Flight Simulator: Williams Star Trek: The Next Generation Pinball

If you have time to kill, you could make an entertaining diversion over debating whether or not pinball tables can be considered video games or not. Traditionally, they've always existed on the margins of the industry: You won't see any big video game publications talking about them, but you will likely see fans of a certain kind of video game, namely retro hobbyists, displaying a passion for pinball tables very similar to the one they have for their favourite video games.

From my point of view, this is extremely easy to explain. Pinball tables may not be video games per se, but they're definitely close relatives-Fellow travellers at the very least. There's a lineage shared by both pinball and a certain strand of the video game industry, which just so happens to be the one that most interests me personally. In fact, I would argue that video games, at their purest, are far closer to pinball than they are to computers and computer games. To put my point in the crudest and most basic terms, although they're both technically speaking interactive electronic entertainment, computer games were historically always programming exercises intended both to allow coders to flex their logic muscles and test the limits of computer hardware. Video games, by contrast, I feel have always been more of an attempt to design a kind of action-oriented sensory experience. As an illustration, contrast two of the most prototypical computer and video games: Zork and Asteroids: Both came out within a few years of each other, both were called “games” of some kind, but each is profoundly different from the other. One consists of nothing but plain text, is deeply narrative-driven and is meant to be puzzled over in long, marathon sessions, the other consists of vector graphics, has no story whatsoever and is meant to be played in short bursts.

Another difference is the setting these two titles were conceived of as being played in. Zork is surely for the home computer user, and in 1977 “home computer user” signifies a very specific sort of person. Asteroids, on the other hand, was meant to be played in bars and arcades: Extremely public places. Asteroids was also a coin-op cabinet. In other words, it's a game that can be played by literally anyone who has some loose change in their pocket. This is what brings us back to pinball, because it's pinball tables, not computer games like Zork, that are the true ancestor for video games as we know them today (or at least as *I* know them). Like Asteroids, pinball is a stand-up, coin-op cabinet game that has no story and relies on visual and auditory sensory feedback to cultivate an experience between the player and the game, and like Asteroids, pinball games used to be found in bars and arcades everywhere and could be played by anyone with a few quarters to spare. And both pinball tables and video games exist in the liminal space between digital electronics and analog mechanics inhabited only by a chosen few.

This ironically means that pinball tables, by their very nature, are almost a purer form of what I consider a video game than a lot of video games. The fundamental goal is a constructed sensory experience that evokes a resonance and response through images, sound and player agency alone, not a logic puzzle to be solved or an Aristotelean narrative with a bell-curve plot and character development. Done well, both pinball tables and the best video games can transport you into a Zen-like state of focus and clarity where it's just you, the game and the experience of the sensory confluence. That said, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the tacit capitalist undertones implicit in arcade gaming: Namely, being a coin-op cabinet sort of requires the machine to make money off of players, and the way many of them do this is by employing the same trick as gambling casinos: Manipulating addiction cycles to get people hooked so they'll keep pumping money into the slot until they get a new high score or advance past that tricky level that's been stumping them so they can finally “beat” the game.

(This is, incidentally, in all likelihood where the concept of video game difficulty comes from. Yet another reason to immediately disregard the opinion of anyone who says difficulty is the most important part of a video game.)

Which is why it's perhaps always been destined that the arcade would be saved by the video games they gave birth to. The earliest driving force behind the home video game industry was providing people with arcade games they could play at home: The Atari 2600 tried to sell itself on its home conversion of Pac-Man, and even though it was far from accurate it was enough to ensure the system's longevity. Later, it was Nintendo's painstaking translation of their own Donkey Kong that cemented the early success of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Although it's been a desire that's existed since the dawn of the industry, It wouldn't be until years later that consoles would be able to get truly accurate arcade reproductions. Nowadays however, you can get wonderfully lavish packages collecting all of the great arcade classics in immaculate condition, like the two-volume Atari's Greatest Hits for the Nintendo DS, Midway Arcade Origins for the XBOX 360 and the multiplatform The Pinball Arcade, and the best part is you only have to pay one flat rate these days. It's in that third compilation that you can find a perfect representation of the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball table designed by Steve Ritchie for Williams Electronics in 1993.

To my pleasant surprise, it seems that Star Trek: The Next Generation is considered by aficionados to be one of the greatest pinball tables ever made. I'm not actually a pinball expert myself, but if I were to hazard a guess, I would say it's probably due to the wide variety of different modes and target combinations that add up to a complex gameplay experience that's both frenetic and tactical. It has three different high score tables, which is a feature entirely unique to this table, and the production quality is amazing. The entire cast of the TV show provided voice clips for the game, and it's this pinball game that really brings to light the utterly endearing, tongue-in-cheek, puckish charm and sense of humour these people have better than just about anywhere else they've ever worked together. The table itself is adorned with beautiful pieces of retro futuristic 80 science fiction pop art that to me are of a kind with the Playmates toys. There's a video display with some great pixel art, including one of the best representation of the Starship Enterprise I've ever seen, and a fantastic downmix of the music from the TV show. It all comes together to capture what to me is and always has been the definitive, truest look-and-feel for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I wouldn't be able to describe the gameplay and do it justice here-I find pinball to be by necessity a deeply complex game that's difficult to adequately summarise in a manner that's not the tone of a dry technical manual (The Pinball Arcade version alone has something like a 637-page instruction manual, and that's just for this one table). But basically, like any pinball game, Star Trek: The Next Generation involves activating a series of different modes which have you targeting specific parts of the table to score points. Triggering events in a specific order is important, as are hitting the right targets at the right time. The good thing is, unlike some other pinball tables I've played, Star Trek: The Next Generation does a good job lighting up different parts of the playfield for you so this, alongside vocal cues from the cast, makes it very easy to intuit what the game wants you to do at any given moment without spending a month studying the intricacies of the table's mechanical design (not that people don't, of course: Pinball fans are notoriously hardcore about this stuff).

There's a variety of modes, called “Missions” here, with names like “Search the Galaxy”, “Wormhole”, “Neutral Zone Encounter”, “Rescue” and “Holodeck simulation”, and you have to complete all the missions to unlock the “Final Frontier” mission, which is the true endgame scenario (and of course, you get a higher payout if you score well on all of the different modes beforehand). One thing I really like about this table is how much thought has clearly gone into to making the actual gameplay fit the Star Trek: The Next Generation framing device: “Search the Galaxy”, for example, has you shooting the “Alpha Quadrant”. “Beta Quadrant” and “Delta Quadrant” ramps in order, than shooting a specific target to activate “Gamma Quadrant” mode. And, for an added bit of fun, the target you hit for “Gamma Quadrant” mode is right next to a picture of the Bajoran Wormhole, which also plays a part in the “Wormhole” mission! The first time I noticed that it brought a huge smile to my face: Not only is a piece of contemporary Star Trek: The Next Generation spinoff media finally acknowledging the existence of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it's also reaffirming my belief that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine truly belongs in the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

(I really appreciate, by the way, how there's a mode called “Search the Galaxy” here at all. There's also a secondary objective where you collect certain “Artifacts” by scoring exceptionally well on certain missions: It really makes you feel like an adventurer out exploring the wodners of outer space, which I've always though the Enterprise ought to be.)

Although the Pinball Arcade version of Star Trek: The Next Generation is probably one of my most-played video games, I've only actually seen the real thing in person twice. Once was...I'm not confidant it was contemporary, but it was certainly closer to Star Trek: The Next Generation than to now. I was at a restaurant with my cousin's family, and they happened to have this game near the entrance. I'd never seen it before, nor was I aware that a Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball table even existed. I was really excited, because I was fascinated by pinball tables and of course loved Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I had to give it a go. Now bear in mind, “fascinated by pinball and the arcade” does not mean “good at pinball”-I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, got completely overwhelmed by the scope of the thing and sank all my balls pretty much immediately. But it was the sensory experience of the whole thing, playing Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball in a dark, smoky bar with all the lights flashing and sounds swirling around, that was the most important thing to me.

The second time I got to play it was just last year as of this writing, at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. The Strong has an utterly peerless collection of arcade pinball and video game cabinets, and has a significant portion of its space dedicated to the history of the industry. Among their pinball tables they had a copy of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I naturally had to have a go at it. I was *significantly* better at it this time around due to me being older and having a ton of experience with the game on my own time. And I can report firsthand that The Pinball Arcade's digital recreation of this table is as perfect as they could possibly have made it: Playing the game on my computer and playing it in real life felt effectively identical, and I think I even prefer playing it with an XBOX One controller instead of with flipper buttons on the side of the cabinet! I didn't play my best that day (at home I've actually made it to the top of the third high score table), but I had to stop myself from spending all my money on arcade tokens.

Pinball tables, by the nature of what they are, can only operate on the level of aesthetics and imagery. It's a loose collection of sounds and images, and its up to your imagination to fill in the rest. When playing a pinball table based on a licensed property, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, the game can only capture the iconography and pop culture memory of the thing itself. And yet in doing so, I would argue pinball actually captures the work's true essence. I have a hard time putting into words what Star Trek: The Next Generation means to me and what I feel when I'm reminded of the sensory imprint it's left on me, but, like pornography, I know it when I see it. And this pinball game is it.



The Pinball Arcade is free-to-play on Steam here, and downloading Star Trek: The Next Generation is only $5. You can check the game itself in action here.

Flight Simulator: Star Trek: The Next Generation (Game Boy, NES)

If you were a casual Star Trek: The Next Generation fan in the 80s and early 90s looking for a video game based on your favourite TV show, your options were severely limited. Star Trek computer and video games were overwhelmingly dominated by the Original Series (much like the franchise in general), and if you wanted a game specifically based on The Next Generation, you pretty much had only two options: There was a trivia game released in 1990 that was just what it sounds like: A bunch of trivia questions based on the show's early seasons. The year before that there was the rather more intriguing Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Transinium Challenge, a sort of hybrid third-person adventure detective game that put you in the shoes of Commander Riker investigating a series of attacks on a friendly outpost.

This was all very well and good, but from my perspective back then there was just one problem: Both Star Trek: The Next Generation Trivia and The Transinium Challenge were DOS games, and PC games were things far, far above my family's pay grade and class level. I'm not sure we even *owned* a personal computer in 1989 come to think of it, and once we finally did get one it was a Macintosh, a platform that is famously well known for its excellent pedigree when it comes to PC gaming. My...history with PC gaming is something that continues to this day, and I could fill a book with all the indignities I've lived through involving Steam, system requirements, hard drives, graphics cards, hardware standards, trolling modders and planned obsolescence. Suffice to say, DOS may as well have been a strange and unfamiliar ancient runic language as far as I was and am concerned.

Regular readers of the blog will of course know I eventually did get to experience a computerized representation of the Star Trek universe through the wonderful Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, which satiated my need for a Star Trek video game for awhile at least. But as precious as that game has always been to me, it was destined from the beginning to be little more than a temporary solution, because that game was all about the Original Series, and I wasn't. I needed an actual video game based on the world I knew and loved, and, even had I known they existed back then (which I didn't), DOS games from four years ago simply weren't going to cut it. And it would also be really nice if this game would come out for a proper video game console instead of the computer, because that would vastly increase the odds of my getting to play it.

In my opinion, consoles are the natural home of video games. For one thing they have always been, and will always be, significantly cheaper than a high-end PC built for gaming. They're also designed for one thing and one thing only, playing video games, which means they do that one thing extremely well. The single biggest barrier to my truly getting into PC gaming, apart from the unacceptably ghastly financial investment, is mouse and keyboard controls. For anything other than text adventures, point-and-click games or first person shooters I find them hideously clunky, awkward and unintuitive (and I even find mouse and keyboard an imperfect solution for FPS games because my fingers always feel cramped and limited on the WASD keys-I'll take a control stick any day). On consoles, you don't have to worry about any of that, nor do you have to worry about building your machine to spec because the games are designed for the hardware instead of the other way around. It's also nice to not have to shell out a small fortune to replace worn out hard drives or engage in a data backup daisy chain process that frightens and intimidates me even today.

(Seriously! At the moment of writing, the hard drive on the very laptop I write this on needs to be replaced, and the necessary replacement drive *alone* costs the same as a whole new video game console!)

But there's also a biographical reason I have a zealous preference for console gaming, and that's because I grew up with it. My cousin was the one who introduced me to the world of video games, and although a PC gamer himself, the way he did so was through the home consoles of the era. As big a fan of the medium of video games as I was and still am, I started my own collection comparatively late for people my age. My parents, admirably wanting to foster in me a love of nature, the outdoors and genuine experiences were very apprehensive about video games for a very long time, fearing they would consume all of my time and interest at the expense of other things. It took a great many years of seeing me playing video games with my cousin or at the arcade machines in the bar and having a well-adjusted relationship with them for my parents to finally relent and get me a video game console of my own. This means that while I was intimately familiar with things like Pong consoles, Game & Watch, the Atari 2600, the NES and the SEGA Genesis, these were experiences I could only have at my cousin's house and were out of reach for my own personal everyday enjoyment.

*My* video game console, that is the one I personally owned, was the Game Boy. Although I started getting home consoles in later years to play catch up (my collection of physical games media is actually far less extensive than you perhaps might think it is given the way I talk about video games), the Game Boy was the first real console I got to own and therefore the one that's always been the most precious to me. That was the one that my dad got me for Christmas one year and that was the one that became my first real gateway into what's become possibly my favourite form of creative expression. In many ways it had to be, because it was peering over my cousin's shoulder as he played his own Game Boy huddled under the lamp on my mom's end table (the Game Boy wasn't backlit until friggin' 2005!) that comprised some of my most powerfully formative emotions surrounding video games. The Game Boy was also portable, which meant I could take it anywhere, and I was and still am a very active (some would say restlessly unsettled) person. And I've no doubt the fact the Game Boy was considerably cheaper than the home consoles of the day was some manner of help in swaying my parents.

(I've been staunchly loyal to and a fierce advocate for handheld gaming ever since, and this is currently manifesting in my torrid, potentially doomed love affair with the New Nintendo 3DS. As I write this I'm also struck by the similarity between the words “portable” and “portal”: Because that's what the Game Boy and its lineage have always been-Portals to the Otherworld that can fit in your pocket and travel with you anywhere. But that's another intellectual exercise.)

You'll hopefully forgive the lengthy digression away from Star Trek this post has become, but the point is all of this builds to what for me was yet another in a long line of life changing events surrounding Star Trek: The release of Star Trek: The Next Generation for the Game Boy in 1993. I find it entirely fitting that the first real Star Trek: The Next Generation video game of note (well, for me at any rate) came out on the Game Boy first. Regardless of how good they might have been, Star Trek: The Next Generation Trivia and Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Transinium Challenge were always going to be limited to fairly niche audiences. Namely, people affluent and nerdy enough to at once be into Star Trek, afford a DOS PC in 1989 and know how to run the damn thing. And in spite of how ahistorical the narrative actually is, there was still a little of the lingering stigma (at least in the United States) of home consoles being primarily children's toys.

But the Game Boy? It was perfectly acceptable and expected to see it in the hands of everyone except the most conservative sets: Kids, teenagers, young adults of all stripes, moms and other working women, athletes and shut-ins alike. The Game Boy was for everyone. Tetris and Super Mario Land were the Clash of Clans and Candy Crush of their day, except they weren't immoral and barely legal exploitative Skinner box exercises in engendering social control through manipulating addiction cycles. And so of course Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that never was a cult series in spite of the revisionist history surrounding it, that was well-known and well-loved all around the world and at the absolute peak of its popularity in 1993, would make its real video game debut on the Game Boy.

I still remember walking into an Electronics Boutique at my local mall and seeing this game on the shelves. My face must have lit up like the morning sun. To think, for the very first time I could finally carry a part of my show and my universe with me on my video game console! It was one of the best video game experiences I've ever had. And this was something of a historical milestone in games media not just for me, but for others as well. As of this writing, not even Wikipedia has an entry on The Transinium Challenge: You have to go to hardcore niche (gaming or Star Trek) sites to find info on that. But they do have a page on this humble Game Boy game, and when many people of my age and perspective think about the “first” Star Trek: The Next Generation game, this is the one that tends to come to our mind. Sheltered as I was growing up I never knew this back then, but last year (as of this writing) during the Game Boy's 25th Anniversary festivities, I was pleasantly, but hugely, surprised to see this game cited as an old favourite and reliable constant for my fellow Game Boy aficionados.

But this does make sense-Apart from the stature Star Trek: The Next Generation had as a pop culture phenomenon then, 1993 was also significant year for the Game Boy. This was early enough in the fourth generation (home console generation that is-Handhelds traditionally operated under a separate hardware cycle unto their own) where the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was getting all the buzz, but older systems like the SEGA Genesis and original NES were still very much in the pop consciousness, though their lustre was on the wane. The NES in particular was effectively at the end of its life, but it still had a massive install base and level of awareness, usually among poorer people or the younger relatives of those who had moved on to the SNES and had the older machines entrusted to them. This meant that while there were still games being made for it, supporting the NES was very much an afterthought for publishers and developers. This led to the curious phenomenon of certain games being developed for the much more ubiquitous and evergreen Game Boy first, and then ported to the NES later, a complete inversion of the traditional relationship between home consoles and handhelds.

What normally happens is that the handheld, being based on a stripped-down version of the hardware architecture from the previous generation, would get similarly pared down ports of older home console games. The Game Boy was designed as a kind of portable NES, but released after the TurboGrafix-16 and SEGA Genesis unofficially launched the fourth generation, and while Nintendo was well into development of the SNES. This meant that in its early years, the Game Boy had a reputation among gamers for getting inferior versions of NES games due to their roughly comparable builds. Although this was largely an unjust negative stigma leveled against the Game Boy and handheld gaming in general from the hardcore gamerz contingent (an early precursor of the mentality that would turn “casual gamer” into a slur in the 2000s), any remote justification for this reputation was completely gone by 1993, when games that launched on both systems would become wild successes on the Game Boy and utterly fizzle out on the NES. 

DuckTales 2, for example, was the sequel to a game that's considered an acclaimed classic of the NES library. Although critics consider the sequel even better than the original, its 1993 release meant that it barely saw any traffic at all on that platform. The Game Boy version, by contrast, sold over a million copies. This is what explains Star Trek: The Next Generation's reception on Game Boy: There was, in fact an NES version of this game that was also released, but, in keeping with the times, it's actually a port of the handheld version instead of the other way around. And while the home console release is mostly seen as a historical footnote from the final days of the NES, the Game Boy game is considered something of a minor classic by fans. Which is as it should be: I have both versions and, to be honest, the NES port is in most respects a deeply inferior one.

I guess this means this is the part of the game review where I actually talk about the game!

The most memorable part of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary to me was always the space combat sections. So naturally, the first thing that immediately grabbed me about Star Trek: The Next Generation is that it's pretty much *nothing* but that, over and over again forever! Well, that's an exaggeration. In truth, the game has a robust variety of different mission types, it's just the combat ones seem to be the ones that come up the most. This might have something to do with the fact that the missions pretty much all boil down to either warping somewhere to get in a space dogfight with some alien starships, or warping somewhere to beam someone or something from one place to another place, sometimes both at the same time. But the game gets a surprising amount of mileage out of this structure: Each mission opens with a briefing letting you know where you're supposed to go and what you're supposed to do, and it's all based around a randomized execution of this formula, so the game changes each time to turn it on.

So, you might be warping somewhere to stop an “invasion fleet” (by blasting the fuck out of it), or you might be stopping pirates from interfering trade routes (by blasting the fuck out of them) or rescuing a freighter being attacked by hostile aliens (by blasting the fuck out of them). Alternatively, you could be escorting an ambassador from one planet to another, evacuating scientists on a research station about to explode, or evacuating the colonists on a planet ravaged by a plague. Either way, the difficulty increases with each mission you complete as you “advance in rank”. One particularly memorable potential mission involves you crossing the Neutral Zone to rescue a Federation espionage agent who's cover has been blown, just like in “Face of the Enemy”. Except this time, you first have to deal with an aggressive Romulan Warbird pursuing you both by blasting the fuck out of it.

As frankly horrific as this all sounds for a Star Trek: The Next Generation game (I mean at *no point* is there *ever* the option for a peaceful resolution to a conflict; negotiation and diplomacy are *literally* not programmed into the game), I'll be honest with you: In 1993, on the Game Boy, this was perfectly acceptable. Space combat is always fun and the novelty of finally having an accessible Star Trek: The Next Generation video game was more than enough to carry the experience. It still holds up well: It was and is a great way to get a short burst of Star Trek: The Next Generation on the go in a simple, self-explanatory way, and the random nature of the mission system means there's far more depth and replayability to the experience than you might think there would be at first glance. In fact, to this day it's still one of the handheld games I like to keep within reach and in regular rotation at all times. Furthermore, the game's random nature also becomes an allegory for what I feel is one of the most important distinguishing truths about video games as a medium: No two playthroughs will ever be truly the same.

(This is, however, far less acceptable for a home console game, and I'd be willing to bet that's a big part of the reason for the comparative failure of the NES version. If I'd spent $50 for this as an NES game back in the day instead of $25-$30 for it as a Game Boy one, I'd probably have been pretty upset. I'll get back to that a little later on.)

What's less defensible, I'm afraid, is the framing device. You see, the premise of this game is that you're not *actually* playing the Enterprise crew. Oh no, you're playing a Starfleet Academy Cadet undergoing command training in a *holodeck recreation* of the Enterprise. So in other words, you're basically playing Wesley Crusher. Captain Picard only appears at the beginning of each mission on the main viewscreen to give you a briefing, then it's up to you to manage your holographic crew. And not even, like, the whole crew: You're limited exclusively to Worf (who handles defense and weapons systems), Data (who actually fills Ro Laren's role as helsman instead of his own, and no, Laren is not anywhere in the game, why would you ever think that?) Geordi (who manages repairs like Scotty from Star Trek: 25th Anniversary), Miles O'Brien (transporter, natch, though his presence is also another example of the weird trend in 1993 spinoff media of erasing Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and Commander Riker (who does nothing except remind you what your mission objectives are and let you know when you're running out of time. Oh yeah, there's a time limit).

Your interactions with your crew are limited, likely again due to this being the Game Boy. There's only one real main gameplay screen, which is a shot of the main viewer with a set of Starfleet insignia at the bottom, each of which corresponds to a member of the crew. You can select them with the A button to bring up a sub-menu where you can manage their actions, and the insignia will flash if they have something to report. The positive flipside to this system is that it's *really* easy and fun to pretend you're doing something else while you're playing it. There are a goodly amount of ship's systems recreated, and you have to manage all of them manually, each with its own little minigame: That is, you have to go into Worf's screen to raise the shields and arm the photon torpedoes before battle, Data's to plot a course, set warp speed and engage, Geordi's to prioritize system repairs if you take damage, and Chief O'Brien's to work the transporter (there is literally never any reason to go see Commander Riker unless you're exhausted from working all night and have completely forgotten what you're supposed to do, as I was the night I was replaying the game for review).

So because of that, and because you're doing all of this yourself, it's really easy to imagine yourself *as* Worf or Data or Geordi or Miles or someone else cool instead of the nameless, faceless Academy cadet you're actually meant to be playing as. That's part of the magic of these old video games-Because of the technical limitations of the time, the majority of the context, background, story and exposition had to come in the form of supplementary material like the manual instead of in the game itself. And you would likely have only read the manual through once to get a beat on the game and then kept it on a shelf for future reference if you forgot something (if you were good) or thrown it out with the box and jammed the cartridge into the slot like an addict going through withdrawal (if you were bad). So using your imagination, in tandem with the sensations of the gameplay itself, was a far larger and more important part of the experience, and of creating your own personal meaning from that experience, than it oftentimes is today. Executed properly, a video game should heighten one's imagination and creativity, not suppress or dampen it.

The minigames themselves were always a mixed bag. Poor Will is, as I said, largely superfluous, and Worf's section is pretty much limited to two sets of “toggle on/toggle off” switches. Data gets the job done: I like how there's a nice variety of different planets missions can take place on, and how they're all named after planets from the TV show (and no, the missions and their respective planets have absolutely nothing to do with any actual episodes: Due to the random nature of the game, it's entirely possible to have Talarians invading Kataan or a scientific research station on Risa. Though I did get a big smile one time when I had to go to a “Starbase” in orbit of planet “Bajor”. Too bad I had to evacuate it) and it's cool how you can choose how fast you want to warp to your destination on a scale from 1 to 9. Although it definitely adds to the immersion, the problem is that the decision you make about your warp speed is *completely meaningless*: You're on a time limit, so naturally you want to get there and back as fast as possible, so you're always going to want to go at Warp 9 to give yourself the most time. And the thing about it is there's no consequence for going everywhere at that speed (I know this was before “Force of Nature”, but I can't help but think about that. At the very least you'd think there'd be some warning about the ship not being able to travel at maximum warp for prolonged periods of time due to antimatter containment or whatever) so, from a purely mechanical perspective, you may as well not even have the choice.

Data can also take the Enterprise into a standard orbit around a planet, which you'll need to do in certain kinds of missions, like if you have to escort an ambassador, evacuate a colony or hunt for stolen cargo hidden somewhere on the surface (which is a pretty cool brief to get: It's a Star Trek: The Next Generation treasure hunt!). This minigame is one of my favourites because it makes you feel like you're actually piloting a starship: Normally you just use the control pad to move in four directions, with Data also being able to put the Enterprise into half impulse, full impulse or bring it to a full stop. But here, you have to fly through a series of expanding quadrangles as close to the centre as you can get to achieve a stable orbit: The graphical overlays are really cool, instantly reminiscent of early 80s vector graphics, which I find to be charming and appropriate. It's also neat how the stability of your orbit is determined by how close you are to the planet, and you can throw the whole thing off if you approach it too fast or at too odd an angle-It's one of the most complex and immersive parts of the game for me.

Chief O'Brien's section of the game is similarly enjoyable. You naturally play as him primarily whenever you get a mission that heavily features the transporter and it's a lot of fun: You get a moderately sized and delightfully 80s grid screen to monitor, and your job is to move a cursor along that grid to locate whatever it is that needs to be transported. There's a “lock” gauge that tells you how close to your target you are, and a “power” gauge that, once you've found it, tells you how close you are to beaming it up. It really makes you feel how you might imagine it would feel to actually be someone on a starship working with this kind of retro futuristic computer equipment. The only kind of annoying thing about Miles' sections is whenever you have to evacuate people, because there's always like ten guys to find and they're all inevitably running all over the place like assholes. This is a problem, because you have to keep the cursor *on* the guys for a few seconds in order to get a solid transporter lock. You'd think that if they're dying from the plague or trying to escape their freighter before the warp core explodes or whatever they'd stand still to make things easy for the transporter chief who is actively trying to save their fucking lives as quickly as possible. This is why I much prefer it when I have an ambassador to escort or hidden treasure to find instead.

Geordi's minigames are sadly probably the most annoying for me: For one, you'll only need him during really serious and heavy late-game combat which is the part of the game I find the most annoying anyway, and having to keep jumping back and forth between prioritizing repairs and trying to actually shoot shit drives me up the wall. In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, the repair screen was a sub-menu that you could toggle on and off, quickly click to make your choice, and then get right back to the action. But here, you have to toggle off combat (leaving you a sitting duck, which is great when you've got three asshole Romulan Warbirds buzzing around you like the world's worst insect swarm), navigate to Geordi and then call up two different screens: One to select him, and the other to effect the repairs. Then, you've got to do all that all over again but this time in reverse, by which point the Romulans have likely crippled a bunch of your other systems, so you have to go all the way back to engineering, which you just spent all that time trying to get out of!

Sometimes you'll also have to reroute power to disabled systems, which is a whole other minigame. Anyone who knows anything about video games knows how well minigames involving hacking or rerouting power tend to go, and that's badly. Star Trek: The Next Generation is no exception, as it has you tediously following a minuscule spark through a tangled mess of electrical junctions, constantly flipping switches all the way to ensure it goes to the right system. This one takes up two screens, so of course you can't keep track of where the spark is and where it's supposed to go at the same time. Again, a fun thing to do in the heat of battle with some pissed off Romulans. This probably wouldn't have been so bad if at least some part of the process was automated: Like, if you could tell Worf to maintain a consistent firing pattern and have Data keep the ship in a specific attack formation so the Enterprise at least wouldn't be stupidly lying around slack-jawed and defenseless while you're off dicking around in engineering. Fortunately you *can* elect to have Geordi prioritize repairs as he sees fit, which is typically what I do. Unfortunately you can't do that if you have to reroute power.

(For extra fun, try doing this in the game's final confrontation. With the Borg.)

The space combat itself is pretty functional and satisfying, which is good because that's what you'll be spending most of your time doing. Navigating space using the control pad is simple and intuitive, and so is having the phasers mapped to the A button and photon torpedoes mapped to the B button. It literally couldn't be simpler, and while that's a good thing, it also can make you feel a bit let down if you're used to the frenetic combat of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. The biggest letdown is the lack of a radar screen which added one more tactical level to the combat and helped increase the tension of the situation as you tried to outmanoeuvre and flank your opponent. Also, the Enterprise can sometimes feel a bit sluggish at times, especially on the NES version, where she lumbers around *painfully* slowly. It gives me a decent idea of what it would be like to do a frontside Gazelle Spin with an ocean liner. The Game Boy version by contrast feels far tighter and snappier.

There are a handful of different ships you'll be sparring with, and what's neat is that they all have different unique behaviours. Talarians basically just stand around waiting to get killed, while Ferengi Marauders keep trying to run away from your rain of hellfire, only occasionally turning to take a shot at you. The problem is, due to the limitations of the Game Boy, they usually accomplish this by jankily clipping across the screen at *just* the right speed to make it next to impossible to catch up with them. Fortunately however they seem to have a programmatic desire to simply move around you in circles, so, instead of chasing them, it's actually more advantageous to stay put and wait for the bad guys to come around again. Eventually, laws of attrition and abandonment of the will to live from sheer boredom will dictate the Enterprise will win the encounter, but be sure to clear some time. The Romulans have basically the same strategy as the Ferengi, but they're a lot faster, can clip up and down instead of just side to side and enjoy plastering you with photon torpedoes at every opportunity. I don't like fighting Romulans.

The sound effects and music both in and out of battle are crisp (especially if you're taking advantage of the Game Boy's “Dot Matrix with Stereo Sound” by wearing headphones), and nicely evocative of the game's world. There's an ambient sensor sound that plays on the main screen, and if warp drive and phaser blasts can sound a little underwhelming, the photon torpedo blast is quite satisfying to hear. The 8-bit downmix of the theme song is excellent, and the game has some small musical cues of its own that pop in during certain events. It's an effective use of the Game Boy's chiptune sound card, which until recently never got anywhere near the recognition and praise I feel it truly deserved. In my opinion, and in the hands of talented composers, Game Boy chiptunes can sound leagues more enjoyable than the music from NES and even Super Nintendo games. A fact which is duly supported by the NES version of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which *technically* is supposed to have richer and more complex audio capabilities, but which actually ends up sounding oddly flat to me. The theme song is cut off in this version for some reason, and, most unforgivably, the phaser effects sound like they come from the Original Series!

Visually there are tradeoffs in the porting job as well. While the sprite art in the Game Boy game is crisp and decently detailed for what it needs to do (though the portraits of the characters and the splash screen of the Enterprise at the title are the best-Some of the in-game sprites look weirdly deformed), many of the NES sprites look fuzzy, washed out and cruder by comparison. I don't *think* developer Absolute Entertainment just upscaled them to fit the NES' higher resolution, but for some reason some of them don't quite look as good to me. Some of the visuals on the NES are better though, namely the transporter beam custscene, Captain Picard's opening briefing and the LCARS overlays during the minigames, all of which look more colourful and detailed than on the monochrome Game Boy. *However*, if you're playing the Game Boy version on a Game Boy Colour or Game Boy Advance, the newer systems do offer a form of post facto colorization that adds a bit more vibrancy and contrast to the world, as they do for all the original Game Boy games.

Apart from that, and the fact the passwords are different, the two games are effectively identical. But if you're only going to play one, I do have to recommend the Game Boy version over the NES one, because the Game Boy was the system this game was truly designed for, and it's always best to play games on the hardware they were first intended to be played on. And I do recommend this game, very highly in fact. There's annoying and questionable things about it to be sure, but you have to remember that back then we were a lot more accepting of our video games, quirks and all. It's not like today where it seems any minor nitpick is enough to completely ruin an entire experience for a whole swath of people. That's not to say there aren't some instances where the severity of a game's flaws are enough to warrant writing it off, but back then we understood that video games were ambitious, frequently compromised and inelegant affairs and didn't always demand perfection from them. Developers were doing the best they could with comparatively crude technology, and we didn't take it as a personal slight when the end result wasn't *quite* an unqualified success. And at least for me, the pros of this one far outweigh the cons.

I sincerely hope that I've been able, in some way, to bring you back to a simpler time when the sheer joy of being able to bring your favourite show and characters with you anywhere was enough, and all you had to do to leap into their world was to reach into your pocket, pull out your Game Boy and flip the power switch.

Flight Simulator: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (Mac, PC)

Quite simply, a watershed moment for me. 

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is the reason the video game section of this project exists. It is, as far as I'm concerned, *the* Star Trek video game because it was *my* Star Trek video game, or at least my first. In true 25th Anniversary fashion, it missed the actual date itself by a good year and a half, possibly even longer depending on which platform you played it on. But with time unbound such things are as trivialities and we can make moments last as long as they need to. 

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary was released between 1992 and 1993 on a number of platforms: It came out on DOS first, and was eventually ported to the Amiga and Macintosh. Much, much later it was re-released a few times on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but I played the original release. There was a different game also called Star Trek: 25th Anniversary made for the NES and Game Boy in 1991 but (and this is an extreme rarity in my history with video games), it's the version that came out on home computers that I remember, not the console one. In particular, it's the Macintosh release: My first computer was one of the original Macintosh Classics...I can't remember the actual model, but it must have been able to support some form of colour graphics considering it could run this game. I loved that machine dearly and a huge portion of my formative gaming memories were kindled on it: This game, the planetarium programme Voyager II, Cyan Worlds' beguiling Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo (which anticipates their much more famous Myst), the Carmen Sandiego games...They were all there among the first slate of video games I actually got to own for myself.

Some years later, I'm going to guess around 1995, I came home one night to find my computer had been replaced by one of the first generation of the new Power Macs, the ones where they started using those PowerPC chip architectures. That machine was as big and bulky and 90s as my old one had been sleek and compact and 80s and I wasn't entirely sure what to make of that...I appreciated having a more powerful computer to play around with, but I still deeply missed that plucky little machine I had loved so much. This new one seemed to tower over me while my old one had felt just the right size. Although I'll certainly give the Power Mac points for longevity-I still have it, and dug it out in anticipation for this essay. After locating some irritatingly misplaced power cords, I fired it up and was playing Star Trek: 25th Anniversary within minutes. Everything still works as well as they day I first got it.

Apart from my personal sentimentality, my having the Macintosh version of this game is actually relevant in two important respects: One, because I actually still have the original game running on more or less original hardware, this sadly means I couldn't get any screenshots of my personal copy to share with you. There's probably a way to get media like that from old computer hardware, but I don't know how to do it without emulators and regardless I certainly wouldn't have had the time or resources to set it up. Thankfully, it seems this game is surprisingly popular and well-known enough there's a bunch of screenshots and gameplay videos of it floating around the Internet you could find if you were interested. Secondly, and I just found this out comparatively recently, it seems later versions included the actual voices of the Original Series cast members reprising their roles, meaning this game and its sequel are technically their final ensemble performance. Either this was specific to the PC version or a feature of one of the later CD-ROM re-releases (I have the version that came on 3.5” floppy disks), but either way that was something that was never part of my experiences with the game.

Speaking of the Original Series, It's here where you could say my Star Trek “fandom” as it were truly began to crystallize: This game was very possibly the first bit of Star Trek ephemera I got that wasn't directly linked to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and as a result this was my first introduction to the Original Series crew and the work that defined my early impressions of who they were and what I thought they were like. Perhaps appropriately then, the spectre of the recent Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country looms very large over this game, and it is in fact far more of a piece with that tone and feel of film then it is with the actual Original Series.


The bridge is what stands out to me the most: While the crew still wear their technicolor prep school-esque uniforms from the show, the bridge seems to be quite clearly based on the one from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which means it's darkly lit and set really low, surrounded by walls with constantly blinking and flashing monitors. There are still a few design notes that nod to the Original Series, like Kirk's captain's chair and that red handrail that goes around the perimeter of the room, though I wouldn't have known that back then. I really like this look for Kirk's Enterprise: It gives the ship a pared-down, utilitarian feel while still keeping a sense of 1980s technofuturism to the aesthetic. Actually, I think I prefer the way the Enterprise looks here then to any other depiction of this story-For the longest time I always pictured it looking the way it does in this game rather then in any of the Original Series or Original Series-inspired TV episodes or movies. I was really disappointed to see the real sets when I finally got to see the show in the late 90s and early 2000s on the Sci-Fi channel because by that point they looked so fake and uninspiring to me. The material realities of television production simply could not live up to my own imagination.

As you may have gathered, the fact that I played this game before I'd ever seen any of the Original Series episodes or movies is kind of significant (well...I may have watched “The Trouble with Tribbles” before playing this come to think of it, as I seem to recall renting it and “By Any Other Name” from the local video store along with possibly some season 1 Star Trek: The Next Generation stuff 'round about the time the latter show was first coming to VHS. That would have been 1991, and this game came out the year later, but I can't recall for certain). It's this version of the Original Series (even down to the 16-bit remix of the theme song) that I remember most fondly. And yet even so...While at once I was interested to get a first-hand look at what this “Other” Star Trek thing my relatives kept talking about was, at the same time the fact that this wasn't Star Trek: The Next Generation, wasn't the thing I *really* watched and liked, was a niggling bit of reality that would always gnaw at me in subtle ways.

Even back then while I fully understood and recognised that this was the thing turning 25, that this was its birthday and that's what we ought to be celebrating, I just couldn't help myself from thinking it would have been nice had something called Star Trek: 25th Anniversary acknowledged *all* of Star Trek. Especially as until very recently “Star Trek” and Star Trek: The Next Generation had been synonymous in my mind. During lulls between missions I would furtively start hunting around for little Easter eggs developer Interplay might have slipped into the game. On the bridge you could click on various crewmembers to activate different ship's functions, and Spock had access to the ship's computer. You could type something into a little search bar that popped up (say, “Klingons”), and the game would give you a mini in-universe encyclopedia entry on whatever you searched for. Sometimes I'd type in things like “Captain Picard” or “USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D” knowing full well I'd get no results just on the off-chance something might come up.

The game itself is a fun hybrid between point-and-click adventure game and sci-fi space flight and combat simulator. It's divided into various “episodes”, with each one being a mission using one or both styles. Perhaps the one and only concession to fanwank and revisionist fan history in all of the 25th Anniversary is the conceit that this game and its sequel comprise those infamous last two years of the five-year mission. Even to this day Original Series fans stubbornly insist on ignoring the fact D.C. Fontana has already told this story, though you can enjoy the games themselves perfectly well while disregarding that little bit of pandering. Hell, I'll go one further and retcon the entire Original Series: As far as I'm concerned this game, it's sequel, the Animated Series and select aspects of the film series are the only “canon” accounts of the story of Captain Kirk and his crew.

OK, I'll allow “The Trouble with Tribbles” too, because I'm generous.

The mission (or “episode”, if you will) I remember most vividly is the first one, “Demon World”, because I could never get past it back in the day and since I kept replaying it over and over again it's permanently burned onto my mind. It starts out with the Enterprise participating in a war games simulation with the USS Republic, which is a damn sight harder than I remembered and than it has any right to be. This serves as the introduction to the space combat part of the game, and you have to raise shields, activate weapons and chase the Republic around a sector of space using a radar screen between the helm and navigation consoles. When you get hit, and you will, you'll have to open up the damage repair menu (the D key in my game, though it took me awhile to remember the controls: It was like straining my mind forcing it to remember some arcane bit of magickal knowledge) and tell Scotty which part of the ship you want him to focus on repairing. Of course, by the time you do that you'll have likely taken several more hits from the Republic and gone down in flames before you can even react.

But when that thing appears on screen and you unload a volley of phaser and photon torpedo fire right into its face and are rewarded by seeing that telltale red and orange explosion effect, it's incredibly satisfying. Probably way more than it should be.

This was one of the games I used to play with my cousin a lot whenever he would come over to visit, and the only one that was mine. He was my introduction to a lot of things in the outside world, especially when it came to pop culture, so I always looked forward to those visits and treasured them very deeply. And just for the record, he was five years older and way more experienced with video games, and even *he* got his ass kicked with alarming regularity by the Republic. Even so, it was always a ton of fun to just keep replaying that section over and over regardless: If I'm honest, this was probably our favourite part of the whole game. But could you blame us? The music was exciting, the graphics were busy and evocative and it was tense playing cat-and-mouse like that.

In fact, the space combat stuff was so much fun we'd oftentimes throw the whole mission and just go looking for trouble. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary employed a form of copy protection where, after you got your mission briefing from Starfleet Command to travel to a specific planet, you'd have to consult a star chart only included in the instruction manual to find out where on the map that planet was located as the in-game stellar cartography map had no names or other identifying information. We never saw it as copy protection back then; to us it was just one more thing you had to do that added to the immersion of the game (once we figured out what we were supposed to do, that is, as the game gave no indication whatsoever you were meant to consult the instruction manual).

Anyway, the idea was that if you picked the wrong star system, you'd go “off-course” and trespass into Klingon, Romulan or Elasi Pirate territory and get blown to oblivion by an enormous fleet of starships. So, we'd *deliberately do that*: Pick a star system at random, go to warp and see how long we could survive the inevitable onslaught. At first, I hasten to add, it came out of a perfectly innocent desire to explore-Travel to uncharted star systems, Explore Strange New Worlds and all that, you know? But after about the third or fourth “Captain Kirk! You have trespassed into Klingon/Romulan/Elasi territory! Prepare to get royally fucked up!” It became kind of like a self-imposed endurance mode: I don't think you could ever win encounters like that (and if you could we managed it so infrequently I can't remember ever having done it), but it was fun to see how long you could last. Of the Romulan Birds-of-Prey, my cousin once memorably remarked something to the effect of “There's like a gazillion of them. We're going down.”

The Elasi Pirates were always my favourite to run into. They were an original culture designed for this game-A fallen planetary civilization made up of a kind of Mad Max-esque warring group of pirates and raiders sailing around in cobbled-together starships that resembled heavily modified Klingon Battle Cruisers. Though again, I couldn't have known that back then-I remember always wondering why I'd never seen them referenced or mentioned anywhere else in Star Trek as they were always such a memorable and iconic part of this game for me. I seem to remember them being the hardest to run into: For whatever reason they always seemed to be rarer encounters than the Klingons or the Romulans, even though to me they were the third Major Rival Faction of the Original Series. Speaking of the Klingons and Romulans, this was also naturally the first time (or one of the first times depending on how badly I've screwed up my personal history and am misremembering it) I'd gotten to see what they looked like prior to their redesigns from Star Trek: The Next Generation: I liked them, especially the starship designs, but granted they were different and still held a personal preference for the ones I had known before.

Once you managed to figure out how the navigation worked (or were finally able to tear yourself away from suicidally hurling yourself at a wall of enemy starships at warp speed) the point-and-click adventure side of the game became more evident. In each episode, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and a redshirt beam down to a planet or over to a starship to help solve a particular problem. I think the idea is you're supposed to be controlling Kirk and issuing orders, but I always got the sense you were playing the landing party more broadly. Each character has an inventory with specific set of items you'll need to use in specific situations, and you can position where everyone is standing at any given time and tell them to interact with different objects throughout the world.

The idea of having a literally nameless redshirt is a tipoff to a tied old Star Trek joke, and yes, they can die in a myriad of horrible ways. I can proudly say, however, I have never lost a single person during a serious playthrough of this game: If there was ever a time one of my security officers got killed or hurt, that was it-The game was over and I would just reset. I never found it “funny” that a redshirt might die because I had no prior experience with the Original Series such that I would recognise that as a joke. To me it was a mistake, a tragic one, and I would obviously have to not do what I did the next time because I couldn't stand to see anyone die, even a nameless security officer.

And anyway, I was fine with resetting because it meant I got to fight the Republic again.

In “Demon World”, the landing party has to investigate reports of Demon sightings on Pollux V. Upon beaming down, the landing party learns Pollux V is governed by a monastic order and that they're currently fearing an invasion of apparent “Demons” into their “Heaven”. The landing party discovers an injured monk by the name of Brother Chub, who was attacked by the Demons and has developed an infection that can only be cured by distilling a hypo-dytoxin out of some local berries. They're directed to a series of mines north of the central establishment where the berries grow, but the monks are afraid to visit because that's also where they say the Demons reside. So the first thing you have to do is go to the mines on the top of a mountain, get the berries and bring them back so McCoy can make the dytoxin.

This is actually way more difficult than it sounds, because this is a point-and-click adventure game, and I can't tell you how many frustrated hours I spent when I was younger trying to figure out how to advance this damn quest. Finding the berries is the easy part: You just walk up the mountain a bit, fight some Klingons and pick up a severed hand. The trouble comes when you go back down, because actually making the dytoxin isn't as simple as you think it is. If I recall correctly, you have to have McCoy make it even though Brother Stephen, the guy who sent you, is standing right next to the machine and specifically asks for the berries. So naturally (well, at least for me), you'd want to give him the berries, which, if I'm remembering correctly, he either proceeds to do jack shit with or you can't even give him them in to begin with. So you then proceed to walk around like a dumbass for hours until you give up, reset the game and fight the Republic again.

As is typical for this kind of game, the challenge isn't in solving the puzzle yourself so much as it is in figuring out how the developer *wants* you to solve the puzzle and implementing the solution *they* had designed it around instead of coming up with a solution yourself. Obviously the nature of video games necessitating a pre-programmed set of specific actions limits the possibilities for freeform experimentation here, but I find it especially clumsy, awkward, counter-intuitive and immersion breaking in this genre. In my view, the truly excellent examples of game design work in tandem with the player's own psychology: The trick is designing a puzzle in such an elegant and intuitive way that the most natural and instinctive solution a player will come to is also the one you've programmed to be the correct one. In essence, you're subtly manipulating the player into doing what you want them to do while making them feel like they're figuring things out on their own. Which, in a sense, they are: It's just sort of a performative demonstration of how the process works. Hence, I suppose, the term video game. For me, that goes a long way towards helping me feel like I'm a part of the world the game creates and its artistry instead of just constantly being aware of the reality that I'm frittering away my time with a prettified computer generated logic switch.

(The other annoying thing about this part of the game is that it's a really sensitive and temperamental process to actually select the juice synthesizer itself: You have to click on the *exact right* pixel of a spot, or else it won't work, you assume you've made a mistake somewhere and waste *even more* time.)

If you finally manage to figure all that out, you can poke around the citadel or whatever a bit and learn it's likely Pollux V had other inhabitants. If you go back up the mountain to find a cave with a door out front, you can blast away the rock barrier in front of it and use the severed hand to open the door. Inside, you'll meet a group of peaceful little green men called Nauains, who are the planet's original inhabitants. In prehistoric times they learned of an inevitable series of meteoroid strikes and built an underground sanctuary to preserve their knowledge and people. The “Demons” the people were seeing were part of an automated defense system the Nauians use to keep intruders away, but once they learn of the landing party's peaceful intentions, they agree to share their technology with the other inhabitants of the planet and apply for Federation citizenship.

There are other episodes and missions to check out, including one that explores the culture of the Elasi Pirates, but “Demon World” will always be the part of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary that I'll instantly think of whenever someone mentions the game. And perhaps it's fitting that, as of this writing, it's now available through GOG.com when we're almost as far from it as it was from the original Star Trek. I'm grateful that video games allow me to relive so many of the most precious moments of my life: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary takes me back to when my love for Star Trek was at its most unfettered and profound, and I can re-experience that any time I turn it on. Perhaps you have similar memories of this game or this time of your own, but even if you don't, I would humbly hope that playing this game even today can bring you a fraction of the joy it's brought me for so many years.


Check out Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and its sequels Star Trek: Judgment Rites and Star Trek Starfleet Academy at GOG.com! They are also on Steam.

Flight Simulator: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (NES)

I must be some kind of glutton for punishment.

By 1989 there were a diverse selection of Star Trek games available for various consoles and home computers, including the first title based on Star Trek: The Next Generation; an MS-DOS adventure game called The Transinium Challenge where you play Commander Riker in charge of a team investigating terrorist attacks in the Aquila system. It was one of the first games to showcase the format that would go on to characterize many of the Star Trek games I remember, such as plotting a course in stellar cartography and leading an away team comprised of party members of your choosing, each of whom has their own unique skillsets. The Transinium Challenge was also interesting because of its emphasis on diplomacy and puzzle-solving instead of space tactics, and its original extraterrestrial culture, which draws heavy influence from Celtic mythology and folklore.

But no, I had to pick a game for the NES based on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

To be fair, it's not strictly a red flag when you get a game based on a mediocre, unsuccessful movie. Sometimes passionate and tenacious video games based on licenses can rise above and beyond their source material to become well-loved and effective in their own right in spite of their roots: Gremlins 2: The New Batch for the NES and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay for the XBOX are both considered classics, while the movies they were based on...aren't. Simply being Star Trek V: The Final Frontier does not doom this game from the outset. If anything, Star Trek V should work *better* as a video game freed from the constraints of the linear narrative structure of the Hollywood blockbuster. What is somewhat concerning, however, is the fact this game was never actually released and is only available as a reproduction cart or through particularly creative means. Also, that it was designed by Bandai Games. That name may not ring a bell for a lot of you, but it had me both completely astonished and incredibly apprehensive, because this is the exact same team responsible for that godawful Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. game for the Famicom Disk System.

And yet even so, this was *still* easier to find and get actually running than an old DOS game would have been. I've reached the age where actually having my video games *work* out-of-the-box is a requirement for me to invest my time, so this was kind of a deciding factor for me. So, having something of a baseline set of expectations for what I was in for, I braced myself for the worst and fired up Star Trek V: The Final Frontier to see what this crew came up when given a far less coherent film to adapt.

Well, it's pretty. Parts of it.

Well, the good thing is that the overall production values are much higher this time. The graphics and sound, while nothing really to write home about, are actually somewhat appealing and have a measure of artistry about them that Project E.D.E.N. utterly lacked. I would complain about this and get confused as to why a Japanese developer has clearly put more effort into a game based on a Western property than a comparatively major local one (or, for that matter, why an NES game looks and sounds better than an FDS one), but honestly I'm just happy the thing isn't entirely repulsive to look at and listen to: There's some decent 8-bit renditions of the music from the movie (including *that* piece), and the sprite art is relatively detailed and colourful for the time. Although I say that referring primarily to the backgrounds-While the renditions of Kirk and co. we seen in the cutscenes are detailed enough, they only bothered to design one overworld sprite. This means that, whether you're playing Sulu in the early levels or Kirk in the later ones...Your character looks identical either way.

(And no, it doesn't remotely resemble either Kirk *or* Sulu. Why on Earth would you think that it would?)  

Subtle.

Just like last time, there are two primary gameplay modes: The first is your standard sidescroller-shooter type action, which is serviceable if a bit boring, because now we don't even have any platforming obstacles or hovercar powerups to break up the monotony of walking to the right blasting things. Which is literally what you do, as the levels are all completely flat and utterly devoid of visual interest save for the backgrounds (well, I guess Nimbus III *is* a desert planet, after all). As befitting the movie this game is based on, the first level consists of taking Sulu to retake the Paradise cantina from enemy forces that look suspiciously like Jawas. One does sort of expect to see Luke Sywalker floating by in the background on a landspeeder. Your health and Phaser energy both have their own meters, and the higher your phaser energy the more powerful your shots become and the longer the range you get with them. And you're going to need every bar of that, because the enemies, even on the first level, take forever to take down and, just like in Project E.D.E.N., they spawn out of nothingness right in front of you giving you no time to react, so you'll never hit them before they hit you.

Get used to seeing this screen a lot.

You do get powerups, but they make no logical or aesthetic sense: Starfleet emblems restore health while hyposprays (?!) give you more phaser energy. Then there's something that looks like a rock, and I have no idea what that's supposed to be or do. Regardless of what the powerups look like, there never seem to be enough of them to keep you going for too long, and poor Sulu always winds up crumpling into a heap at the feet of some Jawa dude who keeps jumping up and down like an evil jackrabbit. The game does have infinite continues (again, like Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N.), which I would normally applaud, but the flip side of that is that you technically have *no excuse* not to keep going until you master its arcane rules. Save, perhaps, your sense of good taste and the value you place on your time and energy.

The Enterprise warp effect is pretty nicely realised.

The first and last levels are sidescrolling action, while the second and third take the form of yet another rudimentary Star Trek space tactics-type deal (and yes, there are only four levels). There's not a whole lot to say about these, except they're a damn sight more functional and interesting than manoeuvring Yuri through a thrown-together bargain basement maze was. You're taking the Enterprise-A through an asteroid field to reach Sha Ka Ree all the while trying to dodge a Klingon Bird-of-Prey. There's a radar and a little ship's operations sub-screen where you can monitor things like your shields, power and damage reports. Basic stuff you'd expect to see in a Star Trek game (and done considerably better in other Star Trek games), but it's nice to have anyway. Since this is NES, obviously there's no fancy joystick controls, it's just point and go with the control pad and interact with the A and B buttons. Which I actually like a lot: I tend to prefer elegance and simplicity in my control schemes as opposed to complexity for the sake of complexity, so sue me.

I quite like the sprite art for the interior scenes. It's pretty good for the time and place.

These kind of games are always hard to review because, since they're unfinished prototypes, they're not necessarily indicative of what the final product could have been. But I'll be honest. I wouldn't have held hugely high hopes for this one simply looking at its pedigree. It improves some things from Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N., yes, albeit just barely. but let's actually think about that for a minute: Project E.D.E.N. was designed for the Famicom Disk System, which is a technically superior console. What does it honestly say about the job this team did on that game that anything on the NES could be seen as an improvement? I, for one, am pretty incensed that Bandai slagged off Dirty Pair (especially ironic given that Bandai Games' parent company now *owns* Sunrise) and did a better job on *Star Trek V* of all things, even if in practice all it amounts to is half-assing it a little bit less. And then there's the fact that Project E.D.E.N. didn't actually have much more content than this game does in the first place: In other words, Bandai Games is telling us a *full retail game* on an *advanced console peripheral* is worth roughly about as much as an unfinished prototype you can find distributed on the Internet for free if you look hard enough.

(And yes, I know ROMs exist of Project E.D.E.N. too and its something like thirty years later, but that's not the point and you know what I mean. One was considered good enough to sell for $50 or however much and one wasn't, and they're essentially the same damn thing.)

But on the other hand, this may well be the definitive Star Trek V: The Final Frontier game simply because of that: Just like the movie it's based on, this game is a half-assed rush-job with with tragically unfulfilled potential cobbled together to keep tapping the lucrative Star Trek brand with no regard to how much it insults the audience's intelligence in the process and how badly that reflects on the creators.

Prophets, that's depressing. I need to go do something fun now.

Flight Simulator: Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. (Famicom Disk System)

Back when I started planning these video game posts it never would have crossed my mind that it would take until 1987 to properly get this phase of the project underway and that the first actual video game we'd be looking at wouldn't even be a Star Trek one. And yet, Kei and Yuri must be heard.

There were a handful of Star Trek titles released for early PCs and home consoles like the Apple II, TRS-80, VIC-20, Commodore 64, Atari 2600 and Vectrex in the early 1980s, but they were all on platforms I either didn't have at a formative age or are so arcane they're difficult to get ahold of these days. Considering the way the pagination for Volume 2 is turning out, I may try to take a look at a few of them to flesh that book out, but we're skipping them for the time being. The Star Trek video games I'm most familiar with date to the late-1980s and early 1990s and we'll talk about those when the time comes, but, as it turns out, Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. predates them all. In the meantime, a whole bunch has happened in the video game industry, namely that there is now in fact a video game industry that has been around long enough to not only crash thanks to market saturation and Atari's sloppy management, but come back bigger than ever before thanks to toy company from Japan called Nintendo.

The Famicom Disk System is a strange beast within the history of Nintendo. It was a Japanese-exclusive add-on for the Famicom (or Family Computer), which is what the NES (or Nintendo Entertainment System) was called in its home country. This naming discrepancy actually reveals a lot about how the history of the game industry in the United States differs from how it played out in Japan. See, by 1985 video games were seen as a dead fad thanks to the collapse of the monopolistic Atari that dragged the whole industry down with it in 1983. Because of this, Nintendo had to market the NES as essentially a children's toy to get it to sell its first Holiday season, in the process changing the way video games are thought of even to this day (before Nintendo's US success, video games were seen as social things for everybody, though primarily young, single, active adults). However, this was only true in the US, and in Japan, the console was marketed as what it straightforwardly was: A home computer designed for family entertainment.

(You can see this attitude play out even today: In the US, in spite of the industry's major inroads in recent years, video games still can't *quite* shake the stigma of being thought of as expensive playthings for lazy, socially maladjusted children, or adults with the mentality of socially maladjusted children. In Japan, the Nintendo 3DS is as ubiquitous as the iPhone.)

So, the Famicom Disk System is something that Nintendo would only ever have released in Japan at this time, along with the modem that also existed for the console at the time (yes, you could access something a lot like the Internet on your Famicom in 1983). Nobody would think the kids' Nintendo toy would need a floppy disk drive, but it makes perfect sense to have one for something called a “Family Computer”. Furthermore, the Disk System existed to correct some of the Famicom's inherent drawbacks: There was only so much performance you could squeeze out of the thing, and this severely limited what developers could do with the system even as early as 1985. The Disk System alleviated all of these problems, allowing for more vibrant and detailed graphics, crisper, more dynamic sound, the ability to save without battery backup and more general processing power. In fact, a lot of the games we think of as being iconic to the NES were actually designed with the Disk System in mind, including classics like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid and Castlevania.

(So much so that it took a *lot* of compression and optimization to shrink those games down so that they'd fit on NES cartridges, meaning the versions we got in the US were *severely* stripped down when compared to their Japanese counterparts. In particular, there's simply no comparison between the NES and FDS versions of Castlevania and Metroid: Aside from the better graphics and sound, the addition of an actual save feature makes them both entirely different experiences. If you ever get the chance to play the original FDS versions of these games, I strongly recommend it.)

So, a Dirty Pair video game for the Famicom Disk System sounds like exactly the sort of thing we would expect to see come out of the Japanese video game industry at this point in history. 1987 was in many ways the series' annus mirablis, with Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture getting a major theatrical release, the premier of the direct-to-OVA second TV series Original Dirty Pair (not to mention With Love from the Lovely Angels) and even the publication of Haruka Takachiho's third light novel, Dirty Pair's Rough and Tumble, where Kei and Yuri team up with Studio Nue's mascot team the Crushers to hunt down a renegade sexbot in the middle of a simmering revolution. And, given the United States' reticence at the time about anything anime that wasn't Macross, Robotech, Voltron, Speed Racer or a first-party Nintendo franchise (combined with the console's inherent regionalism), Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. is sort of the definition of an “Only In Japan” game.

And really, Dirty Pair is custom-tailored for the video game medium if you think about it. I have a theory that one of the unique virtues of video games as a form of artistic expression is their ability to convey ideas, themes, emotions and stories without relying on a conventional linear narrative. Part of this is because video games, probably more than any other kind of media, rely on an implicit and innate understanding of the dynamic interaction between the positionalities and agency of two or more parties (in particular, the players and the developers). The best video games, in my view, directly and overtly play to this, understanding (as oral storytellers do) that their stories will be retold slightly differently every time the game is played. The reason Dirty Pair is a natural fit for video games should be self-evident by this point: The biggest strength, and biggest failing, of Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture was the vestigial nature of its plot when compared to the era-defining, paradigm-shifting power of its music video structure. A video game following in the wake of such a landmark work could take all of that to the next level without any of the drawbacks that come with being shackled to cinema. A post-Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture video game could be a true shamanic vision for the Nintendo age.

Title Screen

Unfortunately for all of us, it sucks.

I genuinely have no idea who this is supposed to be.

As you can probably guess from the title, Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. is loosely based on the events of Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture. And I mean *extremely* loosely: There's one screen of text at the beginning of the game that talks about Agerna, Vizorium (the movie's Spice analog) and Professor Wattsman, but it's all flavour text and none of them are ever addressed again anywhere else in the game. Interestingly enough, there's no mention of Uldas and Edia blaming each other for the Sandingas' attack on the research facilities (the girls know Wattsman is behind everything from the get-go) and I don't think Carson D. Carson is in the game at all, so the story is already better than the one in the movie (that should probably tell you something). Also, the girls get briefed on the mission by someone who I'm going to assume is Gooley A. Francess from the TV show, but the graphics are so crude I honestly can't tell if it's supposed to be him or the 3WA chief from Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia. Neither character was in the movie, in case you were curious.

 

There's an English translation of this game, if you can find it.

But that sort of fealty to the source material was never needed: After all, if video games are more comparable to oral storytelling in terms of narrative than anything else, one wouldn't expect the game's story to be beat-for-beat the same as the movie's, and in this case I'm thrilled that it isn't. And anyway, I was the one arguing for as thin and forgettable a linear narrative as possible. No, the reason Dirty Pair Project E.D.E.N. is a bad game isn't because it doesn't follow in lock-step with the movie, it's because of *everything else*. I mentioned the graphics earlier, and it really is impossible to make much of anything out. This is not me being prejudiced against the art style of older games, the visual aesthetic really would have looked subpar even in 1987: The backgrounds are all crudely defined and remind me of something from an old PC-8801 game, Kei and Yuri's overworld sprites barely resemble who they're supposed to represent and none of the enemies look like anything remotely describable, let alone the creatures from the movie. The sound effects are all monotonous and generic and, most inexcusably, there are, as far as I can tell, only three or four music tracks in the game, only one of which is the overworld theme (and it loops *constantly*) and all of which are mind-numbingly dull, droning and repetitive.

Kei's earring in World 1, Level 1.

Given that this is Dirty Pair and considering how the series is built around Kei and Yuri's relationship, you might expect some kind of co-op mode or at least the option to select one of the two Angels to play as. Since the girls compliment each other so well, a fun thing for the video game to do would be to give each one of them unique powers and abilities that need to be used in tandem to progress. Well, as it turns out Yuri is the only default player character: Kei only shows up when you grab her earring, conveniently located at the beginning of each level, thus summoning her to fly in on a kind of hovercar that Yuri can jump onto and use to traverse the rest of the level. She also gives you backup fire and one extra hit (oh yeah, I forgot to mention you die in one hit), but disappears if you take damage on the hovercar. Yes, in this game Kei, one half of the Lovely Angels and Dirty Pair's original narrator, is relegated to being a glorified power-up. I think that probably says it all.

I can only guess what these hearts are for.

When you're just playing as Yuri on foot, the game plays like a standard-issue sidescroller-shooter, and a particularly bad one at that. Yuri plods from one side of the level to the other traversing some of the most boring, unimaginative level design in video game history at a speed resembling that of a particularly brisk Sunday stroll in the park all the while attempting to dodge a relentless hail of indescribable objects that will surely one-shot her with a migraine-inducing strobing effect should they come anywhere near her vaguely-defined hitbox. You only get one weapon, but there's a power-up you can find that temporarily swaps out your default invisible gun with a terrible rate of fire that shoots lines and sounds like an error message with an invisible gun with a terrible rate of fire that shoots dots and sounds like an error message. There are other power-ups you can find, including a few that look like tiaras (OK...), what seems to be a bottle of poison (!) and even Nanmo (Nanmo isn't in Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture), but I have no idea what they're supposed to do or how to equip them.

(Interestingly, there is apparently a strategy guide for this game done as a manga with exclusive artwork. It's a cute idea and I'd love to read it and add it to my collection someday. I'm sure if I had that, or more to the point a translated version of it, all of this would make a *lot* more sense.)

Beware the Alpha Hoppers and evil cinnamon rolls.

When you've got Kei with you, the game is more like horizontal space shooter (think R-Type or Gradius). The game is marginally more playable here, as the hovercar moves at a decent pace and you get to shoot two sets of missiles at once (that look like lines and sound like error messages), which in my experience is just about the only way to survive the onslaught of enemies that show up in later levels. You still don't get any new weapons or upgrades though, and I don't even think you can use your power-ups in this mode. You just careen from one end of the map to the other, trying desperately not to crash into shit and mash the B button until your thumb falls off (oh yeah, that's another thing: You have to keep repeatedly tapping the button to fire. Given how much shooting you do in this game, this understandably gets tiring very quickly. A turbo controller is pretty much required for this game). You're supposed to get graded on your accuracy at the end of the game (which is a *great* idea for a bullet hell game like this, by the way...), but I've never gotten that far and honestly I care more about clearing the screen and staying alive then any letter grade the game might give me for playing by its arbitrary rules.

Yuri faces the camera in World 2, Level 1.

After the first four levels, the game changes again and becomes a kind of rudimentary action adventure game. Supposedly, the girls have reached Doctor Wattsman's lab, which is designed like a maze. This is where I started to have real problems with the game, because I honestly can't make heads or tails of the layout here and I freely admit I've never actually gotten passed these stages. You're Yuri on foot again, moving from screen to screen trying to find your way out. But every room looks the same (well, there's two or three different “types” of room and each instance is laid out slightly differently) and enemies just spawn out of thin air giving you next to no time to react, which is a real issue considering the control is as sluggish as it is. Without Kei backing you up (her earring doesn't appear in these levels), you're constantly outmanned and outgunned, which just compounds the panic that sets in when you inevitably get lost (there's no map) and find yourself going in circles. One cool thing about these levels is that the game actually made front and backsprites for the characters, and it tries to give you some illusion of depth as you walk into the background and foreground: Not a lot of sidescrollers do that, and in spite of the fact it's not wholly effective (imagine the NES port of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game, but a lot slower, and you get the general idea of what this feels like), it remains pretty ambitious for the time.

These guys seriously just materialize with no warning out of *nothing*.

(There is, I should mention, a co-op mode where the second player takes control of Kei, and I suspect the maze levels are significantly easier if you're playing with two people. The whole game probably is. But, given how obscure and frustrating this game is, I don't fancy my chances of getting anyone else to play it with me to test that theory out.)

I know I've spent a lot of time critiquing the mechanics, which probably seems odd given my stance on video game writing elsewhere, but the thing about mechanics is that they're supposed to be intuitive and invisible, and the moment you actually notice them they become the only thing you think about throughout the entire experience. Video games have an almost transcendent ability to invoke within you a heightened state of consciousness, and always having to fret about movement speed pulls you right back down. The fact is, things like control, level design and combat are a constant problem in this game, and this is on top of the pre-existing issue that it's just resoundingly uninspiring to look at, listen to and play. And it's not like I'm being unfair to a dated relic from another time, I don't think I am. Not in 1987 when Super Mario Bros. 1 and 2, Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid and Mega Man all exist already, each of which was a groundbreaking, evocative and memorable trip all its own. Dirty Pair deserved to be treated like a classic on the Famicom, and Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. simply isn't.

That's really the fundamental problem with Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N.: It's utterly joyless and uninspiring. Even in its weakest moments, animated Dirty Pair always has a sense of wonder and fun about it. That's what saved the very movie this game was based on after all; it simply looked like absolutely nothing else and effortlessly, masterfully captured your imagination. That there's no trace of that magick to be found anywhere in the Famicom Disk System game is the most egregious and comprehensive betrayal of all. Though its moment in the sun seems to have passed, I can only hope that the video game medium will someday give Kei and Yuri the royal treatment they deserve. And not just video games-Dirty Pair warrants love and respect everywhere. Few science fiction works have done so much for us or have such heart.

Until then, I'll still have my dreams of starlight and cosmic highways.