mikeszekely

You mean the first forcefield? There's a room on the left right before the field. Go in there, kill Klingons, and then there's a computer panel you use to turn off the forcefield.

I have a feeling I'm going to be extra mad at that one. I'd just gotten to the point where we were beaming down the base. I mean, I had the loading screen in between the space battle and the ground battle, and that's when the server went down. If I have to start that mission over, I might quit the game.

Hey, that was the last mission I finished before the server went down. I didn't have any problems with it. You want a mission that sucks, do the one in the Briar Patch.

I hope they can keep their servers up a bit longer when the game goes live for real than they can now. I mean, I know it's still beta, so I know they have to fix bugs and tweak things for retail, but they put a notice in the launcher about how this is the last weekend and we should be play as much as we can. Meanwhile, the server is down for something like the fourth time since Thursday night.

You actually read the narrative? Yeah, I'm noticing that repetition too. Last two missions I did were the ones were you fly around in a circle around a planet, eliminating five enemy groups. That seems to be the bulk of the patrol missions Sulu gives you. The plot missions come from Admiral Quinn... they're more fun, but you've got to do a bunch of other boring missions to level up. Also, I was under the impression that when I hit 10 I'd move up to Lt. Commander and get a new ship. I hit 10, but I'm still a Lieutenant. If I'm reading the info off the bar thingy right, I don't need any more XP to move up, but I need a little more than 500 Skill Points. Is that right? I mean, is that normal? Looking at the skill point rewards for the missions that I have, and comparing that to how fast I seem to be getting XP, I think I'll actually hit 11 before I have enough skill points.

Actually, "barbarian" didn't just refer to the Persians. It referred to anyone who was non-Greek, including Egyptians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, etc. And "douchebag" is spelled with a "c".

That's a solid argument for a traditional RPG over an MMO, but that doesn't really negate my point: progression is kind of the point.

After you have your beta key, you plug it into startrekonline.com (you'll need a Cryptic account), then you download a 7GB file. After you install that file, you wait even longer for the game to patch. Then you can play. And AFAIK, Cryptic said you'd be able to patch the beta version the retail version, so no hard copy will be necessary until your computer crashes, forcing you to reformat and reinstall later.

Yeah, but can that guy act? Seriously, if this director had any sense, he'd ask you nicely if you'd be the new Conan instead of casting this tool. But then again, this is the dude who directed Pathfinder, so...

Would you have felt like playing Final Fantasy VII if you started the game at level 99 with the Knights of the Round materia? At least then, while the game would be mind-numbingly easy, you still have FFVII's unintelligible story to murk through. MMO's tend to be a more deficient in the story area, especially since they don't really have endings. Your character's advancement winds up being the prime motivator.

Well, he does mention from time to time that loves Prince of Pesia: the Sands of Time. Oh, and check out his Fallout 3 review.

I wouldn't know. I've been trying to log in for 10 minutes. It took more than five to retrieve my characters, and it's been "loading map" ever since.

I wouldn't know. I've been trying to log in for 10 minutes. It took more than five to retrieve my characters, and it's been "loading map" ever since.

To be fair, like kaioftheforsaken says, you can't really judge MMOs by Galaxies. I think Galaxies has/had a few fans on these boards, but for the most part people thought it was crap, so SOE changed a bunch of stuff and everyone got even more pissed off at it. Another thing worth pointing out is that the game launched back in 2003. Stick a PS2 game in your PS3 and see how it looks, and then recall that the PS2 has fixed specs. While developers don't seem to mind making you buy a new graphics card every time a new shooter comes out, they try to make MMOs more mass-market by dumbing down the the graphics and what not so that an "average" computer can run it... which means Galaxies was designed to run on a Pentium III and Windows 98. Now I'm not saying any of this to defend Galaxies or any other MMO. Because, IMHO, the answer to your original question is that yes, they do suck. Consider World of Warcraft, if you will. Now I'm sure there are some MMO players who are going to agree that WoW sucks and that we should consider their poison of choice instead, but with over 6 million players WoW is the de facto representative of the genre. And to be fair, WoW has colorful graphics, runs on almost any computer, and is pretty easy to learn. But the game itself is pretty much a series of looking for a guy, the guy telling you to kill x number of y, or bring him x number of some stupid crap by killing even more y. And it's hard to feel heroic collecting 20 zombie bear nutsacs for some old dude who lives in a shack in the woods when there's 6 million other guys doing it, and you have no idea what the purpose behind it all is.

I'll say this... the more your play STO, the more it grows on you. That's more than I could say for WoW.

I'm up to about level 4 now, and playing STO kinda makes me wish Bioware would do a proper single-player Trek RPG. My character, Mike "Zero" McAwesome, Captain of the USS Executor, is just begging to be evil. Evil beard, black gloves, stance that always looks mere moments away from lifting his arms, throwing his head back, and belting out a truly wicked evil genius laugh... and he's tooling around the sector helping miners and rescuing Vulcan monks. One thing I do like about the game is how you can, if you've got the credits, replace parts of your ship with parts from another class. The Executor is mostly a Centaur class, but I replaced the struts with another class. The result is that the nacelles are farther apart and sort of swooped down, almost like a Klingon Bird of Prey. I'm looking forward to getting another promotion so I can get a bigger cruiser, though. That new Excalibur class is looking awful sexy...

PMed

Finally got a beta key. I'm not impressed with it so far, but I can't say I've done much more than all that intro crap (I was doing my first actual mission when the server went down). Little things are irritating me with it. Like why is it that when I click on an enemy, I'll shoot him and then stand there like a doofus? Can't it be assumed that I want to keep shooting him with my regular attack until the guy is dead? And I hope they really beef up their servers before launch, because as it stands the game is laggy as hell. When I was at the starbase, it would take awhile for the game to figure out when I changed my inventory. The worst is transitioning from space to ground (or vice versa). Instead of a smooth transition, my ship model will still show for several minutes, during which I can do nothing (except maybe play a more fun game on my PSP or DS while I wait).

I still say cheap on the CPU, splurge on the GPU. It's not just about resolution. It's about high texture quality, 16x anti-aliasing, full-screen anistropic filtering, high-level particle effects, dynamic shadows and lighting, etc.

Seriously, lately you've been playing the same games as me, just beating them before I do. First it was Uncharted 2, then Dragon Age, then Bayonetta, and I just started Darksiders today. I'm guessing you're getting Mass Effect 2, and that's what I'm planning on playing after Darksiders. You wouldn't, by chance, be considering Dante's Inferno? A part of me is put off by the fact that the marketing has be horrendous, and a part of me is put off by the fact that it's not similar to God of War, it pretty much is God of War, with their art assets pasted on top of Sony's game. On the other hand, God of War is fun, and near as I can tell from the demo Dante's Inferno is kinda fun too. And I do have a birthday the week before, and I don't really know what else to ask for since my Mass Effect 2 reserve is paid off...

Processor speeds rarely provide an accurate measure of real processing power anymore. It's really only useful when comparing processors within a family, and even then it's not always a sure thing (for example, a 2.67GHz Core 2 Duo might not have the performance of a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo if the 2.67 was part of the internally-named "Conroe" line and the 2.66 is part of the "Wolfdale" line). And obviously, a Core 2 beats anything with a Pentium label, and the fastest Core 2 Quad can't hang with the slowest Core i5 or Core i7 (not sure where the Core i3 fits in yet). And of course, that's just the Intel side. Things get even murkier when you start comparing Intel to AMD, although the rule of thumb is that AMD gets solidly beat on the high end, but provide more bang for your buck in the low to mid-range. The best thing to do is to check benchmarks against other processors, and from what I can tell the processor in that combo (an AMD Athlon II X2 240, for those of you who don't feel like clicking myk's link) performs quite well, especially given it's price. Since you're going to be using your system for gaming, here are the benchmarks that are probably of the most interest for you. The idea here is that it outperforms it's closest Intel competitor, the Pentium E5200, but other tests on other pages show that it's lagging behind the Core 2 Duo E8200. On the flip side, the E8200 costs nearly double the X2 240. In fact, the X2 240 is a little cheaper than the E5200, which makes it a better value there. At the end of the day, the thing to really keep in mind is that pretty much all but the most entry-level CPUs are just fine for most everyday computing and, and with gaming your GPU is going to be a bigger factor than your CPU (a Core i7 with a GeForce 8800GTS is not going to outperform a Core 2 Duo with a GTX 280). You really only need to invest in a very high-end processor if you do a lot of processor-intensive tasks like media encoding on a daily basis. In short, the combo you picked is fine. It's a solid mid-range processor and a capable if unremarkable motherboard (that'd actually make a decent home theater box). As for upgrading the GPU, it's not a bad idea. The 8800GT is still a solid performer that can handle most games on the market, but it is getting a little long in the tooth as Nvidia expands their GTX line and ATI has their HD 5000 series. I would hold off on that until you get definite specs for AvP, though. I made the mistake of upgrading my video card one time when I found out a new game was coming out that I wanted, and the card I bought wound up only playing that game on the low settings.

Maybe. Thing is, it seems like everyone was delaying games to avoid competing with Modern Warfare 2, and I'm finding a surprising number of games I want to play coming out in the next three months. I'm curious about White Knight Chronicles, but if it comes out during this time frame, I'm concerned that it could get lost in the shuffle.

If you plan on playing games, you'll get more bang for your buck if you cheap on the CPU and splurge on the GPU.

Which one is Durga? I've got the katana for my hand weapon and the pistols on my feet, and I've been using that combo for about half the time I've been playing (I'm about to fight the fourth Cardinal Virtue, I think). I have the claws on my hands and the shotgun on my feet for the B combination, but I haven't found it to be as versatile a combination.

Because canonically this game takes place several years after Nemesis. Newer classes like the Sovereign are still tooling around, sure, but older ships like the Excelsior and the Miranda would both have been in service for over 100 years. Heck, looking at the lines on both ships, the Sovereign like is the Excelsior's replacement. The crap ton of fictional classes really doesn't bother me. Almost every one of them are a updated take on an older class (ex, the Excalibur is a homage to the Constitution).