combat must be, in my opinion.

When your ship is destroyed, it respawns 15 seconds later.

What I would have liked to have seen:
In the beginning of the tutorial levels, you are welcomed aboard a full sized starship in the transporter room, and are taken to your station. If you chose science, it might be a medlab, or a sensors station on the bridge or something. If you chose engineer, it could be deep in engineering, or again maybe a station on the bridge. If you chose tactical, perhaps ship security, or again a station on the bridge. Within a few minutes of your arrival, the ship is attacked. A small explosion takes out the person training you, and you are ordered to take charge of your station. You learn how to operate it, while assisting in the destruction of the attacking vessel.

In the end however, the starship your aboard is clearly losing. Communications are out, and a message has got to get back to starfleet. The captain orders you to the shuttlecraft bay. There you hop in a runabout and the starship covers your escape to warp. At this point you're introduced to shuttlecraft controls and navigation, as well as how to fight in one.

After a bit of training, you send your message off to starfleet, and through some plot manipulation, they set you free in the universe. You can then start doing solo missions sent from starfleet, or even group stuff. As you build up rank and "fake federation money type thing" since the federation doesn't use money, you can get a better ship. Eventually, you can buy your own starship that requires a minimum of 3 people to operate, and you start doing larger, more dangerous quests with your crew of friends or pickups that you invited onto your ship. For example, there's a klingon cruiser attacking a neutral zone planet, so you have your nav officer plot a course there, you arrive and he starts plotting maneuvers, while your tactical officer manages weapons and shields, and you give commands and watch secondary systems.

I want a real Star Trek Massively Multiplayer simulation game. Not a horribly watered down version of Eve with Star Trek branding.

Dave told me to make a post about this, so here it is.

Sorry for the almost week delay in the podcast. I had some family emergencies come up that kept me from getting everything put together. It's out now though, so enjoy.

Addendum:
This is even a week later than I originally wrote this post. The guys who do our hosting had their sprinkler system go off, which pretty much completely fucked over their servers, which are, essentially, our servers. Thankfully they kept good backups, and we're up and running again, with a sweet new podcast. We've also submitted some new shows to machinima.com, which will hopefully be out soon, and Phil got his account back active to start work on DWMM10. Good times.

Phil talks about Mass Effect like I talk about Dragon Age.

On another note, I've reactivated me EVE Online account after discovering during my 5 day free reactivation that the game has improved greatly. If anyone cares to find me, I'm chilling around in the Minmatar regions under the name Parleion.

Also, LOST comes back on in the US tonight. You should probably watch it. It's going to be amazing.