 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO thats drunk I have been a fan of Star Trek for as long as I can remember thanks to my parents being fans of the original show We'd watch every episode of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine as they aired And if my parents couldn't be there to watch They'd tape it, and I swear we had like 12 tapes at one point just filled with hours of random Star Trek episodes And I'd always get yelled at if I wanted to tape Saturday Night Live or Conan O'Brien or something You better not dupe over the latest Star Trek The point is I do like Star Trek and I have for a long time so I feel qualified to review the three Star Trek games that were released for the Super Nintendo. The first is titled Star Trek The Next Generation Futures Past, released for the SNES and Sega Genesis in September 1994 and developed by Spectrum Holobite, a company mostly known for creating simulation games on PC throughout the 80s, so that's the vibe we've got here. You start out on the bridge with everyone staring at you waiting for you to do something and you use left and right on the D-pad to move around to different stations. You have an incoming distress signal from someone on Kotus Moose 6, so you go to the navigation menu, find that planet, and warp there. Then you wait around a while, you go back to the navigation menu and switch to impulse. Then you go back to the navigation menu again and switch to impulse again. Yep, this is one of those games. Eventually you can beam down there within a way team with a bunch of different characters to choose from that I'll get to in a bit. So you beam down and you wander around until you find some Romulans to shoot, then you rescue this person, but the second you get back on the bridge, you're caught in a battle with a Romulans scout ship. Eventually you'll do enough damage and they'll hail you saying, whoops, we just happened to wander into the neutral zone with guns blazing, how the heck did that happen, my bad? And he just nopes out of there. Then an admiral interrupts things and tells you to go cure a plague someplace else. That's the gist of the game right there, and it falls firmly in the category of, well, that's the best they could do at the time. If you were a fan of the show, this would have been seen as good enough. What really help are the small touches that add up to make for a surprisingly involved game like using your sensors to scan a nearby planet or ship to determine who to bring down to the surface, or if you get into a firefight you can divert resources from other areas of the ship over to whatever needs to be repaired. There's a ton of text here like planet classifications, descriptions of various galactic phenomena, and I also liked that they included real sound effects from the show and kept the general computer graphic design intact. They really crammed a lot into this game, so if you're a fan you'll enjoy that part of it, but if you're not into Star Trek then you probably won't. The big problem with Next Generation Futures Past is the combat, it's just really basic and really dull. Press A to shoot, hold Y and use the D pad to switch characters, and cycle through whatever items you have with the L and R buttons. Here it's cool that you can pick your away team, and each character does come with specific items, but you're pretty much always gonna want data in your party because he's data and he can do basically anything, and Wharf because he's the best at combat. Dr. Crusher comes with healing items, Lieutenant LeForge can see in the dark and use a tricorder, Picard can uh, lecture people about morality I guess, and Riker of course makes out with anyone and everyone. Nah those two are just kind of generic characters in this mode along with uh, Ensign Lian McDermott, Vince Matthews, who are these people? It's like I'm renting this from Blockbuster and these are all creative player characters that I'm stuck with from whoever played the game before me. I figured this was like NBA Jam and these are just people that worked on the game, but uh, no. I have no idea who these people are. If you do somehow, let me know in the comments. But yeah, Next Generation Futures Past is very loyal to the show and the bridge sequences are actually kind of cool, but the combat is lousy. What you see is what you get here, just crummy controls and generic enemy patterns. It seriously feels like I'm playing X-Men for NES. There's puzzles here and there, but they're very simple. There's no strategy beyond picking your away team. You just blast your way on by so you can get to the next thing you need to do. Same thing goes for the space battles, which are somehow even more generic. Again, I think this would have been seen as good enough for fans at the time and hey, maybe it is now since it does capture the show really well. But if you're not a fan, you're really not missing anything here. Let's move on to Star Trek Starfleet Academy Starship Bridge Simulator. Say that five times fast. Star Trek Starfleet Starship Star... This game was developed by an interplay for the Super Nintendo and released in January 1995 and it's not to be confused with the 1997 remake made by Interplay for PC which is simply titled Star Trek Starfleet Academy. Here you play as a Starfleet cadet who's just starting out with the goal being to graduate in four years. There's five simulated missions you need to complete each year and there is a password system to help you out. Again, the strength of this game is the bridge sequences. It feels a lot like Wind Commander in particular where you hang out and talk with other cadets and attend briefings and get yelled at by your superiors. No characters from any of the TV shows or movies are here. Just look-alikes like Totally Not Captain Kirk and Totally Not Lieutenant Uhura but there are a couple scenarios taken from movies like The Undiscovered Country and The Wrath of Khan. When you start a new game, you've got preset names to choose from and hey look, you can play as Scotty Too Hotty. The missions, meanwhile, start really simple to the point of being incredibly boring. It's pretty much just a long tutorial that you have to get through that includes things like patrolling areas and using the ship's tractor beam. You have to get a grade of at least 75% to pass each mission. Hey, seize, get degrees, man. Eventually, about 30 minutes into the game, you're finally at the point where you're shooting stuff and carrying out real missions but it's pretty clear right away that the action here is not the game's strength. The controls are clunky and slow to respond and the viewing area is frustratingly small. It feels like Dollar Tree Star Fox. Again, this game would have been sufficient for what it was trying to accomplish at the time. It's got some ambitious ideas, it's really immersive with a lot of attention to detail and the amount of interaction with all sorts of different characters from different backgrounds is kinda cool. Starfleet Academy is a game made for a very specific audience, namely kids who are really into Star Trek and on that front, this game succeeds. I'm sure there are lots of folks out there who will go to bat for this game because they played it as a kid and I totally get it. I was probably a little too old when this one came out so the interest wasn't really there for me but at a certain age, I would have eaten this up. But this is a channel about retro gaming and this is a video about whether or not this game has held up over time and on that front, I'd have to say no, it's very limited and very slow. This game also got a release on the Sega 32X and that's a better version since it performs faster and makes the combat a bit more palatable. But really, if this kind of game interests you, you should seek out the PC remake that I mentioned earlier. A game like this is ultimately meant for PC. And while the SNES tries and does manage to make this game kinda sorta interesting at times, you'd have to be a massive Star Trek fan with a lot of patience to sink any meaningful time into this one. Finally, there's Star Trek Deep Space Nine The Crossroads of Time made for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis by Novotrade. Again, another developer that was known for making PC games in the 80s like Impossible Mission 2. This is probably the most straightforward game of the three, but instead of having a centralized location for everything, you actually run around as Commander Sisko and I'm sorry, I can't help but laugh at this. Not just that Sisko runs like Thurman Thomas, I just imagine him actually running from place to place like this on the show and the entire time he's just out of breath and sweaty. Otherwise, the game layout is similar to the other two games, only this time there's a shady Cardassian ship and you ask Dax about it, but she says there's a problem with anti-protein emissions in lower Pylon 3, so you gotta send O'Brien out to fix it, but he's busy with the security grid, so Sisko decides to go himself, but first he's gotta modify his tricorder to read those specific emissions and if you don't know what any of that means, the game does not care. And you know what? I appreciate that, especially here. I mean, Deep Space Nine is kind of its own niche within Star Trek, which is a niche of science fiction, so if it's a niche within a niche, why not lean all the way into that, nuts to everyone else? The settings and story indicate that the game takes place toward the beginning of Season 1, despite being released in September 1995, when the show was already well past that. In other words, this is when Sisko still had his hair and hadn't grown a goatee yet. Again, like the other two games, the source material is represented really well. There's the promenade, quarks, Garrick is hanging around, you run into Dax, Kira, Odo, Bashir, Nog, and even Morne. And I'm guessing that they had to remove his dialogue from the game entirely because it just took up too much memory, that guy never shuts up. The big difference between the DS9 game and the other two games is that this one is a side-scrolling platformer. Once you figure out what to do, you have to carry out your mission with Sisko going all action hero and climbing around stuff and shooting the occasional enemy. And that's fine on the surface, but the game is not always forthcoming about what you need to do next. This is one of those games where you don't just have to talk to everyone, you have to talk to everyone in the right order, so you'll spend a lot of time sprinting around the station from person to person. Thankfully, the station isn't that huge, so it's not that bad, but it is annoying. The platforming itself is pretty lousy, too. This plays kinda like a cinematic platformer, you know, like Prince of Persia, except worse, with a viewing point that jolts your eyes back and forth to the point that I get a headache if I play this one for too long. This is one of those games where you just never get comfortable with the controls. There are other game modes here, like traveling through an asteroid field in a shuttlecraft, as well as playing different characters like Kira, Bashir, and Odo who can change forms and go through the vents to get from place to place. But that's really the only difference any of those characters have, and the shoot-em-up stages are just generic. I appreciate that the missions are at least different from each other, but finding out what to do is annoying, platforming is annoying, and the camera viewpoint is really annoying, and you'll find all those problems on the Sega Genesis version as well, since it's pretty much the same game. One thing I should mention about all three of these games is the music. Next Generation Futures Past has the classic Next Generation theme song, Deep Space Nine has its theme, and there's a couple other recognizable tunes as well. But the rest of the music in each of these titles is this totally bland video-gamey music that sounds more in place with something like Troy Aikman Football than it does Star Trek. So yeah, the three Star Trek games on Super Nintendo are fun novelties that firmly remain products of their time. Today, they're fun to check out for longtime fans just to see all these characters in 16-bit form, but you're really not going to want to sink any meaningful time into them. Resistance is not futile, it's encouraged. You can find much better Star Trek games from this era elsewhere. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.