Star Trek: Generations never adequately answered the question of who’s the best out of Kirk and Picard. Fortunately, however, the entire cast of the film, including William Shatner as Kirk and Patrick Stewart as Picard, have been gathered together at Spectrum Holobyte’s San Francisco headquarters to record the voice-overs for the nearly complete game of the film, providing an ideal opportunity for the two captains to be sized up. Who, then, would win a straight fight between the pair of them?
   ‘Well, I’d have to say Patrick Stewart,’ reveals Simon Finch, Generations’ producer. ‘he’s slightly taller than William Shatner.’
   Excellent. That’s settled, then.
   Working with the Star Trek cast has had other benefits, too, not least of which has been the opportunity to get the game’s script polished up by those who know Star Trek best.
   "Patrick Stewart was great. He’d go, ‘Picard would never say it like this. He’d say this instead.’ And then he’d make up a much more Picard-like line. And William Shatner patiently read every line in about three different ways, to make sure we’d have the one we needed.’
   Spectrum Holobyte have managed to get all the key characters from the film to contribute voice-overs, including the six main bridge crew from the Enterprise D, along with the voice of the ship’s computer (Majel Barrett), William Shatner, Soran (Malcolm McDowell) and Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), and Simon reckons the result will be the most authentically Star Trekky Star Trek game yet. All the time you’re playing, characters will pop up to offer advice, ranging from vague clues to Geordie telling you exactly where to go and what to do. ‘It’s a good job I like Star Trek,’ says Simon, ‘or I’d have gone mad.’
   While perhaps not the finest of the eight Star Trek films, with its tiresomely protracted Kirk/Picard fight in the desert and Malcolm McDowell’s nonsensical evil masterplan, Star Trek: Generations does at least have a really good bit where the Enterprise crashes into a planet. And the game’s plot follows the film’s pretty closely, beginning at the mysteriously attacked Amargosa observatory and then having you warping off around the galaxy in pursuit of Soran (McDowell), trying to prevent him from blowing up planets and stars to clear a path for the ‘Nexus’, a ribbon of energy which moves through the galaxy and which Soran wants somehow to join up with. Spectrum Holobyte have fleshed out the story considerably, however, with many new locations to visit and characters to deal with, so the game should take rather longer to play than the film does to watch.
   The game’s divided into three, sort of, ‘chunks’.
   At the heart of Generations is the Stellar Cartography room, where you decide what to do next based around a map of the surrounding star systems. You can use the ship’s scanners to examine planets, stars and ships in your search for Soran, who will be trying either to launch one of his torpedos or to gather together the ingredients necessary to build one. And you can also simulate the destruction of stars and planets, to see the effect it will have on the path of the Nexus and perhaps try to predict Soran’s next move. Meanwhile, Picard and Data will chat away in the background, hopefully providing some clues.
   Once you’ve decided on the best course of action, you’ll embark upon one of the game’s other two sections: an away mission, which has you wandering around in first-person 3D, or a space battle, in which you shoot spaceships modelled in 3D in a similar fashion to Spectrum Holobyte’s last Star Trek game, A Final Unity.