Cube Tries to Play Every Star Trek Game

[Cube]

Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Final Unity

• Original Release: 1995
• Developer: Spectrum HoloByte
• Publisher: Spectrum HoloByte
• Platform: MS-DOS

This feels like a Next Generation movie. It’s a point and click adventure that starts off with a few loose plot points and missions that all start coming together as the Federations, Romulans and a newly discovered race called the Chodak (who also appear in Future’s Past with a similar plot) race to find a device that can alter reality anywhere in the galaxy. It’s all voiced by the cast of The Next Generation, with all the main crew getting pivotal moments in the story (although Troi’s main input is astrology, her empath and counselling isn’t really used in the game).

The game has multiple levels of depth and control. On the Enterprise, you can choose to manually alter repair teams and power output or let La Forge handle it for you. In ship combat, you can control the Enterprise manually or delegate it to Worf. Although the combat is very broken on modern systems, so letting Worf handle it is the only option (the system looks quite in depth). Ships exploding also tends to crash he game, so be sure to save, but luckily the Enterprise D mainly faces stripped down Romulan warbirds and Worf handles them with ease – although one odd thing about this game is that every enemy self destructs once defeated.

On away missions, you can also manually select an away team or let the game choose for you. While the first is nice for hearing different dialogue, you often need a specific character to perform a task and going back to the Enterprise and returning is a big faff, so it’s best to stick to the game’s recommendation. I think it rotates the cast quite nicely so they all have a part to play.

For the point and click puzzles, they start off great with lots of interactions that make sense, unfortunately the game devolves to extremely obscure solutions and objects you interact with can blend in with the background. It even has multiple moments where you can fail the game, but the game doesn’t tell you and lets you carry on. Although sometimes there are multiple solutions. There’s one part where you get to solve a puzzle if you pick up a random bit of metal (a paper clip), other wise you’ll have to shoot some sensors.

Even with those issues, A Final Unity is a great game and is well worth it for the story. It’s a shame that this hasn’t gotten a re-release that makes it easier to play (installing the game is a faff) and fixes up a few of the issues.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (Grandstand LCD)

• Original Release: 1995
• Developer: Grandstand
• Publisher: Grandstand
• Original Platform: Electronic Handheld
• Not played: Too expensive to get second hand.

Another obscure Star Trek LCD game. This one looks like it was sold under both the Grandstand and Tiger names, both with the same design. It’s also different to the previous Tiger handheld, although a similar idea. In this you just have to dodge to blow up asteroids.

 

Star Trek Omnipedia

• Original Release: 1995
• Developer: Imergy
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Platform: PC
• Also Known as: Star Trek Encyclopaedia
• Version played: Encyclopaedia 3.0

Originally released under the name Star Trek Omnipedia before being renamed Star Trek Encyclopaedia. I “played” the 3.0 version of this, covering everything up to the DS9 episode “The Adversary”. There are a few images and short videos. While the LCARS interface is nice, it isn’t easy to navigate or search.

Trivial Pursuit The Sci-Fi Master Game: Star Trek Edition

• Original Release: 1994
• Developer: Telstar Video
• Publisher: Telstar Video
• Original Platform: Board Game
• Not played: Too expensive to get second hand (plus converting the VHS)

A VHS add-on to Trivial Pursuit. This features clips and questions from the original series plus the six films.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Harbinger

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: Stormfront Studios
• Publisher: Viacom New Media
• Platform: MS-DOS

DS9 Harbinger is a Myst-style adventure game. Each part of the level is made up of still images, with you clicking the edge of the screen to move around and turn in very limited places. This allows the game to look very impressive visually, especially in screenshots. The 3D models of the characters look vert impressive for the time and everyone is wonderfully voice acted, using the original cast of DS9.

You play a diplomat named Bannick, called to DS9 to assist an ambassador in speaking with a new alien race called the Scythians. These aliens speak in an unusual manner and nobody other than the ambassador has been able to figure it out. As you reach DS9, you get attacked by drones (in an impressive FMV cutscene) and crash land. The drones stat building up to attack DS9. To make matters worse, when you visit the ambassador you discover that he has been murdered. You need to solve the murder, work out how to talk to the Scythians and find a way to stop the drones.

The part of the game on DS9 is great (once you get your head around navigating the station), with lots of conversation options and an intriguing mystery. Puzzles are mostly self-enclosed, leaving you to focus more on the narrative mystery.

In a few parts of the game, you have to man the weapons of DS9 (and a runabout). These sections are just click to shoot, but are surprisingly difficult and not fun at all.

The latter half of the game, once you leave DS9, is much more of a challenging puzzle game like Myst, where you have to navigate a maze (not easy due to how you move, working out how to ger around DS9 was difficult enough), and is very much a chore, especially as you have large periods with no talking. That said, working out how to trick the AIs in charge and talking to them towards the ends is a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t get the full cast of DS9 for this game, so O’Brien and Bashir are said to be on a mission (Worf hasn’t joined the cast yet). You do get to spend plenty of time with Sisko, Odo, Dax, Quark and Kira, though, so there’s still a lot of interaction with the crew.

Star Trek: Klingon

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: Simon & Schuster
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Platform: PC

This is an interactive movie game, where you watch clips before being presented with a choice. Where you click on (or choosing not to click) will either end the game or let you proceed.

This is presented as a holonovel made by Gowron (Robert O’Reilly), where he wants to teach weaklings about how to be a true Klingon so you can be a worthy opponent. In the holonovel, you take the place as a Klingon boy on his Rite of Ascension when his father stops an assassination attempt on Gowron. You then embark on a journey to find out who is behind everything.

The game aspect of this is quite poor, as all but the right option lead to someone shouting at you and the game resetting to just before – the Borg game is much more creative in terms of using the interactive movie mechanic. The story, however, is interesting with some fun moments. It’s a good insight into Klingon culture. On YouTube, there are two ways of watching this: if you want to enjoy the story, you can watch the “correct path” version, which turns it into a fun Klingon episode of Star Trek. You can also watch a version with all the failure clips, with lots of wonderful overacting.

Star Trek: Klingon Language Lab

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: Simon & Schuster
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Platform: PC

Released alongside Star Trek: Klingon, this software is an introduction to the Klingon language. It features Robert O’Reilly as Gowron who reads out all the Klingon words and phrases – each one has a video of him saying it, too. It has right categories, each with its own quiz to test your skills, which seem on a similar level to Duolingo.

It also features a section that helps you with the individual phonemes. While there’s only a limited amount of words and phrases, it’s a decent introductory language tool.

[Cube]

Star Trek: Borg

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: Simon & Schuster
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Platform: PC

The second interactive movie game. This follows Cadet Furlong who is being sent to a starbase ahead of a Borg invasion 10 years after the Battle of Wolf 359. Wishing he was fighting the Borg instead, as he lost his father at the Battle of Wolf 359, the cadet ends up being visited by Q. Q offers him a chance at saving his father and sends the cadet to the past, taking the place of the security officer and Q taking place of the medic.

The whole game is made up of live action footage, and John de Lancie gets plenty of screen time and is wonderful through the whole thing. The cast of new characters are also really good, too. At points in the “film” you get to make choices or solve puzzles, with Q resetting you if you mess up. I found that I much preferred picking the “wrong” options so I could see all the footage – you can never get tired of Q teasing you.

Because of Q resetting things, I think this works better than the Klingon game. I also really like that they make use of the bad choices as you sometimes need information from them to progress though the correct path. Unfortunately, the game is a lot of hassle to get working on a modern PC, so unless it gets easier, I would recommend watching the game on YouTube instead – treat it as an extra episode of Star Trek, as that’s what it essentially is.

 

Deep Space Nine Entertainment Utility

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: Sound Source
• Publisher: Sound Source
• Platform: PC

This is a collection of resources for Windows 3.1/95 PCs. It features system sounds, wallpapers and a screensaver. It also features a jigsaw puzzle with four puzzles.

Star Trek Voyager Entertainment Utility

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: Sound Source
• Publisher: Sound Source
• Platform: PC

This is a collection of resources for Windows 3.1/95 PCs. It features system sounds, wallpapers and a screensaver. It also features a jigsaw puzzle with four puzzles.

 

Star Trek: First Contact Portable Arcade Game

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: MGA
• Publisher: MGA
• Original Platform: Electronic Handheld
• Not played: Too expensive to get second hand.

An LCD game based on First Contact. By far the best thing about this is the case of the device, which is a shiny Starfleet combadge. The game itself has the Enterprise E blasting lots and lots of Borg Cubes. From the looks of the various imagery and video I cand find, I do wonder if this is the same coding as the Grandstand LCD but with different sprites.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation Collectible Dice Game

• Original Release: 1994
• Developer: Dan Verssen
• Publisher: Five Rings
• Original Platform: Board Game
• Not played: Not enough information to recreate.

While I was able to recreate some of the dice used in this in Tabletop Simulator, I can’t find enough information on all the starter dice or all the needed symbols to make a version that can be played.

For the Collectible Dice Game, you had to buy two starter packs (the main two were Enterprise E and Borg Sphere) each game came with what you needed for one player. Some dice represent shields and status which you change manually, while others you roll to determine their strength. You could get booster packs to have alternative dice with different values to use instead.

You had dice that reflected the four areas of shields, the warp core output and integrity and power reserves. Then you had movement, repair and weapon dice for your main actions. Each ship also had special and command dice with unique abilities. It sounds like it would be a fairly in-depth game and could use different dice to take more risks – for example, a phaser that does a lot more damage, but is far more likely to miss.

 

Star Trek: The Card Game

• Original Release: 1994
• Developer: Jeff Grubb, Don Perrin, Margaret Weis
• Publisher: Fleer
• Original Platform: Board Game

While this is another collectible card game, this is much less in depth than the Customizable Card Game. This one focuses on The Original series where each player takes turns trying to complete missions. The missions, plots and outcomes are cards and if the current player chooses not to play one, the opponent gets to add one. Opponents can also add challenges to make things more difficult for you – but then your rewards for completing them are also increased.

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are also not in anyone’s deck. Instead, they are part of the “core crew” (along with the Enterprise) that both players can select for missions, although at the cost of experience. Completing missions will earn you experience and the goal is to be the first to gather 25 experience.

 

Star Trek: Battle of the Borg

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: Playmates
• Publisher: Playmates
• Original Platform: Board Game
• Not played: No prototypes

Playmates internal product data showed off this Star Trek board game in development for release with the upcoming Star Trek film (which would have been First Contact). The artwork for the box must have been made before the Enterprise E was officially show, so they used a Galaxy class ship instead.

The information on the box mock-up is all placeholder text, but one feature of the board game was that the mini-figures that came with the came would be poseable.

 

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

• Original Release: 1997
• Developer: Interplay
• Publisher: Interplay
• Platform: PC

A game that will be sharing a name with a Star Trek show. Starfleet Academy is sort of a reimagining of Starfleet Academy Bridge Simulator on SNES/32X, as it features the same style of gameplay and some of the same cadets, but with a new story, new characters and a completely different set of missions.

The first things that strikes you is the live action cutscenes. These often look odd as none of the actors were filmed on set, they were instead filmed separately and imposed onto the backgrounds. The cutouts can be very rough at times, but its somehow still very charming, especially as everyone is taking it seriously, including William Shatner, Walter Koenig, and George Takei in their last official live action appearances. You also get to make choices which impacts your ratings – if you don’t make the right ones, you won’t get to play a bonus mission at the end of the game.

The game uses a mixture of a joystick (or controller) and keyboard and it works quite well, even if it takes a bit of getting used to. It offers a lot more control than the SNES/32X games, but at the same time it also feels like you’re doing everything yourself instead of commanding a crew. The combat is still only forward phasers/torpedoes, but it feels a lot more fluid than any of the previous space combat, and it helped out by a full screen view that displays all needed information.

While this further separates you from the crew, it’s very much required for playing the game. The missions are almost entirely combat related, with a few where you can avoid encounters. None of the missions paritcuarly stood out to me, other than one where you casually pass through the Galactic Barrier with a really nice cutscene.

Starfleet Academy is an interesting game, especially with the cutscenes. The gameplay can be frustrating at times (especially as you can very quickly have systems knocked out, a big pain if it’s impulse or weapons), but for the most part it’s fun to play.

[Cube]

Star Trek: Generations

• Original Release: 1997
• Developer: MicroProse
• Publisher: MicroProse
• Platform: PC

This game is definitely intriguing. It very loosely follows the story of Star Trek Generations, with Soren trying to destroy stars in order to change the path of the mysterious energy ribbon called the Nexus. In this game, Soren needs to destroy multiple starts to get what he wants, and you need to stop him – you can even prevent him from destroying the Amargosa star.

Most of the game is played in a first person view. The controls definitely feel very dated, but are one of the things that makes the game interesting. The directional buttons move forward/backwards and turns while the mouse aims the cursor. On the bottom of the screen, you control your inventory, scanning and map. The big square in the middle will show you objects you can interact with when you get close to them, which is a really nice touch. On the top of the screen, your phaser will aim at that part of the screen. It’s very different to the first person controls we’re used to now.

In these levels you’ll shoot through enemies and solve puzzles. Sometimes, you’ll even beam down in disguise and can do a lot before you have to resort to shooting. The graphics are extremely charming and are surprisingly nice to look at. When you get hurt a lot, you’ll be beamed up and the mission will have failed – however, you can fail a few missions before you lose the game.

Between missions, you’ll use Stellar Cartography to scan planets and stars in order to work out where you next have to go. You’ll also sometimes encounter enemy ships and use a pretty poor interface to fight them with. All the good parts are in the missions.

The missions are quite interesting. One has you infiltrate a Romulan base as Troi, one involves Crusher investigating a living planet and fighting giant antibodies (it reminds me a bit of the Voyager episode “Macrocosm” and the Chodak from Future’s Past/Final Unity even pop up.

Eventually, you’ll reach Veridian III. As Geordi is never captured in this game, things play out differently. Picard ends up in the Nexus (which is just a flashing blank screen as he asks Kirk for help), then Kirk delays Soren and falls off a bridge. Soren then beams to the Enterprise and initiates a warp core overload. After separating the saucer, Picard beams to the stardrive section and stops Soren from destroying the saucer (although he does enough damage that it has to crash land) before finding an escape pod with a sleeping Spot and watching the stardrive section blow up in a very impressive cutscene that looks like it’s actually using the studio models.

Although that’s not the only ending – you can actually fully defeat Soren. He brings a large fleet with him to Veridian III, but if you manage to disable his ship, he’ll self-destruct. The Enterprise D warps off unscathed and Kirk will still be in the Nexus.

Star Trek: Captain’s Chair

• Original Release: 1997
• Developer: Imergy
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Platform: PC

Another interactive CD-ROM, this time focusing on the bridges of the original Enterprise, Enterprise D, Defiant, Voyager and Enterprise E (plus a hidden Klingon Bird of Prey bridge). Each bridge has a lot of locations to view from (in 360 degrees) and you can zoom into every single panel on the bridge. Some of them have buttons you can press, and even a couple of simple games.

Sulu, Worf, Sisko, Janeway and Riker all give tours of the bridges, talking about each station. Janeway’s tour is the most fascinating, as it’s written from the perspective of before the ship launched, so the only other character mentioned is Harry Kim (none of the other people officially assigned to Voyager are part of the main cast). It’s also referred to “The Voyager” a lot, which sounds odd.

Kotra

• Original Release: Seen on-screen in 1997
• Developer: Abayomi, Dean Jones
• Publisher: Self-Published
• Original Platform: Board Game

A Cardassian board game seen in the DS9 episode “Empok Nor”, a game about “about bold strategy and decisive action” according to Garak. I manged to find some rules on DeviantArt and have made a few changes to them myself.

When you attack an opponent piece, you have to attack it with a piece that is the same or higher rank, or else you’ll use yours. The key thing, however, is that you can’t see what ranks any of the pieces are as they’re printed on the bottom of each piece. You can check yours whenever you want, and both pieces are revealed when an attack happens – so you’ll know what the winner is, but you’ll have to keep track of it yourself.

The aim of the game is to attack your opponents capital piece. One clue regarding this is that the capital piece can’t move, so you’ll be keeping an eye for pieces your opponent doesn’t touch – but also be wary as there are also mine pieces that also can’t move and will take out both themselves and any piece attacking them (except for the Garresh, a low ranking piece that can defuse mines).

While taking the opponent’s capital ends the game, the winner is the player who got the most pieces based on points earned during the game and the pieces you have captured. The capital is worth a lot of points, but if you aren’t careful you can still lose.

Star Trek: Voyager: Retribution

• Original Release: N/A (In development 1997)
• Developer: Looking Glass
• Publisher: Viacom
• Original Platform: PC
• Not played: No leaked prototypes.

This was an adventure game based on Star Trek Voyager and likely would have played similar to Seep Space Nine: Harbinger. The plot involved an away team being captured by the Kazon and over the three chapters, you would encounter two new races. It was supposed to feature the full cast of the show, but ended up getting cancelled.

Lots of the sets were faithfully recreated in 3D for the game, likely with the intention to be used for screenshots and converted into the backdrops for the game (the models are far too detailed for computers). It looks like a lot of Voyager was completed, along with an alien ship and planet. The artist, Mark Lizotte, had access to the set blueprints and spent two days on the sets measuring and checking colours against samples to get them spot on.

In response to the game being cancelled, a few of the developers (including the game’s writer, Ken Levine) left the company and formed Irrational Games, making System Shock 2 and BioShock.

Star Trek Pinball

• Original Release: 1998
• Developer: Sales Curve
• Publisher: Interplay
• Platform: PC

A very basic pinball game. It features three tables (one exclusive to two players), which are designed to be like real life tables (though not based on actual ones) rather than taking advantage of being a video game. The tables are fairly generic and don’t really make much use of the Star Trek license other than imagery.

The two main tables both have the same problem – they have a ramp or button directly above the centre of t

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Klingon Honor Guard

• Original Release: 1998
• Developer: MicroProse
• Publisher: MicroProse
• Platform: PC

This game is an interesting bit of gaming history: the first game ever released using the Unreal engine, coming out before Unreal itself. It uses a beta version of the engine, so is quite buggy, and the gameplay often feels exactly like Unreal, as it’s a first person shooter that uses a lot of the same code – the movement, some level elements (such at mine carts attached to rails above them) and enemy AI are straight from Unreal.

You play as a new recruit for the Klingon Honor Guard when your training gets interrupted because the Klingon High Council has been bombed, with Gowron injured. Kurn (Worf’s brother, played by Tony Todd) and a Dahar Master send you on a quest to work out who is behind it. Naturally, this involves killing lots of enemies, which mainly consist of Klingons and Andorian pirates.

The graphics are good for the time, although most of the game is dark and full of browns, a lot of the levels merge together. A lot of levels are confusing mazes where you spend most of your time hunting for hard to see keys or buttons to progress. A few standout ones are set on space stations and ships. Because the structure is confined by the outside shape, the layouts make a lot more sense. The game has a lot of levels, and most of them end up merging together.

When not aimlessly walking around, the game is a lot of fun. Stabbing foes with a bat’leth is enjoyable, with lots of colourful blood spraying around (there are no humans in the game so it avoids having red blood). Most of the other weapons are fairly boring, with the exception of a disc weapon which launces a bouncing disc that destroys entire rooms of enemies. You can also find some gadgets to use, such as a deployable camera (never found a use for it) and mag boots, which are vital for going on spacewalks in some levels.

Klingon Honour Guard is fun in parts, but often frustrating. I feel like it goes on a bit too long, with the most enjoyable levels being close to each other in the middle of the game. It also doesn’t really capture the feel of the Star Trek universe. You see Klingons and Andorians, but they don’t really act like them. The main character also repeatedly shouts “I will cut you up like gach” at your foes, which I found odd because Klingons eat them alive, so there’s no cutting up.

Star Trek: The Game Show

• Original Release: 1998
• Developer: Sound Source
• Publisher: Sound Source
• Platform: PC

A trivia game with some good production values, as it’s hosted by Q and Q. Q is played by John de Lancie with another Q as his sidekick (played by Karen Cornwell, this is her only acting role). All the questions and answers are read out, so there’s plenty of voice acting from the two, including plenty of quips. There’s even an annoying audience member that blurts out the answer if you run out of time. The quiz is split into four sections: Alpha Quadrant, Beta Quadrant, Gamma Quadrant and Delta Quadrant. The show covers TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager and the movies.

In the Alpha Quadrant, the questions are about the characters in Star Trek. A wheel will spin and land on a division and you’ll be asked a question about someone from it. There’s plenty of variety and some interesting questions. In Beta Quadrant, the game reveals five clues one at a time and you need to type in the answer, either an alien race or a character’s name. The clues are quite well worded and there are some very obscure characters.

Gamma Quadrant focuses on command problems and how situations in the shows were solved. There’s also some interactivity as you can forfeit a question and send it to another player. Getting a question wrong will get you negative points in this round, so you don’t want to just guess.

The final round, Delta Quadrant, has five different styles, one chosen at random in each game, each loosely based on each of the shows (with the fifth representing the films).

While most of the questions are interesting and delve into a lot of deep Trek references, I did find one mistake: a question asks what Scotty used to construct the tank for carrying whales. Plexiglass wasn’t an option – instead the game wanted transparent aluminium (which Scotty traded the formula in order to get the Plexiglass).

Overall, this is a very entertaining trivia game.

 

[Cube]

Star Trek: Starship Creator

• Original Release: 1998
• Developer: Imergy
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Platform: PC

This game lets you create your own starships. You start off with a popular starship class, such as Constitution, Galaxy, Intrepid or Defiant and then modify it in phases. The first phase is appearance, letting you toggle between different nacelles, hulls and saucers. Next up is the name, followed by internal systems that affect the stats.

One you’ve built a ship, you can send it on missions. The missions are fully automatic, so you just sit back and watch your creation at work (or put it in “stealth” mode and do something else).

While quite limited, it’s nice to see your creations flying around. I focused on three ships: the first was a Constitution class USS USS Columbia (I didn’t realise it automatically added the USS part), designed to look like a Constitution mixed with the NX class. Then a really silly looking Defiant, the Potato class USS Spud. Finally, a really cool looking Intrepid I called the USS Pathfinder.

Monopoly: Star Trek The Next Generation

• Original Release: 1998
• Developer: Hasbro
• Publisher: Hasbro
• Platform: Board Game

A Star Trek: The Next Generation themed version of Monopoly. These versions of Monopoly don’t do anything with the actual theme, it’s just the basic game with different pictures and player pieces. If you’ve played one licences Monopoly, you’ve played them all (other a small amount of special ones).

Monopoly is a terrible roll-and-move trading game. The mechanics were originally designed with a runaway winner in mind to demonstrate how bad landlords are, only for the game to be stolen by someone else and mass produced. The game is also often made worse by people incorporating “house rules”, such as putting fine/tax money under “free parking” – something that just makes the game drag even longer.

Almost everything you do is determined by rolling two dice. For the first few turns round the board, there is property you can either buy or send to auction (a rule most people forget) and the it’s the case of trying not to land on ren, although as it’s all dice based, there’s to tactics for doing so, other than not paying to leave jail early (it’s actually beneficial to stay in jail).

There’s also a lot of negotiating and trading properties with other players to try and create sets. In order to buy houses and hotels.

This version of Monopoly had something special promised: if you linked all four planned versions of Star Trek Monopoly, you can link them together via the wormhole in the corner of the board, but only one of these versions existed and it’s still just Monopoly, just one that drags on even more.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine & The Next Generation: The Board Game

• Original Release: 1998
• Developer: Component Game Systems
• Publisher: Component Game Systems
• Platform: Board Game

While the names suggest that these are different games, they’re part of the same system and are compatible with each other. These are the “Core Sets”, with plans for releasing additional starter kids (new factions) and reinforcement packs. The system for these games is called the “Component Games System” and was initially made for Babylon 5: The Board Game (which seems like it was quite popular), before expanding into more franchises.

The company shut down shortly after the Star Trek core sets were released, so none of the additional stuff was made. I do find the names of the games odd as they send the message that these are just basic individual cheap tie-in games. It needed a subtitle to indicate that they’re part of the same system.

The game itself is a 4x game. A turn consists of the following: bookkeeping (checking victory, gaining money, paying for repairs), building new ships and bases, moving then combat. It seems like a fairly typical game of the genre. There are different scenarios to choose from in the form of different map layouts, either a singular map or, if you want a proper DS9 experience, you can set up the gamma quadrant separately, using the wormhole to move between maps.

For testing it out, I could only find images of a limited amount of pieces, but was able to put together a small 2-player Maquis Vs Dominion game (and even then, I had to borrow a few map tiles from the imagery of the Babylon 5 game – the games use the same rules so you could probably combine them). The game is fine, but doesn’t really do anything special with the genre.

Star Trek: Insurrection: Son’a Ambush Adventure

• Original Release: 1998
• Developer: Last Unicorn Games
• Publisher: Last Unicorn Games
• Platform: Board Game

This board game was given out with Issue Inquest Games Magazine #46 (February 1999), and utilises the simple combat system from Star Trek: The Next Generation Roleplaying Game.

The goal of the game is to get at least one Ba’ku to the cave (although I added the extra challenge of seeing how many you can rescue). Drones will try to capture the Ba’ku while Son’a soldiers will attack the Enterprise crew (Picard, Data, Crusher, Worf and Troi). More drones appear at the end of each turn (which can be very dangerous, as if they land on a crew member, the crew member is lost), with three soldiers appearing on turn three.

You can only shoot at enemies one or to spaces away. Each crew member rolls a different number of dice (although onl the highest number is counted). The default you need to hit is an 8 for one square away or 10 for two squares away, you can also fire at additional targets, each one adding to the score you need to hit. The character’s phaser skill is added to the roll. One dice is the “Drama” dice. If this lands on a 6, you use both that and the next highest roll.

Everything is mostly down to Data, with Worf backing him up. If you can get them to be the main wall between the drones and the Ba’ku, you’re set, with Picard, Troi and Crusher getting any stragglers. I ended up getting all but one of the Ba’ku to the cave on my first try, with the very start of the game being the most difficult part. If you lose Data early on, you pretty much have no chance at stopping the drones from taking all of the Ba’ku.

Durotta

• Original Release: 1991 (appeared in Star Trek in 1998)
• Developer: Blaise Muller
• Publisher: Gigamic
• Original Platform: Board Game

Durotta is what the game Quarto will be called in the 24th century. Based on the Voyager Season 5 opening episode “Night”, with Tom Paris opening the game with the “Novakovich gambit”.

The object of Durotta is to place a piece in order to form a line of 4 with a single matching characteristic. These characteristics are: Tall/Short, Round/Square, Light/Dark and Full/Hollow. As long as one characteristic is consistent across 4 in a row, you’ll win. For example: if you place a tall piece to form a row of four tall pieces, you win, even if they are all a mixture of light and dark.

What makes the game special is that you don’t choose what piece you play: your opponent does, which makes the game incredibly strategic as you have to think about what moves your opponent can make when deciding what piece to hand them, but also keep an eye on the remaining pieces when placing one as you don’t want to force yourself to give your opponent the winning piece. We see Tom and B’elanna passing each other the pieces, so it seems like they were following the actual rules of the game (even if they made up names for moves).

I only tried this game because of it’s appearance in Voyager, but I really love it. It’s a brilliant game, and the mini version (the one I got) is nice and portable – it also looks fantastic and makes for a great display piece.

Star Trek First Contact: Aftermath

• Original Release: N/A (In development 1998)
• Developer: MicroProse
• Publisher: MicroProse
• Original Platform: PC
• Not played: No leaked prototypes.

After making the Generations game, MicroProse set to work on a game for First Contact. Instead of retelling the events of the film, they opted to make a direct sequel: the Borg Queen had managed to copy her brain to the Enterprise’s computer, and the Enterprise kept some of the Borg (for either study, release or prisoners, it’s not clear). A few months after First Contact, this copy of the queen takes control of the Borg on the ship and starts assimilating.

The whole game would have been set on the Enterprise E (although from the screenshots, the holodeck was also used), with parts of the game being random to encourage replayability. You directly controlled all 7 of the main cast, swapping between them at will. You could also give them tasks, such as researching technology to stop the Borg.. There was an additional tactical interface where you order around 49 other crewmembers.

The game itself would have taken around 5 hours for a successful campaign, although from the sounds of the game I would imagine some playthroughs might get to a point where beating the Borg would be impossible (due to bad planning), requiring a restart. It sounded like an interesting idea, but was cancelled when a deal with Activision was made for Star Trek games.

Star Trek: Birth of The Federation

• Original Release: 1999
• Developer: MicroProse
• Publisher: Hasbro Interactive
• Platform: PC

Birth of the Federation is a turn based 4x strategy game (think of a turn-based Stellaris). You can play as the Federation (although it’s just humans), Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians of Ferrengi.

My first attempt ended in tragedy my science ship was lost to a neutron star pretty much straight away, then a major accident happened at another colony and I seemed to not have the dilithium required to build more. I used the game to learn the other parts of the game ready for the next game.

The start of the game is all about colonising systems, sustaining them (either manually or using the handy auto builder). Spacedocks are the most important element as they expand your reach, letting you colonise more star systems. Once you encounter other races, you can offer messages of peace, friendship, give gifts, demand goods or declare war. Unfortunately, the diplomacy is the weakest element. With the major races, it’s pretty much buying time before war, while with minor races if you’re lucky or throw enough money at them, you can get a system and possibly a couple of ships added to your faction as they join you.

There are two game types: control 60% of the galaxy or wipe out two factions that are set as your rivals. At some point, you’re going to need to take over systems owned by other factions, and you can only do so by wiping out all life in the system, which seems a bit overboard. This will anger other factions, so the game seems to be building up your recourses and ships enough to take on everyone near the end. The final part of the games (either winning or losing) seems anti-climatic, as it seems to be having a fleet bomb a defenceless planet.

Ship battles can be fought though a turn-based tactical screen, with some tactics working well over others. It mainly comes down to having more and better ships, though.

Birth of a Federation has a lot of depth, and I suspect would have been great when it came out. The genre has evolved a lot since then, so I wouldn’t recommend it now.

[Cube]

Star Trek: Starfleet Command

• Original Release: 1999
• Developer: Quicksilver / 14 Degrees East
• Publisher: Interplay
• Platform: PC

This ship combat game is based on the board game Star Fleet Battles (which licensed designs from Star Trek but is officially not Star Trek). This game has a lot to it. There are six races: Federation, Klingon, Romulans, Gorn, Lyran and Hydran, each with their own ships and campaign – every faction even has its own unique HUD and menu interface, a lot of effort clearly went into this game.

The same is true with the gameplay itself, there’s an immense amount of depth, so much you can do with how the weapons work, power distribution, using the transporter in offensive ways, having shuttles help you in combat and so much more. For someone who wants to feel like they’re fully managing a ship on their own, this is the kind of game for them. I personally did not enjoy it at all, with everything feeling extremely slow and sluggish, with battles feeling like endurance tests of not getting bored.

It’s not the game’s fault, really. It does what it sets out to do and does it well, it just really isn’t my kind of thing.

Star Trek: Hidden Evil

• Original Release: 1999
• Developer: Presto
• Publisher: Activision
• Platform: PC

This was the first one that was a nightmare to get running. Even though it’s on GoG, it requires audio hardware acceleration to be turned off, which isn’t an option on Windows 11. In the end, I had to install Windows 10 on a partition to get it working. Was it worth it? Definitely not.

Hidden Evil starts out quite promising. You play as Ensign Sovok, a human that was raised by Vulcans and is the first human to have mastered the Vulcan neck pinch (which you use in the stealth sections of the game). He serves on a station near Ba’ku, that has discovered ancient ruins near where the Son’a are settling, and they have requested Picard to look into it.

Leaving the Enterprise E and everyone but Data behind Picard has Sovok take him to Ba’ku to investigate, although the Son’a soon start a rebellion.

The game is played form a stationary camera. The controls aren’t as bad as I expected, and worked well when mapped to a controller. Aiming isn’t easy, so you’ll just flail and spam the shoot button until you hit something. There’s a few basic puzzles, but most of the game is just roaming around, occasionally shooting things. There’s a lot of pointless back and forth and padding to the game – which is astonishing for a game that is shorter than Insurrection.

The plot starts to pick up when you discover one of the ancient beings: one of the aliens from The Chase. Then, just as things get interesting, she’s immediately disposed of and instead the real villain is revealed: a big organic blob that spews out insect soldiers. Given time, this thing could overrun the entire galaxy. Romulans take her and then you have two really boring missions aimlessly roaming corridors on a Romulan space station and the Enterprise E – somehow they made exploring the Enterprise boring (also, only Picard and Data still talk to you on the Enterprise).

Hidden Evil feels like a game that had big plans, but the developers didn’t have the budget to do what they want. As a result, it feels like they gave up on their own story half way through this short game.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion

• Original Release: 1999
• Developer: Imergy
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Platform: PC

The interface of this is the same as the Encyclopaedia. This has information on every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, including background information and the complete script for each episode. There is also a trailer for all episodes.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion

• Original Release: 1999
• Developer: Imergy
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Platform: PC

The interface of this is the same as the Encyclopaedia. This has information on every episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, including background information and the complete script for each episode. There is also a trailer for all episodes.

Star Trek: Trivia Challenge

• Original Release: 1999
• Developer: Sound Source
• Publisher: Sound Source
• Platform: PC

The sequel to Star Trek: The Game Show, this is worse in every possible way. John De Lancie as Q is gone as the host, and we instead have an extremely obnoxious guy that comes off as a bit creepy and very annoying. Deep Space Nine and Voyager have also been ditched. You can choose to have a quiz about The Original Series, The Next Generation or play a round of both.

In each round, you have four questions in four categories. Half of the categories are puns which often don’t make sense. The questions, as well as the possible answers, often feel rather immature – there are multiple questions about the “Red Shirts always die” joke (with the “correct” answer being a joke rather than an actual event) and a surprising number of questions include sexist remarks towards women, including one where you are asked what Uhura would do if you whispered the Swahili phrase “sisi ngono” in her ear. It essentially means “let’s have sex” with the answer being Uhura laughing and giving you a friendly slap.

While The Game Show is a lot of fun, this one is really not worth playing at all.

UNO: Star Trek

• Original Release: 1999
• Developer: Jim Keifer
• Publisher: Mattel
• Platform: Board Game

The popular game Uno where you’re trying to get rid of all your cards. This plays the same as the traditional Uno, but it has four unique wild cards.

Mind Meld lets you look at the next player’s hand, Live Long and Prosper lets you discard your entire hand and draw the same number of cards, Beam Me Up, Scotty can cancel the impact a card has on you and Double Tribble forces the next player to double the number of cards in their hand.

There was a second version of this released by Fundex, which only had the “Beam Me Up” extra wild card.

Star Trek Adventure: Serie Classica

• Original Release: 1999
• Developer: Jim Keifer
• Publisher: Mattel
• Platform: Board Game
• Not played: Very little information available.

This game had a lot of ambition. It licensed all Trek shows, but despite having Kirk, Picard, Sisko and Janeway on the box, is focused entirely on The Original Series.

You can play as either the Federation, Klingons, Gorn or Romulans with the main game focusing on an away mission, where you will face lots of dangers, overcome tests and fight enemies, but your ship will still have to face dangers of its own.

It looks like a very in depth board game, but there’s no way to know with the information available on the internet.

Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury

• Original Release: N/A (Cancelled 1999)
• Developer: Interplay
• Publisher: Interplay
• Original Platform: PC
• Not played: No leaked prototypes.

A point and click adventure game that boasted some very interesting graphics. It featured the whole cast from The Original Series (although due to declining health, Maurice LaMarche took over from DeForest Kelly part way through development). It was going to have six chapters, each focusing on a different member of the crew with an interconnected plot. It revolved around peace talks on Vulcan between them and Romulans, with the Romulan ambassador being murdered.

There are a few videos of cutscenes and a couple of trailers, but this YouTube video shows how the game would have played:

 

I've also recently discovered some old online browser games, so I'm posting them out of order.

 

Star Trek: First Contact: Battle The Borg

• Original Release: 1996
• Developer: StarTrek.com
• Publisher: StarTrek.com
• Platform: Shockwave

I could only play a demo of this browser game, but the full game is probably more of the same thing, just with different map layouts or more Borg. You roam through the corridors of the Enterprise E, shooting Borg. After every shot, you need to remodulate phasers.

The game is made of pre-rendered backgrounds, so turning will “snap” to the direction. There are a few side routes to explore, although if you play the game properly you won’t get to see much, as the game ends when you’ve killed a small number of Borg. You can just run past them to see the full “map”, which consists of a few small sections that repeat endlessly.

For a quick distraction online, it’s not the worst game.

Namadra V Corridor

• Original Release: 1997
• Developer: StarTrek.com
• Publisher: StarTrek.com
• Platform: Shockwave

This Shockwave game from the Star Trek website puts you in the role of a Starfleet Academy Cadet tasked with completing a simulation where your ship is trapped in the deadly Namadra V Corridor. Not only are Klingons trying to attack you, but parts of the corridor will wear down your shields and hull. You need to get to the end of the corridor across different difficulty levels.

To move, you must press one of the six directions and set how many hexes to move (although it’s quicker to press “engage” multiple times than set a number). You want to try and stay in empty space as much as possible, but may have to go through some blue tiles (which zap your shields) – but stay away from the red ones as they’ll blow you up. You can also fire a probe in any direction which will reveal tiles until it reaches an obstacle.

It’s a very simple game that’s a bit annoying to control, but is fun for what it is. This game (and the whole Star Trek website) was initially exclusive people that used MSN as their internet provider.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Odo’s Investigation

• Original Release: 1997
• Developer: StarTrek.com
• Publisher: StarTrek.com
• Platform: Shockwave

This Shockwave game from the Star Trek website is a holodeck simulation to test your detective skills. You have 30 minutes to solve a crime by asking witnesses around the station followed by asking the three suspects a total of four questions between them.

Every time you change location, it takes 2 minutes, then talking to a witness takes 4 minutes. Unless you get lucky, you won’t be able to solve in on your first try as you need to find the one witness that disagrees with a question later on. Witnesses are also in different locations each time, so you need to remember who you talked to.

That said, even though Odo tells you off for accusing with no evidence if you get the suspect wrong, you don’t actually need to encounter the key witness for a correct answer, so you can get it right by random choice. You can even skip straight to accusing without talking to any witnesses. Of course, this ruins the game, but I imagine people did it to submit high scores after they had played.

There are three different scenarios in this, although instead of progressing through them, the scenario is picked randomly at the start.

 

[Cube]

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.

 

[Cube]

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.

 

[Dcubed]

A Nintendo branded Star Trek game!?

Now there’s some good pub quiz trivia material 

Of course it’s a bloody LCD game 

Edited July 3, 2023 by Dcubed

[Cube]

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

[Glen-i]

On 11/07/2023 at 10:17 AM, Cube said:

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.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the idea was to put 4 Monopoly boards together to make a board that's 4 times as large, and therefore double the amount of spaces it takes to get around the perimeter?

My word, that might be the closest we've ever come to "Hell on Earth"!

[Cube]

5 minutes ago, Glen-i said:

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the idea was to put 4 Monopoly boards together to make a board that's 4 times as large, and therefore double the amount of spaces it takes to get around the perimeter?

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. 

[Glen-i]

3 minutes ago, Cube said:

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. 

Oh... Oh no...

The mere thought of that is horrific!

[Cube]

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.

[Happenstance]

I've been waiting for you to get to Bridge Commander. One of my all time favourite games. I spent so many hours messing about with the mods and constant space battles.

[Glen-i]

@Dcubed, was Bridge Commander that game your brother played the hell out of wayyyyyy back?

Because I vaguely remember that one.

[Dcubed]

2 minutes ago, Glen-i said:

@Dcubed, was Bridge Commander that game your brother played the hell out of wayyyyyy back?

Because I vaguely remember that one.

No, it's Starfleet Academy you're thinking of.

That and Elite Force, he played the hell out of that one as well.

[Cube]

On 17/07/2023 at 4:17 PM, Happenstance said:

I've been waiting for you to get to Bridge Commander. One of my all time favourite games. I spent so many hours messing about with the mods and constant space battles.

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.

 

[Happenstance]

19 hours ago, Cube said:

I wonder if you ended up using an of the mods I helped out with (the biggest one was called Kobayashi Maru).

Yeah I used Kobayashi Maru, great mod pack. Also spent a lot of time with the Stargate ship packs.

[Cube]

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.

[Dcubed]

Wow! We’re almost done already? Would’ve thought that there would be much more (especially the crappy LCD games! Where are the rest of the crappy LCD games!?!?).

Congrats though @Cube   Which one is your fave? (And which one is the ultimate baktag?)

[Cube]

1 minute ago, Dcubed said:

Wow! We’re almost done already? Would’ve thought that there would be much more (especially the crappy LCD games! Where are the rest of the crappy LCD games!?!?).

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).

[Dcubed]

3 hours ago, Cube said:

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).

Sounds amazing, looking forward to the dreck 

[Cube]

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.

[Cube]

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.

[Dcubed]

Wow.  Star Trek Rivals' inspiration is... pretty blatant.  I kinda low-key love how brazen it is