I’ve been an avid gamer since childhood. I recall those all in one gaming systems that used the triangle cartridges, and had a steering wheel on one end of the console for a driving game, and a gun with holster on the other end for a primitive shooting game, and paddles somewhere in the middle for pong. Back then, games were just games, and people played for fun.

Lately, I’ve been really loving the 21^st century gaming experience on my XBOX 360. I’ve become quite good at Star Trek Legacy. As an diehard Star Trek fan, I felt it was my mission to do so. I am able to easily defeat the computer 1 on 1 in hard mode and take on their fleets of ships with just one of mine if I set the difficulty to medium or lower. This built up my confidence enough to start playing online. The first dozen or so people I engaged, I either creamed or came very close to beating the first time, and finally beating them the next time around. Wow I thought to myself, I still have the eye of the tiger when it comes to gaming.

Well I thought that until last night when I engaged this fellow named “warbuke” (spelling?) . He set up a 4 on 4 battle with 58k points. This is a sweet spot configuration for me as I believe I found the best combination of 4 ships at this price. Believing so, I picked the following Federation ships: Akira, Defiant, Sovereign, Nebula. The Akira and Defiant ships are light powerful and fast with the former having the ability to launch a lot of hurt on its enemies with its huge arsenal of weapons and the later being highly maneuverable and stealthy. The Nebula is not quite as agile as the Akira/Defiant, but packs a lot of punch while the Sovereign is one of the most powerful ships in the game but isn’t very maneuverable. This should be a great combo for most battle scenarios and I proved that point in countless battles against the computer (even the Borg) and other online gamers.

So I confidentially walk into this battle with “warbuke” and note he chose 3 Galaxy class starships and 1 Defiant. I said to myself, this will be an easy battle since he chose 3 very slow ships and only 1 quick and stealthy ship. In the back of my mind, I said to myself I must first take out his Defiant because anyone who competently pilots that ship can easily take on any ship in the game and dominate the battle. So I launch my attack, noting his Galaxy vessels in the distance, NOT yet engaged in the battle. Before I could switch over to my Akira ship to launch a volley of photon torpedos, he already disabled her weapons and engines leaving it a sitting duck for his Galaxy ships to instantly destroy. The battle lasted a whopping 1 minute and 30 seconds. From the moment I saw my Akira exploding, I knew I just had my ass handed to me on a platter. How could this have happened? It must have been a fluke, or so I thought.

So I took him on again. This time, we faced off Defiant to Defiant. I quickly cloaked my vessel before closing in on him. I switched to my radar screen to figure out my next move. To my surprise, he was following my cloaked vessel matching every move I made. I was trapped. While a ship is cloaked, it cannot warp, fire its weapons or repair itself. As my cloak timer ran out and I began to become visible, he once again subsystem targeted my ship and took out my weapons and engines. Game over.

Infuriated, I went on the Legacy forums to report this incident to other gamers. I really figured he somehow hacked the game to make his ships more powerful and also see through cloaked ships. I quickly found a few of his victims online. Sure enough our friend “warbuke” intensely studied the game and discovered all of the operational bugs for him to use in his favor. He somehow figured out a way of doing perfect subsystem targeting to take out a ship with full shields and also see through cloaked ships. I am told this guy is unbeatable. He basically pulled off the ultimate Kobashi Maru.

Remembering the a recent South Park episode about the game “Warcraft” and the boys ganging up to beat an unbeatable player, I recruit others to my cause. Help me serve this guy and teach him a lesson. Revenge is a dish best served cold. Let him feel the Wrath of Gene. Join me in my struggle and get a copy of Star Trek Legacy for Xbox 360. Together we can bring order to this chaos and destroy this Sith Lord once and for all.

“WARBUKE!” “WARBUKE!”

Liked it? Take a second to support AV Rant on Patreon!