Star Trek: 25th Anniversary


Star Trek's 25th Anniversary back in 1991 was filled with assloads of merchandising and franchise whoring. Thankfully, someone had the good sense to license some videogames out of the deal. Unfortunately, the first game we got was Ultra's "Star Trek 25th Anniversary" for NES. In 1992, missing the anniversary, we got Interplay's Star Trek 25th Anniversary for PC, Mac, and Amiga. Unlike Ultra's crummy NES game, it was a point and click adventure game AND a bridge simulator. A year later, they released a CD-ROM version featuring a new intro, full speech for every line of dialog (with the original actors playing themselves!), and an extended final mission.

The game starts off similar to Wing Commander, actually. You fire it up and the next thing you know you're thrown into a mock ship combat situation with no idea what the hell to do. Careful study of the game manual and some brief quips from Spock will get you going on the basics, but it's highly unlikely you'll win your mock battle the first few times you play it. What's important is that you keep replaying that god damn part over and over and over until you really do get the hang of it, because your ability to work the bridge during combat is absolutely critical in the game. Pressing the number keys switches up your ship's speed, tab alternates between navigation and moving your mouse cursor over the bridge, and you're going to be clicking on Scotty quite a bit to tell him what to prioritize in his repairs.



For the most part, mission structure begins with you receiving your orders from Starfleet, you consult the star chart (the copy protection for the game) to determine where to tell Chekov to plot a course to, you enter orbit, beam down, and then complete an adventure portion of the game. Something a lot of people miss out on is talking to Spock and using his computer to look for information in the ship's computer banks prior to going down on the surface, something that proves quite essential in some missions.

Interface-wise, the adventure portion has a bit of a learning curve as well. Like the bridge portion of the game, it has hot keys to jump between the most common functions, but it also has a mouse driven interface where you can right click and choose from a series of actions based on where you click on the paper doll that pops up. Clicking on the lowered hand changes the cursor to "Pick Up", Clicking on the raised hand changed it to "Use", lips to "Talk", etc. Because you're the ship's captain, you'll oftentimes have to delegate the action responsibility to someone else in your away team (such as selecting Use, then selecting Spock, and then selecting a computer). If you attempt to do something dangerous, the token red shirt will say something along the lines of, "wait a minute sir, let me try that before you" and then get his ass fucking smoked. It's quite satisfying, actually.



There are typically multiple paths through each mission and sometimes multiple solutions to puzzles (with different solutions yielding a higher score at the end of the mission). In one mission you can choose to teleport to a location or break in the door. Once in, you can try diplomacy or you can start cooking peeps with phaser fire. Even when you try diplomacy, you can act like a starfleet captain or you can be a crass douchebag. A few of the puzzles have fairly obtuse solutions if you don't take the time to reference the ship's computer before going to the surface, so...yea. Second time I mentioned that, it might be important. :) Each mission is quite replayable, if for no other reason than to see the different responses you get from various actions (to include trying to find every way possible in each mission to get your token red shirt killed).

At the end of the mission, your performance score is revealed to you and you are assigned commendation points from Starfleet. These points improve your crew's ability to perform (such as making Scotty coax more juice from the engines and Sulu turn the Enterprise tighter in combat) and go towards your end game total, which in turn determines what your ending will be. Right now, I think that there's four endings, though I'm not really sure until some more people complete the game and record their endings.



Actually getting the ending of the game is a complete bitch, though. The final battle has you going against a ship that's equally matched to the Enterprise and two smaller craft that love to tag team the hell out of you while you slam your fist through your keyboard and scream obscenities that'd make a salty sailor blush like Strawberry Shortcake. It took me about 3 hours to finally complete the battle, though a few people have stated that it's not really that hard (jerks). By the end of the battle you will become far more intimately familiar with the ship combat than you ever thought you'd be, that's for sure.

So in conclusion, it's a great adventure game with lots of replayability, marred by SNK-boss syndrome at the very end. The disk version is easy as pie to get online (don't forget to configure the sound before you start playing unless you like PC Speaker blips and bloops) and the CD-ROM version is like $10-$20 on eBay if you want to play the talkie version. While it may be possible to get it running in WinXP, just run DOSbox like a real (wo?)man and play it proper.


p.s. enjoy the HQ4x filter on the screenshots :P Also, I scanned the manual as a CDZ, so if you've got CDisplay or something similar, you should be golden.