Lately my posts have tended to be more about recent games, so when thinking up ideas for tonight’s post I thought about doing something a little older, or even a lot older going back to my earliest gaming memories. One of the first games I ever bought on my own was a triple pack, Worms 2, Star Trek Generations and Titanic: Adventure out of Time. I got so much mileage out of that little selection it puts my more recent gaming to shame. The main reason I bought the pack was Worms 2, I had two friends at school who loved discussing it and I didn’t want to be left out. I didn’t really understand it at the time but still got some enjoyment out of it and my admiration for it has grown over the years, in fact whilst sitting thinking of ideas I chuckled when I remembered some of the voices sets available. Titanic: Adventure Out of Time is a first-person adventure game, using real people for the dialogue scenes. But the one I want to cover today is Star Trek Generations, based on the film of the same name this game is a genre-straddling adventure which has you chasing Dr. Soran across the sector to prevent him destroying worlds on his quest to re-enter a place called ‘the Nexus’.
Your actions in the game and progress through the storyline are centred around the Enterprise-Ds Stellar Cartography, only seen for a very brief time in the film you spend a lot of time here in the game. This forms a sort of point-and-click adventure, each planet and the occasional ship can be scanned providing you with information that will lead you to the next mission. The cast of the film and television series provide their voices which gives the game a very authentic feel and helps to fill the gaps where the plot differs from the film, which it does a lot. This isn’t just a straight copy of the storyline like most modern day film tie-ins, with areas expanded and object collection thrust on the player to fill the time, Star Trek Generations takes the ideas behind the film and extrapolates them into something more. In the film Dr. Soran is attempting to destroy suns, when it comes to the story this only happens a handful of times, but it stands to reason that if he were to actually do it there are multiple paths he could take depending on how the crew of the Enterprise-D acts to stop him. Ultimately it’s just a simple branching path of levels, but it helps enormously to give the feeling that the player is changing the film.
Whenever a site is discovered the game switches to a first-person shooter\adventure game, there are a total of twelve levels each played out with a different crew member (with some repeats), Dr. Crusher is sent to a living planet, Geordi is sent to a crippled Bird-of-Prey, Deanna is sent to a Romulan outpost, etc. The screen is broken up into four areas, the top half covers your view, bottom left shows your tricorder read-out, right shows your inventory, but it’s the middle that’s interesting. The first-person visuals were only a few steps up from Wolfenstein 3D which made making out details impossible, so when you approach an interesting section such as a console or broken panel a more detailed 2D view would appear in the middle. This allowed the developers to make the area interactive allowing a hands-on approach for the player. It wasn’t brilliant but added some nice depth to the game. The tricorder had two uses, one showed your characters health and the other showed a map with various settings for distance and what to highlight. I really like the idea of using tricorders in games but they have been pretty underused to date, the only other one I remember was in Elite Force 2 and all that did was add overlays to your view. The one item in your inventory you couldn’t drop was your comm-badge, so if you drop the tricorder for whatever reason you lose the read-out. Which could be a little annoying, but I like it as a realistic touch. Throughout a mission you would pick-up a large assortment of objects, for making temporary fixes to equipment and bypassing locked areas, and then there were the weapons. 
Depending on the mission you are equipped with different firearms, mostly the standard type-two phaser, you could also pick-up and use enemy weapons. Each weapon introduced a settings slider in the middle above the view section, for Starfleet phasers this ran all the way from green (light stun, often so light it takes two shots to have any effect) to red (vaporise) with all the options in-between. Enemies recover from stun (depending on how high the setting) but higher settings use more power and if there isn’t a source of power cells you’re out of luck, stun was required in one mission, at least in part. There was a nice selection of enemy weapons, the most memorable for me were the Romulan rifle and phaser, these only had two\three settings for stun and kill.
But the thing I liked most about the action sequences was how losing didn’t necessarily mean the end, if your character is severely injured or you fail to complete the mission goal then you’re beamed back to the ship. The sun would explode, leaving a constant reminder on the Stellar Cartography screen, and the path of the Nexus would change. This would open up the next series of missions depending on which mission you fail at. I never managed to work out Dr. Crushers level so it was fortunate that this was possible. Too many games make failure final…
The last sub-game was ship combat, it is pretty basic really but has some nice touches. Phasers can be fired at lower power settings, less powerful but quicker to recharge, and it is also possible to select the number of photon torpedoes per volley. As you’d expect in this kind of game each ship has four shield facings and lots of subsystems to damage, and you can choose which one to target, manoeuvring is very simple and involves, forward attack, retreat and fly around in circles. There is also a power management aspect, this only really comes into play once your power systems have been damaged, but it helps keep things interesting. Most of the time you go up against the same ships, but there is variety which forces you to change your tactics. There was one enemy in particular I remember, the Chodak (also seen in ST TNG: A Final Unity). Their ships were more powerful than the Enterprise-D and often came in pairs, I seem to remember I defeated one of their ships…once. This was an interesting aspect to the game, and I did have some fun particularly with the easier enemies such as the Bird-of-Prey, but I enjoyed the action sequences much more.
The various sections of the game are tied together using clips from the film, they were a little short at times but that was to make them fit better with games storyline, which they did.
I will always have fond memories of Star Trek Generations, obviously since it was one of the first big games I played, but even without the rose-tinted glasses it still offers something interesting with the multiple genres and tie-in to the film. However it’s not one I see people going out of their way to play, especially given the difficulties running it on modern computers. I wanted to load it up to have a quick play before I started writing, but 16-bit compatibility was dropped in 64-bit Vista so I’ll have to look into other ways of running it, such as Virtual PC or Linux. Which is a shame because I really think there is much about it I could appreciate now that I’m a little older and a smidgen wiser.
