Former Interplay Dev Talks "Disastrous" Old Star Trek Games 124
In a podcast recorded at PAX, a former Interplay developer named Thom Robertson talks about the problems he encountered while working on the company's Star Trek titles. In particular, he was the lead designer of the canceled Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, and mentioned how incredibly ambitious initial plans for the game were. "Just one of the many reasons why that project was doomed to failure was because the team and the management had really no concept of exactly how expensive a proposition they were imagining when they set out to do it. I saw the plans. They were looking at four to six hours of created video, and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie. Something did not connect." He also discussed how Interplay was "too close to Hollywood," and the problems they ran into while filming for Starfleet Academy The full podcast (MP3) is available from 1Up; Robertson's interview begins 42 minutes in.
Podcast? (Score:3, Insightful)
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they are all phony shitty titles for old technology
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The parent got modded down, but he's right, Web 2.0 is just "the web" and podcasts are just mp3 files. While we're at it, blogs and tweets are journals and Googling means to search (I've heard people say things like "i'll go google that on yahoo.").
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Hmmm. I'd call myself fairly up to date with technology -- I even have a linux box that will play full screen flash video -- but I'm yet to actually understand what is meant by 'podcast'..... I'm going to assume this is a good thing. For some reason, the very sound of the word is enough to make me decide it is something I don't care about -- a little like twitter.
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"Podcast" means an MP3 of people talking. That's all.
Re:Podcast? (Score:4, Insightful)
Podcasts are also often (but not always) delivered via RSS feeds, so you can keep up to date with a regular "radio show" over the Internet.
I agree, though, what is wrong with giving a transcript as well? I get the British Computer Society emails and occasionally go "that looks interesting" only to go "it's in the 'podcast' section? oh well, never mind".
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what is wrong with giving a transcript as well?
Nothing wrong with it, but it does take time and effort.
left an important detail... (Score:2, Informative)
that is it should be played with an iPod.
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Perhaps the GP post meant his comment to indicate the iPod is where the "pod" came from in "podcast".
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So what if I download these "podcasts" only sporradically, and frequently only one for a particular "artist"? Is it no longer a podcast?
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Is there an OSS voice recognition software out there that I can use to create _passable_ text transcripts of such "podcasts"? I looked at sphinx some years ago and it seems to require way too much fiddling just to get "voice to text".
Great if it's something as usable as: cat audiofile | speech2text --use-model model1 > text_transcript
Apparently nowadays there's commercial software that has pretty good voice recognition.
Re:Podcast? (Score:5, Funny)
What happened to OSS voice recognition?
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all?
Re:Podcast? (Score:5, Funny)
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all?
Sorry, I tried to use my Vista VR engine to reply.
I meant to say "you can find some info on that subject here [wikipedia.org]"
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You obviously do not use Vista, as the voice recognition, and handwriting recognition for that matter, are two of the very few things in Vista that work well. You may have to train it for an hour for it to be 99% or so, but it was 95%+ OOTB when I was speaking to it. I can, however, still type much faster than I can talk, which is probably the only reason I do not use it.
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I don't think sphinx was really intended to be used for transcribing audio, but to respond to a short set of specific voice commands. Last time I played with it was back in 2002... It worked great with my voice, and other male voices, but the first time I was demonstrating it to a girl, it went nuts. Must be some difference in tone or inflection or something.
-Restil
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It appears you can actually search it, so we threw it out.
Re:Podcast? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What matters is the actual information bandwidth, and that's much wider for written text than for speech. We can read much faster than we can talk, and when you have text on the screen, you can skim around freely.
That may be true, but audio wins in two contexts:
Audio has much better upload bandwidth. It's a lot easier to talk about whats on your mind than to compose a written piece.
Audio is better for multitasking. You can read and walk at the same time, but its much easier to listen and walk. You can't read and run at the same time, but you can listen and run. You can also listen and drive. On the other hand, its hard to both listen and read, or listen while thinking about something other than what you're list
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Thanks, now me and all the other people stuck on dial-up are crying. We'd just gotten over the last time someone said that.
--- Mr. DOS
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What happened to good old bandwidth-friendly text?
I... am not... programmed... to answer... in that area. *beeeeeeeep*
You know you are old (Score:5, Insightful)
When they talk about OLD star trek games and you see them talking about Fury and not 25th anniversary... or the freeware/shareware enterprise simulators of the dos era...
Now get of my damn spaceship!
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You know you're old if you remember that your copy of 25th Anniversary came with a video demo for Fury :-)
Are you sure? My copy of Judgment Rites came with that demo, but not 25th Anniversary.
The video demo also came with Starfleet Academy. Which was really the game that began the decline of Interplay's trek games. 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites were awesome. I remember being incredibly excited about Vulcan Fury because it looked like a return to those games, but with cool 3d graphics.
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I still get bitter when I think about Secret of Vulcan Fury.
Oh, and while Starfleet Academy was shite, Klingon Academy was awesome. More awesome than Bridge Commander.
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DOS? MS-DOS? Try HP 2000 ACCESS BASIC. I'm sorry, but if the game doesn't involve wasting most of a roll of yellow paper and the loud clatter of a teletype, it's not OLD.
Now get off my mock-up of the Bridge set.
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Yeah, I was hoping to read about 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites too â" 25th was one of the first computer games I ever bought. (Third actually, after Space Quest V and Sim City.)
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EGA Trek is still fun to play. You should look for the old 2.x versions that still feature Star Trek races instead of made-up ones (yay lawyers). I also still like to play Begin2 from time to time.
Why yes, I /did/ play "classical" Star Trek games on my Apple //c and DOS machine back in the day, and I even sometimes fire up the one that comes in the bsdgames package.
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--Back in the day (high school) I remember optimizing a spaghetti-code BASICA TREK program. Mainly changing the input+enter to 2-key combos, colorizing the "tactical grid" from white to green, and making the ASCII-art Enterprise Warp pylons look better...
--Tried porting it to Powerbasic (286 back then, doncha know) and the thing wouldn't import - it was over 64K without the binary tokens! // might see if I still have teh code lying about somewhere, just for kicks
True That (Score:2)
Meanwhile I can't remember a commercial trek game that I actually felt inclined to play other than the coin-op one, which was similarly simple.
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I still play Super Star Trek.
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Where's the love for The Kobayashi Alternative? [wikipedia.org]
The old problem (Score:4, Insightful)
It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap. Of course, third person shooters, even if your weapon is a lightsaber, are much easier to make than space fighter simulations, especially when there actually is not one dude commanding and piloting the ship himself but a whole bunch of people working together. Nobody ever accused capturing that as being easy.
I was putting high hopes into STOnline... until I saw that video from E3, I believe it was. Two Klingons standing across the hall from five Federation type people. One of them stands directly in front of the Klingon. So what happens? A short bout of Phaser fire and perhaps a bit of one on one? No. It took them like thirty seconds to take an unmoving target down and surely somewhere among ten to fifteen Phaser blasts.
So basically, they copied WoW. You have your stats, the enemy has his and you just trade blows until the weaker one dies.
WTF?
When did that EVER happen in ANY Star Trek series or movie? They use weapons that kill instantly (or at least stun, unless you are Borg). Not swords or axes that may be excused with glancing blows.
So yes, making this somewhat 'realistic' is harder than a fantasy game for the masses. You should have realized that even before you began.
I believe Star Trek games are crappy because the developers feel we ST fans are somehow pretty dumb. That we'll gobble up any game that even hints as letting us play as our heroes. So they slap some crude Star Trek graphics on the cheapest source code they can find. They cut corners when something is harder to do.
So what do you expect?
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Good star trek games exist. They are fewer than crappy ST games, but still.
ST: Away team, while displaying an evident lack of originality (it was basically just commando in space), was very decent.
Re:The old problem (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to make a good game based on a series/movie/comic book/whatever, you need to capture the spirit of the base.
Star Trek is about mystery, riddles, discovery, and technobabble. Aside from the technobabble this is difficult to do right - not many games have this at their core. Compare this with Star Wars with is about action with a touch of Mysticism. The action part has been done in a lot of games, and is easy to do right.
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The action part has been done in a lot of games, and is easy to do right.
If it's so easy, how come there are so many shitty action games out there, with more coming ("WET", I'm looking at you..). And what's with this fad of getting people to time button presses just to progress what is usually a cut-scene? I'd rather watch the cut scene (as opposed to watching the bottom of the screen to make sure I don't miss a button press), or have no cut-scene at all.
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Actually, I'm thinking that the Half Life series has a lot of that going on. I would think that the source engine would be a good base to create a Star Trek game around. Great physics, great graphics, and a lot of potential to interact with the environment.
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Re:The old problem (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a little unfair to say that all Star Trek games have been awful. The old 25th Anniversary adventure game which came out back in the 90s was decent. Perhaps not on the level of the Lucasarts adventures of the day, but it was certainly a game you could play, have fun with, and feel like you were doing something in the Star Trek universe. Starfleet Academy and Klingon Academy were good, if somewhat eccentric, space-shooters, while the Starfleet Command games were decent implementations of a tactical board-game which could have been excellent with a bit more polish.
Yes, there have been a good number of stinkers as well (particularly the FMV-adventure games), but let's look at the other franchise you name; Star Wars.
Back in the early and mid-90s, a Star Wars logo on a game was pretty much a sure sign of quality. On the PC, you had the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and Dark Forces (by far the most intelligent product of the "Doom clone" generation of fpses). On the consoles, you had the Super Star Wars series, which were great (if perhaps overly difficult) platformers.
However, around about the time the sequels started appearing, the quality took a nose-dive. The Episode 1 games ranged from the mediocre and unoriginal (Pod Racer) to the downright awful (anything with Gungans in it). In fact, you could even argue that the rot set in earlier; Supremacy and Force Commander were very poor games, while X-Wing vs TIE Fighter was a disappointment to most people. The TIE-ins (no pun originally intended, but I found I'd typed that and decided to keep it) with the later prequels were no better.
Ok, the games have pulled back a little now from their Episode 1/Episode 2 nadir. KoTOR was excellent (though we can blame BioWare for that), Jedi Knight 2 was fairly good, a few of the RTSes have been ok and X-Wing Alliance repaired much of the damage done by XvT. But the Star Wars gaming franchise still has a pretty chequered history over the last decade, certainly as much so as Star Trek.
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Well, I don't expect anything to be decent that is modelled after Episodes one to three. A turd is a turd, after all.
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Sometimes turds can have good uses (thinking fuel/fertiliser). I always though the Tomb Raider series was a turd, but I actually enjoyed the first movie. The second one wasn't up to much though.
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Except for Jedi Outcast - done by Raven, and one of the best Star Wars games ever.
Re:The old problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Phasers one-shot targets for one reason, and one reason only: plot. The only times that combat was a going plot concern in any Star Trek series, the phasers were plotted out of existence or plenty of cover and bad marksmanship was provided.
I don't think this game is going to be any better than the array of godawful Interplay releases, but complaining that a weapon in an MMO doesn't kill people outright is ridiculous.
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The point is that with lightsaber battles you can parry and dodge. With phasers you either hit or miss, and you aren't likely to miss at point blank range against a stationary target. You shouldn't have to shoot someone 100 times with a phaser to kill them. If that means that you can't both stand out in the open waiting for your superior stats to grind the other player's health down to 0, so be it. The gaming world would be a much more interesting place if people couldn't rely on the fact that they've playe
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Thank you, that is exactly what I'm talking about.
They don't have to all be one hit kills. But how good can immersion be if your enemy and you just stand across each other being blasted repeatedly by deadly weapons? In FPS games, there is a concept called relativity. You get hit by a handgun in the shoulder? No big. If it happens to be a tank shell, you're dead. Doesn't matter what 'level' you are.
I mean this is supposed to be a role playing game, or am I wrong? How much immersion can you expect, when peopl
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If you're expecting immersion to trump playability and fun in an MMO, you're either totally ignorant of the genre or looking for a reason to complain. Phasers are a staple of the setting, but one-shot kills are neither interesting nor fun for the players. MMO combat is not a scenario where you get killed, respawn at your conveniently located base, and run back into the fi
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And I still fail to see your point.
First, why can't an MMO not contain FPS bits when it clearly makes sense? Is standing there, in the middle of a corridor, taking shots left and right for thirty seconds any more enjoyable than actually, gasp, having to do something to survive?
MMO, as far as I remember, stands for massive, multi-user and online. Which of those would a realistic ST RPG not conform to? Just because YOU think MMO equals WoW-style gameplay?
With one hit kills, you at least don't have the problem
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You are wrong, MMORPGs are power-fantasy games. Not that that matters, since the whole concept of gaining more hit points as you play originates with RPGs.
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Easy solution to this problem. Star Trek is better suited to adventure games than action games. 25th Anniversary and A Final Unity were hands down the best Star Trek games. Stick with what works. Star Trek games should be adventure games.
Re:The old problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. The creator of the former built its own game studio to make sure the games were made right; the latter whored out its IP to anyone who asked.
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Unfortunately, its sequel sucked and was a massive failure despite moderately improved graphics.
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Not all of the Trek games were shit: 25th Anniversary was REALLY good, and captured the feel of the show VERY nicely.
I also liked - well, I liked the idea of, though the execution was lacking - Birth of the Federation. It was an interesting game, and had it been moddable to make some parts more reasonable, that would have been great. The problem was that the balance was really, really off in some places (send in the birds of prey! Everything dies before it can fight back; who cares if you can't stay cloaked
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The combat in 25th Anniversary was poor, but the rest of the game was a lot of fun. A Final Unity was also fun. Borg was okay, if you thought of it as a feature-length episode with some clicking required. I enjoyed Birth of the Federation, although someone borrowed my copy and never gave it back. Hidden Evil was quite fun, but went very silly toward the end.
What do all of these games have in common? None of them is an FPS. Mind you, the worst Star Trek 'game' I ever played was Starship Creator, so
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Me and my friend spent HOURS playing BotF. An amazing game and a perfect fit for Star Trek I thought, suprised they didn't make more or fixed some of the massive bugs that game had. The balancing issues were huge like you said, but had the sequal not been canned probably been fixed. Sigh I miss that game :-(
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SW games are either a derivative of the FPS or the old WW2 style dogfighting/"sims" as they are called on consoles
The ST Armada RTS games were very popular but after a while they got boring as every mission was the same thing. they had a few single to a few ship combat games but they were a pain in the ass to play as you had to always spin around to fire weapons on different parts of the ship. even in the the 21st century we don't have this problem on warships.
it's the same concept as Madden NFL. A "realist
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It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap.
I think that is because, conceptually, Star Trek is deeply layered, insightful, and eloquent, using masterful techniques that do not translate well into simple video games. When placed into the context of an interactive piece, Star Trek feels hollow.
Star Wars, on the other hand, was always about the special effects and excitement. These kind of concepts are more consistent with modern video game techniques and as such, the Star Wars games translate easily.
Starfleet Command (Score:3, Insightful)
I especially enjoyed the 3rd game in the series for bringing it up to the more recent era of Trek and adding in customizable ships.
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Quake 2 Map (Score:5, Interesting)
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I played the EF series to death, literally. I clanned up just like the Quake days (Fraggers United) and played for tens of hours each week until there were no longer enough online players to get a 6 v 6 match going. It's unfortunate that the EF2 release was so cartoonish and slow, it ruined the game and people quit playing.
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They are terrible games. The first one was just atrocious, bland levels and terrible combat. The second one was basically a pre-cursor to Quake 4, which suffers the same horrible design ...
"Okay we've landed on this space ship that's suffered an attack, we need to go here now. C'mon team let's go!"
"Oh look, a door is stuck half open, everyone stay here, Player, you go three floors down and turn the switch back on to make it open"
"You're back, sweet, let's go"
"Oh look, just around the corner is the elevator
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Is this it? http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/levels/m-o/ncc1701d.zip [gamers.org]
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Best x-mas party ever! (Score:4, Insightful)
That quote made me smile:
He points out other roadblocks to development, such as Christmas party planning distractions
Yeah, because had everyone ordered supper and stayed late instead of going to the party and got in early the morning after instead of over-sleeping from alcohol intoxication during a Saturday, they surely would have made their deadline! Hey, they even provided the sleeping bags.
Oh, and Bob and Cindy spent a couple of hours planning the party each few weeks prior to it. 30 minutes of video footage lost right there!
Management primer: if you're seriously thinking about making your employees skip a Christmas party, the schedule started slipping a looong time ago!
Re:Best x-mas party ever! (Score:4, Informative)
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BotF (Score:3, Insightful)
The game Birth of the Federation [wikipedia.org] has been an
excellent Star Trek game. Friends of mine still play it on a regular basis
even though it's a decade old.
CU, Martin
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Yes. The Star Trek: Armada games were pretty damn fun, too.
Ignoring Engineers (Score:1)
Ignoring the engineers finally led to disaster. This had to happen eventually. Fortunately no interns were blown up due to power surges in their computers.
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I can'na change the laws of software development captain!
I thought it was about 25th annivesary + sequel (Score:3, Informative)
You know, "Old" Star Trek games by Interplay, which captured the spirit of the Original Series perfectly all the way up to the end-of-episode's philosophical discussion and/or ragging Spock.
Wikipedia links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_25th_Anniversary_(1992_video_game) [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Judgment_Rites [wikipedia.org]
If you can find these on somewhere and like adventure games, get'em.
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Because of that I make sure to keep a working computer that can play it (currently a 133MHz AMD '586', more like a 486-DX5, with 64MB of FPM RAM and a 500MB HDD)
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Have you tried DOSBox?
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Speaking of Star Trek games, Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity [wikipedia.org] was pretty good too, even if it wasn't by Interplay.
Except for the spaceship battles, which sucked.
Oh, hmm, I also don't remember playing Star Trek: Judgement Rites... I should check if it's on the Interplay 10th Anniversary Collection, which I also have lying around somewhere.
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Yep, I still have that somewhere. They originally planned a whole freeform portion included but that kinda got done away with. The adventure itself is ok. Should probably test how it works through Dosbox.
Voyager arcade (Score:1)
Doesn't count (Score:3, Interesting)
Arcade games are a different breed entirely. While yes, I did spend a few dozen too many quarters on the Voyager arcade game, arcade games don't have the luxury of using complex gameplay mechanics. If one or two screens (and possibly a few in-game prompts) can't explain the game mechanics, players will lose interest quickly and hop onto the next game. When I go to the arcade, I see DDR, Guitar Hero, air hockey, skee-ball, some racing games, and about a dozen different gallery shooters with various minor dif
Licensed properties are always problematic (Score:3, Insightful)
1. It's usually the bigger companies that get them, not smaller ones.
2. Licensed properties are seen as licenses to print money, the fans will buy whatever slop goes on the market.
3. Consequently the push for the developer is to get something with the licensed faces out the door, no matter whether or not it's any good.
4. Fans go on to purchase these games, living down to the expectations of the publishers.
5. A dependable if not spectacular profit is made from the game.
6. Publishers greenlight another unimaginative, unenjoyable, underdeveloped, hackneyed licensed game.
There was a game based on the old Starfleet Battles tabletop game. Came out yonks ago. It was pretty much half-completed. It had a lot of ambition, you could tell it had the potential to be a good game, but it was seriously only half complete! Sure, the graphics were pretty, single ship and small fleet actions played out fine, but the entire strategic element was obviously spanked together in a weekend. They released a sequel not too long after that. Was it the game they originally planned, this time completed? No. If anything, they broke what did work and replaced the half-baked strategic mode with the distilled essence of pain and suffering, squeezed from the souls of the unborn.
Terribly disappointed.
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1. It's usually the bigger companies that get them, not smaller ones.
2. Licensed properties are seen as licenses to print money, the fans will buy whatever slop goes on the market.
3. Consequently the push for the developer is to get something with the licensed faces out the door, no matter whether or not it's any good.
4. Fans go on to purchase these games, living down to the expectations of the publishers.
5. A dependable if not spectacular profit is made from the game.
6. Publishers greenlight another unimaginative, unenjoyable, underdeveloped, hackneyed licensed game.
You forgot the biggest problem they all face: They try to force the storytelling of one format onto another.
A game is not a movie in the same way that a movie is not a book.
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Task Force Games that published Starfleet Battles contracted with consulting company AMS (later of Dragon's Lair fame) to produce a "computer assisted board game" called Star Fleet Command.
It was a microprocessor based game controller that would let players enter energy allocation, weapons fire etc and then indicate the results on labeled LEDs. It used a much simplified version of the board game and used a simple square grid instead of hex one.
After the project was completed and shown at Toy Fair, Task Forc
New Unit of Measurement? (Score:3, Interesting)
and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie
But how many Libraries if Congress would it have been?
Did the maths for you (Score:1)
and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie
But how many Libraries if Congress would it have been?
Toy Story 2 Budget = $90,000,000 - 20% of which is $18,000,000
2009 VW Bug = $18,290
20% of Toy Story 2 movie budget = 984 VW Beetles
There are 1728 VW Bugs in 1 Library of Congress
By my calculations, that would be 0.569444444 Libraries of Congress
Lego Star Trek (Score:2, Funny)