The 16 away missions, first of all, cast you as a character from the crew - there’s at least one mission per crew member, including one near the end for Kirk - and beam you over to a base, a planet surface or an enemy ship where you’ll probably have to use that character’s particular qualities to achieve the mission objective. As Troi, for example, you’re sent on a spy mission to a Romulan base, disguised as a Romulan. (That bit’s not in the film.) And as Worf you’re sent in to the base of the breakaway Klingon faction to sort them out. You can also, as Riker, explore the Amargosa observatory that’s in the film - Spectrum Holobyte actually obtained the blueprints for the observatory from Paramount, who’d designed the whole base even though they only built part of it for the film, and modelled the entire structure accurately.
   ‘You can tackle the missions pretty much any way you want,’ says Simon, ‘including simply treating them like Doom and shooting everyone with your phaser. But that won’t tend to get you very far. To succeed you’ll have to think like a Starfleet officer and use a more careful approach. The missions are really about exploring, and solving puzzles. They involve all the sorts of things Star Trek characters normally do: rerouting conduit pathways... Oh, and reversing the polarity. There’s lots of reversing the polarity.’
   If you examine control panels and things, more detailed versions of them will appear in the corner of the screen for polarity-reversing purposes. And as well as a phaser you’re also provided with a tricorder, which can be used to monitor your health and scan for life signs and so on. Plus, there’s a structural map which is available from the beginning in known areas like Starfleet bases, or is built up as you go along in places like enemy ships. You’ve also got a communicator badge, so if you get stuck you can call the Enterprise to see if they’ve got any suggestions.
   The alternative to an away mission is one of the space battles. These take place in 640 by 480 3D graphics, 
and in 16-bit colour, and have you fighting accurately modelled Romulan Warbirds and Klingon Birds of 
Prey. The multiple screens that A Final Unity’s combat sections used have been combined into one, so you 
don’t get all the confusing jumping between weapons, control, engineering and all that as you try to manage 
your ship’s systems to reroute power to damaged areas.
   ‘We’ve tried to capture the feel of the combat from The Wrath of Khan, the second Star Trek film, because 
we reckon that has the best space battles,’ Simon explains. ‘So the ships are relatively slow and unmanoeuvrable, and you’ve really got to concentrate on seeking out the enemy ships’ weak spots.’
   Finally, all this is tied together with some excellent video clips, although Simon is eager to stress that 
they’re kept strictly in the sidelines, and no clip is longer than a couple of minutes. The clips crop up at 
significant moments to illustrate, for example, a star being blown up and the Enterprise escaping in the nick 
of time. Some sections have been digitised directly from the film, although the large team found they had to 
create ratherr more of the video from scratch than they were originally anticipating.
   ‘We kept finding that the bit of the film we needed had someone’s head in the way or something,’ Simon recalls, ‘so we’d have to do the whole sequence ourselves.’ But he seems very pleased with the results. ‘’The video quality we’ve come up with is so good, in 640 by 480 16-bit colour, and the 3D graphics are so convincing, that when we sent some of our clips to Paramount for their approval they thought we’d digitised them straight from the film.’
   Michael Dorn was finishing off Worf’s lines in the background as I spoke with Simon, and the game is described as ‘almost ready’. So we’re aiming to bring you a review of the completed Generations in our April issue, to coincide with the game’s projected release date that month. You may, however, want to bear in mind that it’s being published here in the UK by MicroProse, makers of Grand Prix 2 and Magic: The Gathering.