Gaming Bullets

• David Litwin, programmer for Totally Games, has written the first installment of GameSpot's 'Star Trek: Bridge Commander' designer diary. In this issue he talked about the development of the game's concept:

  We also wanted to capture the detail and depth of the bridge stations. Doing a space combat simulation is a large task. Adding a completely new additional interface with a full bridge and animated interactive characters made a large task massive. We knew that a game could be made where each character on the bridge had its own full-screen detailed minigame, but we knew that it was well beyond our scope.

  The full article, which also includes three new screenshots, can be found here.

• Two versions of the 'Bridge Commander' trailer as well as a 30.9 MB compilation of footage from the game have been uploaded at the official web site.

• 'Bridge Commander's' executive producer posted at the official site's gaming forums that the game has advanced into the beta (testing) stage of development and is expected to ship in early March.

• GameOver has posted a review of the recently-released 'Star Trek: Armada II.' "I liked the first Armada. I really did," wrote 'Rorschach'. "I asked the guys at GO to let me review Armada 2 as soon as I heard it had gone gold. And while the plotline of Armada 2 is almost as good as the first one, and the 30 missions cover a good spread of objectives, and some of the new ships are neat, the poor AI makes this such a paint-by-the-numbers RTS as to make your brain curdle from disuse." The game was awarded a rating of 65% in the complete analysis.

• Steve Krutzler at TrekWeb has also weighed in with his thoughts on 'Armada II.' Here's an extract from his review:

  There isn't anything very groundbreaking about 'Armada II' that makes you think you're playing a more advanced game. In fact, it seems more like what the original 'Armada' was supposed to be, just that this time they mostly got it right. The game is a traditional RTS in the vein of 'Command & Conquer' and it's incredibly addicting and fun to play.

  To read the full review, in which the game was given a score of 3 out of 4, head over to TrekWeb.

• A transcript of Armada Universe's 'Armada II' patch chat has been posted here.

  Thanks to Blue's News for most of these!

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