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Star Trek: Timegrinds
itsatwap
✭✭
in The Bridge
wherein a level 27 Fancy Man of Cornwood helps a level 70 Jazz Musician get his chips
The number of ticks on my Daily Rewards card - like a Caffe Nero loyalty card but where they give you free **tsk tsk** every day to try to trick you into coming in because maybe you’ll buy something - tells me that I have now been playing Star Trek Timelines for 14 days. It feels like longer.
In 48 minutes, it will be 1am at the Disruptor Beam HQ in Framingham, Massachusetts, which means that I will get a whole shitload of buttons to press; but for now I’ve pressed all the easily accessible buttons, so I need to locate some extra buttons to press with my accumulated button-pressing-rations, AKA chronitons. Chronitons are Star Trek’s subatomic time particles, which become dangerously agitated whenever someone, somewhere in the universe, is wasting their time on a freemium mobile game.
The Daily Rewards card reminds me that later this week I will be able to smoosh together my Rare Crew Member, 2-star Jazz Musician Riker, with an absolutely free 1-star Jazz Musician Riker, to make 3-star Jazz Musician Riker. I imagine that this process looks a lot like the bit in Bill and Ted when the two medium-sized Stations leg it at each other in a carpark to make one big Station (sometimes I grunt the word “Staayshuun” while I press the button). I am able to imagine this because Star Trek Timelines offers no alternative suggestion of what is going on. One of the undeniable strengths of Star Trek Timelines is that it leaves a lot of scope for imagination. The question of what is going on when you press all these buttons is one that I really think Disruptor Beam would lose nothing by answering (e.g. these are three Jazz Musician Rikers from points in history just nanoseconds apart which you must reintegrate to stabilise their phasic startrekmumbojumboblah). Unlike the question of why you’re doing it. I do realise that it is absolutely central to Disruptor Beam’s business model that we do not stop to ask the question of why we are doing any of this.
Take Jazz Musician Riker. For the uninitiated, Jazz Musician Riker is essentially a space rapist with a trumpet. I want to level him up. He’s level 70, which means that he’s happy with his current trumpet, but he needs casino chips to grow as a person. Gotta have ‘em. Not any **tsk tsk** old casino chips like I might give to my level 43 florist. 3-star Rare casino chips. When I open their entry on Jazz Musician Riker’s card, I see that the 3-star Casino Chips appear to do nothing for him. But he’s not coming out of his trailer until he gets them, the little diva (in fact, if the card says the casino chips do nothing, it actually means that they will make the guns slightly better on whatever space ship he is on - a surprising benefit of casino chips that humanity discovered way back in the 22nd century). Fortunately, I can make the good casino chips the same way high-quality casino chips are made in real life: by gluing together 8 **tsk tsk** casino chips. But nothing is ever simple for a star captain on a scav hunt: even **tsk tsk** casino chips are hard to come by here in the post-Temporal Anomaly universe. The only place in the known universe where **tsk tsk** casino chips can be found is the jungle planet N’Vak from the year 2154, where a long-dead Klingon colony founded by casino-chip hoarding warmongers will occasionally give them out to Quixotic interstellar do-gooders like me, Captain Titanius Anglesmith, A Fancy Man of Cornwood. So, I do… whatever it is I have to do on N’Vak 15 or 16 times, and I get the poker chips for old Jazzy Bill. I don’t know what it is that I had to do 15 or 16 times, because I long ago 3-starred the mission while making the buttons for his admiral/pimp jacket, which means that instead having to play the mission, I can just press a button and the game will imagine that I played it. I wonder if the developers of the game stopped to think about what they were really saying when they decided that one of the rewards for success was that you didn’t have to play the actual game anymore.
As I say, if the "what" is unnecessarily ugly, the "why" is necessarily ugly. I’m levelling up Jazz Musician Riker partly because he is one of my most useful characters - he’s a whizz with the old photon torpedoes (it’s somewhat upsetting that he was given to me as a freebie on the same day that he was given to every other player in the game). But mostly I’m levelling him up because if I can get him to level 100 and Station him up to 3 stars, I will Immortalise him. Now, anyone who has witnessed Jonathan Frakes’ portrayal of Will Riker will attest that this is the last thing that anyone should be doing. Star Trek III: The Search to Make Sure That Riker Is Definitely Dead would have been a fan favourite. But this is the end: this is why we play, apparently. If I can Immortalise Jazzo, I will then be able to look at him, forever. That is what success looks like. The only thing left to do would be to Immortalise the next guy. I guess I can make my peace with that. Disruptor Beam gotta eat, after all. I just wish they’d put in a bit more exposition to make me forget slightly more often that I am “playing” a spreadsheet.
Demoralised, I flip over to see how my Voyage is doing. The USS Rachel Dolezal has a Dilemma, which is good, cos normally the bridge crew just keep going until they completely run out of fuel, at which point, I imagine, they sit around laughing about how stoned they are until you arrive to see what the hell they’re playing at, and they ask you for 5 bucks “for dilithium”. Anyway, it seems a Klingon captain got blotto at a dinner party and slagged us off. Is that a dilemma? I correct him prissily, and then steal some candles from his digs. I chop up the candles to make some chronitons, and then find what looks like Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher tied up in the closet. Kal-if-fee Kirk and I make some homophobic jokes about what the Klingon captain was doing with “Wesley”, and then we get around to what we’re going to do with “Wesley”. See, we already have a fully Stationed (staaayshuuun) Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher back at base, so this kid’s an imposter. There’s only one option: into the Klingon Mince-o-Matic to make 50 Honour Sausages. Once I’ve turned three Wesley Crushers into honour sausages I can take Jazz Musician Riker down to the Honour Hall, strap him into the Honour Chair and force feed him Wesley Crusher Honour Sausages during what I like to call “Dynamic Officer Training Sessions”. That will make him play the trombone better. Something to look forward to, I guess.
Sigh.
What the hell am I going to do with all these chronitons.
The number of ticks on my Daily Rewards card - like a Caffe Nero loyalty card but where they give you free **tsk tsk** every day to try to trick you into coming in because maybe you’ll buy something - tells me that I have now been playing Star Trek Timelines for 14 days. It feels like longer.
In 48 minutes, it will be 1am at the Disruptor Beam HQ in Framingham, Massachusetts, which means that I will get a whole shitload of buttons to press; but for now I’ve pressed all the easily accessible buttons, so I need to locate some extra buttons to press with my accumulated button-pressing-rations, AKA chronitons. Chronitons are Star Trek’s subatomic time particles, which become dangerously agitated whenever someone, somewhere in the universe, is wasting their time on a freemium mobile game.
The Daily Rewards card reminds me that later this week I will be able to smoosh together my Rare Crew Member, 2-star Jazz Musician Riker, with an absolutely free 1-star Jazz Musician Riker, to make 3-star Jazz Musician Riker. I imagine that this process looks a lot like the bit in Bill and Ted when the two medium-sized Stations leg it at each other in a carpark to make one big Station (sometimes I grunt the word “Staayshuun” while I press the button). I am able to imagine this because Star Trek Timelines offers no alternative suggestion of what is going on. One of the undeniable strengths of Star Trek Timelines is that it leaves a lot of scope for imagination. The question of what is going on when you press all these buttons is one that I really think Disruptor Beam would lose nothing by answering (e.g. these are three Jazz Musician Rikers from points in history just nanoseconds apart which you must reintegrate to stabilise their phasic startrekmumbojumboblah). Unlike the question of why you’re doing it. I do realise that it is absolutely central to Disruptor Beam’s business model that we do not stop to ask the question of why we are doing any of this.
Take Jazz Musician Riker. For the uninitiated, Jazz Musician Riker is essentially a space rapist with a trumpet. I want to level him up. He’s level 70, which means that he’s happy with his current trumpet, but he needs casino chips to grow as a person. Gotta have ‘em. Not any **tsk tsk** old casino chips like I might give to my level 43 florist. 3-star Rare casino chips. When I open their entry on Jazz Musician Riker’s card, I see that the 3-star Casino Chips appear to do nothing for him. But he’s not coming out of his trailer until he gets them, the little diva (in fact, if the card says the casino chips do nothing, it actually means that they will make the guns slightly better on whatever space ship he is on - a surprising benefit of casino chips that humanity discovered way back in the 22nd century). Fortunately, I can make the good casino chips the same way high-quality casino chips are made in real life: by gluing together 8 **tsk tsk** casino chips. But nothing is ever simple for a star captain on a scav hunt: even **tsk tsk** casino chips are hard to come by here in the post-Temporal Anomaly universe. The only place in the known universe where **tsk tsk** casino chips can be found is the jungle planet N’Vak from the year 2154, where a long-dead Klingon colony founded by casino-chip hoarding warmongers will occasionally give them out to Quixotic interstellar do-gooders like me, Captain Titanius Anglesmith, A Fancy Man of Cornwood. So, I do… whatever it is I have to do on N’Vak 15 or 16 times, and I get the poker chips for old Jazzy Bill. I don’t know what it is that I had to do 15 or 16 times, because I long ago 3-starred the mission while making the buttons for his admiral/pimp jacket, which means that instead having to play the mission, I can just press a button and the game will imagine that I played it. I wonder if the developers of the game stopped to think about what they were really saying when they decided that one of the rewards for success was that you didn’t have to play the actual game anymore.
As I say, if the "what" is unnecessarily ugly, the "why" is necessarily ugly. I’m levelling up Jazz Musician Riker partly because he is one of my most useful characters - he’s a whizz with the old photon torpedoes (it’s somewhat upsetting that he was given to me as a freebie on the same day that he was given to every other player in the game). But mostly I’m levelling him up because if I can get him to level 100 and Station him up to 3 stars, I will Immortalise him. Now, anyone who has witnessed Jonathan Frakes’ portrayal of Will Riker will attest that this is the last thing that anyone should be doing. Star Trek III: The Search to Make Sure That Riker Is Definitely Dead would have been a fan favourite. But this is the end: this is why we play, apparently. If I can Immortalise Jazzo, I will then be able to look at him, forever. That is what success looks like. The only thing left to do would be to Immortalise the next guy. I guess I can make my peace with that. Disruptor Beam gotta eat, after all. I just wish they’d put in a bit more exposition to make me forget slightly more often that I am “playing” a spreadsheet.
Demoralised, I flip over to see how my Voyage is doing. The USS Rachel Dolezal has a Dilemma, which is good, cos normally the bridge crew just keep going until they completely run out of fuel, at which point, I imagine, they sit around laughing about how stoned they are until you arrive to see what the hell they’re playing at, and they ask you for 5 bucks “for dilithium”. Anyway, it seems a Klingon captain got blotto at a dinner party and slagged us off. Is that a dilemma? I correct him prissily, and then steal some candles from his digs. I chop up the candles to make some chronitons, and then find what looks like Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher tied up in the closet. Kal-if-fee Kirk and I make some homophobic jokes about what the Klingon captain was doing with “Wesley”, and then we get around to what we’re going to do with “Wesley”. See, we already have a fully Stationed (staaayshuuun) Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher back at base, so this kid’s an imposter. There’s only one option: into the Klingon Mince-o-Matic to make 50 Honour Sausages. Once I’ve turned three Wesley Crushers into honour sausages I can take Jazz Musician Riker down to the Honour Hall, strap him into the Honour Chair and force feed him Wesley Crusher Honour Sausages during what I like to call “Dynamic Officer Training Sessions”. That will make him play the trombone better. Something to look forward to, I guess.
Sigh.
What the hell am I going to do with all these chronitons.
5
Comments
What's really funny is that you may have no idea how fortunate you are that you arrived at a time in the timeline when Jazzy Riker is given away like candy from a pinata. There was a time not long ago when that was somehow the rarest and most (somewhat tongue in cheek) coveted card in STT. So you unwittingly drove all of us long-time players into a tizzy by using that card as your otherwise entertaining example and explanation of the banality of the grind. 😅
LOL
Thanks, and bartender I'll have whatever @itsatwap is having.
Now imagine trolling DB with increasingly bad humour every week for months for him. Because I did do that. To the annoyance of many I'm sure. But I had fun. It's all in the meta game!
~· Fly with the Subspace Eddies! ·~
This will surely generate a swath of new Riker cards, infuriating those waiting for Stripey Shirt Janeway and Augment Katherine Burnham as these two are back burner again.
Hah, thanks mate, high praise. Obviously, I'm playing the game because it's addictive AF, but there's actually some bits that I genuinely like, too. The recent expedition event had some interesting tactical choices to make if you were going to make the most of your tickets, the campaign missions feel very star trek because they force you to make difficult choices between two undesirable options and the starship battles have interesting (but underexploited) tactics. But the source material is so rich, and games like FTL have shown the way, I just don't get why there have too be so many bits of the game that are not immersive or not really a game.