Have we got a treat for you. Coming up this Saturday at 9 pm Pacific on the The Event Horizon, our  guests will be David Hernly, creator of the game Starship Horizons, and Rick Aseltine of Bridgesimulators.com, a company that sets up starship bridge simulation environments for conventions and public events, one of them being Starship Horizons.

Starship Horizons being played at Shore Leave 36, hosted by Bridgesimulators.com

You might remember an article we wrote around this time last year about the upcoming release of UbiSoft’s Star Trek: Bridge Crew game, and how we thought it was thrilling, but impractical for most mortals with more moderate budgets. The cost of entry for a single player for the game is still on the order of $1300. Starship Horizons was one of the games we mentioned in that article as being still a work in progress, and that we didn’t know when it was coming out. It’s finally in release, and setup costs are probably lower than any of the other networked bridge simulators, requiring only thin clients capable of running a web browser for the various crew workstations apart from the game server itself (which requires Microsoft Windows, but can be a laptop or an eMachine if that’s all you have).

Starship Horizons creator David Hernly

Four years in the making, Starship Horizons was created as a reaction to perceived limitations in the popular Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator, also a one-man project. It supports up to six players per ship, and allows head to head play for numerous competing ships in the same “galaxy”. It’s also feature-rich and has simulation details unmatched in other games.

You can buy a pre-launch version of the game now (and get free updates) directly from the Starship Horizons web site.The game costs $60, but you only have to buy it once for the server, unlike other games that charge you per chair. Of the commercial products we tried, it’s by far the lowest cost per chair and the most technically capable of all the bridge simulator games.

This episode of The Event Horizon is absolutely meant for Trek fans and game geeks, and if that’s you, get ready to learn a lot about the game, how it was built and what it’s like to experience it in real life.

Showtimes are:

Your hosts are Gene Turnbow and Susan Fox. The Event Horizon – it’s Sci-Fi for your Wifi!

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