zhrodague

G4 TV has this new game, Star Trek 2.0. This is an example of interactive TV, where an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, is displayed with a stock ticker. Throughout the episode, various facets of the Star Trek universe -- as companies on what they call the 'Spock Market' -- are bought and sold. The show features trivia facts, a stock ticker, and a live chat with the topic of the hour. Players watch the show, and buy and sell these stocks while the show is going via the Internet. Seriously a neat idea, until you look at the implementation.

Of course, being a big Captain Kirk fan, there's no way I can avoid playing this game, in spite of its shortcomings. Trek is Trek, and when it's on, I'm there to watch, even if it is just on in the background while I do other, seemingly more important things. Its quirky, and the idea that this show is now an interactive game, played against other players, is just too good to pass up.

The client is built on Flash, which annoys most of us systems people. Flash is resource intensive, even though it's just a web-browser plug-in. On my 2Ghz Dell laptop, with a pretty decent videocard, this application wants 100% of my CPU. The big culprit, I think, is the stock ticker marquee. I suggest rewriting the scrolling code to go easier on those of us that don't have supercomputers on our desktops yet. Flash is resource intensive, but badly writen Flash applications, like this one, take the cake. It will timeout in my browser, and the app will have to be reloaded.

Another problem I have, is the periodic changing of the rules of the game. I believe the game would be more fun to play, if the rules didn't change unexpectedly and as often. This moving of the goalpost makes the game unwinable, and therefore not fun to play. What fun would a game be, where sometimes your points completely disappear, and you're worse-off than if you started a new game -- effectively being penalized for being a long-term player? None, and that's the second time I didn't want to play the game anymore. But again, Trek is Trek, and I want to tune in.

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