Star Treks famous holodeck
is a fully customizable virtual environment that is capable of fabricating any place from
any time. The premise is wonderful: you go into an empty room, tell the computer to run
the Mean Streets of New York program, and suddenly youre in the roaring twenties
sipping bourbon in some back room speakeasy. While the word "holodeck" is a
blend of "hologram" and "deck," it might just as easily have come from
"holiday," too, since the holodecks recreational applications are often
enjoyed by crewmembers needing a break from the daily stresses of life on a star ship.The holodeck is
the logical extension of video games, which seek to immerse their audience in a fabricated
environment, telling a story in which the reader actively participates. The
holodecks strength lies in its ability to faithfully recreate any environment and
provide full interactivity with this environment. So if youre standing in that
backroom speakeasy and you dont like the look of the guy in the mustache and
wrinkled fedora, you can throw your drink in his eyes, or give him a hug, or just stomp on
his foot. Its up to you. Think of the holodeck as one giant simulator capable of
providing perfect simulations of almost any experience.
Unfortunately
for you and me, the holodeck is a work of fiction. Until technology catches up with
imagination, well have to make do with good old fashioned video games, including
Activisions latest attempt, Bridge Commander. This game seeks to simulate the
fictional experience of captaining a Sovereign class vessel for the United Federation of
Planets. And everything the holodeck has, Bridge Commander lacks. The bridge of your star
ship looks nice enough, unless you notice that the line where wall meets ceiling is jagged
along the diagonal. But compared to your crewmembers, the environment looks spectacular.
Human models are polygonal to a fault, so that Captain Picards bald head looks more
like a twenty-sided die than a cue ball. And the development team took a lesson from Speed
Racer when they worked on matching characters mouth movements to their actual
speechthe dialogue looks worse than the cheapest dubbing offered by the Sunday
Afternoon Martial Arts Theatre on PBS. Those sorts of details matter less in first-person
shooters, where the emphasis is on adrenaline-charged action. But in Bridge Commander you
interact with the crew so often that their presence is elemental to the game. The less
realistic they look, the less convincingly they move or speak, the poorer the overall game
experience becomes.
One
saving grace in this regard is the voice acting, which ranges from competent to
noteworthy. Jean Luc and Data both make appearances, and they are played with consummate
professionalism by Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner. The supporting cast does as fine a
job as any Star Trek episode can offer.
Also
satisfying is the plot, which is nuanced and intriguing enough to keep a simulation
entertaining in the absence of the usual battles. Captains of star ships dont spend
all their time destroying enemy vessels. There are diplomats to be escorted, summits to be
protected from outside interference and hotheaded factions. Bridge Commander understands
this enough to provide a broad variety of missions and tasks that require players to think
as much as they shoot. Or rather, think as much as they give the order to fire.
Unfortunately,
Bridge Commander is tied to a clunky command system that involves clicking on crewmembers
and choosing their orders from a preselected menu. This drastically narrows the
games interactive capabilities, as well as your possibilities as captain, and thus
drastically diminishes the accuracy of the simulation. Airplane sims have the advantage
here because they place you in the pilots seat and put the controls at your
disposal. Controls can only fill their specific function. Crewmembers of a star ship, on
the other hand, are supposed to be capable of stretching the limits of their sections and
bending the rules in times of stress. Yet the menu doesnt offer the option of
ordering Commander Sanchez to launch a probe at the planet to get Commander Datas
coordinates so you can rescue him from the approaching enemy fleetyou have to
eliminate the enemy ships and then go into low orbit before Sanchez will conduct a
successful scan. In other words, there isnt room for innovation outside the
games pre-designed series of events. Of course, this isnt Activisions
faultwe all suffer the limits of technology. But this particular limit enforces a
pretty low ceiling on the otherwise vast possibilities that a star ship captain simulator
could offer.
Finally,
the AI is especially disappointing. When other federation ships join your cause,
theyll sometimes follow you from star system to system and sometimes not. But
because the command menus are limited, theres no way to hail these friendly ships
and tell them to get their thumb out of their ass and follow you. So if theres an
especially difficult battle on the horizon, your allies could be two star systems away
while you face the music alone. And despite what I said earlier about a variety of
missions, Bridge Commander is nevertheless full of battles. This can be good or not,
depending on your tolerance for giving the order to fire and then watching your Tactics
officer move back for an attack run and line up the forward torpedoes. Theres an
option to take control of the tactics, even to manually fire the weapons, but this is
about half as fun as it sounds and ultimately more trouble than its worth.
The
bottom line? If youre a Star Trek fan, youll probably enjoy Bridge Commander
as much as anything else the Star Trek industry has to offer. It should also provide
adequate entertainment for space fans of more general tastes. With its complex storyline,
Bridge Commander could even provide a satisfying morsel to the role-playing crowd. But
hardcore sim fans who lack a special affinity for star ship games should be wary, and
those craving adrenaline-charged thrills should turn their gun sights elsewhere.