Like the cast of the original TV series, this game is starting to look its age. To extend its life, Interplay have added sound – a whole CD full, in fact.
Gameplay is the classic point and click affair. If you want Mr Spock to examine a Tribble, you first click on the Use icon, then on pointy ears himself, then on the Tribble. He walks over and says something smug, much in the style of The Secret of Monkey Island and the more recent Discworld.
This method of exploring can be really tedious – every time you enter a new location you have to examine every object separately to find out what it is. This repetition is compounded by the fact that after looking at an object, you then need to get Spock to use his Tricorder, and Bones to use his medical Tricorder.
Worse still are the graphics. Now a game doesn’t need great graphics to be enjoyable, but in this case you can easily spend an hour looking for a missing clue only to discover that you’ve overlooked a dismembered hand – usually not an easy thing to do, but when it’s a blob of five dark brown pixels on a background of light brown pixels, it’s infuriatingly easy.
In the game’s favour is its subject matter. Surely no TV series has evoked the worldwide adoration of so many dedicated, if slightly strange, viewers. To maintain the TV allusions, the game is broken into separate ‘episodes’, complete with the banter on the bridge at the end of each.
In the floppy version, any speech simply appears as text on screen; in this version, every word is spoken out loud. Even better, Interplay enlisted William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Deforest Kelly themselves to record their characters’ voices. The other characters are played by sound-a-likes, although they have precious few lines. This greatly improves the game’s atmosphere. Previously you had to imagine that the blue blob on the left was Spock, but when it’s actually his voice speaking, the illusion holds.
Sound is the only addition to the game. There are no extra episodes, so if you bought the floppy version there is not enough reason to upgrade. If you’re looking to buy an adventure game, it looks old compared to the slick graphics of Discworld, but the suspense of waiting for Scotty to tell you that ‘She canna take no more’ keeps you glued to the screen. Derek Smith
Next Generation
If you prefer the new Star Trek, you may be interested in the Star Trek Interactive Technical Manual, reviewed in issue 20 of Macformat.
Before you let loose with your phaser, do remember that the aliens are sometimes friendly. Thought and care are needed.
To maintain complete believability (not to mention tradition), the security guard in red is always killed ten minutes after beaming down to the planet.
All the messages are read out by actors (including William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Deforest Kelly) adding atmosphere, drama and funny Scottish accents to the game.
Price: £39.99. Out: now.
Requires: any colour Mac, 3Mb of free RAM, System 7 or later, 13Mb of hard disk space, any CD-ROM drive.
