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Sci-Fi Entertainment Games

Star Trek Game To Launch Alongside New Movie 82

Posted by Soulskill from the set-phasers-to-not-terrible-please dept.
Paramount announced yesterday that Star Trek D-A-C will be available for download for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC when the movie is released on May 8th. The acronym in the title stands for different types of gameplay: Deathmatch, Assault, and Conquest. It's an arcade-style game, with a solo mode as well as multiplayer modes that handle up to 12 players. According to Joystiq, "It's a top-down 3D space shooter that doesn't require a lot of hardcore gameplay experience to jump into, but it features a large amount of strategic gameplay that'll please hardcore gamers." Several screenshots have been released.
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Star Trek Game To Launch Alongside New Movie More

Star Trek Game To Launch Alongside New Movie

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  • If this game is anything but a pretty remake of Netrek, this will have been a huge missed opportunity.
  • "Why the screaming?"
    "It is a warning, Captain. Beware: The Shovelware is coming."

  • Looks just like Space War (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Holy shit, I havent played Space War in years.

  • They Just Don't Get It... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hal2814 ( 725639 ) on Friday April 24, 2009 @09:21AM (#27700759)
    Maybe this movie will deviate from the norm but very rarely does Star Trek devote a ton of time to space battles. Why the hell are so many Star Trek games based on space battle? This would sorta make sense for a BSG game but for Star Trek, space exploration and exploring strange new worlds make up the bulk of the plot lines. I think that's why those who played 25th Anniversary love it so much. A Star Trek game actually felt like a game version of the show instead of some space sim with Star Trek intellectual property pasted on top of it. Can we please get another real Star Trek game?!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Akido37 ( 1473009 )
      Star Trek: A Final Unity was probably the best Star Trek game ever released.

      Minimal combat, which could be avoided based on your actions, and many missions and away teams, just like on the show.

      I hope the new Star Trek Online [startrekonline.com] does it justice.

      • Re:They Just Don't Get It... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday April 24, 2009 @09:52AM (#27701099) Journal
        A Final Unity and the 25th Anniversary game were both good. You had a bit of space combat (with a horrible interface) in the 25th Anniversary game, but mostly it was away teams and exploring. I also quite enjoyed Birth of the Federation, which was a Civilisation-style game. Quite a bit of space combat there, but only if you chose to play that way. Playing as the Federation or Ferengi it was discouraged, but if you played as the Romulans or Klingons it was encouraged.

        • Re:They Just Don't Get It... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Shakrai ( 717556 ) on Friday April 24, 2009 @10:13AM (#27701353) Journal

          Playing as the Federation or Ferengi it was discouraged

          Actually it was kind of encouraged as the Federation. You got small morale boosts for winning space battles but took a huge morale hit if you tried to land troops and conquer planets to actually win the war. As a result you'd usually wind up in an endless war where'd you destroy their ships as soon as they built them but couldn't actually end the war without alienating the civilian population. Remind you of the present day United States where the public will cheer on air campaigns with minimal American loss of life but go apeshit we land ground forces and start suffering a larger number of casualties?

          To add more irony to the mix, the game actually encouraged genocide when playing as the Federation. You'd take less of a morale hit by engaging in orbital bombardments until everybody was dead than you would by invading and conquering the place. About the only time you could get away with ground invasions as the Federation was when you liberated conquered races from the other major powers. Those were actually kind of fun because you'd get a HUGE morale boost and liberated race would usually want to join the Federation within a turn or two.

          The Romulans were their own PITA with morale too. Believe it or not the Romulan population was almost as picky as the Federation was, just in different ways. The Cardassians could almost get away with ignoring morale. Bad morale == good excuse to build forced labor camps! I never played as the Klingon's or Ferengi. Keep meaning to load that game back up one day but it doesn't seem to like my new computer for some reason -- which is strange because I've had it working on XP before without issue.

          • Hmm, I mostly played as the Romulans and don't remember them having a problem with morale. I didn't often conquer planets as the Federation though, since it was easy to encourage them to petition for membership. I think you could bribe them into doing it as Romulans too - quite cheaply if the Tal Shiar was strong - but I might be misremembering. I do remember that the Romulans were the only species to be able to easily defeat a Borg Cube. The combat system gave a free turn to a cloaked fleet, so if you

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Shakrai ( 717556 )

              I never played with the Borg option turned on. It was extremely frustrating to spend weeks building an empire only to see it annihilated by the Borg in half an hour. Even if you could manage to beat them the NPC never could -- so they would destroy all of your adversaries and leave you with an extremely boring/uninteresting game to play.

              I had issues keeping the Romulan population happy when I wasn't at war. Morale seemed to deteriorate overtime and only going to war would bring it back up.

          • Remind you of the present day United States where the public will cheer on air campaigns with minimal American loss of life but go apeshit we land ground forces and start suffering a larger number of casualties?

            I think the present day United States public is just unaccustomed to fighting a war against someone who actually needed to be fought. Or was there a bunch of going apeshit over Afghanistan that I was unaware of?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Shakrai ( 717556 )

              Americans have always gotten upset when our forces suffer substantial casualties, even during wars with popular support. Ever read about the public reaction after Tarawa?

          • You'd take less of a morale hit by engaging in orbital bombardments until everybody was dead

            When I found out you could do that, it became my conquering method of choice while playing as everyone except the Cardassians. Sure, other races didn't get the morale hit the Federation did, but the Cardassians (and to a smaller extent the Klingons) were the only ones capable of actually getting acceptable productivity out of the conquered planets, whereas with the genocide option, you could get all the planet bonuses and your own people in control, happily working.

            About the only time you could get away with ground invasions as the Federation was when you liberated conquered races from the other major powers. Those were actually kind of fun because you'd get a HUGE morale boost and liberated race would usually want to join the Federation within a turn or two.

            Ugh...unless they were the member of anot

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Shakrai ( 717556 )

        Star Trek: A Final Unity was probably the best Star Trek game ever released. Minimal combat, which could be avoided based on your actions, and many missions and away teams, just like on the show. I hope the new Star Trek Online [startrekonline.com] does it justice.

        Final Unity also had a pretty cool combat interface if you were inclined to try and manage it all yourself instead of letting Worf do it for you. It was fairly overwhelming but actually seemed representative of what you'd expect space combat in the TNG universe to look like. There were a few battles that you couldn't avoid in the storyline as I recall -- one or two with the Romulans (one of which was painfully easy to win because it was with a "modified" warbird that sacrificed weaponry for speed) and one

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dy2t ( 549292 )
      I agree completely. The Star Trek: Judgment Rites released following that game was also great and seemed to capture to a suprising degree the flavor of the old show.

      I just saw the "Not your father's Star Trek" trailer for the movie the other day. It seems to dovetail this new mindless shoot'em up game. I'm sad to see Star Trek de-evolve from an interesting, optimistic future into a rehash of Tom Corbett or Flash Gordon fighting BEMs (but with better sfx, of course.)

      Yes, I am old.

      • I agree completely. The Star Trek: Judgment Rites released following that game was also great and seemed to capture to a suprising degree the flavor of the old show.

        I actually think Judgment Rites was significantly better than 25th Anniversary. The away teams had varied members instead of just Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and Ensign Ricky, so sometimes you got Scotty or Chekov to be engaged in the storyline.

        This variety also led to more entertaining puzzles, such as during a mission at a museum where Scotty had to harvest parts from museum pieces to solve the problem at hand (and I can't remember what it was...it's been a long time).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      Dont make me Ogg you.....

    • Star Trek isn't about battles in general. They happen (especially in some of the later shows), but usually the captain manages to avoid combat with diplomacy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eln ( 21727 )

      Because a game based on the stuff that goes on in the corridors of the Enterprise between battles would be boring as hell?

      Games can't survive on 10 minutes of dialogue at a time like TV shows can, you need a lot of action to sustain interest.

      Besides, the Star Trek movies were always a lot more about combat than the TV shows were.

    • I miss the Starfleet Command games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fleet_Command [wikipedia.org] The first one was cool, but they kept dumbing the series down, so that by the last one, it was less a tactical simulator and more like a strategy action game.

      Hmm, I should dig those up....

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by HoboCop ( 987492 )

      I'm not sure exactly what it was called.. but when I was very young I used to play a text based ST game on my Dad's mainframe terminal at home. It was awesome, you could discover planets and mine for dilithium crystals, do experimental things with your engines, and klingons would pop up from time to time to fight? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

      It supports your statement though... It would be a great candidate for a next-gen 'SimEarth' type of free-play exploration game.

    • Can we please get another real Star Trek movie?

      It seems the dumbing down of Star Trek is continued with dumbed down video games...

  • Wasn't there supposed to be a Trek MMOG? I remember hearing a lot about that about a year ago, but nothing recently.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Jeez01 ( 1442147 )
      Crytpic announced they are working on Star trek MMO, originally it was being developed by Perpetual which went bankrupt. They released some screen shots couple months ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      Maybe people realized that it wouldn't be as cool as they thought when they are phasoring 50 Centarian rats for their pelts.

      • Maybe people realized that it wouldn't be as cool as they thought when they are phasoring 50 Centarian rats for their pelts.

        50 Centarian rats? Are those like rapping space rats?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by acohen1 ( 1454445 )
      Cryptic is working on it. It will be based on the same engine as Champions Online, which today has an official release date for 7/14 which is a very good sign for progress on the Star Trek MMO to really get up to speed.

  • Badly exploited franchise (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Shrike82 ( 1471633 ) on Friday April 24, 2009 @09:22AM (#27700777)
    I always felt disappointed with the majority of Star Trek games. Sure there were some half decent first person shooters, and a few point-and-click adventures back in the day that were fun and engrossing. Then I think of Birth of the Federation, which wasn't awful, but as 4X space games go it was no Master of Orion 2. Ditto two fly-around-a-solar-system shooters that were completely underwhelming (the names escape me).

    I'm sure loads of people would disagree, but I always thought Star Trek games had the potential to be awesome, but were consistently mediocre.

    • Bethesda has been churning games out by the bucketfuls since they got the license. ST: Legacy was quite good. ST: Encounters, which this new game looks most like, was alright. Tactical Assault and Conquest were underwhelming.

      Armada 2 is still one of my favorite RTS and the one I turn to when I want a break from Starcraft.

      I'd say the hit-miss rate of Trek games is at least as good as for games in general. I say that as a confessed die-hard Trekkie, mind. =)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )
      I'm sure loads of people would disagree, but I always thought Star Trek games had the potential to be awesome, but were consistently mediocre.

      I think the same of the TV show.
    • A really awesome game that I thoroughly enjoyed - as much as I could despite it's bugs - was Dominion Wars. I think it had a lot that Starship Command lacked.
  • For and IP based game to suck in die hard fans and than crap all over them with rushed design and implementation.

  • DAC... (Score:3, Informative)

    by hansamurai ( 907719 ) <hansamurai@gmail.com> on Friday April 24, 2009 @09:23AM (#27700787) Homepage Journal

    But does it have Gratuitous Space Battles? [gratuitous...attles.com]

  • Tribbles (Score:3, Funny)

    by belloc1 ( 1118477 ) on Friday April 24, 2009 @09:23AM (#27700791)

    I heard the second level is called "The Trouble With Tribbles"

  • Yawn (Score:1)

    by Yuioup ( 452151 )
    Looks like crap.

  • Screenshot: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Friday April 24, 2009 @09:52AM (#27701105)
    YOU MUST DESTROY 16 KINGONS IN 30 STARDATES WITH 4 STARBASES
                   +++
                             STARDATE  2100
        *                    CONDITION GREEN
             >!<<*>          QUADRANT  2,2
              *              SECTOR    5,4
                       *     ENERGY    3000
                             SHIELDS   0
    *                       PHOTON TORPEDOES 10
    COMMAND

    (Modified due to lameness filter. Really? Too many "Junk Characters" for a "Code" post?)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Alari ( 181784 )

      See? Even the geekiest of Star Trek games made by the geekiest of geeks, was all about space combat.

    • Ah, great memories. I also have fond memories of EGATrek [dosgamesarchive.com], which had almost the same game mechanics but updated EGA graphics. Ran great on my Amstrad PC1640.

    • This was the first game that I found in an old book of programs I checked out from the library. I typed the entire thing into my Commodore 64 and then proceeded to colorize the game with all of the weird color commands that you put into the PRINT statements.

      I remember being so proud at 14 years old for typing it all in.

      Thanks for the fond memories.

  • Top-down? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday April 24, 2009 @09:56AM (#27701165) Journal
    Seriously? They're releasing a top-down space combat game? Is it 1990 again and nobody told me? If you're going to create a strategic space combat game, why not license the engine from a game that did it well (e.g. Homeworld) and use that.

    • Well, if Khan was a genius and his tactical planning was limited to two dimensions, who are the game designers to try to work in 3?

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The real reason Khan couldn't think in 3 dimensions was because he was too arrogant to look up and his chest was so massive that he couldnt look down.

    • Seriously? They're releasing a top-down space combat game? Is it 1990 again and nobody told me? If you're going to create a strategic space combat game, why not license the engine from a game that did it well (e.g. Homeworld) and use that.

      +1

      Homeworld == Best 3D space sim ever. Real 3D, not pseudo 3D. I think Hegemonia used the same engine.

      • While it may have been a good game, I hardly see how it is a proper simulation of 3d combat. In real 3d, the Z axis would just be another component for the distance vector. Simply coming at an angle from above would not give you some sort of magical advantage, as the enemy could point his ship "up" straight towards you. Furthermore, there would hardly be many "holes" in the ship turret coverage, because the engineers designing ships for combat in 3 dimensions would make sure you have no vulnerable spots.

    • Actually, I kind of like the idea of the simple 2D top down shooter. Subspace was a blast and Escape Velocity was great too. It's a shame that most developers don't consider older genre's any more. There's so much that can be done with top-down shooters that's still haven't been done. Regardless, it sounds like they aren't really trying to release a strategic game. Although Homeworld was a good game, it is a pretty old game, and I've never heard about their engine being for sale. They could probably d

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brkello ( 642429 )
      I'm confused, people on Slashdot complain about games not needing to be 3D to be fun and that gets modded up. Now people on Slashdot complain because a game isn't 3d and is top-down. Can we please make up our mind? Or do we just hate everything (except Linux, Apple, and Nintendo)?
      • It depends on the situation. For a strategic space game, the only reason to go with 2D is that 3D is too hard, but since Homeworld this is no longer a valid excuse. For a more tactical game, simplifying the interface at the expense of realism is a good excuse (see Escape Velocity). Games don't have to be 3D to be fun, but you should make sure you pick the right technology for the genre. If you want to make a 2D top-down space game, don't try to make it a strategic game. If you want to make a 2D top-dow

  • So is the plural of DAC pronounced DAX?

    I wonder which version of the combination entityy it will feature?
    Curzon
    Jedzia
    Ezri
    Frankfurt

  • I'll either buy it...or I won't.

  • Deathmatch, Assault, and Conquest ... what? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This isn't Trek.

    Where the heck are the "Diplomacy" and "Seduce Alien Woman" options?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by eln ( 21727 )

      This game is based on the prequel movie. You're mixing up the games based on TOS and TNG.

      The game based on TOS has "Start Fist-Fight" and "Seduce Alien Woman" buttons, while the one based on TNG has "Talk Endlessly (aka Diplomacy)" and "Flirt with Troi" buttons.

  • And the release of "Secret of Vulcan Fury", baby!

  • No sale from Mii!

  • Simultaneous release = bad game (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Friday April 24, 2009 @01:02PM (#27703703)

    Generally when games release simultaneously with movies, they tend to be disappointing, because the rigid release date forces the game to come out whether it's really finshed or not

  • Deathmatch-Assault-Conquest...

    Yes, Gene Roddenberry would have wanted it that way.

  • All Star Trek games are always just rip-offs from other games, just switching the story a bit and replacing the characters with Star Trek characters.

    They should look at the Star Wars franchise. Lucas Arts and the Jedi Knight's series were just amazingly well done imho. Star Trek as so much possibilities, but no one seems to take advantage of it...

    I remember (as a good Trekkie) to have tried every single trek game, and always being disappointed.

    I remember playing the demo of "DS9-The Fallen". The demo was qu

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