Saturday, March 11, 2017

Star Trek Bridge Commander VR Woes!

Just saw the Star Trek Bridge Crew virtual reality game video the other day.  I went from intrigued to awestruck to saddened in the space of about three minutes.


Watching the game being played by some of my favorite Star Trek actors was just amazing - especially how into the experience LaVar Burton was.  It was like he was home again and it warmed my heart to see it!

This game is the game that I've dreamed of for some time.  There surely are space simulators that allow you to take on different roles on a bridge (Artemis, for example), but I really wanted to do it in the Star Trek universe and actually, along with my friends, take command of the ship and go where no one had gone before...and likely blow some things up along the way.  In addition, while it's not TRUE virtual reality in that you reach out and touch virtual controls, each player is in charge of their station and uses a controller to do their thing.  You can even look over at other crew members to see what they're doing.

Then reality set in.  I don't have VR gear for my PS4 or an Occulus.  Those things cost about $400ish these days.  And even if by some miracle I got such an expense past the CFO (my wife), finding four buddies who also have a VR headset is outside the bounds of reality.  They all have their own CFOs to whom they have to answer.

So the sad reality is that this looks like a dream of a game that I'll never get to play.  Maybe someday the VR gear will come down in price to a point where other married folks with bills to pay and other responsibilities can own them, but for now it's because of the price matter that I can't see this game doing very well in sales.
If you and four or so of your friends have VR gear, please feel free to comment on this post and tell me how the game was - I'd love to at least live vicariously through you!

Loving RPG Settings

I've loved role-playing games since I was a kid.  I've also always had a great imagination and constantly wanted to use it to mentally transport me to fictional places and times and explore them.  It didn't take long to see that one fed very easily into the other.

In essence, an RPG is like a novel where you see the world and its history, but the actual story is yours to create as a GM and as players.  The RPG will, of course, also have rules to aid said GM and players to adventure in that world.  On no few occasions, I've found myself either liking the setting but not the mechanics or enjoying the setting and the mechanics but could not find any players to play it.

So in my years of gaming, I've collected more than my share of RPG core rules books and sourcebooks.  If I had to put a number on it, I'd say that of the gaming books that I own, I've played/employed 30, maybe 40, percent of them.  And when I bought them I intended to try to play perhaps 70 percent with that last 30 purchased just for their settings.

We're doing some basement remodeling here at home, which has necessitated moving my RPG books out of their bookcases and onto the floor temporarily, so I took a few pictures that I'm putting in this post.  Over the years, I've lost more than a few games to damage, a loan that never returned, or that simply got lost in the shuffle, but I've done my very best to keep what I've bought.