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First Great Star Trek PC Game?
Bones writes: "You know how all Star Trek games are so full of promise but then suck when they get released (unlike the Star Wars games). Well we must be up to game number 590,000 on the Star Trek license and I think we might for the first time have a good egg according to this review of Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force. That Beatdown guy actually liked it, which means it must be good. Plus it uses the famed Quake III Arena engine. Yay!"
Got Rhinos?
Where the game really comes into itself, and where it really shows that it's not just a cool Q3 mod, is the single player game. As if to counterbalance the onslaught of multiplayer-only games, the Elite Force team have come up with a (great) plot, involving a decent variety of locations/enemies/puzzle things, along with some *usable* AI for your accompanying team mates (they don't get stuck anywhere but, hmm, they have been known to shoot me to death for letting them get shot by the enemy a few times...)
I think it's fair to say that this has drawn me in even more than Half-Life did. Only gripes are that it has a quick save, but no quick load function and loading takes far too long, especially when the level being loaded is already in memory.
Final Unity was okay, but 'Star Trek: Borg' was an absolutely *incredible* game. The entire game was Fullscreen, Full motion video, and played out EXACTLY like an episode of the Next Generation. Except you got to choose the plot twists.
And while it's not a Game, the 'Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual' was another great release. Walking around different decks of the ship, now that was just cool. (By todays standards, and looking at the 3D recreation of Voyager's bridge in Elite Force, the Technical Manual would be terrible. However, when it came out, it was incredible.) I bought the actual Technical Manual in print, and seeing those pages come to life on that CDROM was very cool.
'Star Trek: Bridge Commander' looks promising, too. It looks to be a full 3D recreation of a Galaxy Class ship (ala The Enterprise D), including the bridge, and full operation. You get to command a starship! Whee! I'm looking forward to that.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
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SO how coem ther si 10000000 gaems about STAR TRACK comineing out evary day?!?
do we needs thes many STAR TRACK gaems?
Quote torn from the JEFF K. interview with Jake Simpson. Just like with every Jeff K. article, I laughed so hard I had a brain hemorrhage and now I'm dead. (You bastards had better appreciate that I'm using my final words to bring you this bit of humor.)
It had all the voice actors from the show including Reading Rainbow's Levar Burton, along with all kinds of fun and interesting ways to disarm your opponents (having the doctor kill enemies with the medical reader was highly enjoyable).
Sadly, the game suffered from too many flaws: it only ran in DOS (don't even try to run in it Win95/98), Captain Picard's voice was extremely repetitive (if I had to hear "Make it so, number one" one more time I'd shoot myself) and there was a number of strange graphic blunders, the funniest being the way number one continually turned and stared at Picard's butt whilst on the bridge. No joke.
Nothing I found more funny then having Picard issue the order "Make it so, number one" and have number one stare at his ass right afterwards. He kind of had this look on his face that said "Captain? Right now?"
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
There are definitely good points to it, but the character interaction is weak and the 'puzzles' are really stupid -- they mostly consist of finding the right switch panel and pressing it. Oooh, that took brainpower. And most of the battles have been pretty repetitive.
I am presently in a level that has a really massive, huge fight, and it's fun but frustrating. If you're into lots of Star-Trek style shooting of bad guys, you might like this one.
On the whole I thought Deus Ex was a much, much better game. Star Trek is flashy. Deus Ex uses sort of a creaky engine that isn't nearly as fast and doesn't look as good, but the story is vastly better and the situations and puzzles a lot more interesting.
I think all of Star Trek has gotten that way -- most of it is plastic and cardboard, with very little substance to it. "Quick, hand me the spanning phase-inductance tool, the transmudiating resistance coil is out of alignment!"
Blech.
Oh, one caveat: I have played both games only single-player. I haven't done multiplayer with either.