The Inside Scoop on Gaming

A few months back, on a lark, I joined a Star Trek Sim. Simmers clearly have a number of things in common with people who play RPGs and some notable differences, particularly in terminology and use of rules.

It's not that bad, but I found myself in a bit of an information gap. Most ST Simmers spend far more money on Trek material than we do on games, which is one reason we as groups lack a lot of overlap. You need to have a lot of mad money at hand to have a large game supply and a large ST materials library.

Over the years, I think I managed to catch EVERY original ST show, and most of the TNG episodes. Some DS9 and a few Voyagers. OTOH, there's a lot of Trek material that I'm completely unfamiliar with.

Captain's Chair looked promising. Five tours though the ships used in shows and/or movies, narrated by an actor appropriate to the ship in question. For a small investment I'd get a computer program that would guide me through what each ship had and did, through quicktime files of Michael Okuda's deck plans for the ships.

It wasn't what I expected. I didn't think that when they said this would be a guided tour of each ship's bridge they were being utterly literal.

I, fool that I am, figured this would be akin to an arcade shoot em up game, without the alilen animated undead. I could, when gaming on IRC, run the program and if something happened on deck 19, I could get a visual of deck 19 and have a reference view on another window.

NOPE. What I got was a short narrated tour of EACH bridge, some in character references, such as Sisko's pride in Commanding the Defiant, the ship he designed, or Sulu talking about Kirk. (On Jay Leno's show, George Takei made a distinction between Hiraku Sulu's opinion of James T. Kirk, (very high) and his opinion of William Shatner, which he decided to be diplomatically silent about.)

Beyond these short narrations you can pan tilt and zoom around each bridge and click on work station readouts that pull up an image of what a person at that station might see. Beyond that nothing else.

Beyond that it's pretty much pretty pictures.

Note: the CD includes both Windows and Mac versions. It also includes what was then the current QuickTime. Since this is a 1997 release, there's a good chance you may have a better version of QuickTime on your hard drive, so be careful before you let it install QT.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Captain's Chair
Author: Michael and Denise Okuda Category: Computer database for Star Trek Company/Publisher: Simon and Shuster Interactive Line: Star Trek Classics Cost: $19.99 Page count: n/a ISBN: 0-671-31778-2 Capsule Review by SD Anderson on 03/11/00. Genre tags: Science_fiction Far_Future Space	A few months back, on a lark, I joined a Star Trek Sim. Simmers clearly have a number of things in common with people who play RPGs and some notable differences, particularly in terminology and use of rules. It's not that bad, but I found myself in a bit of an information gap. Most ST Simmers spend far more money on Trek material than we do on games, which is one reason we as groups lack a lot of overlap. You need to have a lot of mad money at hand to have a large game supply and a large ST materials library. Over the years, I think I managed to catch EVERY original ST show, and most of the TNG episodes. Some DS9 and a few Voyagers. OTOH, there's a lot of Trek material that I'm completely unfamiliar with. Captain's Chair looked promising. Five tours though the ships used in shows and/or movies, narrated by an actor appropriate to the ship in question. For a small investment I'd get a computer program that would guide me through what each ship had and did, through quicktime files of Michael Okuda's deck plans for the ships. It wasn't what I expected. I didn't think that when they said this would be a guided tour of each ship's bridge they were being utterly literal. I, fool that I am, figured this would be akin to an arcade shoot em up game, without the alilen animated undead. I could, when gaming on IRC, run the program and if something happened on deck 19, I could get a visual of deck 19 and have a reference view on another window. NOPE. What I got was a short narrated tour of EACH bridge, some in character references, such as Sisko's pride in Commanding the Defiant, the ship he designed, or Sulu talking about Kirk. (On Jay Leno's show, George Takei made a distinction between Hiraku Sulu's opinion of James T. Kirk, (very high) and his opinion of William Shatner, which he decided to be diplomatically silent about.) Beyond these short narrations you can pan tilt and zoom around each bridge and click on work station readouts that pull up an image of what a person at that station might see. Beyond that nothing else. Beyond that it's pretty much pretty pictures. Note: the CD includes both Windows and Mac versions. It also includes what was then the current QuickTime. Since this is a 1997 release, there's a good chance you may have a better version of QuickTime on your hard drive, so be careful before you let it install QT. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 2 (Sparse)