A Brief History Of Star Trek PC Games

[IInuyasha74]

We take a brief look at the "Star Trek" game franchise, from the 1970s to the present day.

A Brief History Of Star Trek PC Games : Read more

 

[ern88]

I wish they would do another Bridge Commander style game.

 

[Reynar]

Uhhh...Birth of the Federation was turn-based. And glorious despite the game breaking memory leak and other bugs.

 

[adgjlsfhk]

No star trek armada III? technically its a mod, but it still is amazing.

 

[Mopar63]

Birth of the Federation was an amazing game that needs to be remade. Sadly it was never properly supported. The Star Fleet Command series will always hold a special place in my heart. I worked with Taldren as a part of the "Inner Circle" a select group of play testers that worked directly with the devs. I was also the creator and Editor and Chief of Hailing Frequencies, an SFC Fanzine. Of all the Star Fleet Commands my least favorite was SFC III, I just never felt it captured the essence of SFC.

I works on the New Worlds beta, all I can say is I am sorry. :-( I played a lot of Star Trek Online but Perfect World has pretty much ruined what started as a great Star Trek game.

 

[dimar]

I would love Star Trek game series, Mass Effect style. Rich story line and lots of action. But no prequels. I hate prequels!

 

[enewmen]

Some where exceptionally good, but only similar to Star Trek - having warp, shield, photons, etc. The Cosmic Balance by SSI (1982) for example added strategy by limiting the space available by hull size. So you can have a ton of weapons, but no shields. Or Super fast but no weapons. Or good weapons & shields but no living space. Balanced, Or any combination. The paper game "Star Fleet Battles" (1979) was also excellent, but there was never a good computer game version of that.

Edit: Most licenced "Star Trek" games where made for suckers and totally SUCKED! "Starship Creator" (1998) for example was exceptionally bad (wait 2 hours to cross the map and nothing happens).
Edit again: I have no love for Star Trek online - no good reason and I can't die. Just don't like it.

 

[jaguarskx]

Playing Star Trek Online while doing a bit of moderation...LOL.

 

[jaguarskx]

Star Trek Bridge Crew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=romB8e5nMp8

 

[cletus_slackjawd]

Armada and bridge commander where my favorite

 

[wifiburger]

did not play a single startrek game, even tough the movies / tv series are decent,
FPS MMO would be nice I'll play that 20% no man sky and 80% destiny yeah that would be awesome

 

[voodoochicken]

It's Lt. Worf not Warf, he's not a wharf rat

 

[alextheblue]

I know this is about the PC games but I enjoyed Echoes From the Past released towards the end of the Genesis / MD's retail career. Had a little bit of everything Star Trek.

 

[DarkZenith]

" or Lt. Commander Warf (Michael Dorn)".... Really? How did this get through editing???

 

[randomizer]

Starfleet Academy was brutal. You could fail the entire game or be killed in a cut scene if you picked the wrong dialogue options.

 

[RazberyBandit]

JP and some others might come down on me for this, but....

Speaking as a former TH freelance editor, there are a few reasons for the mistakes readers often find here, including those which some would deem glaringly obvious.

Firstly, there's the pay - paying someone a penny-per-word does not serve to inspire heavy investment into actually editing the body of work being presented. I used to edit Wolfgang's articles and had to force myself to stop correcting mistakes outside of roughly an hour of time invested. Otherwise, it wasn't worth the money. Remember: one-thousand words only paid ten bucks.

Secondly, editors were (and likely still are) not responsible for any fact-checking whatsoever. So, all names, places, dates, times, etc. were solely the responsibility of the author. This essentially translates into the assigned editor ignoring such things.

These first two factors form a combination that essentially turns a person with the term editor in his title into little more than a basic proofreader. As an example, Activision was misspelled as or replaced with the word Activation within one of these tiles. To me, that's a clear sign someone, either the author or editor, used auto-complete or auto-correct, respectively.

Thirdly, there was no education requirement to become a TH editor. I'm a college drop-out who never scored higher than 500 on the Verbal portion of the SAT, yet I still possess enough basic English grammar mastery to be a TH editor, to the extent that TH's former Editor-in-Chief, Chris Angelini, once asked me to share the feature story editing load. I respectfully declined.

 

[cabose369]

I wish they would make an actual Star Trek Armada III (not the fan-made game). 15 years later and I still play Armada 2. With the custom made maps you can download it still plays well and is lots of fun.

 

[VinnyML]

They forgot one of the best and one of the first multi-player games ever built.

Netrek - www.netrek.org

Unfortunately, hasn't been updated in years...

 

[VinnyML]

How could they miss one of the first and IMHO one of the best multi-player games. That would be:

Netrek

You can see the details at www.netrek.org. Unfortunately, hasn't been updated in years but a phenomenal game that required teamwork to win.

 

[velocityg4]

Star Trek 25th Anniversary is my favorite Star Trek game. I think it was the first game I played when I got a 486 DX 33Mhz. I played it again recently running DOS in a VM. It is still fun.

I also enjoyed Starfleet Academy. Most other Trek games were bad.

Outside of the PC. Star Trek The Next Generation on SNES was pretty fun.

The best of the Star Trek ripoff game was Rescue!

 

[bloodroses]

I'm guessing the star trek: Strategic Operations Simulator game from the arcades and ported to the Commodore 64, atari 2600, etc never got a port for the PC?

 

[notlim981]

There's a typo on picture 22: "This game was an early attempt by Activation to take the Star Trek game franchise into an MMO format."

Wouldn't it be Activision?

 

[ajac09]

" hundreds of TV shows" no 100's of EPISODES of several TV shows.

 

[fonzy]

A new Star Trek game based after the Dominion War would be awesome...or even TNG era with one of the new graphics engine would be awesome.

 

[JerTheCatboy]

Star Trek: Birth of the Federation was not a RTS. It's a 4X game, like Master of Orion.