So. Welcome to my new series. This is my first LP, so I’ll be figuring things out as I go along. To the game!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WInt8QuiKQo]
To quote from Wikipedia,
“Star Trek: Elite Force II is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Ritual Entertainment and published by Activision. It was released on June 20, 2003 for Microsoft Windows. Elite Force II is a sequel to 2000’s Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force. Whereas the original game was powered by the first version of id Software‘s id Tech 3 engine, Elite Force II is based on a heavily modified version of the Quake III: Team Arena engine with Ritual’s ÜberTools GDK, allowing for expansive outdoor environments and higher quality facial animations.”
The game got pretty good reviews, and I liked it quite a bit, but its reach was hampered somewhat by the fact that a licensing dispute forced Activision to pull it from store shelves not long after its release. Now, you’re lucky if you can find a new copy for sale for less than $75 US.
Like I said, I liked this game, although there are some design details that frustrate me greatly. Overall, I think I preferred the previous game, but the sequal came with some well-needed improvements. I’ll try to go into more detail about my likes and dislikes in future videos and blog posts, but I might forget some things. Oh, well.
As of summer 2012, there are a few playthrough video series on YouTube, though they appear to have no commentary. So, since there doesn’t appear to be a proper LP of this game out there, I will be using the assumption that there is still room in the world for whatever this thing is.
As you watch this first episode, you might notice a few things.
1. I’m not very good at this game.
2. I’m playing on the easiest difficulty setting. This is because I am bad at video games (see #1), and this game has a few parts that are disproportionately harder than the rest of the game. I’m doing this project to amuse myself and entertain you, and nothing will ruin that faster than having to play the same 5 minutes over and over while my hard drive fills up with video recording files. Which brings me to…
3. I’m recording in 640 X 480. This is for several reasons. The text is easier to read, the recorded video files are smaller, my connection to upload to YouTube is very slow, and honestly the game doesn’t look very much better no matter how high the resolution is. If you can’t stand it, I don’t know what I can do to change that. Sorry.
4. There is no gender option in the new game screen. You might only notice this if you’ve played the first game. In it, you could choose to play as Alex(ander) Munro, or… Alex(andria) Munro. Nothing really changed, except for your voice actor and character model. I don’t know why it was omitted in the sequel, but I’m guessing budget concerns. Maybe.
5. There was almost no gameplay in this video. Yeah. There will be more in the next one, I promise.