Thought I would inform the world on my current situation.

After blasting though at good 30 hours of Skyrim, I had to take a break in order to prevent burnout. So, once Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates came in the mail, I was excited. There have been a few issues to crop up so far.

First and formost, getting this thing to run was a really pain in the @$$. What happens is that in Windows 7, the auto run literally doesn't work. You'll get a little window after putting int the disk that has a cool picture of a pirate Heavy Crusier and two buttons. One says "install" the other says "exit". When you click install, the window closes.... and then nothing happens. Never fear, I thought, on windows 7 this happens all the time. So I open the files directly from computer, select the setup.exe file and run as administrator. The result: Nothing. Nothing at all. So after a good 30 minutes scowering the interwebs, I found the solution: Run the setup with Windows XP compataility pack 3, and after 15 minutes it installed fine.

Now to the game itself..... there are some issues here as well. I never owned Orion Pirates, I only owned Empire at War, which is the second game, plus the original Starfleet Command. There are a few changes made here from those games. A couple are for the better. You can now actually target the point-defense systems on other ships rather than just having to deal with them the whole game like in SFCII, where it caused me to never play as the Federation, Klingons or Mirak ever, because the ships I'd buy were missile ships, and for those of you who don't know, missles are utterly useless against any ship armed with PDWs. So that's a plus.

But as far as the "8 new Pirate factions!" that the game brags about, the truth is that there is only one. All 8 "factions" have the exact same ships, with the only difference being that the starting area for each faction is different, and sometimes the Beastrider faction will fly into battle with space creatures as escorts. You read that right. This was a tad disappointing, but at least you can play as dirty, traiterous pirates now.

The other issues that I have is reguarding the "advanced" ships, which are so overpowere that they make the game nearly impossible. For those of you who don't know, SFC games breaks the ships and the Campaigen up into several era: Early, Middle, Late, and now Advanced. In all the other games, the best option was Late, so naturally in this game I picked the new era, Advanced. Horrible, horrible decision. Like in all the other games, you start out with just a small frigate and almost no money. In the earlier games, at this stage you would usually run into only small pirate frigates who would often times only be armed with one or two phasers, which is roughly the same weapons loadout of the average shuttle in Star Trek. In Orion Pirates, however, when I fired up advanced I was treated to an encounter that pitted me, a lowly frigate, alongside a pirate Destroyer against a Klingon Battleship, argubly the most powerful vessel in the game. In all my hours of campagining in SFC I and II, I saw a Battleship once. That was in the last story mission for the Federation campagin in SFC I, and it was on my side. Here, I had to deal with one ON MY THIRD MISSION! What was going through the minds of the Admirals in this universe? "What's that? The Klingon Flagship less than two lighty years away from Earth? Just send that Frigate whoose Captian graduated from the Academy last week. That should work out just fine."

Also in the advanced era are the advanced variety of Frigates, Light Crusiers, and Heavy Crusiers. They are completely overpowered to the point of breaking the game. In one skirmish, using a Advanced Light Crusier I destroyed a Klingon Heavy Crusier, on hard, in one pass. ONE PASS! Had I used a normal Light Crusier, the battle could have lasted about 15 minutes, and I would probubly have lost. This on top of the godly powerful ships in this era during the campagin makes me believe that the game is desgined and balanced to be played in the Late era. By the way, you don't start out with the advanced variety of frigate in the advanced era ether. You have to buy them, and they cost SOOO much money.

All that said, I'm still enjoying the hell out of it. Nothing beats Nostalgia. I've owned it for two days and played almost a dozen hours. It's great fun. Saddly, however, the USS Excelsior, NCC-2000, commanded by Captian Hikaru Sulu was lost with all hands fighting against the Intersteller Concordium on Stardate 2286.5 while attempting to liberate the planet "Planet" from the enemy. I, as Captain of the USS Freedom, NCC-2143, wish to express my deepest gratitude for his service and my deepest condolences to his wife and daughter, Ensign Demora Sulu of the USS Enterpirse, NCC-1701-B. He will be missed. (Watching the Excelsior, one of the most legendary ships in Star Trek lore, being blow to pieces will forever be burned into my gaming memories.)