Shooting starships

by ERIK LEIJON

When I was younger, and a much bigger Star Trek fan than I am today (thanks to the horrid Scott Bakula vehicle Enterprise), there was always that one Discovery Channel-loving douchebag who would turn every conversation about the Prime Directive into a diatribe about alleged scientific inaccuracies in the series. Sort of like that idiot who as a response to anything wrestling-related, with a condescending tone that indicates more fear and ignorance than real acumen, gives the insightful comment, “You know it’s fake, right?”

Physics douche didn’t really understand the powerful dialogue between Captain Kirk and General Chang (Christopher Plummer’s Shakespeare-quoting Klingon villain, who dreaded an uncertain future with humans in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). Instead, he scoffed at the action-packed final scenes because fiery explosions are impossible in oxygen-lacking outer space. Thankfully, fun-killer is nowhere to be found, because the best moments of

Project Sylpheed (X360/Microsoft, GameArts) are the massive spaceship explosions... and not much else.

Sylpheed is the ideal game for showing off the graphical capabilities of the Xbox 360 to people who never play video games. It’s a free-roaming space dog-fighting game, and controlling the ship is a breeze. Every stage is filled to the brim with cartoonish spaceships, and your job is to shoot anything that moves, then refill at the big station before jumping back into the action. The first hour of Sylpheed is a mind-blowing experience—the battles are impossibly hectic and the visuals are beautifully coloured and detailed. Chasing down those first enemy ships and striking them with a heat-seeking missile is as satisfying as any shooter you’ll ever play. As Chang would say, “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!” Problem is, these dogs lack a deep bag of tricks.

Once you cross that first orgasmic hour, it becomes evident that beyond the original concept, there isn’t much to this game. The missions have specific goals, but the directions are typically fancy speak for “shoot yellow things on radar.” Sending orders to your fellow pilots (such as specific attack instructions or flying formations) is an underutilized function since the ships tend to accomplish their missions on their own. Eventually, every fight becomes so hectic that any pre-fight strategy flies out the window and avoiding accidentally flying into bigger ships becomes the only important skill worth learning. There’s a storyline—this is a Square Enix game after all—but the characters are bland and the tribulations of the 27th century really have no bearing on the action.

The potential was certainly there: the explosions and fire fights fill the screen with seizure-inducing fluorescent lights, and piloting a ship capable of 360 degrees of movement is completely effortless. The concept never gets out of drydock, though, and no matter how great the game looks, the box will likely be sitting pretty on your shelf.

Drowned in SURROUND

When it comes to headphones, it’s important to be picky. Those brittle white ones you got with your personal music player probably suck and are one drunken stumble away from emitting nothing but a high-pitched screech. I slammed the OTTO Surround Sound Stereo Headset against my ears, and, even if logically all headphones provide a type of surround sound, good surround-sound headphones are worth their weight in gold.

There’s a button on the side of the headphones that transforms regular sound into surround. When I was listening to compressed AAC and mp3 files in surround, they sounded louder, but blemishes in the low-quality music files were clearly exposed. They worked much better when I was playing PSP, a format powerful enough to provide quality sound. These headphones provide such clear sound they might be too good for iPods and mp3 players. Check out www.hearotto.com.