Episode 62 – Bad Reboot?

Posted on | March 15, 2010 | 4 Comments

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Special Guest Vernon Wilmer joins us on the couch for reviews of his Documentary series Star Trek: My Experience, Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek Online, IDW’s Star Trek: Nero series, Electronic Arts’ Mass Effect 2 and Spaced: The Complete Series on DVD.

Fail: Star Trek Online

Posted on | March 4, 2010 | 2 Comments

“If you do not learn from history you are doomed to repeat it.”

I first heard those words when I complained of being bored in history class in middle school. Being a child of such fortunate circumstance to have been blessed with sharp wits at an early age, those words sunk in and I passed that class with an A. I have always tried to learn the easy way, allowing those that came before to learn through toil and trial and pass on their hard won knowledge to me so that I would not have to waste time and effort doing it. This is an obvious and effective means of education; the concept that we do not have to keep reinventing the wheel with every passing generation.

Yet it seems that some game developers cannot learn from the past. Games that are rushed have problems. Content that is rushed will be buggy and untested. And gamers, as a whole, are not stupid. I point to the brutally obvious example of Star Wars Galaxies to illustrate this point. Even developers of that game have come forward to admit mistakes were made on an epic scale. There are numerous blogs and news articles detailing why that game failed so miserably. Their words, apparently, have fallen on deaf ears.

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