star trek online

Star Trek Online: Perfect Timing

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Entering Earth Spacedock

Cryptic has a friend in Netflix. The Internet movie streaming giant recently obtained a two year license to offer every episode of every incarnation of Star Trek (aside from the animated series) for instant viewing by folks in the United States.
There’s not one Trek fan who isn’t gonna watch a few episodes and not want to get into the bridge of a starship of their own and mix it up with some Klinks and Rommies. Star Trek Online absolutely delivers on that. With their Foundry, you can even potentially create some episodes of your own. I was watching a Voyager episode, “Message in a Bottle“, which features a fight where a Nebula-class starship is chasing a stolen experimental assault ship when Romulan battleships decloak and start firing and then Federation starships catch up and then there’s a grand old battle. If STO wasn’t down for maintenance right now, I could have whipped up that exact encounter in about half an hour.

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Star Trek Online FE305: Cutting the Cord (spoilers)

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Cutting the Cord

After last week’s epic episode, “Coliseum”, those of us at the Federation News Service were intrigued to see just how they could possibly top that nod back to the high point of the Star Trek franchise — the very beginning.
Maybe they could have stayed in a retro mood, and maybe it would have been better if they had. “Cut the Cord”, the finale of the “Cloaked Intentions” arc, instead took its cues from “Star Trek Nemesis”, the movie that finally killed the Star Trek franchise. Nonetheless, it was still a fun, if literally on rails, experience.
Details, and spoilers, after the break.

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Star Trek Online FE304: Coliseum (spoilers)

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Vanity, thy name is Reman shields

You can’t think of “Star Trek” and coliseums together without thinking immediately of the original series episodes “Bread and Circuses“, where the Enterprise crew beam into a 20th century version of the Roman Empire, and “Amok Time“, where Kirk and Spock battle to the death on the planet Vulcan. (The director of “Bread and Circuses”, Ralph Senensky, blogs about directing that episode — a must read! Includes bloopers!)
In “Coliseum”, the folks at Cryptic have managed to include nods to BOTH episodes AND to the Star Trek Enterprise episode “Desert Crossing“. If it sounds like there’s a lot going on in this episode, then you heard right. And speaking of sound — make sure your sound and especially your music is turned on. There’s a point in the episode where you expect to hear a certain bit of music — AND YOU DO.
Spoilers after the break. Or, if you read this on my RSS feed, prepare to be spoiled. I’m going to be switching between screenshots of my Federation and my Klingon runs… they were identical aside from the PCs (who were played both times by Longasc and me).

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