So, Trekkies...

[Edmond Dantes]

Were any of the console Trek games good?

It seems like the only Star Trek games I ever hear getting praised are PC games--Interplay's 25th Anniversary (not the same as the NES or Game Boy games of the same name), and Raven Software's Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force... which I never played because at the time, I didn't care about Voyager, but I may rectify that as lately I'm more interested in Trek in general.

I used to own three gameboy games--25th Anniversary, TNG, and Generations and I remember liking two of them (Generations was basically like a hardmode hack of TNG and thus I didn't care for it), and I remember 25th for NES wasn't bad, but what about others?

For that matter what about DOS or early windows Trek? As in, "anything BEFORE the afformentioned Elite Force"?

Thanks in advance.

(Random, but why do people hate The Motion Picture--the movie I mean? I thought it was pretty good)

[Steve W]

I personally loved Star Trek: Shattered Universe on the PS2 and Xbox. It's a story of Captain Sulu's USS Excelsior getting pulled into the Mirror, Mirror universe and having to battle their way across the quadrant to get to a spacial anomaly that might let them get back. Warning: the difficulty balance is totally off, to a degree I've never seen before. Level 4 is a bat-guano insane difficulty spike where you pilot a shuttlecraft to destroy 4 Constitution-class starships (along with all their fightercraft/shuttlecraft) and when that's over, suddenly two Orion Syndicate starships warp in and attack (along with their fightercraft). It's soul-crushingly frustrating, I probably would have given up at that point if I weren't a huge Star Trek fan and wanted to push through.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture comes across to people as boring since there are long stretches of special effects. The approach through the energy clouds to V'Ger, for example. On first viewing it's pretty impressive, evoking that "2001: A Space Odyssey" kind of feel, but on repeated viewings for people who aren't as into Trek as folks like me, it gets dull quickly. A lot of that was due to the studio wanting the film to feel epic, hence the great soundtrack and slow, majestic views of Enterprise in space dock. Plus, they only fire a weapon once, a photon torpedo at an asteroid. And the movie was considered a failure because Paramount poured money into attempting to launch their own network in the 1970s with Star Trek Phase II being the flagship show, when the network failed to launch (because the other three networks pressured advertisers to boycott Paramount to keep them from competing) a lot of that cost of development was dumped into the budget of The Motion Picture. It could never make those millions of dollars back at the box office.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is my favorite movie in the series. Because it's the most Trek-like, it stays true to the core of the original series. Sure, the new uniform designs are incredibly ugly and the bridge just doesn't seem the same, but it's still a winner in my book. Given the choice, I'll watch The Motion Picture over The Wrath of Khan anyday.

[Edmond Dantes]

I recently re-watched Star Treks V and VI. A discussion came up between me and a friend about what gives Star Trek its "identity" and I kinda felt like those two exemplified it.

It basically came down (for me) to this: Trek is usually ABOUT something, whereas most other sci-fi movies/television are just... stories. To use the obvious example, Star Wars doesn't really have deep themes, its just "empire is bad, rebels good." A Trek take on it would give more insight into the Empire and come down on a definite side, much like a lot of TOS stories did.

Even V, which was largely a mindless action story, still tried to be about God and cosmic thoughts and stuff. Which already makes it better than Insurrection and Nemesis, which were just pointless popcorn flicks that shouldn't have been called Star Trek. Its also why I don't get the desire some fans have for a Star Trek and Star Wars crossover, because really the two universes feel like they wouldn't mesh at all.

.....

I kinda expect this to fly out the window when discussing gaming though.

I've been wondering what the video games TNG: A Final Unity and TNG: Echoes of the Past are about.

[Emperor Megas]

...I'll watch the Motion Picture over The Wrath of Khan anyday.

Wait... You're like, NOT gonna add the troll face or anything? 😶

[YoshiM]

The TNG game for SNES/Genesis was decent, though one version seemed to play better than the other. I can't remember which.

[Greg2600]

I like the one on Vectrex, that's about it.

[Cornelius]

Anyone play the mobile app game? Fleet Command, I think. I assume it is pretty typical mobile pay to win stuff, but looks kinda neat from the ads I've seen.