I know we have threads on this already, but I feel like Ritchie and his team and Stern just deserve a little enthusiasm for what they've done with this game. We've got a solid bug thread where we should consolidate issues, and we had a good launch thread, but I thought now that we've had a little time to actually play we could talk about how it's feeling after some experience.

My opinion? The new code rules! Utterly different game now, it's got all the fun, fast and flowy feeling from before, but without feeling like a grind. Every mode matters and is worth shooting for, transitioning between them is way faster and easier now, and there's a ton of new custom audio, which gives the machine so much more life. The old movie quotes were repeated all the time and got so old. Now there's variety and more narrative and feedback as you play.

I still think that speeding up Urban's call outs maybe 20% (keeping the same pitch) would be a good thing, but I'm totally adjusting to them. Just like I find the Metallica callouts charming now when I hated them at first, but even flat Urban isn't anywhere near as bad as Lars!

We'll get a bug fix release very soon (I'm confident of this), and it will hopefully take care of a few niggling issues, but overall it's great right now.

I wasn't playing Star Trek at all before the new code, I played Metallica almost strictly, with a little Tron. Metallica just has had hooks in me for months, I love it. I haven't even tried the new 1.63 code on it yet, even though I loaded it when it came out, because what limited pin time I've had I'm enjoying playing Star Trek again too much. I'll go back to Metallica soon, that game rules, but Star Trek is now something worth stepping away from Metallica to play now.

I just checked FedEx tracking, the decal test prints are being delivered tomorrow. If they came out all good then I'll post everything up, will have a price, will open pre-orders, etc. So fingers crossed! I'm trying to get the rule cards done too, but I can finish them up during the pre-order period, I won't let them delay anything. No one is going to be in or out on this one because of the rule cards.

Heh, yes sir, you've been first before I even touched a pixel on this one, I remember.

I was thinking last night while playing, that the clearest indication to me that the level 1 modes are fixed is remember how annoying it used to be to get the Black Hole time extended award? It was almost a punishment, here, sit in this pointless mode for longer. Now I'm stoked to get it, that's more time to get the Galactic Away Team shot. It's a complete 180°.

I know it's frustrating that it takes a year for games to get finished code, I certainly am not cheerleading that part of the process, but it feels good to see the potential for this game finally unlocked. The details and strategy that this update added really made a difference. Not to take anything away from Ritchie, especially because I firmly believe his passion and commitment to his games is what gets the code updated later, but it really does show the importance of software to these games, no layout can save a game without the matching code to bring it all together.

I edited my thread title after realizing that "rules" kinda made it look like I was talking about the game rules, instead of how awesome the game is.