Star Trek Games

[Alpha2099]

Putting aside new games like Star Trek Online, I thought I'd open up discussion about old Star Trek games. There's been a fair amount going all the way back to practically the beginning of video games, and I haven't played them all, but here's what I've been exposed to:

Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator
I've played the Atari 2600 version as well as the arcade version. Obviously nothing can beat the arcade one, with its vector graphics and fairly intricate design given the age it was made. The Atari port is faithful, even if you can't remember which dashes on the side represent which parts of the ship, and it can be hard to warp without accidentally firing a torpedo. I know the ColecoVision port has better graphics, and there was also a Vectrex version.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Edition
I have only played the Game Boy version, which I know is nothing like the NES version. I'll admit, I didn't get very far before I lost interest.

Star Trek: The Next Generation
This started with the Game Boy, but I've played the NES version as well as the Game Gear port. The Game Gear has the best graphics of the three, and that's quite amazing to me. The game was quite ambitious for its time with varying missions and combat, culminating in a showdown with the Borg, but it has its flaws -- most notably the fact that your sensor readings are a 2-D representation of a 3-D field, and enemies have a nasty habit of going above or below you where you can't find them.

There was also a TNG game for SNES and Genesis, called Future's Past, but I can only play that game for about 5 minutes before the controls make it unplayable.

Finally, I've played about halfway through the old PC game "A Final Unity." That one I really like, mostly because they got all the actors to lend their voices to the characters and the story was written by the show's writers.


So, share your stories of some classic Star Trek games!

[Greg2600]

I've played almost all of them made through the early 2000's. I felt that the games got steadily better, and peaked with Interplay's 25th anniversary and Judgment Rites on PC-CD, which had real TOS voice dialogue. From that point on, all down hill.

The old, old games are decent, SOS on 2600/Colecovision/5200, and Star Trek on Vectrex is a lot of fun. I never liked text adventures, so I can't comment on the many 80's computer releases. Bandai's canceled ST V game was terrible. Spectrum Holobyte made TNG A Final Unity, that was pretty good. Honestly I found all the interactive games to be pretty lousy, with somewhat bearable cutscenes (Borg, Klingon, Academy, Klingon Academy, DS0 Harbinger). Microprose made a few games, the Klingon FPS was okay. The casual gamer had no use for these games.

On console, NES 25th anniversary was too much of a pita to play and try to figure out where everything was hidden. Most of the other titles stunk. On NES, Gameboy, Genesis, SNES, they all mostly stunk. Either incredibly boring space sims, or poorly done side scrollers.

I am not into strategy games, but I was always told that the Starfleet command games were great. By the time they got into full on FPS (Elite Force) or space combat (Dominion Wars) I had largely lost interest. Generations was a terrible game, although Hidden Evil was tolerable.

[Tanooki]

I've only really played very few I found truly enjoyable. I agree with the peaking with Judgement Rites and 25th Anniversary both DOS-PC and originally on DISCS, but they did CD releases too.

Aside from that there's the old vector arcade/vectrex Star Trek game, and then oddly that SNES specific Star Trek Starfleet Academy Starship Simulator game was fun as it was both stage based missions, but it has this nice straight combat secondary game to get lost in alone or with someone.

[bb_hood]

There is a Star Trek game for Sega Genesis: Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Ive never played it but it is a game I would like to try out in the future. I actually have a loose manual for Deep Space Nine, and Ive noticed that in the back there is an order form for a special edition Benjamin Sisko action figure. Last summer I saw one of these action figures go for 50$ on ebay. Deep Space 9 is actually a really good show, personally I think its better than Star Trek Next Generation.

I would like to see a Star Trek Voyager game. It deserves a game.

[tom]

Not a bad game..

I liked the old Star Trek 3.5 from Adventure International on A8, very faithful to the 70s version of Star Trek

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Actually, there is a Voyager game for PS2 called Elite Forces. It's a first person shooter and it's one UGLY game that hasn't aged well visually at all.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

The fact that Star Trek's strength has been its intellectual dealings with human nature and social issues in a sci-fi setting rather than straight up turn your brain off action like Star Wars has led to far fewer opportunities for video games, and those that have been made are for the most part pretty mediocre to downright bad.

Here's my take on the ones I have played:


Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (NES): Very cool set up, but the gameplay is poorly executed and isn't fun to play. The controls are pretty bad, and overall, I wish there was less game and more cutscenes. It's not a good game by any means.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (GB): Same name, totally different game. Here, the game is basically the TOS epiosde "The Doomsday Machine" made into a videogame. Half the game is a horizontal shmup (WHAT) that's actually a whole lot of fun. The other half is overhead levels like the NES game, but better, and not actually the main focus of the game. Buy this one. You'll be surprised how good it is.

Star Trek TNG Future's Past (SNES) - This is sort of an update of the NES 25th Anniversary, and everything's better. The away missions are fun, and enjoyable. Roo from RetroWare did a 16-bit Gems on the Genesis version of this game which is slightly different, and he prefers that one, but either way TNG on the 16-bit platforms is pretty decent.

TNG 8-bit (GB, NES, GG) : Surprisingly decent game built around first person star ship combat and various mini games like beaming aboard cargo and personal. The GameGear version obviously looks the best, but since it lacks the Select button, controls kinda suck for that one. Good on all three platforms.

Beyond the Nexus (GB): A tie-in game to Star Trek Generations, this is built with the TNG GB engine and plays similar. It's as good, but there are worse Star Trek games.

Star Trek DS9 (SNES): Awful. The controls, the visuals, the music, the gameplay, just everything about it is the pits. The team that thought season 1 Sisco should run around the station in a 2D platformer with bad level design should have been fired. This game is one of the worst on the SNES.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (SNES): Kind of an adventure-rpg meets a flight sim. You can do historic TOS missions, like "Balance of Terror", or even the Wrath of Khan. It's also on 32X, which looks better, but I prefer the controls of the SNES version.

Star Trek Voyager Elite Forces (PS2) An FPS fighting borg. A weird idea, but not awful. The game's visuals have aged extremely poorly, making it look more like the typical N64 game than a PS2 game.

Star Trek: Legacy (Xbox 360): The best Star Trek game ever made, bar none. The story comprises every Trek era, by telling the origin story of the Borg. It begins after the Enterprise TV ended, and it concludes after Voyager. It's considered canon, so for Trek fans, this is a great fill in the gaps game. It's also a whole lot of fun to play. WAYYYY better on 360 than on PC, due to difficult PC controls, bugs, and high system requirements. Still, the PC version has many awesome mods, but play it on 360 if you can.

[Atarileaf]

I've played almost all of them made through the early 2000's. I felt that the games got steadily better, and peaked with Interplay's 25th anniversary and Judgment Rites on PC-CD, which had real TOS voice dialogue. From that point on, all down hill.

The old, old games are decent, SOS on 2600/Colecovision/5200, and Star Trek on Vectrex is a lot of fun. I never liked text adventures, so I can't comment on the many 80's computer releases. Bandai's canceled ST V game was terrible. Spectrum Holobyte made TNG A Final Unity, that was pretty good. Honestly I found all the interactive games to be pretty lousy, with somewhat bearable cutscenes (Borg, Klingon, Academy, Klingon Academy, DS0 Harbinger). Microprose made a few games, the Klingon FPS was okay. The casual gamer had no use for these games.

On console, NES 25th anniversary was too much of a pita to play and try to figure out where everything was hidden. Most of the other titles stunk. On NES, Gameboy, Genesis, SNES, they all mostly stunk. Either incredibly boring space sims, or poorly done side scrollers.

I am not into strategy games, but I was always told that the Starfleet command games were great. By the time they got into full on FPS (Elite Force) or space combat (Dominion Wars) I had largely lost interest. Generations was a terrible game, although Hidden Evil was tolerable.

Pretty much agree completely with this assessment. I too found the DOS PC adventure games to be the best, the SOS arcade game great and the various ports "ok". I played one on the Genesis back in the day that was also OK but I don't remember which one, it was Next Generation, that's all I remember. I also liked "Final Unity" but got stuck at one point and couldn't figure it out so I never finished it. Would like to try again if I ever find another copy and can get it working on a modern PC.

I thought Elite Force was a decent FPS and always wanted to try the sequel but it's rare and pricey online so never bothered.

[Alpha2099]

I also liked "Final Unity" but got stuck at one point and couldn't figure it out so I never finished it. Would like to try again if I ever find another copy and can get it working on a modern PC.

I did manage to get "A Final Unity" to work on my laptop, but it wasn't easy. To start, I needed DOSBox, but that alone wasn't good enough. The game won't just load into DOS because it's not really a DOS-based game, it's a Windows game. So I had to find a way to install Windows 3.1 into DOSBox, then I had to tell DOSBox to install the game through that version of Windows. It took me the better part of a day to get it all working, and to top it off, you can't see the cutscenes unless you're playing in a windowed mode; fullscreen won't work.

Bottom line: You can get it to work, but it's quite a process.

[Lictalon]

(All the games are called "25th Anniversary," although they were nothing alike).

Agreed: ST games probably peaked with the PC games of the 1990s: 25th Anniversary & Judgment Rites. I really liked the LucasArts-type-gameplay of those, with the puzzles.

I thought the NES version of 25th Anniversary was just a watered-down attempt to replicate the PC adventure games. The SNES ST:TNG game had potential and a good interface, but ended up as an action game, not really an adventure game.

Agreed: ST: 25th Anniversary (GameBoy) was nothing more than a space shooter. ST:TNG (GameBoy and NES) and Starfleet Academy (SNES) were nothing more than ship simulators, although Academy had a bit more variation.

When it comes to the PC, I've always been more of a strategy/Civ game fan, and honestly, I really thought Birth of the Federation was a good game...for the first 20 turns. But its diplomacy and AI was lousy, the interface was ugly, and it was programmed horribly (after so many turns, the AI takes forever to process its moves). A game along those lines had good potential, but was wasted there. ST: Conquests for PS2 was far too simple to be a real strategy game.

[Greg2600]

I think the bottom line is that you run into a quandary with old Trek. The shows/movies were really not action-oriented, thus doing action games always felt and looked out of place. The point and click, and puzzle-quasi-adventure games felt more like the shows, but they were notoriously difficult to figure out and advance. Even when they got that part right, they would throw in space combat which was terrible. 25th anniversary and Judgment Rites had an abysmal space combat section.

I haven't played any game made in the last 10 years, but I imagine the Abrams Trek games are better and more in tune with the films, because they were action films. Modern sims, I can go right down the line: Bridge Commander, Encounters, Invasion, Shattered Universe, and they were all just too darn complicated. Maybe 15 years ago when I had time to sit and spend a week to figure it all out.

Satoshi, I've heard decent things about ST: Legacy, which was a Rockstar affiliated design team and had the voices of each series captain.

[Edmond Dantes]

I liked the old Star Trek 3.5 from Adventure International on A8, very faithful to the 70s version of Star Trek

60s, not 70s. Unless you're referring to the Animated Series (which is the only Trek produced in the 1970s...)

Personally, I remember liking the Gameboy Trek games, and 25th Anniversary for PC, although I always hated that there was no way to interact with objects in your inventory other than just selecting them. It seems like Sierra On-Line was the only company that figured out you NEED to have an option to "Look" at items in your inventory in order to figure out what they are and get an idea what they are for (and even then, Sierra eventually resorted to just giving you a blown-up image of the object, which sometimes doesn't help at all).

I got stuck in the second mission because I could never figure out how you're supposed to use the Phaser Welder on the phaser, since you can't directly use inventory items on other inventory items.

[Leo_A]

The videogame simulation of Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball is on Pinball Arcade.

[Alpha2099]

I started playing Star Trek: Invasion last night. It's okay so far, but the controls are way too slippery. The simple movement of the analog stick sends me way farther over than I want to go, and there's no way to adjust sensitivity in the options.

[love2lovearcades83]

This website sells refurbished arcade and retro games. Right now there's a really cool Star Trek pinball machine for sale, check it out. http://www.arcadespecialties.com/STARTREK.html

[Alpha2099]

This website sells refurbished arcade and retro games. Right now there's a really cool Star Trek pinball machine for sale, check it out. http://www.arcadespecialties.com/STARTREK.html

I'd like it more if it wasn't the J.J. Abrams version of Star Trek.

[camarotuner]

About 10 years ago on one of my "stupid nerd trips" (I set out to do something incredibly nerdy for the sake of doing something incredibly nerdy) I wanted to see the Star Trek Experience when it was still at the Hilton in Vegas. Amongst my list of things to do while there was locate the giant sized Star Trek Voyager sit-down arcade cab. From what I understand this size cab they only made 2. One for the paramount headquarters and one for the Hilton. After walking around for over an hour and no one knowing where it was, I finally found it. Way the hell off in the corner next to a TCBY yogurt stand. Then I spent like 50 bucks beating the thing. Wonder if it's still there? Anyone know if it's still there?

Fairly enjoyable game. They made regular and standard size sit-down cabs for the game as well. I haven't seen one in ages. Man I'd love to get ahold of one of those.

[BlastProcessing402]

60s, not 70s. Unless you're referring to the Animated Series (which is the only Trek produced in the 1970s...)

There was more Trek produced in the 70's. There was Phase II, which they wound up not making, but came very close so they did do a lot of work on it. Then they took resources from that and put them into the first movie, which was also produced in the 70's.

[Atarileaf]

I started playing Star Trek: Invasion last night. It's okay so far, but the controls are way too slippery. The simple movement of the analog stick sends me way farther over than I want to go, and there's no way to adjust sensitivity in the options.

Ah yes, vague memories of this one. It's a PS1 space shooter along the lines of Colony Wars I believe. I know it wasn't as good as CW but I don't remember if it was downright awful or not. Off to youtube for a memory job

[Atarileaf]

There was more Trek produced in the 70's. There was Phase II, which they wound up not making, but came very close so they did do a lot of work on it. Then they took resources from that and put them into the first movie, which was also produced in the 70's.

Phase II is a fanmade series now.