Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

The Good
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary puts you in control of the original men and women of the star ship named, Enterprise. This science fiction adventure game features impressive graphics, sound and many familiar faces from the 1960's television series mixed in with a few first person perspective space ship battles.

The Bad
The away team missions can sometimes be unnecessarily difficult because of a few faults. First, your other crew members attempt to follow you around (i.e. Mickey Mousecapde or Gilligan's Island) and need to be protected. Second, you cannot move diagonally and will sometimes find yourself blocked by seemingly small things like a bush or thin wall. Third, the hit detection is less then perfect and some of the enemies are difficult to see. Fourth, if you beam up before completing an away mission you have to restart from the beginning. Last, but not least, die hard Star Trek fans will note a few inconsistencies with the storyline.

The Bottom Line
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary features above average graphics and sound, along with a good, albeit not perfect, understanding of the franchises cannon. Most of the time, you are on a planet in a point n' click, science fiction, graphic adventure format. But, their are a few real time strategy elements during the space ship battles. If you can get by the game's major faults, then you will enjoy the ride.

The Good
The game tries to capture the feel of the original Star trek with a mixture of ship-based activities and away team missions. When on board ship you are really given the impression that you are in control, being able to check on the status of the ship (although most of the positions never need checking).

The story plays out like a normal episode of Star Trek, complete with occasional 'witty' cats with various members of crew, and the obligatory summing up of the adventure at the end of the bridge. This is nice, though fairly sparse throughout the game.

Most of the game takes place on various planets, where a landing party of your choice beams down the planet to investigate. This section feels like an rpg of the time, such as Zelda, where the tasks mostly revolve around collecting item A, and trading it for item B. This repetition is broken up through occasional action, and the necessity of choosing the right landing party member for the right task.

The graphics are a mixed bag. There is a nice animated introduction, emulating the opening sequence. The on board ship graphics are also done fairly well (though the bridge characters are too cartoony compared to the cut-scene animations).

For an early machine such as the NES this is a fairly well presented game, which does echo some of the feel of the programme.

The Bad
The game does fall short of actually capturing the spirit of the show, as it relies too heavily on inventory swapping, rather than showing the characters to have any real personality. There is only one way to complete every activity, which is generally made clear through hints given whenever anything is picked up, or characters spoken too.

Choosing your away team is a nice touch, but has the downside of only allowing three members to a team, with different tasks on the planets requiring different team members, resulting in constantly beaming up and down with different crew. This is further worsened by not being able to skip the lengthy beaming animation.

The planetary graphics are nice and convey a large planet, but all the characters on the planet are hollow and only ever want one thing to help you progress. Plus anything on the planet of any significance is always used in the story, making it easy to tell what to do.

Starship combat (I only encountered this once) was confusing, and required killing things, something at odds with the planetary missions.

The Bottom Line
Looks and plays like an early simplified version of the later PC 25th anniversary game. As such doesn't feel quite as smooth.

Still an enjoyable if short and easy game, good for a Trekkie looking to play a quick dash of the original series.

The Good
The 1960s Star Trek television series didn't just launch a multi media franchise. It promoted the optimistic idea that humanity would not only boldly explore the unknown stars, but conquer racism, bigotry, political oppression, poverty and most diseases. It's a nice idea to see in science fiction, let alone a video game.

As the original Television series was celebrating its 25th Anniversary, several licsensed Star Trek video games were released. The NES game features some amazing 8-bit graphics, and series of action/adventure missions lifted from the series.

Each mission involves a familiar group of crewmembers landing on a new planet in order to interact with the locals and solve some [mostly] inventory based puzzles.

Periodically, you also have to command the Enterprise for some action packed, intergalactic battles.

Successfully completing the missions [and surving the action sequences] advances a larger story along, which connects to events from the television series in a nice manner. All in all, this is an incredibly well designed, 8-bit video game that respects the original source material.

The Bad
Sometimes the puzzles in the game are made more difficult because of poor design or the hardware limitations of the NES. It's not a problem with inventory based puzzles, but their are a few times where a puzzle is made extra difficult because you have to look at detailed patterns located on small bricks.

A more common problem with missions involves how the game handles death. If you need to restart a mission, i.e. because your characters have taken too much damage, the game has you retracing a lot of the progress you made before having to be beamed up to the Enterprise.

Hence, while you essentially have unlimited extra lives, it can get annoying having to retrace your progess each time you beam down. Passwords keep this from becoming too frustrating, but it does require some patience.

Lastly, the space ship battles are not terribly fun. They are OK. I'm not sure how else they could be designed for a NES game, but these arcade sequences were less fun to play, then the missons. Fortunately, their aren't too many of them.

The Bottom Line
Star Trek comes to life superbly on the NES. The graphics recreate the look and feel of the original Television series. The gameplay combines adventure gaming with some fast-paced space ship battles. All the main crewmembers appear, along with the obligatory "red shirts ". Fans of the series will recognize other characters, creatures and plot elements