Please hear me out...
I have been playing Taldren's award winning, highly acclaimed series based upon Star Trek since
SFC2: Empires at War . I knew, even before I flew my first sortie in a police frigate, that I had made a good purchase right when I heard Captain Sulu's voice (George Takei) bring me up to speed of the story thus far. FMV though it was, I felt already that I was truly witnessing something worthy of Trek canon. When the actual game began, after completing the easy to follow tutorials, I was hooked through and through.
But something happened after the first three weeks of constant play: I was feeling....bored, as to be expected. Even with the occasional LAN party, or the subsequent release of
Orion Pirates and its insane new weapons like the Xphaser and such, it simply wasn't enough for me. I had dropped the game thereafter in favor of
Baldur's Gate I & II,
Planescape:Torment, and pen and paper RPGs like Palladium's
Rifts . BG was exciting enough, but
Torment taught me that there are more intricate ways to further enjoy video games with open-ended characters....
I had fired up SFC2 after a long hiatus. I was a newbie, again. My friends who said never to give up on the game were kicking me around left and right. While my buddies opted for more beefy carrier ships and missle boats, I settled with a straight up Fed CA. They wanted Gphasers and plasma torps, I wanted the
Enterprise . Multiplayer wasn't my thing anymore. I wanted something else. I decided I would play the single player game strictly for the sake of character development.
I played alone, in conquest mode, first developing a concept for my main character, the captain, then the other senior officers. I strove for something completely new and refreshing, yet familiar based on the inspiration I had from Gene Roddenberry's TOS and Next Gen. I had enough of the typical male human captain (or even snooty Janeway for that matter) brandishing their charismatic skills of diplomacy and bravado, getting themselves out of every single impossible situation they encountered. I instead wanted someone flawed, female, and Andorian.
The idea created a solid foundation of renewed interest in me, and SFC, in my mind, was reborn anew. Lieutenant J'anthala (an elven style name reused from one of my old DnD characters), graduating 4th in her class at Starfleet Academy (which was an excellent game too BTW
) received command of the USS San Mateo, FF class frigate, at the recommendation of Rear Admiral Perin Taylor, J'anthala's mentor and human godfather.
From there all the other pieces fell into place...
Then SFC3 was released. I joined these boards a couple of months later, and ever since, I've read far more negatives than positives about the game. I too have contributed a few snippets of negs, but nothing serious as to warrant an utter hatred of the game. I kept the faith, a beta patch was released, and I was pleased. For a short time that is. My old LAN party friends have since moved on to bigger and better things, so multiplayer is out the window (my internet connection is pretty bad for online gaming). Yet I still play the game from time to time. Thanks to the Next Gen era the game takes place in, of which I am more familiar with, my character development has gone forward even further. Now I am dabbling in art with character portraits and action shots. Heck, I'm even designing storyboards as a pre-production for episodes in my own personal Trek TV series!
The ship? The Prometheus class NX cruiser of course.
This is after my captain's role in SFC3's Unity Station incident, taking place just after
Star Trek: Nemesis.
That's all I have to say about that (thanks go to
Forrest Gump for that line).
Topic: SFC...A Journey of the Mind (Read 2270 times)