Star Trek Online

First off, I am not allowed to change my profile pic on the “Meet the team” page. Dan thought my cat wearing a fez avatar was too much like blogspot or whatever the hell that is. Hell, I try to stay away from social media as much as humanly possible. He said it’s like livejournal. He’s probably lying, but whatever. Like the Andy Warhol silkscreen pics of two overweight white guys will endear us to people except for more overweight white guys. Which might be our demographic, but that might be me stereotyping. Nah, this site is for fat occidental neckbeards, we all know it is. We just have to accept it and move on. Which leads us to Star Trek Online.

Now Dan has wanted me to play this damned game for the longest time and I haven’t. After the whole World of Warcraft fiasco, I wanted to stay away from other MMORPGs, like how a guy eating cornflakes wants to stay away from a leper colony that is flaking off skin and appendages. The retail version is resting on my coffee table right now. He gave me a box of old stuff, mainly a lot of old paperbacks of Salinger and Asimov and Twain and his Mao Zedong-likeness emblazoned bookbag. The price is on the cover. He paid $49.99 for it.

It’s free to play now.

Now I want to call him a rube, but you know, I’ve always wanted to be a klingon or a romulan or a ferengi. Can I be a ferengi in this game? The box is right there. I mean, I could look. Hold on, I am going to take a nap and later I will look to see if I can be a ferengi. I don’t think I can. Oh, I actually saw ol’ Dan playing the game one day. There he was flying in space, just flying in space. The graphics were pretty nifty. I think he got into a fight or something. I didn’t see the ground levels. He said they were pretty awful, but this was two years ago? Oh how time flies when you go to sleep at two in the afternoon and wake up at eight or nine in the evening and then go back to bed at around midnight or one before you have to get up to go to work at five am.

I am going to take that nap now. It’s nearly three pm. Really, going to sleep at noon or one is the money time to take a nap. Everyone knows that. Anyway, be back in a hour or so.

Okay, so it was more like seven hours.

So anyway, I have sort of a history with this game, a quaint anecdotal history, which makes it kind of charming and special for me never having played it.

What about the whole ferengi-thing?

Ah, there we go. Wikipedia says you can be a ferengi, so that is just fine. Even though it’s a ferengi in the future. I mean, the whole game is set in the future where the Federation and the Klingon Empire are warring about. I don’t know how much I like that actually. I thought the whole being allies was kinda cool. But I guess you need space orcs fighting your space humans. And klingons are soooo space orcs. Well, actually, orks are space orks, but they are mainly for comedy relief, incredibly brutal comedy relief. Klingons are quite a serious endeavor, what with their honor and their violence and their head ridges.

Wait a minute, it says on wikipedia you can play a race on the klingon side simply called “alien.” Now maybe that is a typo but I prefer to think the developers of the game are just phoning it in.

“We need another race for the klingons, Nigel.”

“Well, Willie, just put aliens in there.”

“Aliens?”

“Yeah, just stick some nose ridges or head ridges, it’ll be fine.”

And that is what happened.

Interestingly enough in the 1980’s you needed head ridges to make an alien look like an alien for American audience. But back in the 60’s you just needed to make them look like Mongolians to spook tv viewers back in the day. Well, at least the Klingon  Or you could put pointy ears on them or paint them green or blue or just make them really short (so is it little people or dwarf? Personally, I think dwarf sounds better, the former sounds akin to the Lollipop guild in the Wizard of Oz, and it kind of messes with my head. Better yet, I’ll just use “really, really short dudes and chicks.” That’ll work.) or make them monochrome or make them look like the pig-faced orcs of Tolkien. So their choices back then were limited because now, well, it’s head ridges. For everyone.

So maybe they were trying harder in the 60’s. I don’t know where I am going with this other than to say that the Star Trek universe is rich and nuanced. And it’s going to be hard to put that down in a video game, or it should be. Also, outside of WoW, MMORPGs just don’t seem to work like their publishers thought they would. They expected a cash cow and just got this niche market with only a few working models. You do get the die-hards, like Everquest or Ultima Online, which have very dedicated player bases but nothing like WoW, and let’s face it, the publishers, the developers wanted WoW monies. We all want the WoW monies. And there goes another problem, is that all MMORPGS are well slightly derivative. It’s always some lazy asshole who wants you to go kill shit or pluck shit up because the cock is too lazy to do it on its own.

Goddamned grind.

“Well, Hortense, how can we can all that?”

“Well, Clem, we could have space battles like in EVE online without the economic intrigue or game mechanic complexity.”

“I like that.”

“I knew you would.”

“And you did.”

“Indeed I did.”

“Kind of makes you feel special, doesn’t it.”

“It kind of does, actually.”

“Yes, yes it does.”

“Indeed it does.”

And so forth.

I feel though I am kind of tap dancing around what I believe the plot is.

So here it is.

It’s the future of the Federation. Romulus is still destroyed, I guess, even though I still thinks that makes for shitty canon, but speculative fiction canon is like an asshole, in that you can shove something hard and cold and unyielding into it. But back to the game. You are fighting the klingons for territory and planets. So like before TNG. You and yours backpack around the galaxy finding new civilizations and orders are shoot to kill. Because this is a new Federation. This is a Federation that don’t mess around. I guess. Actually, you probably just try to help people. Which doesn’t sound as fun.

Actually, you know what would make for a really fun Star Trek game? Just being Captain Kirk and having sex with alien women. Just killing aliens and bedding their women. Just getting to the heart of the matter. No beating around the bush. Just Star Trek boiled down to its basest elements.

AWWWWWW YEAHHH!!!!

Let us hope it comes to fruition.

You get it?

What I just typed there?

How dirty is was? With the word “come” in it? And how “fruition” could be something dirty too if you really wanted it to be?

Eh? Eh? Eh? Eh?

Now I’ve depressed myself.

But anyways, I will one day actually play Star Trek Online, even though I will be horribly pressured into doing so. Let’s just hope the Captain James Tiberius Kirk Ethnic Cleansing-scenario will be viable by then.
Or not.

Also I want to change my profile pic to the cat wearing a fez, damn it! I already did it on gravatar, so people will see it anyways! That’s right! The two guys from Wales and Serbia who were looking for masurbation repression sites but accidentally came here already know of my cat fez glory!

Don’t try to stop the inevitable!