I bowed out of the Star Trek Online open beta pretty much as soon as I pre-ordered the game. I burn out pretty easily and didn’t want to grow a character only to have to start all over again.

So I haven’t been writing about the game, or even paying a lot of attention to it. Early access snuck up on me and I missed the initial rush and all the snark-inducing issues that launches always have. Tonight I finally got around to logging in. I spent some time making an “Unknown Race” and then ran through the tutorial. Then spent a lot more time messing with customizing the look of my ship.

Well, if I’m going to be totally honest, the very first thing I did was just sit and listen to the Star Trek intro music. That really takes me back.

I’m looking forward to playing STO at my own lackadaisical pace. I had been planning to play with a bunch of Twitter people, but honestly life right now (and for the indefinite future) doesn’t allow me to play any game seriously enough to ‘keep up’ with friends, and trying to would just be frustrating. Well, again, if I’m going to be totally honest I should say that gaming isn’t important enough to me right now that I’m willing to play that much. (And there’s a PS3 title coming out next week that’s going to distract me, too.)

I had fun tonight. The game ran great, tutorial wasn’t overly crowded. I’m a little disappointed on the options for head coverings for the Unknown Race options but otherwise creating my race was really fun. Wrote a little bio and everything. I’m paying attention to things more than I did in beta, and Leonard Nimoy’s narration blows away Zach Quinto’s, at least for someone who’s been watching Trek since the original series was in 1st run (granted I was really young, but I have a brother who was a teenager at the time).

Here’s my engineering officer. Full name: John Doe. Nickname: Chance. Species: Unknown. I was going for a vaguely reptilian feel, without making him an out and out lizard. And if you haven’t seen the game, don’t judge it too harshly from these shots. A lot of bump-mapping seems to be lost in the screen shot processing or something. In game his emblem and his belt gear look much more 3D.