West Karana

Thanks to TheRemedy for the heads-up on the Cryptic Star Trek Online trailer. The trailer jumps from fight scene to fight scene, and the game seems to go boldly where all the single player games have gone before. Some of these fights look straight out of Star Trek Armada 2, and the hand-to-hand fights look just as pointless as fights in every other MMO. I did some poking around the Cryptic web site and found a list of quest descriptions. I’m interested to hear about more STO quests if you know of any :)

QUEST #: 137
QUEST NAME: Mirror Academy
LOCATION: Starfleet Academy
OBJECTIVES: Kill [15] [Mirror Universe Cadets]
TEXT: Ah, [Player]. An engineering student coupled the phase-inhibiting core bayronic-matter enhancer with the prime cycle correlator and created a rift in space time and now the cadet mess hall is hopping with Starfleet cadets from the mirror universe. Kill [N] of them and return to me for your reward.

QUEST #: 2048
QUEST NAME: It is a good day to die…t
LOCATION: Ice moon of Alpha 3
OBJECTIVES: Harvest [50] [Alpha 3 Ice Snowballs]
TEXT: We are sorry to interrupt your training exercises, but the Balfoozian delegation will be here in two Earth days, and we’re all out of their favorite kind of ice cream. Please take a shuttle from the shuttle bay and harvest [N] [Item] from the Ice Moon of Alpha 3. Good luck, and watch out for the Alphanian Rabbits!

QUEST #: 16184
QUEST NAME: Don’t be Kahless with that!
LOCATION: Klingon Home World
Objectives: Raid
TEXT: [Player], you will have a long and glorious career here in Starfleet. But this is no time to rest upon your laurels. We have word that the evil Klingons are attempting to bring to life a fallen leader to lead them into battle against the Federation. Gather your classmates and take shuttle Copernicus to the Klingon home world. There, you will break in to the Imperial Palace, kill 100 Councilmen and 20 High Councilmen. Make your way into the inner sanctum, and kill the Warlord and the Emperor before they can use a chronosynclastic biofeedback loop to resurrect Kahless. This will be your hardest assignment. And I must impress upon you — if Kahless is brought to life, it could mean the end of the Federation, Starfleet, and your career. See that dead heroes stay dead. Your final grade depends upon it.

If you actually CAN watch this, then I guess their servers have managed to recover from yesterday’s crush. After trying for awhile, I just got the first episode of Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” through a torrent.

Neil Patrick Harris is Dr. Horrible, a struggling mad scientist hoping one day to join the supervillain group, “The Evil Society of Evil”. He occasionally does a video blog where he discusses problems like how his transmat ray is going, what his nemesis Captain Hammer (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) did to him last week that really hurt, how his evil laugh is coming along (he has just gotten a vocal coach), and how nervous he is about talking to a girl he sees at the laundromat, Penny, played by Buffy’s Felicia Day.

This leads into the song “Freeze Ray”, about a gun he wants to invent that will freeze time, so it would be easier to talk to her. He’s interrupted by his friend Moist, who has the power to make stuff damp. He’d been on a date last night with the super-villainess Bait and Switch. At the end of the night, he’d been hoping to go home with Bait, but… oh well.

Among the sopping wet pieces of mail he delivers is a letter from Bad Horse, the evil equine leader of the Evil Society of Evil, which leads right into the song, “Bad Horse” (and where did those cowboys with the painfully fake mustaches come from?).

The thing is hilarious. It’s short, has four fantastically funny songs (the other two are the one Penny sings as she tries to get signatures on her petition to convert an old building to a homeless center, and the song that ends in a three-part harmony between Dr. Horrible, Captain Hammer, and Penny, “A Man’s Gotta Do”).

I won’t spoil anything — but watch it. There will be two other “webisodes”, and even though all three together will likely be only half an hour — I’d buy the DVD.

edit — link to Joss Whedon’s post about Dr. Horrible, how it came to be, and what will become of it. Next episode is up THURSDAY and after July 20 they will no longer be free to watch, though it’s well worth paying.