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Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

aka: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (Enhanced CD-ROM)
Moby ID: 952
DOS Specs

Description official descriptions

Captain Kirk and the USS Enterprise are representatives of the United Federation of Planets. Their role in space is that of explorers as well as a military presence. The Enterprise routinely encounters strange adventures and bizarre situations, each laid out as a separate "episode" which must be played in order. The first episode involves the USS Enterprise being called to a world to investigate strange "demons" have appeared from the mines and begun attacking the settlers.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is based on the 1960s Star Trek TV series. The game is a combination of a point-and-click, side-scrolling adventure game and a first person starship simulator. This tie-in actually missed the 25th Anniversary of Star Trek's TV debut by half a year (nearly three years in the case of the Amiga version), but it uses the original series' characters and settings. Players directly control Captain Kirk, leader of the Starship Enterprise, and are able to give orders to other crew members. While the enterprise is on a peaceful mission, combat is possible. A new game begins on the bridge of the Enterprise, seen from a 3rd person view of Kirk, but a first person view out the viewscreen of the Enterprise. When on board the ship, Kirk can contact Chekov to assign a designation, raise shields or begin combat, contact Sulu to engage warp or adjust magnification, contact Spock to scan for data and search for keyword information, contact Uhura to deal with communications, and contact Scotty to change power allocation and repair damage and beam down to a planet. During combat, the player steers the Enterprise manually and is able to turn in 720 degrees of direction as well as increase or decrease speeds. Weaponry includes phaser banks which draw from the ship's energy and proton torpedoes which are in limited supply.

The adventuring bulk of the game comes in the form of many landing party missions, in which the player beams down to the surface of a planet and explores the situation. Kirk can move about on the screen, other crew members automatically follow him. From the menu, he chooses a body part to perform an action: eyes represent looking, mouth represents speaking, one hand represents using items (and crew members) while another is to pick up objects. Kirk carries an inventory of items collected which can be accessed and used at any time. In most missions Kirk will carry a communicator to contact the ship and a phaser weapon which can be set to "stun" or "kill", The point-and-click adventure has different solutions to problems, but the ideal goal of the federation is to solve things non-violently. Performance is rated accordingly as well as being based on how many extra discoveries and advances made and interaction with different beings, including aliens. The surroundings are all based on styles from the TV series and solutions to puzzles involve the skills of multiple crew members.

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 32 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 80 ratings with 5 reviews)

One of the best adventure games ever!

The Good
GRAPHICS: The graphics in this game are excellent. Full VGA graphics, with good animations and texturing overall makes this game a delight to look at.

INTERFACE: The game also excels in this. The interface is an intuitive "point and click" interface common in adventure games. There's the traditional inventory etc. Nothing radical, but it works very well.

SOUND: The game really stands out in this respect. Everyone returning from the series has the voice of the original actors. They deliver their dialogue in an extremely good manner. It's just like the television show in every respect. The weapon sounds also are top-notch. Overall, the sounds are excellent and serve to immerse you into the Star Trek atmosphere.

STORY: The missions in the game are essentially episodes of Star Trek. Occasionally they tie in with each other, but not often. However, the stories are excellent. There are multiple ways of completing the missions and many different outcomes, allowing for alot of playability.

COMBAT: Combat between ships is very arcade-like. You control everything with the mouse, firing your phasers and photon torpedoes. You aim, tell Scotty to repair damage to various systems etc. Overall, although simple, the combat is very fun and engaging, making for a nice change to the mostly non-violent adventures.

The Bad
Well, the game doesn't really have any flaws per se, except maybe that the "episodes" don't really have a unifying theme to them. A few elements may cross over (such as the Elasi Pirates) but generally they don't have much to do with each other.

Other than this minor nitpick, it's an excellent game!

The Bottom Line
There are some games that have a special quality that just makes them fun. be it Age of Empires, Civilization 3, or Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis, these games will always be among the best. This game is one of them.

DOS · by James Kirk (150) · 2005

One of the first games I bought, and one of the best!

The Good
When I was maybe ten years old, give or take a year or two, after saving up money from Christmas and my birthday, I convinced my dad to take me to Best Buy. Buying video games use to be much cooler than it is now; it use to be that you could walk into Best Buy or Toys R Us and see dozens of titles, even if it was just the covers. So looking around for something that I wanted to spend my money on, I happened to see this game called Star Trek 25th Anniversary on cd.

Well, since I already liked Star Trek, even at my young age, and since it featured the voices of the original cast, something my dad also found appealing, I decided to buy this game. And I played the heck out of it...

This is probably one of the few Star Trek games that developers manage to get right. Throughout the course of the game, you are primarily in control of Captain Kirk, either on foot or commanding the Starship Enterprise ("no bloody A, B..."). The game is divided into two segments: on foot away missions, and ship battles.

The game contains numerous "Episodes", that when played together actually hold a surprising well down story arc. On foot missions range from rescuing a derelict Starfleet vessel, being held on trial on the Klingon homeworld, meeting an ancient Aztec "god", and even an adventure involving Harry Mudd from the Original Series on television!

The ship battles are surprising well done also, and vary in difficulty. While in command as Kirk, you can order Uhuru to hail other ships, Spock to scan them, and even assign different divisions of the ship for Scotty to fix. Ship battles are not random, they only occur if you go to star systems you are not supposed to go to (Klingon, Romulan Neutral Zone, etc), but occasionally skirmishes happen during a routine mission.

The Bad
Speaking from nostalgia here, there was very little I didn't like about the game. It was probably the hardest game I played growing up, hard enough that I even wrote the company, Interplay, for a walkthrough. And amazingly, along with a note from somehow high in the corporation ( I want to say the president, but I can't recall) saying they were glad I enjoyed the game, they send me a hand typed walkthrough, as opposed to some cheap factory laminated thing.

So yeah, missions are hard if you are not use to Myst type games, and they are even harder if you want to achieve the best ranking on every mission.

And I never beat the game! The final battle is against an opponent every bit as cunning and as powerful as you are, and there are some conditions you need to uphold in order to beat them, and I could never quite do it.

The Bottom Line
This is one of those games that will probably be unfortunately lost to time. A classic to those who played it and remember it, it is one of those games that needs to be re-released for newer machines to be able to run it smoothly. But if you can find this game and have an older computer to run it, it is one of the best Star Trek games you will ever find, despite it's age. A true classic that, while never appearing on any Top 100 lists, always seems to get a nod or two by people.

DOS · by STU2 (52) · 2005

Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike, everyone needs to play this game :-)

The Good
Alright. In actuality, I am not a Trekkie. I do enjoy the show, particularly the original, Next Generation, and Voyager, a good bit. I'm sorry, but DS9 just doesn't appeal to me. Anyway, obviously people who go to conventions dressed as Klingons (and moreover bother to learn the language) would find just about any Trek game satisfying. But this is truly Gaming Goodness (to use the PC Gamer terminology) and I wouldn't doubt that almost any person who enjoys adventure gaming would enjoy this program. Even if there were no Star Trek legacy behind it, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is a great play.

First off, the quality is evident everywhere. The graphics, sound, and voice-acting are all top-notch for the era. No skimping here, people. The environments look like you would expect to see in the original Trek. Only better, thanks to computer graphics. Then the voice acting seems to be done by at least some of the original actors, as it is authentic as these things come. No flatness, almost no awkwardness. It's, for the most part, natural and believable. Combined with the dialogue, which is usually well written (there are campy moments from time to time), the speech in the game serves to bring you into it and keep you there.

Plots are vintage Star Trek. And, after all, isn't one of the things which kept us coming back to the TV series the great, often bizaare plotlines? It probably wasn't the female crew in short skirts. Or was it? Be that as it may, the plotlines here are great for the most part. Without repeating stale plotlines from the show, 25th Anniversary succeeds in bringing the best of the show's feel and blending it with good puzzles to create excellent game content.

Finally, there is actually replayability here. What?? In an adventure game?? Yes! After each mission, you are presented with a rating that tells you how well you did at completing your tasks in the best Star Fleet tradition (yes, that does usually mean non-violence). Not only are you here to solve puzzles, but, in like a good Star Fleet officer, you are a diplomat and explorer as well. So don't miss out any chance to make a good impression on the other beings that you meet throughout the game. This ratings system is where the replayability comes in. There is alot of motivation to come back and see what you might have done differently for a better score.

The Bad
At times the music was rather annoying, despite it being good on the whole.

Also, the game is rather short. Especially if you like it as much as me. Why can't they make more like this?

And finally, there were a couple places where you could get stuck because you missed something in a previous area (like the ship).

The Bottom Line
If you like adventure gaming, this one's one of the best in the business. In my opinion, it stands with such classics as Gabriel Knight and Monkey Island.

DOS · by Steelysama (82) · 2000

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Gameplay Help And Wan Feb 20, 2009

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The PC version of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Copy protection

The game used a star map as a copy protection scheme. Without the manual, you could not navigate to the next mission.

Install time

The game was rather infamous in its day for having the most excrutiatingly long install process imaginable, despite being on only five 5.25" hd disks (resp. eight of type 3.5" dd). Average install times ran around 90 minutes. In addition, the sequel, Star Trek: Judgment Rites, had a very long install time also, at least 90 minutes, because as well as copying the data from several floppies, it had to decompress the data on the hard drive up to three times. The data files were compressed multiple times using ARJ and Sonarc was used for audio files (on top of ARJ compression). All this was very slow on PCs back then.

Manual

The manual had a rather silly error in their epileptics warning message: Avoid playing when tired. Play for no more than one hour at a time. Sit well away from the screen, preferably no closer than ten feet.

Music

Interplay faithfully reproduced several music themes from the TV show. The game is configurable to play with several sound cards and even supported General Midi.

Releases

The game was rereleased in a "talkie" CD-ROM after they became the norm. Interplay went the extra mile and reassembled the entire original crew for the production.

References

With the possible exception of Ensign Kije, all of the so-called "redshirts" in this game are named after members of the development team. By episode, they are as follows:* Ensign Everts ("Demon World"), * Lt. Christensen and Crewman Simpson ("Hijacked"), * Lt. Ferris ("Love's Labor Jeopardized"), * Lt. Buchert ("Another Fine Mess"), * Lt. Stragey and Ensign Bennie ("Feathered Serpent"), * and Ensign Mosher ("That Old Devil Moon").

In the final episode, "Vengeance", if you look at the accompanying Security Officer while on the bridge of the U.S.S. Republic, the message will read: "Ensign Kije, who wishes that Lieutenant Stackpole had drawn this assignment." Michael A. Stackpole is, of course, one of the writers.

Information also contributed by 6⅞ of Nine, EddyB43, Scott Monster, and WizardX

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Related Sites +

  • GOG.com
    The game is available for sale (digital download) on this site.

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  • MobyGames ID: 952
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by IJan.

Amiga added by Martin Smith. Windows, Linux added by MAT. Macintosh added by 88 49.

Additional contributors: MAT, Roedie, Alaka, Martin Smith, Timo W., karnak1, FatherJack.

Game added March 3, 2000. Last modified August 2, 2024.