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January 19th, 2000
Though we had only managed to sleep for about an hour in the urined stained Super 8 Hotel room (Which Marcus has yet to reimburse me for), both myself and herr Editor were awake and rip-roarin' ready to go early the next morning.
When we finally arrived the Hilton, its appearance was not altogether what I had expected.
Caster: Hey! This just looks like a regular hotel!
From the outside the Hilton was as vanilla white bread standard hotel as one would imagine a Hilton would look like in a place like, I don't know, Des Moines. I suspected things would get better on the inside.
I was again disappointed.
Caster: Hey! This just looks like the inside of a regular hotel!
Finally, tucked in the back of a particularly unassuming hotel corridor, we found it.
Star Trek: The Experience.
Let me tell you folks, it was beautiful. There were giant viewscreens, and starfields, and more of those purple electric bolt tube-o-mo-jiggies than the mind could comprehend. Before my brain could wrap itself around it, my shaking hands had already squeezed off five undevelopable photos with my disposable camera.
Once my head had stopped reeling from the sheer overstimulation of it, the first thing that caught my attention were huge starship models hanging from the ceiling, including the Enterprises A and D, a Klingon Bird of Prey, and—my favorite—Voyager.
I was dissatisfied.
Marcus: Hey, check it out. Those spaceship models are pretty cool.
After a few more minutes of argument failed to turn up any answers, we entered the attraction through the venue known as "The History of the Future Museum." The most interesting thing about the exhibit is that rather than having placards that say things like "This is an actual hairpiece worn by William Shatner in the episode Delta Vegan Girls Are Easy," they have 24th century descriptions like "This is a tribble."
Part way through the tour we ran across a gruff voiced Klingon woman and a short pathetic Ferengi man. Without hesitation Marcus started doing his trademark "interview as an excuse to be an ass" routine. It went something like this:
Marcus: Hey, Klingon hottie! How's it hangin'?
From the History of the Future Museum, we did indeed embark upon the great mission that the Klingon had briefed us upon. I'm going to warn you now, most of the best parts of the Experience are based on the element of surprise. If you intend to visit Star Trek: The Experience, are pregnant, or suffer neck or back injuries, we highly recommend skipping the remainder of this chapter after the horizontal rule. You can join up with the article again tomorrow. Please come back, we love each and every one of you. It's for your own good. Really.
If, however, you feel that you have a better chance of discovering a method of faster-than-light propulsion than visiting the Las Vegas Hilton, then I invite you to live vicariously through me.
I've always hoped that somebody would.
Star Trek: The Experience begins in exactly the same way that every other motion simulator ride in the known universe does: by cramming forty-five people into a tiny room and focusing their attention on an overhead monitor which introduces them to an excruciatingly contrived, yet terribly urgent call to action. I don't remember exactly what this particular preshow told us, but for the sake of argument, let's just say that Biff has stolen the DeLorean time machine, and the only way to get it back is by going on a Star Tour to the moon of Endor with a wackily inexperienced rookie pilot droid.
From there the automatic doors open and dump the pressurized mass of bipeds into the next chamber. Again, fairly typical. In fact, too typical. There are a few blue lines on the floor perpendicular to five automatic doors at the far end of the room. You know the drill. Stand between the lines, the doors open, you get on the ride.
While all of the stragglers were filtering into the room, a Federation uniformed young lady was barking instructions as if she was pissed that she couldn't make it as a cocktail waitress elsewhere in the casino.
"Stand between the blue lines! Not on them! If you are on a line, you are not in a line! Stand away from the automatic doors, they will open toward you."
"Okay okay," I thought, shuffling off of the blue line, "Stand between the lines. I've done this a million times. Let's just get on with it."
Then the "boarding instructions" video began on the monitors above. You know, the standard "watch your belongings, fasten your seat belt" kind of thing. Then all of the sudden the screen starts to go to static, and with all the passion of a Jungle Cruise captain shooting a hippo, one of the tour guides says, "Uh oh, it looks like there's some kind of... distortion... or something..."
"Blah blah blah," I think to myself, "This is the part where we find out that Dastardly has kidnapped Elroy and we're going to have to board the Questor to catch him. Yadda yadda yadda, these rides are all so lame, why can't one actually be different and..."
At just that moment the room was plunged into total darkness with the trademark sound of a transporter beam powering up. I swear, the lights couldn't have been off for more than four seconds when just as suddenly as they had gone off, they were back on again, except something was different.
In fact, everything was different.
No longer were we in a standard motion-sim queue chamber. We were now in the transporter room of the Enterprise D. In those four seconds of darkness, somehow the entire place had changed.
I mean everything.
And all of this without any perceivable sensation of motion (like going up an elevator or turning around or something).
Now maybe if I had been expecting it to happen it wouldn't have been so breathtaking. Maybe I could have even figured out how they did it. But going from expecting to get on a bogus ride-sim to having apparently actually been beamed, if not to the Enterprise, at least to a different room, I was so completely disoriented that I could barely figure out what had happened, let alone how.
At any rate, I give the designers of the Star Trek: The Experience transporter room the misinformer.com gold award for interactive special effects. It's worth the price of admission alone. Especially considering how completely your ruse of the boarding area had deceived me.
Standing before the perplexed crowd was a transporter officer, looking almost as puzzled as we did.
Still reeling from being uprooted from reality as I knew it, I couldn't figure out if she was real, animatronic, or a projection on some kind of invisible scrim. My questions were quickly answered, however, as the real person came out from behind her console and led the group through the transporter room and into an Enterprise corridor.
If it wasn't for the mandatory clearly marked EXIT door now and again, the rest of the trip was as far as I could tell a flawless recreation of a section of the Enterprise, and you get to parade right through it.
At the end of the corridor, the group marched, much to their wide eyed amazement, into a full scale replica of the Enterprise's bridge. It was sooooooo cooooooool! I mean, they didn't let us walk all the way around or sit in Picard's chair or anything, but we did get to see Riker and LaForge (apparently the only cast members desperate enough for work to agree to appear in this attraction) on the main viewscreen giving us our sadly contrived, chase-scene exposition.
"Some Klingons have beamed you all to what you would perceive as 'the future.' As soon as you arrived here, Captain Picard disappeared from that chair right there that you can't sit in so don't even ask. It turns out that one of you is a direct ancient descendant of Jean-Luc Picard, and without you in the past, he was never born. We need to get you all back to the 'past' so that you can fump like bunnies and make sure our Captain happens."
I swear. It's so retarded it makes Race for Atlantis look like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
But it didn't matter to me. I was close enough to touch the little beige-and-purple-on-black touchpads on the rear wall of the bridge, and there was no way that I wasn't going to do it. They didn't make any pleasant "boop boop" noises, and in fact were nothing more than colored plexiglass, but they looked good, and what else would I really expect?
From the bridge, we took a mildly perilous turbolift trip to the "grand corridor" where we once again received the "shuttlecraft loading" video, but this time for real and with LaForge's voice over.
The sim ride was... well, completely typical in almost every way. There's a couple of Klingon birds of prey chasing you around the Enterprise, then around a planet where we blow up the illogical yet obligatory Klingon somethingorother. The coolness of the whole "beaming up" thing still almost completely occupying my mind, I forgave the ride for all of its faults. Then the ride-movie suddenly took a turn for the better.
After bursting through some kind of standard Star Trek time-portal-worm-holeamajig, we were suddenly in a dogfight with the Klingons over the Vegas strip. Now that was something fun and unexpected. And when the Klingons were all blowed up and the ride was drawing to a close, the disembodied voice of our shuttlecraft pilot informed us that she would put us back where we were taken from via an access shaft on the top of the hotel.
Now call me a stickler for detail, but it always kind of pissed me off that when you are returned to "the Institute" at the end of "Back to the Future: The Ride," the building exterior is neither the building at Universal Studios Florida nor the one at Universal Studios Hollywood. It always kind of destroyed the magic for me. The shuttlecraft in Star Trek: The Experience however, crashed through the lighted sign atop the actual plain looking hotel that I had entered that morning. That kind of attention to detail is what really impresses this space cadet.
Anyway, after floating down an access shaft, the front windows showed a scene of two motion simulator shuttlecraft parked in front of an IMAX screen with an image of Deep Space Nine on it. The voice informed us that she would "put us down right below" the simulator rides that we were "about to board before we were beamed up."
Sure enough, when the doors open, we're in the basement of the Hilton, being confronted by an irate janitor complaining that we had just smashed through the ceiling, and that the elevator would take us "back to the Star Trek stuff upstairs."
The elevator (a completely standard looking hotel type elevator... outside of the fact that the floor buttons were mysteriously non-functional) brought us back up to the DS9 Promenade deck area of the attraction, ending our ride experience.
I must say that this reviewer gives Star Trek: The Experience five thumbs up. The incredible first person special effects (especially that beaming thing... damn!) make up for the lackluster plot. It is a must see for anybody who ever spent hours on end trying to force their fingers to do the "live long and prosper" thing on their own free will.
All content © 1999-2007 misinformer.com. Two to beam up.
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