Monday, February 25, 2013

A very disappointing "tour" of one of my favorite starships



(Note: This is a review I just posted on amazon.com, the online retailer from which I purchased this product.)


This is the line in the description of this... thing... that sucked me in:

"Enclosed with the book is a fabulous CD-ROM that gives viewers a detailed tour of the Enterprise ."

Don't believe it.

The reality isn't even remotely close to what this line promises.

What you get are a few panoramic still images of a few of the important and often-used areas of the Enterprise from "The Next Generation", like the bridge and sickbay, images which you can zoom in on (a little bit) and look left and right and up and down within...

... and that's IT.

There is no "tour" of the Enterprise... at least no "tour" in any sense of the word with which I am familiar.

Hugely disappointing.

I really wish amazon.com would allow zero star reviews, or better yet, negative star reviews. I could definitely have used one for this thing.

On the plus side, it only cost $12.91. That's about ten bucks more than it's worth.

If anyone from Paramount is reading this, I would happily pay ten -- maybe even twenty -- times that $12.91 for a product which was an actual TOUR of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Imagine starting off like this -- you have an option to beam onto the ship, or arrive in a shuttlecraft. From your arrival point, you point and click your way through the entire ship -- and I mean the ENTIRE ship, not just a few rooms -- getting a sense of how huge and complex a Galaxy-class starship is. And I'm not talking about some lame "zoom" in on a few images -- I mean click and move down corridors, through doors which WHOOSH open when you get to them. In short, a tour where you could go anywhere the Captain of the Enterprise could go, if he wanted. Every room, every Jeffries tube, every turbolift, every transporter, every engineering access tunnel, every room in the crew quarters, every lab, every holodeck -- everywhere.

Of course, putting something like that together would take significant effort... something which was clearly not considered for this product. -- PL

2 comments:

Brian said...

Mr. Laird, it's not perfect, but it sounds like you were expecting something more like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-The-Next-Generation/dp/067131629X

It's fifteen years old, but I enjoyed it back then. It doesn't show the whole ship, but it shows quite a bit and there's the option to have a guided tour, narrated by Commander Riker.

Anonymous said...

P,

Making my way through the WonderCon programming guide and I saw this cool sounding project that might be something you are interested in given the topic of this post. It seems like a lot of fans are aware of this so maybe you already know, but if not... enjoy!

http://newstarship.com/

-Felix