I’ve recently fallen in love with Star Trek.
I used to detest it. I’d skip past channels that were broadcasting episodes of it, thinking about how pointless it was and of all the stereotypical people that watched such bilge: lonely, overweight people with little social skills versed only in the fiction of a sad science fiction universe (or was that gamers?). I went on feeling this way for years…
Until I saw the 2009 film reboot with the original generation of characters. I loved it: everyone was imbued with personality, the action scenes were pulse-pounding and the special effects were simply stunning. There was even one scene about halfway through (it’s a major spoiler, so I won’t mention it here, but anyone who’s seen it will know the one I mean) made me audibly squee with delight and excitement despite the fact that I knew next to nothing about the franchise. It proved to me that my initial negative reactions to the franchise were unfounded and showed me just how much I’d been missing by disregarding it for so long.
Since then, Star Trek has become a influence on my life: aiming to view at least one episode a day, I’ve watched the large majority of the episodes from The Original Series, the entirety of The Next Generation, made a start on Deep Space 9 (I think I’m in love with Jadzia Dax) and watched all the movies. I get a warm fuzzy feeling inside knowing that I still have so many more episodes to enjoy.
I was about halfway through watching The Next Generation when I suddenly remembered that I had the videogame based on the series on Game Gear lurking somewhere in my house. I was young when I used to play it so, being unable to read, I never actually understood what was going on: I’d just travel to a planet whose colour I liked the most that day and then shoot down any ships I came across. Suffice to say, I don’t think I made the best starship captain.
I decided to give it another shot now that I would actually know what I was being asked to do, so after months of hunting for it, I found my Game Gear (which was under my mum’s bed), slapped The Next Generation cartridge in the back, positioned it under a lamp so I could actually see the screen and entered the galaxy at my fingertips.
And my God, how rubbish it was. After being presented with Captain Picard telling you what your current mission is, you’re thrust into the bridge of the ship with no clue given as to what you’re supposed to do. You’re given the choice of conversing with a number of characters to achieve your goal: Worf controls the combat readiness and shield status of the Enterprise, Data allows you to choose which planet you next want to go and at what speed (although why anyone would want to go at anything slower than warp nine is anybody’s guess); Geordie controls the engineering and power status of the ship; O’Brien manages who leaves and boards the ship via the transporters and Riker gives you clues as to what you should be doing.
It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s done so painfully badly: when restoring or rerouting power to the ship, you have to partake in some weird, confusing puzzle game of some kind wherein you need to control the flow of power through a grid or something; beaming people up consists of finding shapeless red blobs on a boring, sparsely-detailed grid and consulting with Riker basically amounted to him saying ‘herp derp I don’t know lol.’
The fact that it’s so difficult to navigate through doesn’t help matters: you’ll frequently consult a character when all you meant to do was explore the system you were in, fly past planets you were meant to enter into orbit over due to the clunky controls and accidentally fire upon a ship whose crew you were meant to be rescuing, causing you to bugger up the mission in a fantastically unintentional manner.
It’s a shame that the game based on the series is so rubbish: it has its nice touches, such as the passwords being the names of minor characters in the series, but the fact that it’s so difficult to play and just plain boring makes it highly forgettable, unlike a large portion of episodes in the entirety of the canon. I should probably have guessed it wouldn’t be very good, but it’s still a little disheartening to discover it’s nowhere near as cool as I remembered. Perhaps, as Kirsten discovered in her review of Crazy Taxi for XBLA, our happy memories of some games should be strictly left as exactly that: memories.
Oh, well. Back to the television programmes for me. Engage, make it so, etc.
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