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Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru Original Release: 2021 Developer: Scopely Publisher: Scopely Platform: Browser Not played: Login for the game is broken Kobayashi Maru is a browser game made to promote Fleet Captains. It let you try out the Kobayashi Maru in a choose-your-own adventure style with the game giving you multiple choices. The pixel grahpics look very nice. Unfortunately, while the game is technically still online, the Facebook login required to play is broken, so nobody can play it. Star Trek PICO-8 Original Release: 2021 Developer: Emabolo Publisher: Self-Published Platform: PICO-8 This is a port of Super Star Trek to the PICO-8 system. The PICO-8 isn’t an actual console, but rather a “fantasy console” designed to allow game designers to work within limitations similar to retro consoles, but much easier to develop for. This version of Star Trek 1971 is essentially a “what if the game was ported to a handheld”. Super Star Trek is a text-based game, while this port was made for a system with a D-pad and a few buttons, so this version allows you to select your options from a menu. The biggest change made is how moving works. It has now been separated to impulse and warp. Impulse lets you move within a system, while warp lets you pick a sector from a map. Torpedoes are now aimed with the d-pad with a short aiming dot appearing near the Enterprise. I feel like the “limitations” set about by the PICO-8 fantasy console have helped this game a lot, this a really lovely version of the game to play, and I would probably recommend this version for someone who is interested in playing a version of the 1971 Star Trek game. Star Trek: Alliance Original Release: 2021 Developer: Josh Derksen, Thomas M. Gofton Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board Game Star Trek: Alliance is a new game based on Star Trek: Attack Wing. It focuses on co-operative palay with up to six people (as long as you buy the game three times). Players play though a campaign of six missions, upgrading their captain and ship as they go, completing objectives and combating the AI enemies. The base pack contains six missions in three acts. The first mission allows for retries if you fail, while the middle four missions have you press on, gaining less experience. Experience can be spent improving your captain, getting new abilities or ships (although the better ships are sold separately). The objectives involve scanning targets, protecting allies and defeating enemies. If you fail the final mission, you lose the whole campaign, so you need to spend your experience wisely. The most vital part of this game is the enemy AI, and this does a great job at it. The process of the enemy actions is simple so it doesn’t take too much time to figure out, but the enemies do a good job at keeping you in their targets. I think they would also work as NPC enemies in Attack Wing itself if you wanted to – the systems here could be used to mix up the previous game. You can also try designing your own scenarios. The biggest issue with this game is that, for new players, the rule book is very complicated, covering a lot of Attack Wing itself. The game isn’t too confusing once you actually play, but starting is daunting – especially when new players need to learn Attack Wing and the new mechanics of Alliance. Alliance is a great way to expand Attack Wing, offering a new way to play. Star Trek: Voyager: Delta Quest Original Release: Cancelled (Due 2021) Developer: GameCo Publisher: GameCo Platform: Gambling Machine Not played: No demo units known. The Deep Space Nine gambling game got turned into a Voyager game, which got cancelled. From a promotional video, it looks like a “Match 3 Puzzle game” where you match gets of gems to get clues to the location of the transwarp conduit. You would be able to unlock “exclusive scenes” from the show. The Borg are on your tail and you lose if they catch up to you. With this being a gambling game, I suspect that you would often not have the matches available to progress. Star Trek: Lower Decks: The Badgey Directive Original Release: 2022 Developer: Mighty Kingdom Publisher: East Side Games Platform: Android/iOS The Badgey Directive is an idle clicker game set on the USS Ceritos. Boimler is doing training in the holodeck doing menial tasks when Mariner spices things up by challenging the computer to create a task Boimler can’t win – the computer recreates Badgey who then sets the crew on tasks taken from the history banks – past missions from previous shows. The game itself is quite simple. Icons charge up, when they’re ready you tap on it to get merit points. You spend these merit points to upgrade the icons and unlock new ones, which lead to more merit points. You can add a member of the Ceritos crew to a task to collect the merit points automatically. On top of merit points, you can get latinum (which is spent to skip requirements for buying/upgrading new things, or dilithium which is spent on upgrading characters and simulations. What makes the game work are the little story segments you get as you hit milestones. The dialogue is extremely charming and it’s great seeing the Lower Deckers take on these missions. It’s great seeing them talk about the Kelpians and Saru, and to chase the artic explorer from the Enterprise episode “Regeneration” and realise that these unknown aliens the NX-01 faced were the Borg. Getting in the way of this game is the adverts. If you don’t watch the adverts, your merit points are effectively halved. If the adverts were harmless, I wouldn’t mind, but I was served adverts for fake apps, apps aimed at taking advantage of gambling addicts and even adverts for games about sexually assaulting women. It massively sours the experience and it desperately needs some moderation. I got to episode 16 before I hit the inevitable “wall” where progression turned from a few hours to weeks. At this point, the chore of playing wasn’t worth it to see more snippets of the story. I would much prefer this game in the form of a digital comic. Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova Original Release: 2022 Developer: Tessera Studios Publisher: Outright Games Platform: Xbox One/Series, PS4/5, Switch, PC Set during episodes 10 and 11 of the TV show (not based on the season 1 finale of the same name), this game follows an adventure of the Prototstar crew as they try follow Starfleet’s principles of helping others. The story has them investigate a Dyson Sphere, where the star is being drained and on the verge of becoming supernova. You play the game as Gwyn and Dal, either with another person in local co-op or swapping between them when you want when playing singleplayer. The game is aimed at kids and is heavily inspired by the LEGO games, although there’s no platforming in Supernova, but instead a bigger focus on puzzles. The puzzles are the game’s highlight, and while a lot are simple, some of them, particularly later on, require a bit of thinking. The game introduces more elements as it goes on, then combines it with the previous stuff. Some puzzles also have a hidden extra puzzle on top of them, required for hunting down collectibles. Combat is against Watchers, the machines from the show. There are different kinds of watchers, such as ones that shoot and ones that charge. They can also have other properties, such as being explosive upon defeat or having a healing circle. You can use melee attacks or shoot – with Gwyn being better up close and Dal from a distance – and you’ll need to dash a lot to avoid enemy attacks. Combat gets surprisingly frantic, considering the game is aimed at kids, but the variety in watchers unfortunately doesn’t stop it from becoming repetitive quite quickly. One of the missions also crashed a few times, requiring me to re-do some long stretches of it again. The dialogue for the most part is pretty good. It captures the show well and hints at things that the show deals with in the second half of season 1, with some good interactions between the crew and Holo Janeway. The references, however, I did notice to be oddly specific to a degree I never noticed in the show, referencing planets and locations (such as “Romulus Death Valley”) as though they were second nature, even though they hadn’t heard of Romulus until at most a few weeks earlier. Supernova feels like an ideal game for a parent and a child to play. It does drag on a bit as it’s repetitive, but it’s got a charming story and some interesting puzzles – including some where the two characters get split in time and the player in the past has to set things up for the player in the present. Star Trek: Missions Original Release: 2022 Developer: Bruce Glassco Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board Game Star Trek: Missions is a game based on another board game called “Fantasy Realms”. It’s a series that I like to call “End Game Scoring: The Game”. In this version, there are two kinds of cards: Galaxy cards and Mission Cards. Galaxy cards are characters, objects and locations and come with stats followed by how the card scores at the bottom (typically by requiring certain other cards in your hand). Mission Cards only have the scoring and nothing else. You start the game with 5 Galaxy cards and 2 Mission cards. Each turn you draw one galaxy card or two mission cards, then discard as many cards as you draw (you must keep 1 or 2 mission cards in your hand). These cards are discarded face up in a line and may be drawn by a player instead of drawing a face-down card. Your goal is to try and form a group of cards that score well off each other. Once 12 mission cards or 8 galaxy cards are in the discard area, the game ends and you proceed to scoring. It’s a very quick game, although the scoring part of it can take longer than the game itself. Star Trek: Super-Skill Pinball Original Release: 2022 Developer: Geoff Engelstein Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board Game A roll-and-write pinball game with a Star Trek theme. Super-Skill Pinball is a series of similar games, and the Star Trek one brings its own twists. Super-Skill Pinball is one of those games that sounds very complicated when trying to learn it, but is simple when you get the hand of it. Each turn, two dice a rolled and you pick one of them to “move” your pinball. You start at the top of the pinball machine and have to drop down to a lower level onto a space matching your chosen dice, which you then fill in. Once you reach the flippers, you can then launch the ball to a space that matches the colour of the flipper, dropping down again in later turns. If there are no spaces below you that you can reach, you lose your ball. The game is played over three rounds (with one exception) and each board has unique features. Starfleet Academy is the basic board, with one unique aspect being the “Kobayashi Maru” section which needs a roll of 7 on the dice to complete (there is a way to complete it using other parts of the board). The Trouble With Tribbles is all about managing tribbles – you’ll keep track of your current tribbles on your backplate. You can manipulate how many tribbles you have and even transport them to other players. Lower Decks plays differently to the others – there are no rounds. Instead, the entire board flips for every 10 points you gain. This one is a little bit broken in that you can create an infinite loop to make the game last for hours. Borg Attack has you preparing for a Borg Invasion for two rounds, unlocking ships, torpedoes and modulations. In round three, you use what you have unlocked to fight a Borg cube, starting from the bottoms and working up to the number 6 at the top. The borg attacks your ships as the pinball bounces back and forth between your fleet and the borg. This is a fun solo game, but I don’t think it works as well with others – due to how the game works, people will be finished and have to wait around for everyone else to finish theirs – which on some boards can be a while. Having to wait for everyone to decide what to do on their turn (everyone uses the same dice roll each turn) is also frustrating. --- One more update after this, and I'll be up to date...until Star Trek Infinite comes out a few weeks later.

I can definitely imagine the original loading being immensely frustrating. The emulator I used was much, much faster so it wasn't quite annoying for me. With Wii Music, I think the biggest issue was Nintendo announcing it as though it was their next major game. It made everyone treat it like it was a massively important game for the Wii. I'd love for a remake of Geist. It had a really great idea and I'd love for a new attempt at it, reworking the mechanics into something better.

A few I've played of the very notorious bad games: Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing This is just a completely broken game, just extremely unfinished. The thing is, though, the unfinished nature is pretty much why it's bad.:If finished, it would just be a very boring and dull racing game. I played it during a charity session. Ride to Hell: Retribution Now this is a finished game that is utterly terrible. I also played this during a charity session, until a glitch stopped me from playing more. The gameplay itself is atrocious, the level design is bad and the story is laughable. Sonic 06 With a couple of simple patches, it's a decent game. The fan remake of is extremely enjoyable - it shows that the core concept and level design are quite good. The game was just horribly rushed. Sonic Heroes is a much worse game. Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric This is...just fine. It's mindless, extremely average but quite enjoyable. It's not a good game, but it's nowhere near as bad as people make out. Games that I think deserve to be notable bad games: Doctor Who: Return to Earth My review of this was the first to be published. The game is strange: you have to collect orbs from pedestals (avoiding their "view cone") and shoot them at matching colours to activate actions. To shoot enemies, you fire a matching orb at the orb floating above their head. Aiming was immensely stiff and there's no actual challenge or interesting puzzles. Naughty Bear A silly Hitman clone with violent but cuddly bears. This could have worked if it was funny, with diverse objectives and interesting ideas. This had none. It was also extremely short and each level just felt like a slight variation, with you just doing the exact same thing over and over. One thing I noticed was that the menu button was very similar to every XBLA game, so I'm pretty sure this was supposed to be a cheap downloadable game that was thrown onto a disc at the last moment. Underwurlde One of the Sabreman games form Rare, this one is just horrible with massive falls everywhere, a confusing map with a ton of dead ends, difficult to hit flying enemies and a terrible jump. Hello Neighbour Apparently this is a horror game. To me, horror games completely fail when there's nothing to fear. I actually found it more efficient to get "caught" than to actually try to escape the neighbour, as you instantly respawn with all your items. The game relies entirely on moon logic and pressing buttons that activate things you can't see. I ended up using a guide and found two solutions for the first level. One involved using a fan to push something towards a button, but the fan would not push the item, so that was broken. The second was finding a hidden magnet gun, but then I accidentally hit the drop button and it fell through the ground. 12 Minutes This is a point and click "time loop" game, but it lacks the ability to just do silly things or have fun. Even if you figure things stuff, the main difficulty is activating things so that the main character figures it out. It's mainly dialogue based but nothing you actually want to say is an option. The voice acting sounds like everyone is bored (and this is James McAvoy, Daisey Ridley and Willem Dafoe). What makes it truly terrible is the plot.

I don't know much about pinball, so I opted not to cover them. There is a Star Trek pinball board game that I'll be covering soon.

Star Trek: Dark Remnant Original Release: 2019 Developer: VRStudios Publisher: Dave & Busters. Platform: VR Ride Not played: Cost of getting to location and playing too expensive. Star Trek: Dark Remnant is a VR ride arcade game that was available in Dave & Buster’s. Up to four people sat on the ride, which would tilt and turn to emulate the feeling of the ship moving. You were a member of the USS Galileo, a science ship investigating a decaying neutron star with the Enterprise. A Klingon ship arrives, wanting to destroy the Enterprise. It’s up to you and your team to defend the Enterprise from the Klingon ship. Your control a small handheld device which is linked to the Galileo’s weapons, enabling you to aim and shoot as objects fly across your view. Star Trek: Conflick in the Neutral Zone Original Release: 2019 Developer: Mike Elliott Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board game A board game with a fun pun title. This is a flicking game where the goal is to collect 10 Control Points, either from destroying enemy ships or mining them from the central planet. There are two kinds of ships: round discs are collectors. They mine dilithium or points from planets if they are still on one at the start of their turn, but are destroyed if they are knocked off. Attack ships are used to push other ships off planets or off the board to destroy them. While it sounds simple, there’s a bunch of fiddly rules that have a lot of holes, like how asteroids work. There’s also a lot of trying to remember the location of discs in order to reset them, which makes the game a pain to play and you’ll have to agree with house rules on the fly to carry on. Each payer starts with basic Federation or Klingon ships, but can buy ships of any faction. This means you’ll have a mixture of colours, and the names and pictures are absolutely tiny, making it a big pain to identify which ships are yours. Each non-starter ship has its own power, although these are quite random and don’t have much to do with the ship – the Defiant, for example, can move asteroids with a tractor beam. This game could be replaced with any theme whatsoever and it will make zero difference. Flicking games can be a lot of fun, but they need to be the right kind of simple. The designer of this game has made a load of great games, but this seems like a rush job. Star Trek Chrono-Trek Original Release: 2019 Developer: Looney Labs Publisher: Looney Labs Platform: Board game Star Trek Chrono-Trek is a Star Trek version of Chrononauts. It’s a game all about manipulating the timeline to achieve your goals. Each card has an alternative event on the back, which players can use inverter cards to flip. Some of these can cause a ripple effect and flip over other cards – some changes need multiple prior events to be altered to impact. Each character has a list of goals on their card, which are certain timeline events (regular or alternative) or artefacts, which are found in the main deck. Each turn you draw a card into your hand of three and then play a card – although some are events which happen by default, such as the Devron Anomaly, which moves backwards in time, wiping out humanity if it reaches the beginning. The planning you need to make to win is unfortunately limited by the few cards in your hands. You can also only win during your turn, which means nobody can accidentally trigger a win for someone else – although if everything is right at the start of your turn, you can declare the win straight away. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Fluxx Original Release: 2019 Developer: Looney Labs Publisher: Looney Labs Platform: Board game The Deep Space Nine version of Star Trek Fluxx. This one has no “Ungoal” and only has three creepers, half as many as the TOS and TNG versions, so it’s (usually) a quicker game. It also contained rules for combining the different Star Trek Fluxx games without needing an expansion. Star Trek 1971 Original Release: 2020 Developer: Making Games Per Year Publisher: Making Games Per Year Platform: Browser This is a browser remake of the 1971 Star Trek game by Mike Mayfield, offering both touch and typing interfaces. The experience is streamlined massively, especially in terms of navigating and firing weapons. It’s a very nice version to play, and a very simple way to experience the game without needing to use emulators. It does lose a little bit of its charm due to how automated everything is, moving is as simple as clicking your destination and firing torpedoes just has you selecting from a menu, which means you can’t miss, but it’s still a nice way to see what the original game was aiming for. You can also play a Mirror Universe variant, which changes a few things. The objective of destroying all Klingons makes a bit more sense. Play Here Star Trek: Voyager Fluxx Original Release: 2020 Developer: Looney Labs Publisher: Looney Labs Platform: Board game The Voyager version of Star Trek Fluxx. This has a few more creepers than the DS9 version, but no Ungloal. There were two more expansion packs for the various Star Trek games. The Archer expansion had cards for Archer, Daniels and the Temporal Cold War while the Porthos expansion added some random things like Porthos, Spot, Phlox and Kor. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Red Alert Original Release: Cancelled (Due 2020) Developer: GameCo Publisher: GameCo Platform: Gambling Machine Not played: No demo units known. Developed as a “Video Game Gambling Machine”, this provided a mixture of both luck and skill to possibly win (but almost certainly lose) money on. It was going to be some kind of tower defence game and will pit the gambling addict up against “against antagonistic aliens and dangerous stellar phenomena”. The game was cancelled in order to be rebranded as a Voyager gambling game. Note: Unfortunately, there are a bunch of Star Trek slot machines. I have decided to not cover these, this cancelled one is an exception as it has an actual game element to it. Star Trek: Legends Original Release: 2021 Developer: Tilting Point LLC Publisher: Tilting Point LLC Platform: Apple Arcade Not played: No compatible device for playing. Star Trek Legends was a game that was originally designed as a free 2 play game but is now subscription-based as part of Apple Arcade (which means I have no way to play without spending an obscene amount of money) similar to the Star Wars game Galaxy of Heroes. While it’s no longer a free to paly game, the elements are still there, with lootboxes and a lot of grinding for new characters. The game is a turn based combat game, but because it’s all about how much you’ve grinded and levelled up your characters, strategy doesn’t really seem to matter – the game even has a button to play for you. This one uses the Nexus as the reason why characters from all timelines have ended up together, with Burnham, Worf and McCoy being the main characters in the story.

How exactly are they tracking installs? None of the data on our computers should be going straight to Unity. Will offline installers get banned? And with their updates: how are they going to detect installs from bundles? How do they know a second install is one the same computer without collecting private information?

Star Trek Adversaries Original Release: 2018 Developer: Puppet Master Publisher: Puppet Master Platform: PC, Android, iOS Star Trek: Adversaries was a fast-paced card game that had a good response from critics. It was a digital collectable card game that featured some really nice starship models – and quite a lot of them. Unfortunately, the game was shut down and servers taken offline before it was even live for a full year. Booting up the game just gives you a login error. However, this is a card game, and the information on the cards was kept on the Wiki for the game, so by figuring out the rules, creating needed tokens, I was able to recreate the game in Tabletop Simulator, just without the automation. It’s doesn’t have the fancy effects or the 3D models, but I can still try out the gameplay. It’s a really fun game that reminds me a bit of Star Realms. Most of your cards are ships that can be enhanced by crew. You put them into play and can attack the opponents ship or their flagship – with the overall goal being destroying the flagship. Each turn, the amount of energy you can spend on playing cards is increased every turn, leading to a game that starts out slow and speeds up massively. It also requires you to plan your deck with a balance of cheaper and more expensive cards. Leftover energy at the end of your turn becomes auxiliary energy, this can be spent on your flagships Special or Ultimate powers, which also bring into play that flagship's unique cards. The cards cover all the shows up to Discovery, with the cards looking nice and clean with lovely artwork on them. It covers a nice variety of ships, including a lot of alien ships in the neutral cards. Adversaries is a fun, quick game. I probably would have hated the lootbox nature of the mobile game, but the actual card game has some fun and interesting mechanics. Star Trek Trexels II: The Next Resolution Original Release: 2018 Developer: Kongreagate Publisher: YesGnome, LLC Platform: Android, iOS Not played: Servers down. Trexels 2 brings the first game and gives it the very marketable “throw in everything from all shows” thing that the mobile Star Trek games love because it’s great for lootbox opportunities. The ship building is more of the same: lots of tapping and wait timers, with the ability to pay real money to make the progression qicker. The biggest change are the away missions, which look like they could be interesting as they’re an X-COM style turn based strategy….but from reviews, it’s very shallow and you’ll eventually encounter missions where you need to grind forever to upgrade characters enough to complete, or pay money to do so. The servers for this game were shut down, so there’s no way to play it. Star Trek: Fleet Command Original Release: 2018 Developer: Digit Game Studios Publisher: Scopely Platform: Android, iOS Playing this game now, it very much has a crisis of identity. The game boots up with USS Voyager artwork and you’re given some of the TNG crew at the start, but then the state of the universe makes no sense and the game doesn’t look right and feels more like the Kelvin universe. And that’s because it IS the Kelvin universe. Originally, the game had no additions from other shows. The game was about you being an “independent” in the changed world of the Kelvin timeline, dealing with a mysterious AI helping you created by Scotty. The stuff thrown in by other shows have no explanations, they’re just there, and end up making the game look like a mess (just a more marketable mess). It started off as its own coherent universe before just throwing anything in. Fleet Command is a “press button to do stuff” game. There’s no strategy and very little choice, combat is automatic and missions are extremely repetitive. It starts out promising, looking like a strategy game with in depth base building and complex technology trees, but this is all an illusion as it soon becomes clear that everything has to be done in a specific order. Want to upgrade your drydock for more ships? You need to make sure your Academy is at the right level, which requires Operations at a certain level and so on. The entire game is like this, making it feel like you’re just doing chores for someone else. The game is all about time management. Everything takes time, and the main collectable are speed up items that skip some of these wait timers. If you run out, you can buy more. Other upgrades, such as new crew, are via lootboxes. The crew screen looks impressive, with a good 3D model of the character, but they’re nothing more than bonus stats for your ship. It’s really baffling when part of the game is looking for Scotty when he’s sitting on on of your ships (the Kelvin universe version, too). Having these known characters detracts from the game, but it appeases those that just want to spend money to collect. But all these increased stats, upgrades and new ships doesn’t help the gameplay of just choosing locations and going there. This is by far the most boring game I’ve ever played, and the only positive I can come up with are that the graphics are nice, especially the ship models. But even then, you can only get a good look at these in the menu as ships are a tiny dot when playing. These are nice enough that they could be ported to other games, with some nice alien ships, the USS Discovery, and the Titan-A. You do get one reward for sticking with the game: at a certain milestone, your ship and station is marked for permanent PvP. This means that you’re now at the mercy of those who have played the game for longer and those that have paid money to upgrade their stuff. It’s very much a Pay 2 Win game so this is something that, if you can last through the boredom to reach it, will likely make many people stop playing. This game is probably the most boring game I’ve ever experienced. Stage 9 Original Release: 2018 Developer: Messy Desk Publisher: Messy Desk Platform: PC Stage 9 was a very ambitious fan project: recreate the Enterprise D in its entirety to explore at your own leisure. The project was shut down by CBS before it was completed, so we only have a selection of areas to explore – although most major areas are covered, including some never seen in the show. As this is a very early build, the optimisation isn’t great, so it will be sluggish on decent PCs. As it’s just exploring, it’s not an issue. NPCs look a bit freaky, but you can turn them off. The Enterprise D interiors have been recreated in astounding detail, areas we never got to see – such as the stairs to the Observation lounge – are now something we can look at and inspect. Some consoles also have functionality, you can take control of the ship, play with cargo bay tractor beams and open shuttlebay doors. Speaking of shuttlebays, the most impressive location in this is the Enterprise D’s main shuttlebay, which we never got to see in the show. It’s absolutely colossal, like a full size airport, and you can see why they never had the budget to create a set for it (and CGI was too early when the show was on the air). It really helps to sell the scale of the ship. Another treat is the holodeck, which has more bridges to explore. There’s the bridge of the Enterprise form The Original Series along with different variants of the Enterprise D bridge from: the Encounter at Farpoint, Yesterday’s Enterprise, All Good Things and Generations, giving you a nice idea of how much they were changed for these episodes. It is easy to get lost, though, and it seems obvious that a map would have been implemented later in development. You can find some neat extras such as a phaser range and a shuttle you can pilot. It’s a massive shame that this project was shut down. The developers behind this made an officially approved interactive experience for The Orville where you get to explore the whole ship, and some of them are working on The Roddenberry Archive. Star Trek: Galactic Enterprises Original Release: 2018 Developer: Christophe Boelinger Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board game A trading game where your goal is to make the most latinum. You all play as Ferengi as you bid on types of goods and try to sell them at the highest price. This isn’t a new game, though, it’s based on an older trading game called Fantasy Business. Each round, one good is drawn for each player, plus one actions card. One of a time, players bid on these until each player has one card, or there are no cards left due to players passing. One glaring omission in the goods is that there are no self-sealing stembolts. After this, each player writes down the price they want to sell at. The minimum price this could be is the base price, while the maximum is double the base price. Players can talk amongst themselves and come to agreements – however, they don’t have to honour those agreements when writing them down. Once players have chosen their price, you go through each good. Anyone that set the highest price gets nothing, while everyone else gets their chosen price. The person that chose the lowest price also gets a bonus of 2 per card they own. If all players set the same, it counts as the lowest price and everyone gets the bonus. After this, the goods are kept (they represent an ongoing supply) and you bid on new cards to add to your supply. Your enjoyment of this game will depend entirely on how into negotiating everyone playing is, and how much they’re willing to screw each other over. Even then, there’s too much risk to setting the maximum price unless two people make a specific agreement, so most people just pick the maximum if they’re the only one with a good, then set the minimum if another person has it. The original game has the same issues and nothing was every done to fix it in this version. A Ferengi trading game sounds like a good idea. And while the cards and latinum look nice, this game just feels like accounting. Star Trek Fluxx Original Release: 2018 Developer: Looney Labs Publisher: Looney Labs Platform: Board game The Fluxx games all play the same way, with just some minor differences. It’s a game of silly randomness and changing rules, and can be fun every now and then. I’ve owned a couple of version in the past, including Star Fluxx, which parodies multiple sci-fi shows and films. The game starts with you drawing one card and playing one card, but some cards change how much you draw and play in a turn. Keeper cards are placed in front of you, these are usually characters of object. Goal cards will tell you which Keeper cards will win in game, but only one Goal is in play at once (although rules can change that). However, be wary about Creeper cards: these will join your Keepers when you draw them and you can’t win the game when you have one (unless that creeper is a specific goal). Action cards will also force swapping cards, let you draw and play more while surprise cards can stop actions or let you do something in their place. The Star Trek version of Fluxx is based on The Original Series. One thing that this has that isn’t a standard part of “Fluxx” is the “Ungoal” card. If this comes out and every player has had the “Doomsday Machine” creeper and the Enterprise is not in play, everyone loses. Star Trek: The Next Generation Fluxx Original Release: 2018 Developer: Looney Labs Publisher: Looney Labs Platform: Board game A version of Star Trek Fluxx for The Next Generation. This one is very similar, with another Ungoal card (this time with the Borg). Alongside this was also the Bridge expansion, which adds new cards and goals for combining this with Star Trek Fluxx.

Star Trek Timelines Original Release: 2016 Developer: Disruptor Beam/Tilting Point/Wicked Realm Games Publisher: Tilting Point Platform: Android, iOS, PC For extremely long and grindy pay 2 win mobile games like this, I am playing until the inevitable brick wall. Most mobile games follow the same pattern: at the start, you’ll get lots of lootboxes thrown at you, you’ll get a bit of premium currency, and progression will be nice and swift to try and “hook” you. Then suddenly, progression stops. To get further, you’ll either need to grind for weeks, or pay money. In Star Trek Timelines, there’s a random time anomaly messing with time to enable using characters and ships from all of the shows. It’s the go-to plot for Star Trek mobile games because it means more potential for selling stuff. Your mission is to fix the time anomalies, although with a game like this, there is never actually an “ending” as it means the game would be finished, so you know everything you do will fail. I’ll start by talking about the good thing of Timelines. For starters, the graphics are really nice. Between missions, you get to see your ship in the planetary system the mission is set in, and they all look wonderful (if a bit busy). There’s nothing to actually do with this, it’s just a backdrop to look at, so it’s a bit frivolous and seems like a colossal waste of the nice assets. Now I’ve finished talking about the good points, it’s on to the bad: this is barely a game. The main gameplay are away missions. Your crew have stats and you pick three for an away mission. You have “choices” in the mission but it just amounts to picking the person with the highest stat. You can’t use the same person on two actions in a row, so sometimes you have to pick the second best stat. That’s the total amount of thinking you use in the game. The writing is so dry and the use of just random versions of characters makes everything feel so unimportant that I found myself not having the energy to read most of the dialogue. The game is all about collecting, and earning random things. Unless you spend a massive amount of time or money, you’re not going to be able to use the characters you like, it’s just whoever you happen to have. You need multiples of the same character to merge and you need to collect items (randomly) to improve their stats. I reached a point in mission 3 where I simply didn’t have the required stat. The way to continue is to play random old missions until you are randomly given something that will help. I managed to get 10 “premium” lootboxes which gave me a ton of characters…none of them useful. But don’t worry, you can buy specific crew at certain times by buying bundles that go up to £92!!! I remember playing the beta of this and it had an in-depth combat system. It was a turn-based strategy that was a bit like rock-paper-scissors where your abilities worked against certain abilities, but made your ship vulnerable to others. This system was completely thrown out during the beta and replaced with one where you tap icons when they’ve finished charging. There’s so little thought involved that there’s an autoplay button along with an option to speed up the battles. Timelines is definitely among the worst of all the Star Trek games. It’s devoid of anything interesting, there’s no gameplay and it’s just a chore repeatedly asking you to give it a ridiculous amount of money. Star Trek: Ascendancy Original Release: 2016 Developer: Aaron Dill, John Kovaleski, Sean Sweigart Publisher: Gale Force Nine Platform: Board Game Star Trek Ascendancy is a game of exploration and conquest, although you can try to avoid the conquest if you want. Each player starts on their homeworld with a base that generates the three main resources (production, science and culture) as they explore the galaxy and eventually meet up, with the goal being destroying your rivals (which is not likely) or gaining 5 ascendancy tokens, which you get by generating and spending culture. The exploration system in this is great: you roll a dice to determine how long the “space line” is then draw a new planet, which has an event. These discs can be moved around the connecting planet if needed (to account for table space and connecting to other planets), but are firmly locked in place one connected to a second planet. That said, it also has massive downsides as you can encounter threats and hazards. One player could get a bunch of safe systems ideal for colonising, while another player encounters pulsars and black holes which ruin ships and don’t provide any opportunity to expand or increase your production (although there are rule variants to help with this). Another issue with the game is how long turns take. Sometimes I could have walked to the beach, had a stroll and still get back and have to wait a bit for my turn. I would have much preferred a system where you took turns doing single actions rather than conducting your entire turn in one go, or at least mechanics that allow for more reactions to what the current player is doing. The way Ascendancy works means games tend to drag on, while longer games like Twilight Imperium can keep you engaged the whole time. While Ascendancy is fairly average for a 4X board game, the components and Star Trek them really improve it. Each faction has slightly different rules that reflect the species really well: the Federation can’t conquer neutral planets, for example, while the Cardassians need to have forces by a planet for them to produce anything and playing as the Ferengi does feel like you are merchants. It elevates the game from an average one to one that, despite its flaws, is still fun if everyone is into Star Trek. Star Trek: Frontiers Original Release: 2015 Developer: Vlaada Chvátil, Andrew Parks Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board Game Star Trek: Frontiers is a Star Trek version of the popular board game Mage Knight. It focuses on exploration of the Gamma Quadrant (although you fight a lot of Romulans and Borg). It’s suitable for up to four players, who pick between Picard on the Enterprise D, Sisko on the Definat, Lursa and B’etor on a Bird of Prey and Markok on a Negh’var. It can be played co-op or competitively (although you still have to complete objectives. The game is very in depth with a lot of complicated rules, which means a lot of checking to see how different abilities interact. That said, all parts of the game are engaging, even if it’s a lot to wrap your head around. There’s a big list of scenarios to choose from, and the good combat mechanics (while you explore, it’s very much combat focused) are well thought out. Frontiers also got an expansion. In following on from the Enterprise D and Defiant, it added a new playable ship: The Enterprise A. Along with a new opponent: Khan, flying in his Dominion Warship. The designer was clearly a Wrath of Khan fan and went with that even though there was still plenty of TNG era ships, such as Voyager, or other races. Star Trek: Panic Original Release: 2015 Developer: Justin De Witt Publisher: Fireside Games Platform: Board Game Star Trek Panic is a Star Trek version of a popular co-op tower defence board game called Castle Panic. In Castle Panic, you defend a castle while enemies stream from all around you, you have to use your cards to repair your castle walls and defeat the advancing enemies. Star Trek Panic isn’t simply a retheme of Castle Panic, but brings about new mechanics that suit the theme perfectly. For starters, the Enterprise is not stationary, so you can spin the ship to face your powered shields towards the enemies. You can also move forward, which is simulated not by moving the Enterprise model, but by moving the enemy ships in front of the Enterprise closet (although ships behind the Enterprise don’t move further away). This is important for another main element: the missions. Your objective isn’t just to withstand an attack, but to complete missions along the way. Each mission is only active for a number of turns and require spending cards to fix problems or moving the Enterprise into unknown ships to investigate. This creates the choice of using cards to defend the Enterprise or to finish the mission to get closer to winning the game. As enemies attack, they’ll first damage shields, then hurt the section of Enterprise relevant to that location: you have cardboard overlays to stick on top of the cardboard Enterprise to show off the damage, and it looks really nice. Star Trek Panic is a really nice version of an already great board game, with the new additions fitting the Star Trek theme really well. Unfortunately, the physical game never got released in the UK. Risk: Star Trek 50th Anniversary Edition Original Release: 2015 Developer: The Op Publisher: The Op Platform: Board Game Like Monopoly, Risk is another game that has many, many different licensed versions. However, Risk changes things more than Monopoly does, and the most basic licensed versions have a different map, while some versions have their own rules and can even be completely unique games with the Risk branding thrown on for sales. Risk: Star Trek has two ways to play: One that’s just Risk and another which adds more to it. You play as different captains from the shows (Q has pitted them all against each other, and for some reason they’re going along with it and not working out a way to cooperate). In the enhanced version of the game, you have to complete missions such as “conquer locations controlled by 2 different opponents”, “control the United Federation of Planets” and “Use abilities of all your crew in one turn”. Due to the nature of these missions, the game length can vary a lot – it can either take forever, or it can be over in three turns. The main gameplay is just like risk: sent troops to nearby locations, fight if there opponents or neutral aliens there. This is done by rolling dice, one for each ship attacking or defending (with a maximum of 3 dice for the attacker and 2 for the defender). You can move some of your ships at the end of your turn. At the start of each turn, you have to turn over a Q card, which causes random events, these can help you out or make you lose things, some impact the whole board. The most significant one is the Tribbles, which have two starting cards. These work similar to Pandemic where they’ll grow in numbers before multiplying to other locations. There are only 50 tribbles included in the game, and if you place all of them on the board….everyone loses. Risk: Star Trek is an interesting take on Risk, although one that’s extremely random. Star Trek: The Dice Game Original Release: 2016 Developer: Carl White Publisher: Self-Published Platform: Board Game This is a fan-made board game, but has really nice assets and is the most popular fan made Star Trek board game, other than Klin Zha. It heavily borrows elements from a solo board game I enjoyed a lot called Deep Space D-6. This is a solo board game where you have to use dice to get your ship though missions and dangers. Each turn, you’ll roll the dice – which represent crew divisions and assign them to tasks to manage your ship or contribute to completing missions. One of the dice is a “threat”, which get placed on the threat meter. One you have four on here, you’ll draw an extra event. The events can damage your ship, put crew out of commission or will stop you form performing certain actions until you complete them by assigning dice to them. It’s a really fun game and the mission structure of it makes it different enough from the original game that it’s nice to play both. The developer did get approached by multiple publishers, who pitched the game to Paramount, but never got a response. Star Trek: Bridge Crew Original Release: 2017 Developer: Red Storm Publisher: Ubisoft Platform: PS4, PC Bridge Crew was originally released as a VR exclusive, before being patched to allow people to play it without VR. The ideal experience is to play this in VR with motion controllers with three other friends playing it in VR with motion controllers. I have played this with friends, but the VR is way beyond my budget. The game itself borrows heavily from Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, a LAN game where you essentially create a starship in your house, with each person having a PC to represent their station (or the viewscreen for the captain). I’ve played it at a convention and it’s a great experience, and Bridge Crew is the closest thing that can be done online. There are four stations in this game: Captain, Helm, Tactical and Engineering. Captain is the simplest role in multiplayer: you get told the orders to pass on to your crew, answer hails and push the red alert button. Most of this role is via the voice chat, giving commands to your crew (and hoping they pay attention). Helm gets to fly the ship and set warp and “impulse” destinations (what the game calls in-system warp), and is probably the most involved position due to this. Tactical gets to control the phaser and shield. There’s no phaser arcs or shield arcs, so unfortunately the combat is very basic. You can disrupt enemy weapons, shields or engines via hacking. Engineering sets power levels and prioritises repairs, this is probably the worst role to have and you don’t even get a clear idea of what is happening due to not having access to sensor data like the other three roles. In singleplayer, you play as the captain but can give orders to the crew. The AI is very basic and some actions can reset other orders. The helm officer won’t avoid obstacles, so for some situations, you can take over the station and control it directly (although you can’t give orders from there, you have to return to the Captain’s position). It’s not the ideal way to play, but it gets the job done and is far better than not having the option. The main (and incredibly short) 6-mission story takes place on the USS Aegis, a ship from the Kelvin timeline. The bridge itself is wonderfully made and fits the aesthetic while adapting it to work for a game like this. The missions are fine, but after this all that’s left is random missions. There’s not a lot of content in this game. The game does include additional ships you can use in the random missions: the prime timeline original TOS-style Enterprise and (as part of DLC) the Enterprise D. The TOS bridge absolutely looks the part and is very authentic, although you definitely need to use the help overlay to work out which buttons do what. It’s difficult to use, but it gets the feel of being in The Original Series really well. The Enterprise D bridge takes a few more liberties in its interface, mainly making the LCARS displays more game-like to help it play a lot better. This also makes the engineer’s job (renamed as “operations”) better by improving the repair side of things by assigning damage teams. Bridge Crew is a great start for a multiplayer Star Trek game, but would have been nice with more in depth gameplay for weapons and shields, as well as far more structured missions. Star Trek: Discovery: Away Mission Original Release: 2018 Developer: Sandbox VR Publisher: Sandbox VR Platform: VR Experience Not played: Cost of getting to location and playing too expensive. Star Trek: Discovery: Away Mission is a full body VR room experience. This means you need to go to one of the company’s locations, gear up in their motion sensing outfits and get set up in their special rooms – sort of like an actual Holodeck. Six people can play the game, with you all in the same room – their location in the room corresponds with their location in the game, so you can move around them as needed. The rooms also use fans and other features to enhance the experience – for example, the suit’s rumble packs combined with the fans in the room are used to create the sense of using the transporter. It sounds like a fascinating experience. In Away Mission, you play as a member of Starfleet on board the USS Discovery, investigating a lost Starfleet ship. Tilly acts as your guide from the mission (from Discovery). The mission involves a lot of combat, but you also get points based on how well you use your tricorder.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – On Board the USS Enterprise Original Release: 2013 Developer: Carlton Books Publisher: Carlton Books Platform: PC This reference CD came with the book Star Trek: The Next Generation: On Board The Enterprise, written by Denise and Michael Okuda. It doesn’t mention who made the CD that came with it. The book mentions a “Breathtaking 3D Interactive Tour” which definitely oversells it. You may have noticed from the screenshot that the rooms you look at are computer generated renders. While these renders are extremely well detailed, you can’t explore them in 3D, you’re just looking at photos of the renders. Each room has a couple of 360 photos to scroll through and nothing to interact with, it’s a very limited tour. Included in this is the Bridge, Captain’s Ready Room, the Transporter Room, Sick Bay, a corridor, Engineering and a cargo bay. With how detailed each location is, and how it was all created on a computer, it’s surprising that there are so few places to view from, as it’s much easier to create a new render with this than taking photos of the actual sets, as done in the Interactive Technical Manual. Star Trek: Attack Wing Original Release: 2013 Developer: Christopher Guild, Andrew Parks Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board Game Star Trek: Attack Wing is the main miniature-based Star Trek game, and is sort of still going now, although mainly in the form of repackaged sets. From what I can tell, the last new ship was a Xindi-Reptillian ship in 2017, with the game also being used as a basis for a new co-op version called Star Trek Alliance. Attack Wing does a good job at representing ship combat in Star Trek without being overly complex (although if you star incorporating many different sets, cards start overruling and contradicting each other). Each round, you both set your planned ship manoeuvre on a dial, then move on to using abilities and attacking. Not only is your ship important, but many special abilities and actions are provided by the crew you have. There’s a lot of strategy in the game. One example is how you use shields. Some abilities require shield usage, so you have the ability to allow a shot to bypass your shield in order to protect your shield in order to use that ability. You’re also constantly moving and circling each other. There are also a ton of missions you can get for the game, and some colossal Borg ships you can use (including one with pop out sphere). It’s a fun game and can be scaled and made more complex, or kept to a simple game with a couple of ships. I also want to point out the superb Tabletop Simulator version, which spawn ships/cards based on fleets you design online, and also has a ton of features to help you out, such as control cards that make the ships move automatically. Star Trek Trexels Original Release: 2013 Developer: Xcube Games Publisher: YesGnome, LLC Platform: Android, iOS This is a game that required server access to run: one of a few Star Trek games that are now unplayable due to this. I did play Trexels when it first came out, though, although I wasn’t very impressed. After seeing Star Wars take on this formula with Tiny Death Star (which was actually good), this is Star Trek’s take on the pixelated room management game that was popular at the time. Unfortunately, greed took over on this and the game was excruciatingly slow unless you paid for premium currency. You could gain it from completing missions, but it was very slow. The missions were extremely dull, too. Your crew generated energy cubes over time, so you had to wait for your energy to build up and press one of the two actions at the bottom of the screen. Rooms would increase this energy, as well as other resources needed. Building up a starship really could have been a lot of fun – especially as similar games have shown it can work – but Trexels missed the mark. Star Trek: Alien Domain Original Release: 2015 Developer: GameSamba Publisher: GameSamba Platform: Browser Not played: Servers shut down Star Trek: Alien Domain was a browser-based MMO that had a focus on base building and resource management. It got an expansion/update in 2019 with Incursion before being shut down in 2022. Due to this, there is no way to play the game. The game looks like a free to play game where it start off giving you lots of stuff, but then turns into a slow, hopeless grind unless you spend a ton of money to keep up with everything. The designs of everything look a bit off to me, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. Star Trek: Wrath of Gems Original Release: 2015 Developer: Genera Publisher: CBS Interactive Platform: Browser Not played: Servers shut down After Trexels, Star Trek needed to jump straight on the next mobile gaming fad. Following on from the success of Candy Crush, Wrath of Gems is another Bejewelled clone that has some Star Trek flair stuck onto it. You play by swapping the location of two gems in order to create matching groups of 3 or more. In basic Bejewelled gameplay, you’re doing this to get points, but Wrath of Gems adds a few spins on it. In ship combat, attack gems will let you shoot at your opponents with shields restoring health. You and your opponent take turns, so you have to be careful not to give your opponent a great move. Another type involves collecting combos of different types of gems, while another one is on ground missions where gems unlock your crew’s attacks. There’s a TOS story and TNG story, and each settings has ships and crew to unlock and upgrade, using currency collected from various moves (or purchased). These can also be spent on lootboxes (which can also be purchased), giving you upgraded abilities. The servers for this went down sometime in 2018 and as a result, it is not impossible to play the game, even if you have it installed. Star Trek: Five-Year Mission Original Release: 2015 Developer: David E. Whitcher Publisher: Mayfair Games Platform: Board Game Star Trek: Five-Year Mission is a co-op dice game that uses mechanics from a simple dice game called “Roll for It” – which incidentally was a game I bought because of Wil Wheton’s TableTop show. There are three decks of “alerts” in increasing difficulty, these have dice values and colours that need to be placed on it to complete. If you draw too many of these, you fail, and a new one is drawn at the start of each person’s turn – to make matters work, some may cause you to draw another of the next difficulty up, so you can end up with three new challenges at the start of your turn. A turn sequence is simple: draw a new alert, collect dice (up to your maximum of 5), roll the new dice (plus any you want from last turn) and place them on the alerts to complete them. Some of these alerts will grant you powers that can alter dice values or colours, but this dice manipulation is few and far between. With a bit more, there could have been some strategy to this, but most of the game you’re just rolling and placing dice without needing to plan or think. It’s a fun game, but a bit too simple at times. One nice thing about the game is that you can play with either a TOS theme or TNG theme, or mix them together. Star Trek Road Trip Original Release: 2015 Developer: Tyler Brown, Mikel Fromstein Publisher: Aquarius Platform: Board Game Not played Road Trip is a series of basic roll and move board games. You have to collect attack tokens in order to progress, with action and 50/50 cards giving you bonuses or making it worse for you. The goal is to get a toll pass to reach the centre of the board, fight the battled in the four corners then return back. The Road Trip games are based on different franchises, all with the exact same board layout, rules and card results (just with different designs, names and flavour text). It sounds like a very generic and boring game.

Monopoly: Klingon Edition Original Release: 2011 Developer: Hasbro Publisher: Hasbro Platform: Board Game While this is still the exact same game as regular Monopoly, there’s a bit of effort put into the design of this. Every single part of the game has been translated into Klingon and the overall design is extremely nice – apart from the four corner tiles that Hasbro never like to change (although they still approved Klingon translations on them). Things have also been reworded to make it sound like a war game – money represents the size of your forces. It doesn’t make any difference to how the game works, but it does add a bit of charm to this version. It’s still an awful game. Star Trek Infinite Space Original Release: Cancelled 2011 Developer: Gamefound Publisher: None Platform: Browser Not played: No playable builds available Infinite Space was described as a casual browser-based MMO. While it was in development, the studio Gamefound were still looking for a publishing partner, but had to cancel the game when nobody was interested in it. The game looked very combat heavy, although some footage showed the player character walking around the starbase. There was an ability bar at the bottom with lots of different powers. Players would have been able to play as the Federation or Klingons, with pirates and Cardassians also acting as enemies. Federation ships included an Intrepid, Galaxy, Steamrunner and Norway. Star Trek: Catan Original Release: 2012 Developer: Klaus Teuber Publisher: Catan Studio Platform: Board Game Catan is a game that is essentially decided by the initial placement of your settlements. Each round, you roll a dice and those tiles product resources to anyone with an settlement next to them. These can be traded with other players and used to build routes, more settlements and cities. It has an importance in board games as one of the games that made modern board games popular, but I really don’t like it at all. The Star Trek version of Catan is the same game. The resources are not different planets, which don’t really do a good job at portraying what you get from them. The different resources are: Tritanium, Food, Oxygen, Dilithium and Water. Routes are depicted by ships, outpost and starbases represent settlements and cities. The klingon ship is the robber, which stops production on a tile and can be moved on a roll of 7. The only difference in this version are “Support Cards”. These cards help with the actions in the game, and once you use one it can be swapped with another. It’s a very small change. This version of Catan did get an expansion, called Federation Space, which provides two boards with maps to play on instead of the hexagon tiles. You also now play as different species, although all you have to represent this is a scoreboard with numbers in the design of that species. The ships are still Constitution class ships. Apart from having some victory point markets on the board (the first person that reaches them collects it), it plays the same as regular Catan. Star Trek Deck Building Game: The Original Series Original Release: 2012 Developer: Alex Bykov Publisher: Bandai Platform: Board Game This is essentially just a version of Star Trek Deck Building Game: The Next Generation with a theme of The Original Series. It’s a slightly simplified version, with the main difference being the lack of starships to fight – which also means you can’t upgrade your base ship. Star Trek HeroClix: Tactics Original Release: 2012 Developer: Seth Johnson Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board Game HeroClix is a minauture combat system designed for superhero games. It was very well liked and went into many different properties. When it moved onto Star Trek, it used ships as the models, but the gameplay was not changed to make it feel any different, it still felt like a superhero game. Star Trek (2013) Original Release: 2013 Developer: Digital Extremes Publisher: Namco Bandai Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC Based on the Kelvin Timeline introduced in the 2009 “reboot” film, this is a new adventure starring the crew of the films, with the film’s actors providing voice work. The game is focused on co-op, letting you and a friend play as Kirk and Spock (although you can play singleplayer with the computer handling the other character). The game is very clearly unfinished, it’s quite buggy with very wonky animations. Luckily, my latest playthrough I only encountered a couple of times where the glitches caused Spock to die, most of it was just odd visual bugs, such as within the first minute where Kirk span around in a circle and hovered up above the bridge. Despite this clunkiness, I can’t bring myself to hate this game, I really enjoy it a lot. The dialogue between Kirk and Spock keep things moving and the game tries to keep itself fresh with different environments (they do a great job with the “giant industrial brewery” style of the Enterprise interior) and action pieces like skydiving. The combat is quite simple, but entertaining, with a focus on stealth and finding hidden tunnels and vents to sneak into positions to hack turrets. The plot follows an attack on New Vulcan, where Gorn from another alternate universe have invaded to take a powerful device the Vulcans were working on. These Gorn are very different and you’ll encounter different types with strength and abilities to provide variety of enemies. The Gorn also have a virus that can turn your own crew against you, and the game heavily suggests stunning them instead of killing them – various sections have bonus objectives such as non-lethal or stealth to gain extra XP. Shooting is a fairly generic cover shooter. I found myself using stun (which only makes enemies dizzy) then punching them to knock them out. There are various weapons to try, but the trusty phaser is usually enough. Some sections encourage stealth, but this is always optional. There are turrets, cameras and doors to hack using simple minigames, and is always risky trying in combat. While this Star Trek game doesn’t really excel at any particular thing, it’s still a very enjoyable romp with a good story and fun action. Star Trek: Rivals Original Release: 2013 Developer: Elephant Mouse Publisher: Elephant Mouse Platform: iOS Not Played: Servers offline, although I have played the game it is based on. Star Trek Rivals is a simple card game using images from Star Trek 09. Each card has a number on each side. You and your opponent take turns placing one of your five cards in a 3×3 grin. The aim is to place the card down in a way so that the numbers on your card face a lower number on an opponent’s card, you get 1 point each time you do this. The idea for this game wasn’t made for this, though. This is a rip-off of a minigame called Triple Triad that originated from Final Fantasy VIII (and has been in multiple games since), so I played one of those to give the game a go. It’s a simple game, but can be fun. Competing against someone who had paid for better cards probably isn’t fun, though.

Star Trek: Cadet Training Facility Original Release: 2009 Developer: Nokia/Verizon Publisher: Nokia/Verizon Platform: Browser This Star Trek 09 promotional flash game was made in conjunction with Nokia and Verizon, it consisted of four minigames: Engineering Simulator, Weapons Simulator, Helm Simulator and Captain’s Test (although Captain’s Test doesn’t work). Engineering Simulator has you fixing the warp core by unscrambling images from the film in a sliding block puzzle format. In Weapons Simulator, a comet has hit a planet and you have to blast the debris caused by it, shooting your way though five rounds. In Helm Simulator, a ship has come though a wormhole (strangely, a Defiant Class ship, not a design used in the film). You automatically fly towards it and have to dodge asteroids and hit glowy things to get propelled forwards. It’s a fairly basic minigame collection, trying to get you to watch the film and buy an old school flip phone. Star Trek: Academy Trainer Original Release: 2009 Developer: AddictingGames Publisher: Paramount Platform: Browser This is a minigame collection that supposedly tests what cadets need to do at Starfleet Academy, including some extremely difficult spot the difference puzzles which will end up costing you a lot of points. It starts off with a game where you have to match the colours of wires, then spot the difference, then you have to click to stop pulsating bars at the right position. Next is a maze where you have to move an “unstable atom” by dragging discs across the screen, followed by a terrible breakout/Arkanoid clone. Then some simple maths, more spot the difference, the memory game pairs and finally a shooting game where you blow up lots of glowing discs. It’s a pretty bad minigame collection. Scene It? Star Trek Original Release: 2009 Developer: Mattel Publisher: Mattel Platform: Board Game The Scene It? series of trivia games mixes question cards with visual quizzes via a DVD included with the package. They all follow the same rules. On your turn, you roll the two dice. One shows how many spaces you use, the second shows which category you need to answer a question for. If you get the answer correct, you’ll get to take another turn. Two of the categories, MyPlay and AllPlay, involve the DVD. MyPlay shows you clips form the shows and movies then asks you a question about it, while AllPlay has a voice clip or a distorted image and all players can answer, the quickest will get to take the next turn. Once you reach the end of the board, you have to answer three questions right before answering one final AllPlay question. The Scene it? franchise is kind of fascinating, as it seems like it was heavily marketed as something to buy as a gift. I think it says a lot that it’s easier and cheaper to buy a sealed copy of this game than it is a used one. That said, I am surprised that nobody has made a quiz-like game in the style of Jackbox where people use their phones to answer questions. You could have some basic categories while selling licensed packs as DLC. It would have a lot less setup time, people can play while relaxing on a sofa and it could potentially allow a mix of questions or even assign themes to different people, so you don’t need everyone to know one franchise really well. Monopoly: Star Trek Continuum Edition Original Release: 2009 Developer: Hasbro Publisher: Hasbro Platform: Board Game The third Star Trek Monopoly game, covering all shows up to Enterprise. This doesn’t have the wormhole mechanic from The Next Generation Monopoly, and even just includes the basic house/hotel pieces from monopoly instead of custom ones. Star Trek Scrabble Original Release: 2009 Developer: Fudex Publisher: Fundex Platform: Board Game This version of Scabble can just be played on a regular Scrabble board. The tile distribution and board layout are exactly the same as regular scrabble (except that the Triple Word Score spaces are now called Tribble Word Score, but still triples your store). What makes this different is that it comes with a list of 79 words that can be played for additional points. KYLE, PIKE and EKOS will get you 5 extra points, BAILEY, EYMORG and PONFARR get you 10 points while SCOTTY, ANDORIA and BONES will get you 20 points. On top of this, if you play any word from The Klingon Dictionary, you get 15 points. Star Trek Online Original Release: 2010 Developer: Cryptic Studios Publisher: Atari, Perfect World, Gearbox Platform: PC, Xbox One/Series, PlayStation 4/5. I’ve played a lot of Star Trek Online in the past, so for this playthough I decided to start from scratch on Xbox. The game is still evolving with gameplay changes and new content, so my thought here are based on my original time with the game from a while ago on PC, along with finishing up to the end of the Delta Quadrant on Xbox. The gameplay for this game is best described as “serviceable”. It’s not terrible, but it also isn’t the most exciting. It gets the job done and is just about entertaining enough to get you to the next part of the game. In space combat, you have to keep an eye on shield arcs and weapon charge while activating powers, while on the ground it plays a bit more like a shooter, but doesn’t have exact aiming (you can also play as a more traditional MMO game on PC). The main enjoyment I got from the game was the story, having a few dialogue choices (even though they change nothing) and just interreacting with the world. The overall story arc is about a mysterious threat pushing people into war and being discovered before everyone starts banding together to investigate and stop them. Early on, voiced dialogue was rare, but is not much more common, although some missions have sections where the dialogue is just text, which creates an odd mixture of the two. There are lots of references and a lot of characters from the shows crop up, usually voiced by the same actor. The mission lengths vary a massive amount, and you really have no idea how long a mission will be before starting it. Some just involve talking to one person while others can be a few hours long. Some can be just combat after combat (sometimes massively overstaying its welcome as wave after wave of enemies turn up) while others are more story based with lots of information to reveal, characters to interact with and puzzles to solve – these ones are worth playing the game for. At certain ranks you get awarded a ship, you can pick a name and registry. I decided to call all mine the USS Saru, adding letters as I got new ships. You only have a choice between a few ships, while the rest you’ll have to grind by collecting dilithium or pay for with their premium currency of “Zen” – there are a lot of different currencies in the game, which kind of goes against Star Trek a lot. By the end of my playthough, I had enough dilithium for one ship. What is nice about the ships is that you can customise them, choosing different hulls, saucers, pylons and nacelles, as well as some hull designs. Some options are locked behind premium currency, though. I ended up changing all of my ships. I would absolutely love a new game similar to Starship Creator that just let you design ships using all of the options available in Star Trek Online. There’s plenty of Star Trek Online that I didn’t such, such as the group activities. I do remember doing a few missions in he past, including one where you fly through a massive Voth ships that is so large that it has multiple hangar bays that carry Voth city ships. There’s other kind of repeatable missions to help grind for upgrades, which is something I really don’t enjoy. I enjoyed my time with Star Trek Online, but at towards the end of the Delta Quadrant missions I felt extremely underpowered (while up until a few missions prior, I felt overpowered) and even buying a new ship didn’t help much. I think I had reached the point of grinding or coughing up money. You can choose not only different factions in the game (although later missions mostly are the same for all), but different introductions. A major one is the New Romulus faction, who can then join the Federation or Klingons after their starting missions. I tried out the Discovery era missions (you end up forward in time to carry on with the main campaign) and enjoyed it, you get to interact with Lorca. The tutorial mission is just a slightly reworked version of the normal tutorial, but at least you get to meet captain Shran. The ship you use also has one of the nicest bridges in the game (the ship interiors are terrible for the most part). I do appreciate that you essentially get to play a short Discovery game. I don’t think I will return to Star Trek Online, though, due to the game’s economy and grinding. Once development for the game slows down, I would certainly be very interested in a one-off purchase “Star Trek Offline”. Star Trek Online Architect Original Release: 2010 Developer: The Game Agency Publisher: Atari Platform: Browser This was a flash browser game made to promote Star Trek Online. I initially thought that this was a lost game, until someone kindly pointed me to Newgrounds, where it’s listed under the name “Star Trek Ship Builder”. The game is deceptively simple: an outline of ship parts will appear and components will scroll past quite fast. You need to drag the right ones to the main screen. The better you do, the more time and points you gain. It’s surprisingly difficult but simple fun. Star Trek: Fleet Captains Original Release: 2011 Developer: Mike Elliott, Bryan Kinsella, Ethan Pasternack Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board Game One of the big Star Trek board games. This came with 24 miniatures, a ton of cards and is quite an in-depth game. There’s a focus on both exploration and combat, with the board starting out as completely hidden. It’s a 1v1 game (although you can play as 2v2). Setup takes a bit of time, sorting out the map. You don’t get to choose your initial ships, instead you draw them at random until you have 10 points (or an agreed amount). Mission types are based on the ships drawn. You then pick four decks of cards to become your abilities for that game. When you reach a new tile, there’s a random chance of an encounter, which you draw from the encounter deck. These will usually be challenges you have to face by the ship’s abilities – which can be altered by twisting the base – cards, and crew assigned to the ship. Checks involves adding these abilities and rolling the dice. While this is all a bit random it’s a lot of fun, but I feel it doesn’t suit the 1v1 nature of this game. Combat also uses this system, pitting your ship’s weapons stat against the opponent’s shield stat (with dice rolls added). Destroying enemy ships nets you a victory point, but the opponent can draw a new ship and their fleet strength goes up as well. Your focus will be on completing missions instead, creating a lot of variety in how you play. There’s a lot of good things about Fleet Captains, but for me the weakest aspect is the 1v1 or 2v2 nature of it mixed with the randomness. I personally think this would work better as a co-op game. Star Trek: Expeditions Original Release: 2011 Developer: Reiner Knizia Publisher: WizKids Platform: Board Game I remember playing this a while ago (but unfortunately didn’t take any pictures of it), and the main reason I remember it was because it was so dull. It’s a co-op board game where you’re working together to fix three things on a planet: stop a civil war, stop the Klingons in orbit and convince the planet to join the Federation. Most turns involve flipping a random event, moving your characters and completing random missions by rolling a dice and adding the character’s bonus to it. Everything about the game is just so dry: the board itself is boring, and the backs of the card are needlessly busy while dull at the same time, making the start of the game look like the mess. The flavour text on the cards is boring, or sometimes doesn’t exist – one of the random events is just “transporter’s don’t work this turn”. This kind of game can be done well – there’s a brilliant Thunderbirds game that is similar but so much more fun. Star Trek Deck Building Game: The Next Generation Original Release: 2011 Developer: Alex Bykov Publisher: Bandai Platform: Board Game Another board game I remember playing, that is also already in Tabletop Simulator. The only photo I originally took was of the “Phasers” card, some of you may spot why I found that particular card noticeable. This is a deckbuilding game, not to be confused with Collectable/Trading Card Games where you build decks before the game, in this everyone starts with the same cards and purchases new cards from the middle of the table. You’ll draw 5 cards, use them in a turn, draw 5 more. When your deck runs out, you shuffle your discard pile to make a new deck. It’s a great mechanic used in a lot of games. Most cards will give you XP which is sued to buy other cards. One thing that is more unique about this deck builder is that you have a flagship. Some of your cards will increase the ability of your flagship – with the goal of defeating ships from the space deck by battling them or via diplomacy (where you can use it as your new flagship). You can also battle other players, but I found it unrewarding and a pain. It’s a really fun card game, and even has extra scenarios to play it in co-op against the Borg, or dealing with a Klingon Civil War.

I still have a lot to post the write-up for, it's just my playthoughs are almost done (I get ahead so I can do steady posts). No more LCD games, but there's plenty of dreadful mobile games coming up, including one so boring that I can't properly describe the gameplay (and somehow that one is still going).

Star Trek: Encounters Original Release: 2006 Developer: 4J Studios Publisher: Bethesda Platform: PS2 This is a sort of tie in game to Star Trek Legacy for the PlayStation 2 – a cheap game thrown at the older generation console while all the effort was focused on the Xbox 360. This game does though all the Star Trek shows, from Enterprise to Voyager, along with a campaign called “Star Trek: Sovereign” featuring the Enterprise E. The game is an arcade twin stick shooter. Left analogue stick moves, right analogue stick shoots. While it’s a simple game, the controls are convoluted: the left shoulder buttons change height, you have to swap between phasers, torpedoes and other abilities. What should have been really easy is now a pain due to the control setup, and the change in height makes almost no difference to the game. While a lot of the game is shooting, you’ll encounter various obstacles to padd the game such as racing through rings or following warp trails by moving between glowy things within a short time (which is far more annoying than it sounds). The missions themselves are sometimes very loosely based on stuff that happens in the show, but also really off (like the Xindi invading Earth in the Enterprise missions). Others are slightly unique, such as the Enterprise D encountering a giant lifeform and getting sucked into it. The missions start with a short briefing from an extremely bored William Shatner, with no other voice acting (and zero actual dialogue) in the game, your next objective just pops up in generic sounding text. This couples with how ships move makes it feel like you’re playing with toy ships. Similar to how there are LEGO games, this would feel much better if it was called “Micro Machines Star Trek”. Star Trek: Conquest Original Release: 2007 Developer: 4J Studios Publisher: Bethesda Platform: Wii, PS2 Conquest is a budget 4x strategy game that has a board game feel about it. You pick a race, build fleets, conquer systems and gain more resources to build more stuff. The maps itself is quite small with only a few spaces between each homeworld, which means it’s quick to get into fights. On top of this, each neutral system starts off with enemies you have to fight before you can use it. There are multiple options for the combat. You can skip straight for the results, watch the battle play out on the menu (with you being able to set offensive or defensive modes) or play the battles out in an arcade style. This is very similar to Encounters, being a twin stick shooter, but is thankfully much nicer to control. It’s fun for a little bit, but does get tiresome. The main game has some nice ideas, and the simplicity does help it. You’re limited to three fleets to move around, and they must be in different locations. You also have superweapons that charge up to attack (or heal). Unfortunately, the game itself is not well balanced. The maps are pre-designed based around the players and races involved, and some races can have a lot more space to expand before encountering opponents. The Dominion homeworld is also very easy to defend with one route to it, including having Deep Space Nine as a strong station standing in the way. Conquest does feel a bit like a side game from a bigger release, but for a small budget release it’s not too bad – I do think XBLA would have been an ideal platform for it. Star Trek All About Trivia Original Release: 2007 Developer: Fundex Publisher: Fundex Platform: Board Game Not played: Not enough information to recreate. A trivia game with many questions about The Original Series. You roll the dice and answer a question from the category you land on. If you get it correct, you take another turn. Each player also has three “communicator” cards that allow them to skip a question and try a new one from the next card. Once a player reaches the last space, the opposing players choose what category the player has to play. Star Trek Online (Perpetual Entertainment) Original Release: N/A (Cancelled 2008) Developer: Perpetual Entertainment Publisher: Perpetual Entertainment Original Platform: PC Not played: No leaked prototypes. This version of Star Trek Online was in development by Perpetual Entertainment. The game was due to a lot of focus on non-combat activities such as planetary surveys and diplomatic activities (although there would be plenty of combat, too). Players could only own small ships to trave on their own. The bigger ships – such as the Galaxy class and Sovereign class – were large social hubs with detailed interiors where you would be a member of the crew. The story was set 20 years after Nemesis, where the galaxy was at relative peace and even the Borg weren’t a huge threat. It was focused on exploring the Beta Quadrant and one of the main NPCs would have been Miral Paris, who influenced a lot more Klingons to join Starfleet, especially those that believe her to be the kuvah’magh (this part was kept in the Cryptic version). Developing your character would be about specialising in certain fields, such as medical or flight control, and gain skills that would help in a variety of different situation. There was even an ambition of Star Trek Online leading to a TV show, with player’s actions in the game impacting the show. This concept was tried again by a different Sci-Fi show, Defiance, but the “influence” ended up not amounting to much. When this version of Star Trek Online was cancelled in 2008 (with all development staff sacked), the game’s assets were given to Cryptic Studios, who used it as a basis for their version, but ultimately decided on a different path. There was also a stipulation that the new version had to be released within two years. Star Trek: D-A-C Original Release: 2009 Developer: Naked Sky Publisher: Paramount Digital Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC D-A-C stands for “Deathmatch, Assault, Conquest”, the three game modes in this arcade ship shooter. I couldn’t get the game to run on PC, and because absolutely nobody cares about this game, couldn’t find any methods to try, so I tried the Xbox 360 version. You play as Federation or Romulans from the Star Trek 2009 film (even though the only Romulans involved are from the future), each with three classes of ships: Fighters which play like a twin stick shooter, bombers which drop mines behind them and flagships which have crosshairs that they move across the screen to aim. The deluxe and PC versions added a few more, but they don’t change much. The ships control light one-man fighters, and when you die you launch an escape pod (which is not much smaller than the ship itself) and if you survive, you respawn quicker. It feel like this game was designed as a new IP before having Star Trek quickly thrown on top. Other than the great title screen music (taken from the film), nothing feels remotely Star Trek. Other than the escape pod mechanic, there’s nothing interesting about the game itself. Deathmatch is deathmatch, and Assault and Conquest are just variants of King of the Hill. The game later got a survival mode of just defeating waves of enemies. Star Trek: The Mobile Game (Java Button) Original Release: 2009 Developer: EA Mobile Publisher: EA Platform: Java (Button Phones) Star Trek: The Mobile Game. It’s everything you expect a cheap java Star Trek to be: a vertical scrolling bullet hell shooter. While The Birds of Prey was a fun take on the genre, this is just mindless and dull, even though there’s so much happening on the screen. Your ship automatically fires (you can turn this off, but then you’re just tapping a button constantly as there’s no reason not to) fighting through hoards of Klingon, Cardassian and Romulan forces. While this is set in the Kelvin timeline, all enemy designs are from the TNG era shows. As you complete missions, you can upgrade the Enterprise to make it shoot faster or have more health. There are different power ups to collect, which work just like any other space shooter like this, with powerful screen-filling weapons. Star Trek: The Mobile Game (Java Touch) Original Release: 2009 Developer: EA Mobile Publisher: EA Platform: Java (Touch Phones) The version of Star Trek: The Mobile Game is similar to the version made for button phones, but does have changes. The game is much, much slower, with lots more space to move around as the view is zoomed out and the visible area is wider. It doesn’t make the game any better, just worse in every way. Star Trek: The Mobile Game (iOS) Original Release: 2009 Developer: EA Mobile Publisher: EA Platform: iOS Not played: Do not own compatible device. The version of Star Trek: The Mobile Game for iPhone is essentially a nicer looking version of the button Java version. The enemy layouts are exactly the same, as well as the pace of the game. The graphics look more 3D, with a bit more depth to everything. Delta Vega: Meltdown on the Ice Planet Original Release: 2009 Developer: Esurance Publisher: Esurance Platform: Browser Not played: Flash file can’t be found online. In the advertising campaign for the Star Trek 2009 movie, advertising partners were sought to promote the film. One of them was Esurance, an American insurance company. They produced a flash game starring their mascot, Erin Esurance, called Delta Vega: Meltdown on the Ice Planet. In the game, you shot your way though five levels of enemies (which consisted of random creatures) in order to rescue Keenser from the outpost we see from the film. Unfortunately, I can’t find the game itself, and there aren’t even many screenshots of it. Also, I'm nearly finished with my playthroughs (currently playing Resurgence, love it so far), so I'm sorting out my James Bond game playthroughs.

I wonder if you ended up using an of the mods I helped out with (the biggest one was called Kobayashi Maru). Star Trek: Shattered Universe Original Release: 2004 Developer: Starsphere Interactive Publisher: THQ Platform: PS2/Xbox Shattered Universe is another fighter Star Trek game, similar to Invasion. You play as a random unknown person on board the USS Excelsior. An unknown vortex pulls the ship into the Mirror Universe, with the ship turning into the ISS Excelsior and Sulu gaining a scar (unlike previous Mirror Universe incursions, they seem to have actually swapped bodies (which has horrific connotations for the end of the game). The vortex gets closed by the ISS Enterprise (captained by Chekov), so the Excelsior has to travel to a similar vortex in Tholian space, past Terran Empire, Klingon and Romulan space. The plot is an interesting idea, but the writing is very dry and uninteresting. The combat itself (the entire game) is also extremely dull, and so much stuff seems off. The Mirror universe has started using fighters, and a bunch of them are on the ISS Excelsior. The Excelsior is absolutely useless in combat, so it’s up to you to destroy the enemies and babysit the Excelsior, which will definitely blow up far more than you. Your phasers and secondary weapons (disruptors/torpedoes) charge up very fast, so you can just hold down the buttons to continue firing, you don’t need to wait for a lock-on for homing weapons. The game is just very boring from start to finish. Fighting capital ships (what the game calls the main starships) is also very dull, as instead of attack runs, it’s better to just fly in front of it and then reverse. I was hoping for subsystem targeting and disabling systems, but it’s just a health bar that depletes no matter where you hit – knocking out weapons of engines would have provided some variety in gameplay. Missions continue beyond the point that it feels they should be over and the main interest is just bringing a few things back from The Original Series like the Doomsday machine and Fesarius, but they don’t really amount to much. The game also doesn’t like telling you anything. You’re thrown out on your first mission, straight into combat in a mission that will fail if you don’t start doing the right thing straight away. Throughout the game, you’ll fail objectives because the game isn’t clear about what you’re supposed to do, which means starting the level from scratch (and some can be long and drawn out). The worst example is in one of the early levels, you’re told to destroy some docking clamps holding the USS Excelsior in drydock. If you slightly miss, the Excelsior will blow up. If you fly close to get an accurate hit, enemies will fly into the drydock and the Excelsior will blow up. This is half way into the level, so you have to fight waves of fighters each time you fail. You just keep have to try different parts of the target until you don’t blow up the Excelsior. The game itself was delayed for a few years, which somewhat explains why it feels a bit dated (especially in comparison to similar games like Rogue Squadron 2), but sometimes this game feels even older than Invasion on the PlayStation. Star Trek: The Birds of Prey Original Release: 2002 Developer: Jumbuck Publisher: Jumbuck Platform: Java This Java phone game is a vertical scrolling shooter set during The Original Series. McCoy helps out people on a planet and gets captured by Klingons (who then pass him onto Romulans). You have a phaser that shoots forward and torpedoes that fly towards your nearest target. Your shields recharge if you avoid getting hit and you have a couple of continues. It’s simple, but for what it is, it’s good fun. There are 5 short levels, but they mix things up a bit to keep the game interesting. One has you defending a station, while another has you navigating though a wormhole that pulls your ship to the sides. One issue I do have with the game: the Klingon ships are D7s, not Klingon Birds of Prey. I know the Bird of Prey didn’t appear in TOS, but the name is clearly referring to how both Klingons and Romulans have ships called “Bird of Prey”. Even so, compared to other Java mobile games, this is a really good one. Star Trek: The Cold Enemy Original Release: 2002 Developer: Jumbuck Publisher: Jumbuck Platform: Java Another Java game from the makers of The Birds of Prey. In this, Klingons have captured the Enterprise and it’s up to Scotty to save the day. This is a run-and-gun platformer comprised of six levels. Like The Birds of Prey, the levels are short but with some nice ideas, like one where a phaser is sweeping the surface and you have to hide under platforms. You’ll need to find switches and generators to bypass forcefields and fight Klingons and little round robots. However, the controls aren’t as smooth as the previous game, they’re clunky and are sometimes unresponsive or delayed, causing you to get hit or miss jumps. It’s a shame as it would be a great little short but sweet experience. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Stranded Original Release: 2005 Developer: Denki Publisher: Denki Platform: Sky Active This game was made for the Sky Active service playable though Sky satellite boxes in the UK. Data, Geordi and a (now dead) ensign have crashed on the planet. Data must explore the areas to find parts that can be used to repair the shuttle. You can move, shoot and bring up the tricorder which displays a basic map and your destination. The phaser starts off at 5% power so can’t break through many objects, just small bushes. Exploring the map, you’ll discover items that increase the power of your phaser, which then lets you get past stronger obstacles and fight enemies, which consist of automated gun turrets. You’ll explore a few levels until you collect all the parts you need, collecting crystals along the way to improve your score. There’s also a very basic multiplayer mode where you compete for the best score, but you can only play the game for 3 minutes each. The game is simple, but quite fun. There’s a certain arcade charm to it. Star Trek Legacy Original Release: 2006 Developer: Mad Doc Software Publisher: Bethesda Platform: PC, Xbox 360 Star Trek Legacy is a space combat game that covers all the main eras of Star Trek (at point of release), with a plot that weaves its way through Archer, Kirk, Picard, Janeway and Sisko – all with their original actors voicing – involving a mysterious Vulcan (although strangely, a lot of the backstory is in “extras” and not revealed though the game). The combat is simple but fun, you fly around, locking on targets and firing phasers from all angles. The movement and camera works well. You can balance power between systems and there’s a radial menu for more options when you hold on a target. You control a team of up to four ships, switching between them or controlling them together. There’s a tactical menu with a top-down view of the level, where you can also issue commands form, such as moving to a location or attacking an enemy. It has a lot going for it, but has one major flaw: your team’s AI is flat out broken. Your ships don’t move as a unit. Tell them to warp to a location and they’ll head off at different times, sometimes one of the ships will just give up and head over on impulse. When controlling individual units – which is quite often as a lot of levels require you to spread out – the ships you aren’t directly controlling will either just stop or start doing their own thing, even if you’ve ordered them to a location. There’s one mission where you have to disable an enemy ship and tractor it to a base. For this, it makes sense to have the ship towing it to head straight for the base, then control the others to protect it. But whenever you control on of the other ships (or even go to the tactical map), the ship doing the tow turns around to go back towards the enemies. It makes the game incredibly frustrating – your team’s AI is more of a threat than the enemies. There are instances where you need to take over starbases by beaming over an away team – but sometimes your team continues to blow up the station. One time I tried setting one a different target, but they went back to killing their friends. Legacy had the potential to be a fun – although short -game, but this one issue completely destroys the experience. Star Trek: Tactical Assault Original Release: 2006 Developer: Quicksilver Publisher: Bethesda Platform: PSP From the developers of the original Starfleet Command comes Tactical Assault on PSP (and DS, but I’ll cover that separately). You can definitely see the Starfleet Command roots in this game, with similar shield, weapon and turning displays, along with long, slow battles. Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities end. The depth of Starfleet Command is completely gone, and instead it’s just getting the right shield in view and shooting as soon as your weapons are recharged. The fights constantly flip between trivially easy or frustratingly difficult (where you need to be perfect with your movement). The best thing about the game is the story, which is about the beginnings of peace talks with the Klingons and the Romulans trying to stop, with campaigns for both the Federation and the Klingons. There’s also some dialogue choices which can affect your mission. Some conversations are required while others you have to manually hail the target, and playing true to the Federation by asking questions firsts yields good results. There’s also a great Klingon mission where you’re undercover in a Romulan ship and have to choose between helping Romulans destroy a few Klingon ships or risk blowing your cover. For the platform, the presentation is quite nice, especially the menu transitions on the bridge of a ship, with some good music (although no voice acting). It’s alright for a small portable game, it’s just not exciting on its own. Star Trek: Tactical Assault (DS) Original Release: 2006 Developer: Quicksilver Publisher: Bethesda Platform: DS For the most part, this is the same game as the PSP version of Tactical Assault, however I thought the DS features were worth talking about. Visually, the game is definitively a toned down version of the PSP version, with lower detail models and textures, lower quality music and simplified menus. That said, I think the HUD style is much nicer and cleaner, especially the dialogue boxes. The gameplay itself is exactly the same, so while it looks simpler (but still good for the DS), you’re not getting a toned down gameplay experience. The big thing for the DS version is the LCARS-like control panel. It seems perfect for a Star Trek game and it’s difficulty to imagine how they could get it wrong…which makes it very disappointing that they’ve somehow managed to do exactly that. For starters, the touch interface is missing one important function: targeting enemies. This is done with the L button, which is awkward for left handed people like myself. The weapons and shields are also on separate tabs for no reason – all the information could easily fit on one turn. The shield tab is just a single “recharge shields” button and the weapons are small icons dotted around the ship. This means if you want to use the touch screen alone, you can’t turn and see which of your weapons are ready at the same time. Right handed people might end up playing with a combination of touch screen and buttons (although I imagine plenty will give up on the touch screen fairly quickly), for left handed people, it’s not a viable method of control. The one good thing about the interface is that you can set the Klingon version to Klingon language.

Star Trek: Bridge Commander Original Release: 2002 Developer: Totally Games Publisher: Activision Platform: PC I have very fond memories of this game, and it’s great playing it again. Bridge Commander puts you in the role of a Galaxy class starship (and later Sovereign) and I think it’s the closest game that brings about the feeling of being a captain of a ship – rather than being the ship itself. While in the bridge view, you can give commands to your crew – all fully voiced – and they’ll do it for you. As this is a combat orientated game, you’ll mainly be dealing with Lt. Savali, your tactical officer. You can tell him what targets to aim for, set his tactics or let him decide. If you want to, you can play the entire game like this, ordering your crew and never taking manual control. I really love that you can play for it. If you want to do more yourself, you can do that, too. The external view of the ship enables controls for manual control of the ship, letting you fly around and fire as you prefer. The camera is locked onto the target, letting you move through your different phaser arcs rather than being limited to forward facing weapons like previous space combat games. You also still have access to all the crew and can give commands from this view, so you can continue giving orders and just admire the battles. Targeting subsytems is a major part of the game. You can target individual components of the ship like cloaking devices, individual phasers, shield generators and the warp core. Missions throughout the game will require use of this, especially when disabling ships and stations. The hull of your target will still take damage, so you need to be careful with what you hit – especially if you then need to defend your disabled target. The game isn’t without its flaws. I think it could have done with conversation choices, even just ones that don’t change the story, just your own flair on the conversation. It’s a bit odd that the first officer handles all of the conversations. I would also like more options regarding what you can do, as some sections (particularly Science and Engineering) are quite limited. The game is very good at supporting mods, and the community has added a lot of features (along with nicer looking ships) – for this playthough I went with the base game with some minor modifications to make it run at 1080p. . Bridge Commander is an amazing experience for the ship side of Star Trek, and this would be my basis for the “perfect” Star Trek game, which would combine this with Elite Force and a bit of No Man’s Sky for exploration, some mysteries to solve and new things to discover. Star Trek: Starfleet Command III Original Release: 2002 Developer: Taldren Publisher: Interplay Platform: PC While Starfleet Command 2 was very similar to the first game with more features, this one has gone in a different direction, trying to appeal to a wider audience by streamlining the game. It’s now set in the TNG era, with a proper story that takes place across Klingon, Romulan and Federation campaigns. The “streamlined” features just seem like they’ve removed a lot of features. This does remove a lot of the complication, but it’s also what made the previous games unique. At the same time, they don’t seem to have done much else to make the game appeal to more people, as the game now feels even slower, with less to do due to the removal of these features. While you had multiple weapon types and a ton of crazy tactics to use against opponents, combat in this game is almost entirely spinning in circles, waiting for your weapon energy to recharge and hitting fire when the fire button lights up. The enemy ships love getting extremely close (although there are no collisions to worry about, ships are on slightly different heights – or just fly through each other) , making it impossible to do anything regarding planning the use of your weapon arcs or aiming at specific enemy shields. The main campaigns have the map grid from SFC2, but it doesn’t quite make sense. You’re forced to specific locations throughout the campaign. It would have been better if they kept this map specific to the conquest mode (where you can explore and play randomly generated missions). Other nice touches, such as a unique UI for each race, have been removed and there are fewer factions to play as. People who found the previous games too complex were the target audience for this – people like me. While they weren’t for me, I could understand why people would love those games. This one just comes across as dull. Star Trek: First Duty Original Release: 2002 Developer: Digital Bridges Publisher: Activision Platform: WAP Not played: No playable builds available A very early mobile game, made for WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). This is essentially a browser-based game made by people who had a lot of ambition for what mobile phone games could do. First Duty was an adventure game set at Starfleet Academy. You needed to complete a four year training course. I spoke to one of the developers who describe it as a “chose your own path” game. First Duty was similar to a previous game of theirs called Sorcery!, based on the Steve Jackson book, made as a precursor to their big Star Trek project: Star Trek: Prime Directive. Star Trek: Nemesis Original Release: 2002 Developer: nGame Publisher: Activision Platform: Java This Star Trek: Nemesis tie-in game is a simple game for Java mobile phones set during the final battle of Star Trek: Nemesis. Shinzon, who tells the Enterprise to surrender, is flying to attack Earth and you must stop him. Some Romulan Valdore-class ships also turn up to help Shinzon. You play though 4 rounds of shooting Romulan ships and defending yourself against the cloaked Scimitar. Once per round you can warp to a nearby starbase for repairs. The fifth round is a battle against the Scimitar itself. It’s a very slow and simple game, and not much fun. Star Trek: Voyager: The Arcade Game Original Release: 2002 Developer: Game Refuge Publisher: Monaco Entertainment Platform: Arcade Not played: Could not get game to run in an emulator. Star Trek: Voyager: The Arcade Game is a light gun arcade game that is very much an arcade light gun game first and a Star Trek game second. The game is roughly half an hour long, although you can take different routes and see different things. It consists entirely of shooting a massive amount of enemies – mainly Borg of many different shapes and sizes, form spider drones to big hulking monstrosities. You also fight Hirogen and random other enemies (some of the flying ones look a bit like the Etherians from Elite Force), with multiple types at once at the end. The Voyager crew appear, but the very few voice lines sound like they’ve been badly ripped out of an episode of the show. They spend the entire game running for their lives like complete cowards, leaving you, a completely random ensign who is thinking about starting an elite security squad (not-Hazard team), to save the day. It stars off when the meeting is “rudely interrupted” (those are the actual words the game uses) by The Borg. This is a very silly (and probably fun in an amusing way) lightgun game that uses the Star Trek license as an outer shell. There are some emulators that can run the game (but with no sound), but I haven’t got them to work on my computers. Star Trek Customizable Card Game: Second Edition Original Release: 2002 Developer: Decipher Publisher: Decipher Original Platform: Board Game When the first Customizable Card Game got too complicated, Decipher decided to make a more streamlined version. The core part of the game is still moving ships to missions to complete them, facing dilemmas on the way, but how you play has been changed. Instead of the lengthy setup of the 1st Edition (1E), the 2nd Edition (2E) just has you place five of your own missions in a row. These are placed next to each other regardless of what quadrant the card is in (instead of being in a different location, it just adds 2 to the move cost). You also don’t carefully pick dilemmas like in 1E. You have a dilemma deck which is shuffled and then you draw at random when your opponent starts a mission (although you can order them to increase difficulty). The more personnel on the mission, the more dilemmas they face. Playing card is also different. Instead of playing one a turn, you have seven “credits” each round to spend on playing cards or drawing more, which does speed up the start of the game. While this version is easier to play, I think it loses a lot of the Star Trek “feel” that 1E had – you’re just completing cards now, not exploring a galaxy. Star Trek: Prime Directive Original Release: Cancelled 2002 Developer: Digital Bridges Publisher: Activision Platform: WAP Not played: No playable builds available The main event to the starter of Star Trek: First Duty, this was supposed to be a massively multiplayer mobile game using Wireless Access Protocol (the very early internet of mobile phones). The developers boasted about a persistent universe with ten thousand players per server using Digital Bridges’ “UNITY” system. The game would have taken place in a new area of unexplored space called the Caledonian Expanse, which the Federation has gained access to via a wormhole appearing in Federation space. The UNITY system would enable players from all over the world to work together, regardless of language spoken. An open beta was available for a short time in 2002. I spoke to one of the developers of the game who said that people would be able to discover new star systems and name them – similar to No Man’s Sky. It was a very, very ambitious for mobile phones at the time, especially due to the limited capabilities (the developer I spoke to doesn’t think they saved any screenshots as the game wasn’t much to look at), It ended up getting cancelled as the market for mobile games just wasn’t interested in big, complicated games, and much simpler offline Java games were becoming much more popular, so Digital Bridges moved on to work on those kinds of games instead. Star Trek: Elite Force II Original Release: 2003 Developer: Ritual Publisher: Activision Platform: PC The sequel to Elite Force starts off during the Voyager episode “Endgame”, expanding upon Voyager’s journey through the transwarp hub. A Borg sphere has captured Voyager and the Hazard Team needs to free Voyager before the Borg adapt to their new systems. After Voyager gets home, Munro (who is unfortunately only male in this game – it’s a bit odd when the first game I played as a female Munro) gets stuck teaching at the academy until he impresses Picard, getting assigned to the Enterprise E, which swiftly gets involved in a mystery surrounding some insect-like aliens with organic impulse engines. While this is developed by a different developer, the feel of the gameplay is the same. You have a mixture of alien and federation weapons again (although far more Federation weapons this game, with machine gun and shotgun versions of the compression rifle). My wish about the first game is answered here: I wanted more Tricorder use and puzzles and this has that. The puzzles aren’t great, though, and are just pipe connecting and waveform matching minigame – I would have preferred puzzles that involved more scanning. The tricorder does have more view modes, pointing out weak walls or bioscanners. My favourite thing about the tricorder is that you can scan a lot of things. All the Federation characters have names (both on the Enterprise and at Starfleet Academy) – even the fish do. It’s a nice little touch, and I just love scanning for lifeforms. The new insect-like aliens are definitely used well for a gameplay perspective, as they have many different forms that get introduced throughout the game, although at times it feels a bit lonely as you often get separated from your crew (to the point where they lampshade it), who really don’t get enough screen-time. Previous characters like Chang and Chell barely do anything (in the final mission, Chell is shot and beamed back to the Enterprise before you even start) and the new Klingon member, Korban, is not utilised much at all. There’s one mission where you are looking for a Ferengi on a pirate Klingon space station and instead of wearing casual clothing and taking the Klingon member of the team…they go in full Starfleet gear. Picard also feels a bit lonely. This is set a bit after Nemesis, and everyone has left – even Crusher and La Forge – so it makes sense. The only familiar face he has is Chief Engineer Barclay, with Tuvok (on temporary assignment to the Enterpriser to help integrate the Hazard team). being the only other character from the shows. I don’t have any issues with this, but it would be nice if it felt like Picard had a new crew, but the only developed character is a botanist that you can listen to random conversations (she has no involvement in the plot). Just a named first officer would be enough. That said, Elite Force 2 is still a great game and the gameplay is extremely enjoyable. Some of the plot is predictable – you can tell one of the villains the moment he speaks in his “overly evil” accent, but other moments provide a nice mystery. The weapons are fun to use again, with some great set pieces to keep the action entertaining.

Seems strange to only release it as a physical GBA cartridge. Limited Run Games have their own emulator engine, so not doing a digital release makes no sense. McDonald's released a Game Boy Colour game earlier this year. It was digital-only on a website, but the ROM works on original GBC hardware.

Oh, no no no, it was much worse. You would do a full loop of one board, then when you reached "Go", you would move on to the "Go" of the next board. So the amount of spaces would be quadrupled.

Monopoly: Star Trek Limited Edition Original Release: 2000 Developer: Hasbro Publisher: Hasbro Platform: Board Game This is the same as The Next Generation Monopoly, but with an Original Series theme. It includes the rules for the “wormhole” mechanic where you set up the four Star Trek Monopoly boards (including the future Deep Space Nine and Voyager sets) as play across all four quadrants: TOS was alpha, TNG was beta, DS9 was gamma and Voyager was Delta. This essentially creates a tortuously long version of a game that is already far too long. The rules do state that “in the unlikely event that all four games aren’t released, play this with the available board”. The DS9 and Voyager versions were thankfully never released. Star Trek Trivia Game (Mattel) Original Release: 2000 Developer: Mattel Publisher: Mattel Platform: Board Game A trivia game with questions based on The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. You roll the dice and move through each “quadrant”, representing each show and answer questions based on the show you’re in. Questions have different themes, but the colour of the spaces is relevant to get the four peices you need to win the game. Star Trek: Invasion 2 Original Release: Pitched in 2000 Developer: Warthog Games Publisher: Activision Platform: PlayStation 2 Not played: Game was only in concept stage When development of Star Trek: Invasion was complete, a sequel for the PlayStation 2 was pitched to Activision, but they decided to not go along with it, so we just have a few bits of concept art. The plans for the sequel included 4 player co-op, some linear ground and aquatic missions, voice controls, large space battles and morphing ships. The four main characters would be human, Klingon, Romulan and Cardassian. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars Original Release: 2001 Developer: Gizmo Publisher: Simon and Schuster Platform: PC Dominion Wars is a real time strategy game set during the Dominion Wars of Deep Space Nine. You command a fleet of 1-6 ships in fights against the Dominion and Cardassians. However, it’s not a real time strategy game like Armada, as there’s no base management or building new ships – you select your fleet at the start of each mission. Starfleet Command does something similar, but that has a massive depth of options and micromanagement while Dominion Wars has a few basic targeting options and not a lot more. This makes you feel quite disconnected with what it happening as you set up a few things and just let your ships do their thing. While the ships look good for the time, there’s also something lacking about the presentation of the game. You can pick characters like Sisko, Dax and Worf as captains, but other than a tiny portrait, it means nothing. There’s no voices or dialogue from them. Even when you’re controlling the Defiant, it doesn’t feel like it’s actually THE Defiant, just another generic ship. If you lose ships in a mission, the captains can still be selected like nothing has happened. I must admit that I didn’t get very far in the campaign. A few missions in, I was on a mission to rescue Thomas Riker (the transporter clone that joined the Marquis), who is suddenly so important that it’s worth losing ships and hundreds of lives over. I spent ages going up and down the map without much luck. I found some ships and scanned them and he wasn’t on those. I don’t know if it was a bug or I did something wrong – there isn’t much in the way of guides for the game. I did do a few skirmish matches. Dominion Wars isn’t really a bad game. The mechanics are fine. It’s just boring and lacking in extra touches. Star Trek: Away Team Original Release: 2001 Developer: Reflexive Publisher: Activision Platform: PC Away Team is an isometric strategy game, kind of like a real-time version of X-Com. You control a squad on board a ship called the NX Incursion – a small ship fitted with holoemitters that can disguise itself as other ships. Sadly, you don’t get to do anything with this cool ship, as you control a security squad on ground-based missions. That said, “control” might be a bit too strong of a word. The game is a really odd mixture of them not following instructions really well but also requiring too much control at the same time. One key thing about real time strategy games is AI – you give your units a task and they do it. However, this is nearly non-existent in Away Team. You can only order tour squad to move a short distance as they can’t figure out longer distances. This leads to some situations where you tell your squad to go somewhere and get the confirmation animation, only that half your squad was slightly out of range and stay behind while the rest leave. When you move as a group, there’s also zero formation, it’s like a group of kids walking around, not a highly trained elite squad. This extends to the shooting. Press the shoot button and your squad will stop and shoot directly there. They won’t carry on moving then shoot, and they won’t shoot while still moving either. So when your team is moving around the corner, you either have to let the person in front stand there and get shot, or shoot and have most of your team fire at a wall. I could understand if the game was designed for quick and precise aiming as a key element, but you can pause to fire at any time. The graphics are also frustrating. There’s a nice art style used, but the game is locked to a 640×480 resolution, which was tiny back then. The default zoom makes it hard to tell your team apart and zooming in just stretches the pixels, which is no help at all. The levels are a mixture of shooting through everything or being stealthy, the latter being handy as you can easily trick enemies into investigating something where there’s a wall in the way and they’ll just be confused by the wall. It’s a shame as the story itself is pretty decent, with a mysterious contagion that seems to be taking over the minds of high ranking officials in the Federation, Klingons, Romulans and even taking over Borg drones. Star Trek: Armada II Original Release: 2001 Developer: Mad Doc Software Publisher: Activision Platform: PC Expanding upon the first Armada, this game adds an extra dimension: you can now move up and down. It’s a bit fiddly to do (hold shift while moving the mouse) and when playing against the AI, it doesn’t really make any difference to the game. When playing against other players, you can use it to your advantage by hiding ships underneath other ships and hoping your opponents are using the default view. Armada 2 also has a fancy tactical camera. While you can play the game in this view, it’s a bit fiddly and more for admiring battles. There’s more resources to collect: on top of dilithium from asteroids, you’ll need heavy metals from planets and latinum from nebulae. Along with this is also trading with outposts. There are also more options for how your ships act, you can have them chase enemies over a long distance or let them flee, and how often they use their special abilities. On paper, Armada 2 sounds like it’s an improvement over the first, but something just feels…off. Battles against other ships are short, but bases seem much tougher. The singleplayer missions seem to really drag, many with you slowly whittling away at the enemy base with a load of ships, knowing you’ve won but waiting for the game to accept it. Ships also blow up much quicker, leading to massive squadrons of the top tier ships being a necessity. In the singleplayer campaign, you play though stories where the Federation fight the Borg, the Klingons fight Cardassians (with some Romulans) and the Borg build up their stranded forces and stopping species 8472. The Cardassians, Romulans and 8472 are playable, but only in skirmish. The story is quite basic, but there are some nice lines, particularly from Picard. Star Trek: Borg Assimilator Original Release: N/A (Cancelled 2001) Developer: Cyberlore Publisher: Activision Original Platform: PC Not played: No leaked prototypes. Borg Assimilator was an RTS game where you played as the Borg. In each of the 12 missions, you would have started with a few drones, building up your resources and assimilating enemies. Each mission would have you assimilating a new race, with the ultimate goal of getting the technology to produce an Omega Particle. If you complete these missions, you could then try to conquer the alpha quadrant in free mode. There would also be threats along the way, such as Species 8472, viruses and individuality. You played as the “hive” with a Borg Queen acting as your conduit. After announcing it, Activision ended up cancelling the game because “the game’s design did not reflect the established Star Trek universe”. The game was supposedly near completion at the time. Star Trek Online (Verant Interactive) Original Release: N/A (Cancelled 2001) Developer: Verant Interactive Publisher: Activision Original Platform: PS2, PC Not played: No leaked prototypes. An online RPG that was planned for the PlayStation 2 for PC. Not long after this was announced, the developer (Verant Interactive) decided to drop the game, citing a conflict of interest. They had got the licence to make a Star Wars game, which ended up being Star Wars Galaxies

I remember having a VHS with that on, came with N64 magazine.

Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force Original Release: 2000 Developer: Raven Publisher: Activision Platform: PC 3 After a previous failed attempt, Voyager finally gets a video game: a first person shooter based on the Quake engine. You are part of an elite squad designed for dangerous situations called “Hazard Team”. During a training mission, Voyager gets attacked by an unknown ship and, upon the ship’s destruction, gets transported to a region of space full of dead ships with a dampening field that stops Voyager from moving. You play as Ensign Munro, second in command of Hazard Team, and get sent on missions to other ships, as well as defending Voyager itself. While using the Quake engine, the game is also inflected by Half-Life, with your Hazard Suit maintaining your health and recharging from ports on the wall. The suit also explains other FPS tropes in a way that fits the Star Trek uniforms. Most notably, your suit has a transporter buffer that can store all your weapons. The weapons are also fun to play with, using a mixture of starfleet designs and alien weapons, with starfleet weapons using power from your suit and alien weapons using crystals. This ammo mechanic also makes choosing weapons interesting – using the portable photon torpedo launcher consumes the same ammo as the phaser rifle. The ammo placement throughout weapons also encourages you to swap between starfleet and alien weapons rather than sticking to the same weapon. You also have a standard phaser as a backup (or quickly switching to in order to blow up objects without consuming ammo). There’s also a few puzzle and platforming sections, although I do with the Tricorder (found in the expansion) was given more of a use for this, as most puzzles are pushing switches. A few slower paced sections where you have to scan, learn an analyse stuff would enhance the game a lot – that said, it’s still a great game. The add-on (which now comes with the standard game) lets you explore a good chunk of Voyager, playing with some consoles and having fun in the holodeck (including a Captain Proton mission). It’s a really nice part of the game, and you can even blow up the ship or just shoot people. When you get “killed”, you get a brig scene, although the response is random, so I got 30 days in the brig for vaporising Chakotay. Elite Force isn’t just a great Star Trek game, it’s also a great FPS game. I definitely highly recommend this one. Star Trek: Invasion Original Release: 2000 Developer: Warthog Games Publisher: Activision Platform: PlayStation Star Trek Invasion is a space combat game developed for the PlayStation. Targeting a more casual audience than other Star Trek games, this game has you flying around in single-person fighters. As fighters aren’t a big thing in Star Trek, this game takes a lot of liberties with the franchise, as every race has suddenly started using fighters, including the Borg. These alien fighters have nice designs, as well as the starting Federation fighter. As you progress though the game, you’ll get new and upgraded fighters which…are quite ugly. That said, the game itself looks really nice, especially for the original PlayStation. Your ship is equipped with multiple kinds of phasers, so you can have “bullet style” ones or beam ones, although both are slow, so your targeting lock-on displays a marker ahead of enemy ships to show where you need to aim. You can twist, boost and move to the side. I found the controls to work really well and the gameplay is very enjoyable in short bursts, but unfortunately very repetitive if you’re playing though the whole game as there’s not much variety, mostly just blowing up ships. There are a couple of nice set pieces (including a Death Star II attack on a Borg Cube), but it’s mainly just blowing up other fighters. The story feels like a jumbled mess. While the opening cutscene shows a massive Borg invasion, this is a trivial part of the story, instead it focuses on a mysterious new alien species that have been accidentally awakened by a Federation ship. That said, the story itself jumps around different scenarios, with you dealing with Cardassians, then the Borg, then this new species. The levels don’t flow. In one mission you fight the borg in deep space, the next you protect the Typhon (the carrier ship that transports the fighters) because it has sustained damage in battle, but it’s suddenly falling into a star. The difficulty of the game also ramps up very quickly, with harsh time limits and some levels with infinitely respawning enemies. If you choose to play on easy difficulty (which still gets challenging), the game stops half way through, telling you to start the game from scratch at a higher difficulty level. On top of this, a lot of missions are hidden behind “secrets”, which the game gives you no hints about. These can be needing to have a certain accuracy rating or finding hidden objects and using the tractor beam on them. One of the secret missions unlocked in this manner is actually a requirement for the ending of the game – miss it and you’ll get a different one. Invasion is a lot of fun in short bursts, but doesn’t feel much like a Star Trek game – if it wasn’t for Worf being your commander, you would easily forget. Nintendo Mini Classics: Star Trek Original Release: 2000 Developer: Stadlbauer Publisher: Take 2 Platform: Electronic Handheld Not played: Too expensive to get second hand. This LCD game is a bit of an odd one. Austrian developer Stadlbauer got a license from Nintendo to sell LCD keychain games, starting with recreating Game & Watch games, but in a more Game Boy themed unit. They eventually got licenses to make new games based on franchises, and other publishers helped to publish them in various countries, resulting in different regions getting different Mini Classics games. The Star Trek games were published by Take 2 in Europe. The game itself is a space invaders-style shooting game, with you blowing up waves of Klingons. You can also adjust the intensity of your ship’s phasers, although they are your only weapons. Between waves, you also dodge objects as you travel through warp. Nintendo Mini Classics: Star Trek: The Next Generation Original Release: 2000 Developer: Stadlbauer Publisher: Take 2 Platform: Electronic Handheld Not played: Too expensive to get second hand. An LCD game similar to the Mini Classics based on The Original Series. This is a dual screen one and is the only Nintendo Mini Classics dual screen game that is an original game (the rest were Game & Watch games). The game starts on the bottom screen, with the Enterprise D fighting waves of Klingon ships, space invaders style, just like the other Mini Classics game (although you can’t adjust phasers). Once you’ve defeated a wave of Klingons, Worf will beam down to attack a Klingon base as he tries to free a prisoner. Your time is limited, as another wave of Klingon ships will eventually arrive, and you’ll need to finish the ground level before you can control the Enterprise D. Various listings on Wikis mention a “Single Screen” Nintendo Mini Classics of The Next Generation, but I can’t find any evidence of this actually existing. Star Trek: Voyager: Classified Advertising Materials Original Release: 2000 Developer: Paramount Publisher: Paramount Platform: PC This reference CD came up in my searches and I would presume that there are other ones like this for previous seasons, and perhaps even Deep Space Nine. This was not intended to be seen by consumers, but is a CD for press and advertisers. This disc is about the syndication of Season 6 of Voyager and included a lot of information on the show. There’s an episode guide with the full synopsis of every episode (similar to the TNG/DS9 Episode Guides), information on all the cast (including their personal backgrounds) and various other information on the show, including logos and photos. The disc also contained a couple of wallpapers and a screensaver that has a nice LCARS theme. It also came with an audio CD that contained versions of the main theme in different lengths plus a selection of audio clips. I think it’s quite interesting that instead of putting all this data on a CD and calling it a day, they made this program to do so. That said, you can still browse through all the files with Windows Explorer – the imagery is surprisingly high resolution and all the information is in pdf documents. I think it’s strange that they had all this information, yet never made a Voyager Companion. Star Trek Red Alert! Original Release: 2000 Developer: Matthew Colville, Darrell Hardy, Christian Moore, Christian T. Petersen Publisher: Last Unicorn Games Platform: Board Game This is a Star Trek themed version of a game called Diskwars, which also had themes based on Legend of the Five Rings and Warhammer. It is essentially a miniature war game, but using cardboard discs to keep the costs down and turn it into a collectible game with random packages (although a lot of the ships were sold in labelled packages). I’ve recreated enough for a basic scenario, a 1v1 Federation vs Cardassian match. Each ship has its own command panel, technology and crew. Each turn, you set up to three command orders out of the following: Change speed, change heading, raise shields, attack or activate a crew/tech disk. This does a good job at making it seem like you’re giving orders to crew rather than controlling a ship directly, especially as changing speed (which includes slowing down) and heading are separate actions. This makes manoeuvring your ships difficult, and two inexperienced players can potentially end up completely missing each other constantly. Red Alert has plenty of depth to it without needing an overly complicated rulebook. The game is easy to understand, but difficult to master. Tribbles Customizable Card Game Original Release: 1999 Developer: Tom Braunlich, Bill Martinson, Roland L. Tesh Publisher: Decipher Platform: Board Game This is sort of a standalone expansion to the Star Trek Customizable Card Game, yet also its own completely unique game at the same time. It’s compatible with Tribble cards from the CCG, but has it’s own rule set – one that’s a single page long. Tribbles is a bit like Uno in that the goal is to get rid of all the cards in your hand by placing them in sequence order of 1, 10, 100, 1000 and 100000 Tribble cards. If you can’t go, you draw a card. Cards also have powers like skip, reverse or play another card. Each player starts with their own unique deck and over the course of the 5 matches, you can get rid of some card by adding them to a discard pile, which will then be removed for later matches. It’s a simple game, but also good fun. @Dcubed I think you'll love to know that there were some Star Trek LCD games in the late 2000 - with Nintendo branding, too.

Finally has a release date. Also includes some animated shorts. They seem to have replaced the lives system with "coins", with classic versions still having lives. Edit: More detials: https://origins.sonicthehedgehog.com/ Looks like features are stupidly split across different versions/additional packs. Xbox pricing is live: Standard: £32.99 Deluxe: £36.98 Deluxe has extra animations on the menu and extra remastered music. Some other features (part of the regular game) - Mission Mode (objectives to complete on levels). Extra hard missions in deluxe version - Boss Rush mode Coins are in-game currency, looks like Mirror Mode can be unlocked using them (but automatically unlocked with a pre-order), no idea what else its used for.

Knuckles Chaotix really deserves a re-release with Sonic and Tails added. Sonic is essentially already in the game (when he was removed, he was replaced with Mighty, who functions the same) and the code for Tails is also in the game (loading it works, but with a messed up sprite). They could even do a HD Mean Bean Machine - a lot of the sprites were redone for Sonic Mania anyway, they could even add in the extra mode from the Master System version. Also, when they throw in the Game Gear games like this, they don't even look to see which versions have better Master System versions.

I'm still messing up the controls a bit, but not as much. I've done two temples (Rito, Zora) and a bunch of side quests, enjoying it a lot. I like how they've managed to make the world feel new. It's nice to see themed temples, but they're unfortunately a bit short and easy - the path to them is a much bigger challenge. I've bought a house and the building does some nice things, but it's also short in a lot of ways. There's no windows and walls you don't complete just leave a massive wall (I was expecting it to fill in). A few layout options for each section would also be nice, as well as changing the colour of the outside (like every other Hudson house in the game). That said said, I'm pleased at what I've been able to do with the limited options. I do have one question

I've already organised James Bond games for my next playthrough of stuff, but I'm enjoying doing them all so much that I'm considering a bigger project: Nintendo 64 games. There's loads I remember reading about but never got to play. I am after some advice regarding doing it. First of all, I won't be fully playing every single game, but I will be giving them a good go (potentially using cheats if absolutely necessary, but only as a last resort). I'm not sure that all the Japanese only games have a fan translation, for example. For some games, I'm thinking of playing through the best version of the game I can find. Examples include the Rare Replay versions of Rare games, 3DS versions of Zelda/Star Fox and some PC versions, plus Widescreen mods where possible. My rules for this would be that the content can't be significantly different (DS version of Mario would be too big a change, but the 360 version of Perfect Dark would be fine as it's the same game with nicer graphics) and still retain the N64 "feeling". I'll still play a little bit of the N64 version for a general feeling. For order, I think sorting games by their earliest release of any region is best as Wikipedia has this data in an easy to sort way. The only cancelled games I'll be covering will be those with playable prototypes, added in based on the date of the prototype. Any other suggestions would be appreciated. This will be a long way off, but I figured best to start preparing early.

Star Trek (Game Boy Color) Original Release: N/A (Pitched in 1999) Developer: Aqua Pacific Publisher: N/A Original Platform: Game Boy Color This demo was probably just a pitch for a Star Trek game, submitted to CBS/Paramount but never approved for development. It’s a vertical scrolling shooter where you pilot a Klingon Bird of Prey and alternate between shooting asteroids and what looks like Romulan Scout Ships. The playable prototype is clearly very early, as while you can blow things up, you suffer no damage from anything. I can see the people in charge of the Star Trek license at the time wanting something a bit more substantial. Star Trek: Armada Original Release: 2000 Developer: Activision Publisher: Activision Platform: PC A real time strategy game set after the Dominion war. The story starts with the Enterprise E dealing with Dominion stragglers that refuse to accept that the war is over when a ship from the future comes and warns Picard that the Borg are about to launch a large scale invasion led by Locutus. At the same time, infighting starts out with the Klingons and Romulans – if this doesn’t stop, the alpha quadrant is doomed. Armada is a fairly basic RTS game. Each playable faction -the Federation, Klingons, Romulans and Borg – plays almost identically as they all have the same stations and types of ships, they just look different and have slightly different abilities. Building your forces is the same for all of them, although it does make them more balanced against each other, even if it means a Borg Cube is on par with a Sovereign class ship. The main unique element of Armada is crew. Each ship has its own crew, and the number drops down in battles and become less effective. You can also transport your crew to other ships. Derelict ships can be scattered around to take over, and you can even gain control of enemy ships. It’s a really nice mechanic, even if everyone breeds at an alarming rate. The missions in the story mode have thought out some interesting scenarios to play, which keeps things varied. Some are about defending, some are building up forces to attack, while some have more unique objectives. There’s one where you start off with just a Defiant class ship and need to navigate a maze of asteroid while being chased by far more powerful ships, using derelict ships as cannon fodder to reach the end of the maze. The game looks very nice, and there are some interesting cutscenes throughout the campaign. It makes things less realistic to make the game much more fun to play – like the layouts of the maps, which manage to remain interesting even though they’re in space. While basic, it’s a lot of fun. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen Original Release: 2000 Developer: The Collective Publisher: Simon and Schuster Platform: PC A third person shooter set sometime in season 6 of Deep Space Nine. Most of the main characters are involved, with three playable: Sisko, Kira and Worf. Unfortunately, not all the cast is here, with Avery Brooks and Colm Meaney not returning. The voice actor for Sisko isn’t too bad (although still noticeable), while O’Brien is someone doing a very bad Irish accent. That said, the story is really good. The new alien race, the Grigari are introduced in a spooky manner. They have shielding that needs scanning so you can modulate your phaser to the right frequency, and there’s some nice locations that you visit. The ploy revolves around Pah-Wraith orbs after some Cardassian bodies from a failed experiment are discovered. While the gameplay is mainly shooting, the tricorder is used well for scanning enemies, looking for hazards and solving puzzles. It help keeps the game feeling like it belongs in Star Trek. The shooting mechanics and weapons are quite fun too, and the game plays really well mapped to a controller (using external software). There’s also some rudimentary platforming, which works well enough. It’s a very fun game. My favourite mission involves investigating a crashed Miranda class starship. Even with the old graphics, climbing up a cliff and seeing the ship is a wonderful sight, and you even get to fight on top of it and explore inside. You also get to explore parts of the Defiant and between each mission, explore parts of Deep Space Nine, talking to the main cast and some recurring characters, including Garak. That said, some character’s faces are really not done well – I thought Jazdia Dax was Odo when I first saw her. Worf and the Cardassians look much better than the humans in this game. You can also play through the game as Kira and Worf. Kira has a unique mission on Bajor, but misses out on the crashed Miranda ship. You play though the same levels, but take different routes and have different objectives (although some sections are still completely the same). Kira plays the same as Sisko, while Worf lacks a phaser (which also means no forcefields to bypass) so if you don’t have ammo, you need to get up close and personal with a Bat’leth. Deep Space Nine: The Fallen is a really fun game, I definitely recommend this one. Star Trek: ConQuest Online Original Release: 2000 Developer: Genetic Anomalies Publisher: Activision Platform: PC Unfortunately, I can’t get the full experience of this game as it’s an online focused game and the servers are down. That said, you can still play the tutorial and battle against an AI, just without the full features of the game, so I can at least get a taste of what the game is. ConQuest is some kind of digital board game where you play as a Q battling other Q using pieces from the galaxy. Each turn goes through phases where you plan your actions, which then occur at the same time as your opponent. The deploy phase is where you bring in more pieces from your collection: these can be personnel, ships or items that can be attached to them. The next phase is combat. If you have ships/people in the same place at others, you can fight. However, any attacking ships can not defend. The last phase is the movement phase, where you use the actions of your pieces, which is mainly beaming people to/from planets and ships, the planets being key to victory. The map will have your planet, the opponent’s planet and then 1 or 3 planets in the “Neutral Zone”. You need influence to control these planets, which generate control points to spend on bringing new pieces into the game. The overall objective is to trap the enemy Q on a planet you control for one turn. There’s also a more advanced game which adds some more steps and changes the objective. The first new step is the auction phase, which is where events come into play. For good events, you take turns bidding. For negative events, you both bid in secret. There’s also a “Special” phase where you use the bonus abilities of characters – the Borg Queen, for example can assimilate opponent pieces. You can also generate more control points to spend next turn or generate Q points. These Q points are the path to victory in the advanced game. ConQuest Online is a well thought out strategy game and it’s a shame that the game is server dependant and doesn’t allow for setting up your own matches. It also means that you are stuck with just using the starter Federation pieces when playing against the AI – you can’t get more pieces or the packs from the other factions. Star Trek: Klingon Academy Original Release: 2000 Developer: 14 Degrees East Publisher: Interplay Platform: PC Unfortunately, I couldn’t fully enjoy the full extinct of this game due to my colourblindness. The interface colours, while fitting in with the Klingon style, makes it almost impossible for me to read any of the words in the HUD. Even lowering the resolution to make the HUD appear larger didn’t help, so I had to refer to the manual for the list of button presses I needed for the interface system in order to play. Klingon Academy a follow on from Starfleet Academy, with similar gameplay. The bridge view is removed, instead offering a first person or third person view of the ship. While it was nice to look at, it was better playing in the first person view anyway. Klingon Academy introduces a “Verbal Orders System”, which uses all the number keys to give a large list of commands, requiring 3 or 4 button presses. It’s not very easy to do while in the middle of combat using a joystick to fly around. You can order your helm officer to fly, but they’ll crash the ship. It’s a shame as there’s a lot of advanced tactics buried deep in this system. You can send marines to capture enemy ships overload shields and weapons for a short boost but risking damage and subsystem targeting – this feature would be better refined in Bridge Commanded, aided by your officers not being awful at piloting the ship. The piloting issues also extend to the enemy. While Klingons are known for ramming as a last resort, the Federation (well, simulated Federation) in this seem to love it, with collisions running a lot of missions. You have even more options available to you by using nearby phenomena such as gas giants and planetary rings to your advantage. It’s a shame that there’s so much depth, yet most battles end up slowly pummelling each other while circling close with you trying to avoid getting rammed. Throughout the game you’ll be treated to a ton of live action clips starring Christopher Plummer and David Warner as Chang and Gorkon, who do a wonderful job and the game gives a great insight into Klingons, as well as serving as a prequel to The Undiscovered Country. There’s a lot to like about Klingon Academy, it’s just a shame about the interface and enemy AI. Star Trek: New Worlds Original Release: 2000 Developer: 14 Degrees East Publisher: Interplay Platform: PC A few months after Star Trek Armada came out, we got another real time strategy game set in the Star Trek universe. This is a more traditional ground based one similar to Command & Conquer. Star Trek isn’t exactly known for large scale ground combat, so this takes a lot of liberties. It’s set in a new solar system thar suddenly appeared after a Romulan’s weapons test went wrong. As the location happens to be on an intersection of Federation, Klingon and Romulan territory, it’s a good opportunity for them to colonise this new world and kill each other for its resources. You eventually encounter a race that already lives on the planet, so you kill them, too. With all these random ground vehicles, recognisable Star Trek elements and designs are few and far between. The best thing about this game is the camera. There’s a lot of options for moving the camera around and looking at the fully 3D landscape. It seems odd to praise a camera, but I’m having a hard time thinking of other good things to say about this game, other than the opening and ending FMV cutscenes. The gameplay is extremely tedious. One major RTS element this game throws out is the fog of war system. You can see the landscape of the whole area, but can only see objects near your units. This means that you have absolutely no idea which parts of the map you have previously explored. Units are also very slow at responding and it can take minutes for them to travel where they need to go. This game really needed speed options due to how long everything takes. To make matters worse, these very long missions have to be completed in one go, as there’s no save feature at all – only which missions you’ve unlocked. There are also six different resources to manage, as well as moving officers to locations to complete objectives. Star Trek: Starfleet Command II: Empires at War Original Release: 2000 Developer: Taldren Publisher: Interplay Platform: PC Version played: Orion Pirates v2.564 In order to get this to work, I had to play a version of the standalone expansion Orion Pirates, released in 2001. This version has all the content from the base game added, but also some graphical enhancements – but the important thing is that it’s still the original gameplay. For the most part, it’s the same game as the first. People who know the game extremely well will probably notice various balance changes and additional features, but the game is so in depth that it’s still beyond my understanding. The second game does introduce some new races (including one originally created for the Star Fleet Battles board game) and a new campaign mode. In the campaign mode, you explore hex tiles until you encounter missions, some are optional while others you must play before moving on. It all looks very impressive, with different hubs for your race and other races, ships moving around and races that are allied with you, but almost all of this is fluff to make it appear interesting and doesn’t impact the game: you just move around and encounter random missions. For people who like the depth of the combat in this, this version is definitely a really good version to play. You can pick scenarios, modify them or accept the campaign for what it is and have fun with the random missions. Star Trek: Starship Creator Warp II Original Release: 2000 Developer: Imergy Publisher: Simon & Schuster Platform: PC This is an updated version of the first Starship Creator. It includes some of the ships from the first game with only one new addition: a Klingon Bird of Prey. In this version, you can set your 5 digit prefix code. That’s pretty much it for the ship creator side of things. This version does come with a lot more missions to complete, along with a way to create your own missions. Although this is the most boring part of the game and is only there to run in the background to slowly get more credits to spend on ship part and crew.