Star Trek: Borg (PC)

Developer:

Simon & Schuster

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Release Date:

1996

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Systems:

Win, Mac

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm giving you a choice!

You can either keep reading this perfectly normal regular article on Star Trek: Borg, or you can jump over my other website, Sci-Fi Adventures, and get an enhanced review with additional Star Trek trivia and observations! Stay here if you don't give a damn about the series and just want to read about a video game, go over there if you want too many words.

> CLICK HERE FOR THE EXTENDED SCI-FI ADVENTURES STAR TREK: BORG REVIEW <

I really wouldn't recommend reading both articles. Well, unless you're into sitting through lots of the same content all over again, in which case I might have found the right game for you!

Star Trek: Borg apparently came out in late 1996, just a few weeks before the movie Star Trek: First Contact. That film's all about the Borg so they had their synergy figured out there. That means that in grand scheme of Star Trek games, Borg comes after 25th Anniversary and A Final Unity, but before Starfleet Academy and Elite Force. It was released right at the start of the Trek game explosion that lasted until 2001, where every year would have three or more games, some of them not entirely terrible! In fact this wasn't even the only Trek game by Simon & Schuster that year, as they also released Star Trek: Klingon, which appears to be more of the same kind of thing.

The game will apparently run on modern systems if you download this ancient installer from the Internet Archive: Borgptch, but I don't really know how well it gets along with Windows 10 because I decided to run it in Windows 95 using the PCem PC emulator instead.

I usually only play for an hour or two, but this isn't the longest of games so I'm going to be playing all of it this time. So there's going to be HUGE SPOILERS for this game and maybe a few smaller spoilers for Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes like The Best of Both Worlds.

Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Spectrum HoloByte

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

DOS, Mac

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This week on Super Adventures I've been celebrating Star Trek's 50th anniversary by playing games that basically have nothing to do with the franchise, but that ends here with something a whole lot more relevant.

Sure it would've made more sense for me to play the Star Trek: 25th Anniversary adventure game, but I already have so that's put a wrench into that great idea. There is an entirely different 25th Anniversary on the NES, but I've played that too. So it comes down to this, and that's probably for the best as I've had this game sitting in my attic for so long that I've forgotten what it is or where it even came from. Have I even played it? Probably, once, but who knows?

All I know is that Spectrum HoloByte is a great name for a game developer, and it's a shame that this is one of the last games released with it on the box. They'd bought up MicroProse a couple of years before and by '96 all their games were released under that brand instead (including Trek games Birth of the Federation, Generations and Klingon Honor Guard). Then a few years later Hasbro bought Spectrum HoloByte (at this point known as MicroProse) and closed the studio, but they were in turn bought by Infogrames Entertainment, who acquired their assets and the Atari brand in the deal and renamed the company to Atari Interactive, before renaming themselves to Atari, SA. This shouldn't be confused with Atari, Inc. which is the name they gave to developer Infogrames, Inc. (formerly GT Interactive). There was also arcade game producer Atari Games, which formed when Atari, Inc. (the original one) split into two after the video game crash, but Infogrames never got its hands on that. It eventually ended up as Midway Games West until it was dissolved, with its IPs acquired by Warner Bros.

Game companies, man. It's starting to make sense to me why this never made it to Steam or GOG.

A Final Unity came out in 1995, a full year after 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' ended and about six months after the movie 'Star Trek: Generations', so it wasn't the most timely TV tie-in. Still it's nice that they waited until the game was finished, as quality's always better than synergy (for the player anyway).

The game isn't supported by ScummVM so I'm going to install it to a directory called "STFU" in DOSBox and cross my fingers. I'm sure it'll be fine though. In fact DOSBox is probably more likely to run the game than your average DOS PC, and with far less messing around with memory managers.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Fallen (PC)

Developer:

The Collective

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Release Date:

2000

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Systems:

Windows, Mac

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Today on Super Adventures... it's another licensed sci-fi game! Apparently they come in pairs this year. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Fallen comes from the Star Trek gamesplosion of 2000, when a ridiculous amount of Trek games all appeared at once, and some were even good! The 'Deep Space Nine' spin-off itself had actually ended back in '99, but they boldly went forward and gave the fans a couple more games anyway.

You might think your game backlog is bad, but this has been sitting on my shelf unplayed for like 15 years now. Mostly because I could never get the damn thing to run properly. It always came out running too fast, or way too dark, or with unfiltered textures and giant space pixels in place of stars.

This time though I'm using the dgVoodoo 2 Glide wrapper to trick the game into thinking I have a 3dfx card, and it's actually working pretty great... except for the low resolution and 16-bit colour depth. So be aware that the game can theoretically look better than it does in the upcoming screenshots.

Warning: this will likely contain spoilers for the 'Deep Space Nine' TV series. Like the fact that it has one episode entirely about one of the main cast having a sex change to stand in for his mother, and it's still a better series than 'Voyager'.

(Click an image to see the original screenshot, if you're in the mood for disappointment. They ain't HD by a long shot.)

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (NES)

This year is the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest and most enduring science fiction television series ever made... but there's no bloody way I'm playing another Doctor Who game, so instead I'm taking a look at Star Trek 25th Anniversary on the NES.

You might be wondering what this has to do with Christmas and honestly I can't think of a single thing. Well the stars in the background here do look a bit like snowflakes I suppose... also it's the 25th of December today.

I've already played the PC/Amiga game, but this is supposed to be something entirely different; more of an action game than a point and click adventure I'd expect.

Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force (PC)

The Star Trek franchise hasn't quite done so well as its arch-nemesis Star Wars when it comes to games over the years, perhaps because Trek has always been about working through problems and moral dilemmas, something that's tricky to adapt. On the other hand Star Wars is more about using the force and locking s-foils in attack position, things that can directly translate into straightforward action games like Jedi Knight or TIE Fighter. Though I'm sure the fact that George Lucas owned his own top tier developer probably helped.

For Elite Force though the Trek license was entrusted to Raven Software, the people who brought the world Heretic and Soldier of Fortune (and would later go on to make Jedi Knight II). So of course they decided to take a series about a group of enlightened pacifists who travel through the stars trying to solve problems with diplomacy and reason, and turned it into a first person shooter with the tagline "SET PHASERS™ TO FRAG".

They could've made a Mass Effect style RPG or a Walking Dead style adventure game, but nope, it's a pure FPS built with the Quake III engine. So let's see how well that worked out for them.

(Most pictures can be clicked to enlarge, though they'll still be covered in ugly nasty jpeg compression artifacts.)

Star Trek: Bridge Commander (PC)

Today I'm playing Bridge Commander, a Star Trek space sim by Totally Games, the makers of the legendary X-Wing and TIE Fighter series, unarguably the best space dogfighting games EVER MADE. Well okay maybe that's debatable, but it's undeniable that people seem to like them and if this turns out to be even 50% as good then it'll be 1000% better than 99% of the Trek games I've played so far.

I like how it boldly proclaims 'YOU are the Captain. You have the Conn.' on the cover and has an empty captain-shaped hole to show that yes it's actually YOU commanding this ship! Plus you've suddenly become a bald man with a strong resemblance to Patrick Stewart and the crew are concerned that if you lean any further you'll fall off your chair.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (MS-DOS)

I just found out it's the 46th anniversary of Star Trek, so I though I'd celebrate this monumental occasion by playing an original series Trek game. Okay maybe I'm a few days late, but apparently the original version of the game came out an entire year late (and the other versions even later), so hey I'm not doing so bad.

This is the PC/Amiga/Mac game I'm playing by the way. There's two other games with the same name, one for NES and one on the Game Boy, but it seems that they're all entirely different.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Crossroads of Time (Genesis/Mega Drive)

When I found out that this was actually released for real I had to check it out. A Star Trek platformer? Seriously?

Apparently the lead designer wrote a Star Trek fan film, so I expect this is going to be fairly faithful to the franchise. The music sounds like the actual Deep Space Nine theme, and that looks like the right space station, so it's doing well so far.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - Starship Bridge Simulator (32X)

Wow, what is it with the 32X and 3d space games? This doesn't look like it's going to be one of the best of them.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Klingon Honor Guard (PC) - Guest Post

More Star Trek? Everybody loves Star Trek, right?

Star Trek: Elite Force II (PC) - Guest Post

Regular contributor mecha-neko heads to the final frontier for another FPS Friday.

This post contains spoilers for the Star Trek: Voyager TV series.

Hey, somebody might care!

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Echoes from the Past (Genesis/Mega Drive)

It's a game based on a television series, how bad can it be?