I decided to replay one of my old PC games, Klingon Academy, and I'm having a really good time with it. As I said earlier, I haven't much been interested in gaming lately, but this title has recaptured my attention.

Christopher Plummer reprises his role as General Chang, and the game is a semi-prequel to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. You start out the game as one of Chang's students, and most of the early stuff involved a simulated war with the Federation. But the story eventually starts to involve the "real" Star Trek world as well, outside the simulation.

The missions are exciting and challenging right from the start, and the controls are pretty tough to learn. I'm actually surprised by the fact that I bothered to learn all the complicated keyboard button combinations and advanced methods of playing (allocating power to different parts of the ship, effective cloaking and targeting, damage control settings, etc.), as things of that nature usually frustrate me. But I finished this game before, and most of it's coming back to me pretty quickly this time. A gamepad is very useful, but not required for play.

Overall, it's somewhat like a normal space shooter, but you mostly control huge battleships instead of the usual small fighters. So no quick turns and crazy manuvers. Some may be turned off by the sluggish nature the controls can develop as a result, but I find it to be good fun, and "realistic" in that sense. And there's often a bit of strategy involved in finishing a mission, not just plain fighting. And if you make the wrong decisions, you could fail altogether. That's nothing new for the genre, but still...

There's also a really fun simulation mode where you can stage all kinds of crazy battle situations.

Great voice acting overall (even the worst of the bunch would still be suitable for a Star Trek series episode). Costumes and such aren't quite up to a television production, but certainly not bad. All movie scenes are acted out (no CGI characters), usually the actors are combined with fake computer generated locations or very simple sets. Music suits the game perfectly... very epic in nature. It's a game with great atmosphere really, and one to add to my short list from the other topic.

For the actual progress side of things, I'm on mission 5 or 6 now. Objectives in the game so far have consisted of such things as: eliminating a net of sensors to allow the fleet to pass through the area undetected, a stealth mission where you have to reach an enemy ship while cloaked and observe a secret meeting, some standard eliminate the enemy missions (but sometimes you have to call in reinforcements), and the latest mission is a combination of a standard series of battles and the need to eventually protect another ship from attack.


I was actually thinking about getting another PC game, but I'm still not quite sure what I'd like. Neverwinter Nights sounds like a less complicated relative of the Baldur's Gate games, and with better visuals. That's what I'm leaning toward right now. There's also a new Diablo-style game called Sacred to be released in a day or two, but I'm not sure how well I'd be able to run it. Didn't really feel like downloading the huge demo file, and after what happened with Morrowind, it's probably better not to try games with high requirements.