Gaming Bullets

• X-treme Gaming Radio has posted a 3-part roughly 15 minute audio interview with Les Dorscheid, project leader on the 'Elite Force' Expansion Pack. There are also 12 new screenshots of the pack.

• Meanwhile, the un-official 'Dominion Wars' site has posted an interview with SSI's Mike Wallis. Here's a snippet.

  Q 10).As seen in Star Trek Armada there is a little 3D view box of the current battles taking place, will you have a similar function with DW?

  MW: Our "scan box" is more versitle in that it will show the status of the scanned target, as well as a "cinematic" view of the ship. But our scans are not scripted, pre-generated cinematic scenes like the ones in Armada---ours are real-time little "picture-in-picture" views of your scanned target.

• 3D Gamezone also has an interview, this time with Ion Hardie, Director of Product Development and Lead Level Designer on 'Star Trek Away Team' who answers some questions about the game now that its gone gold.

  3DG: What, if you were given more time, would you have changed and/or added to the game? Is it hard to settle with the fact that you can not make any major changes to the game anymore? (Although minor tweaks can still be done via e.g: patches)

  IH:It was really weird the first few days after going gold and realizing that I couldn't work on the game anymore. It was my life for the last year or so, and even now, weeks later, I still feel the gap of not tweaking the levels or working on an enemy's AI. As far as more time goes, we would have to be given a bunch of extra time to put in the big things that would have changed the game substantially, like 3-6 months. As many games have proven, you can make a game take as long as you have. In our case, for the game we designed, the development time was just about perfect.

• Meanwhile, Gamespy has a preview of upcoming Gizmo Games release, 'Dominion Wars.' Previewer David "Sothoth" Hodgson concludes his look at the game with "So, you've got essentially a 2D "on one plane" combat game with beautifully 3D models in the DS9 universe, with insanely detailed prep screens mimicking and expanding on the television show. Although this may not end up attracting more than just the Star Trek fans themselves, that's a shame because the combat looks to be as entertaining as it is intricate."

• The Elite Force Center has 6 more new screenshots from the upcoming 'Elite Force' expansion pack.

• The official 'Dominion Wars' site has been updated with a new teaser from the Dominion Wars intro movie.

• First up in a virtual plethora of 'Away Team' reviews today is Mike (MacEnder) Sutley of Gamer's Pulse. He rates the latest Trek game an above-average 83 in his review, calling it "uncomplicated, mindless fun."

• The second 'Away Team' review for today comes from 3D Arcade.com. There it's also rated around the low 80's, finding the lack of a larger multiplayer to be the biggest detractor.

• Electronic Playground also has a brief review of the Activision title. Reviewer Jason MacIsaac gave the game a 6.6 out of 10, with the bottom line that "It had the potential to unseat Commandos as the king of real-time squad strategy games, but comes up short."

• 'Away Team' review number four comes from Dejan "Dex" Grbavcic of Action Trip. Rating it at 69%, he said that while pros come in the form of "Catchy game, a lot of weapons and devices, Star Trek Universe" there are a number of cons, including "No novelties, minor bugs, poorly balanced levels."

• Lupos of Gamezone.com was even less positive in his review of the game. Rating it a 6 our of 10, he comments that "It's not horrible, but it suffers from what ails most Star Trek games: it should've been better. "

• Last but not least, Decipher, makers of the Star Trek customisable card game, have posted more details on the cards in its recently announced Voyager deck. Cards include The Vidiian Sodality, Home Away From Home, Handshake, Delta Quadrant Spatial Scission and Volcanic Eruption.

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