Trek universe? Before the reboot and J.J. ABRAMS revision Trek was dead. Enterprise had a couple of good stories, especially the ones with the Andorians, but like the age old Trek versus Wars debate, the fictional world create by Gene Roddenberry has always come off too homespun ideologically for me to actually call myself a fan of the series. Sure L and I waited every month for the latest Voyager VHS release at the local video rental place – located on a traffic roundabout dubbed ‘Gilligan’s Island’, but would I go back and watch the episodes like I would with say Doctor Who or even Babylon 5? Maybe. Probably not.

Yet, the Star Trek Online pre-release has been popping up at me on Steam for few weeks and at its insistance I purchases the ‘digital delux edition’ – we will get back to the issue of content and pricing = downloaded all 10gb, and left the game idling in the background most of the weekend while the prelaunch servers were offline. I checked again this morning, and yes the servers were up but there was a queue to get in. After looking around on the forums, it is clear that it is not an easy launch for Cryptic studios with many bugs, and patches being released and lots of gamers and fanbois.

The game itself is much like Pirates of the Burning sea – a mixture os ship combat and ‘ground’ base away team missions. Flying the Klingon Bird of Prey as an exotic fishlike alien for the Klingons is very cool – with most missions empasins combat whereas the Federation ships are slower and more narrative driven quests.

I’m into – the skills, leveling, crew and combat are all interesting – the ground mechanics less so. I’m keen to take my aqauatic blue friend on a few PVP missions and see what that part of the game is like.