This vast expanse of storage space was mostly just lying empty for the majority of games, until everyone at once had the idea of filling it up with the shittiest quality FMV they could barely pay for. The CD-ROM had suddenly gone mainstream, and developers the world over went from 1.44MB per floppy disc to an astonishing 600MB per shiny circle. Oh my goodness, if you didn’t live through video games in 1996, then count yourself lucky. But it has one other thing, and it’s really important: Q. This is an interactive movie, and it absolutely has as much interaction as any other interactive movie of the godforsaken era. It’s about sitting back in your captain’s chair and barking commands, like a real Jean-Luc Picard. You can absolutely switch to an external view of the ship and carry out the various actions for yourself, but that really does miss the point of Bridge Commander. Along the way you meet Picard and Data, voiced by Stewart and Spiner (the poor bastards must have signed some awful contract at some point, showing up for bit parts in these games). You’re a newly-appointed captain, variously in charge of the USS Dauntless and USS Sovereign, charged with working out which of the traditional enemy races was responsible for the destruction of a star, and the resulting death of your ship’s former captain. Because you’re the captain, and it’s your job to tell everyone else to do that stuff for you. This is a combat sim game where you don’t have to fly the ship, or even fire the weapons. While 2017's Star Trek: Bridge Crew brought something similar to VR, it’s 2002's Bridge Commander that we want to herald in this list. But it’s wonderful that at 30 years old, these are still well worth playing today. It’s very painful to acknowledge that it’s now more years since this game came out than it was between the game and the original series’ airing. The second, Judgment Rites, repeated the format, but this time with an arc storyline running through its seven chapters.īoth games contain some colossal issues, with possible paths that lead to unacknowledged dead ends due to decisions you made hours previously, but also remain absolutely extraordinary examples of the potential of the adventure genre. The first game took the form of seven individual episodic stories that could each have been a proper entry from TOS, with an astonishing amount of variation in how its puzzles could be solved. (As it turns out, Judgment Rites would prove to be the very last time the original cast all worked together.) That’s right, Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols, Kelley, and Takei are all there, at a point when their cinematic stars were shining brightly, agreeing to voice the reams of dialogue for a lowly video game. These were Sierra-style point-n-click adventures, depicting cartoon versions of the original series’ (TOS) bridge crew, and most astonishingly, entirely voiced by the original actors. In fact, this entry should probably encompass two games, both 1992's Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and 1993's Star Trek: Judgment Rites, given they work so well as a whole. While LucasArts and Sierra dominated, many others caught a piece of the action, including Judgment Rites’ Interplay, Brian Fargo’s company that would also give us Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and a miserable legal battle with Bethesda. The 1990s were the decade of the point-n-click adventure, the era during which the genre was capable of being a blockbuster commercial success. More than you’d think, in fact, as hopefully this list-in no particular order-will demonstrate. But games like Elite Force and Judgment Rites showed that TV’s corniest license could offer a basis for some top-notch entertainment. Sure, it’s hard to argue there’s anything that can measure up against TIE Fighter or Dark Forces, but then nor is there really in the rest of gaming. While it’s fair to say that Star Trek games have not exactly gained the nostalgic prestige of Star Wars properties, that doesn’t mean there isn’t gold-pressed latinum to be found among them. Fortunately, we have the authority to whittle the number down to a more manageable eight, in our legally binding list of the best among them. Go back into the Wild West of the ‘70s and ‘80s and that number shoots up when you include the unlicensed, unofficial titles. There have been, depending upon how you count, approximately 47 official Star Trek games. But rather than heading to Netflix and struggling through the first three seasons of Deep Space Nine all over again, what about dipping into its rich history of video games? As the final fan-service-strewn season of Star Trek: Picard comes to an end, confusing everyone by not being absolutely awful, you may well be in the mood for some more Trek before the return of Strange New Worlds in June.
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