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Star Trek Video Games - Set Minefields to Stun

| Print | E-mail Written by Chris Earl Sunday, 08 May 2011

It's a Different Medium – You Idiot!

It's a different medium, you idiot! Star Trek Videogame edition.

By Chris Earl chris.earl@starburstmagazine.com

This month I am combining two subjects that I have been fond of for many years, Star Trek and video games. One of the things that has always struck me about Star Trek games is that many of them are either of average quality or just down-right awful. Below I give a brief history of Star Trek games, examine the reasons that they fail and what has and can yet be done to succeed.

Early days and the early-mid 1990s

Star Trek was one of the first franchises to get the video game tie-in treatments, with interactive text games available as early as 1971. The 1980s saw, in large part, the recycling of the same ship-to-ship combat that many will recognise from the classic ‘Asteroids’. In 1989 Start Trek V: The Final Frontier became the first Trek movie to have a video game tie-in to call its very own. This saw a return to the text-based puzzle, but utilised hand-drawn graphics. The highlight of early Trek games came in the form of 1992’s (one year late) 25th Anniversary. This point and click adventure’s story was set out like several episodes of the original series and featured adventures from the bridge of the Enterprise as well as leading away teams as Captain Kirk. The game was so successful that it earned a sequel, Judgement Rites, which came out the following year.

As the popularity of the CD-ROM increased into the mid-90s games companies started to experiment, Simon & Schuster brought out two ‘interactive movies’, Klingon and Borg. This basically consisted of two hours worth of footage that the gamer sat and watched, occasionally clicking the screen to make a ‘choice’. As the footage was captured with FMV and disc space was limited however, if you chose the wrong choice, you were forced to go back to do it again.

Deep Space Nine got its own game in 1996 in the form of Harbinger. An odd mix of action-adventure and RPG, Harbinger suffered for trying to be too much like the TV show and not being particularly user friendly in the control system. Rather than play as one of the main characters, you were Envoy Bannick, a visiting diplomat who ends up helping a DS9 skeleton crew through a murder investigation and a mystery involving a new alien race from the Gamma quadrant.

Late 1990s and early 2000s

Considered by many fans to be the golden age of Star Trek games, there were over thirty Star Trek games produced during this period. I can personally attest to how gripping the games could be; in my younger days, I nearly failed an English exam because I had been playing Birth of the Federation all morning instead of revising (I ended up writing about Star Trek). The game itself was a turn-based strategy game in which players could chose to control one of the five major powers (Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian or Ferengi) as they spread throughout the galaxy. You had control over ship and resource building, diplomacy, research, spy networks and fleet direction. The populations of each empire reacted to your actions according to how the show had defined their personality. Ferengi for example were happiest when you brought in a lot of money through diplomacy; Klingons happiest when subjugating minor races and at war with other empires; Romulans and Cardassians had great skill for subterfuge. I still find myself coming back to play this game even now, nearly 12 years later.

Pre-dating BotF by one year, the so-called golden age was kicked off with the release of Klingon Honour Guard, a first-person shooter based around everyone’s favourite warrior race. This was on of the first games to utilise the first version of the Unreal engine, later versions would power games like Batman: Arkham Asylum. The first person shooter format was later followed by the successful Voyager: Elite Force and its sequel which focused on Starfleet officers combating the Borg.

Continuing the Klingon theme; Klingon Academy (the superior sequel to ‘97s Starfleet Academy) served as a prequel piece to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and allows the player to control large state ships and smaller Birds of Prey in battles against the Federation. The gameplay encouraged players to use their surroundings as weapons; trapping enemy ships in a planet’s gravity field or ambushing them in a nebula were as essential as blasting enemies with your disruptors.

Late 2000s to the future

Astoundingly, J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot of Star Trek was not seized upon as a platform to launch new Trek games. The lack-lustre D.A.C. was the only game that audiences were gifted. This means that there have only been six Star Trek games released over the last seven years, compared to the 30+ brought out in the seven years previous. To cap it off, last year the much-anticipated Star Trek Online was released to a listless sigh as critics found the gameplay to be repetitive and boring.

Sadly with the end of Star Trek on TV, we have seen a decline in not only the number, but the quality of Star Trek games. Is this down to what Rick Berman has called ‘franchise-fatigue’? Partially. More likely it is the lack of a guiding plan for the universe mixed with the lack of excitement from the fans. I know that when DS9 ended, much of my enthusiasm for the Star Trek banner dwindled with it. I knew that I had the series’ and movies on VHS and could watch them whenever I liked, I knew that I had the games on CD-ROM and could boot them up whenever I liked. However with new releases of good video games, I’m certain that my enthusiasm would not have lost its vigour.

Why then can’t game developers deliver consistently good Star Trek games?

Story structure: The real pitfall of crossing media

Now here in lays the main problem when translating videogames to movies (and vice versa). The main reason for videogame and TV & movie crossovers not being as good as their counterparts: story structure and characterisation. A video is considered to be feature-length when it lasts 75 minutes+ and most movies come in between an hour and a half and two hours. Videogames, however, last anywhere between 6 and 60 hours. The plot and character content of which can be minimal, by which I mean you could spend thirty seconds watching a cutscene for every hour you spend platforming or hack'n'slashing. So videogames either have too many plot points or too few for a writer to be able to translate it directly into a screenplay. A game has the first hour to deliver exposition and introduce the characters. A movie has to do it in twenty minutes. A game has several levels over which to bombard you with set-pieces of action and adventure. A movie probably has time to fit in three or four at the most.
A game can forget story and characterisation during certain parts of its levels. Every part of a movie should reveal more about the plot and characterisation. These very different structures make it very difficult to get all the elements to work right. It might be a cinematic game, but if you can't get the movie's structure right, it's going to suck.

Every time you hear an argument against videogame tie-ins, take these catchphrases into your hearts and repeat:
It was intended to be a movie, so of course the movie is better.
It was intended to be a game, so of course the game is better.

Star Trek: An Exception?

Star Trek however, is one of those rare beasts that refuses to be caged by any one medium. Over the years there have been several instances where it has been a TV show, a cartoon, a comic book, a novel, a movie, a board game, a role-playing game and a video game. This is also one of the reasons that we have such a variety of video games; Star Trek doesn’t stick to just one genre. So unfortunately, our catchphrases don’t always apply. The key to Star Trek’s flexibility is the creators of each project being able to take the essence of Star Trek and apply it to their chosen medium. This is one of two key features; capturing the essence of the show, not trying to force a straight adaptation.

The second key feature has to be engagement. It must be fun, interesting, exciting, compelling, thrilling and satisfying. If there are characters to interact with, then I must be made to feel something for them. If it’s not any of these things, then why should I play it?

Due to the wealth of source material to draw on, it is very rare that we actually see a direct translation of one story, but rather new stories based upon series’ or the universe as a whole. This means that whilst we don’t get much of the pacing problems that other franchise videogames have to deal with, there are still key points that a successful games developer must cover. DS9: Harbinger’s plot could have been easily translated to an early episode of the show (it even used the series’ cast to voice the game) and it was interesting in places, but its clunky game mechanics made it too slow paced and ultimately boring and frustrating. Star Trek: Borg was incredibly true to the source material, even using Q’s ability to manipulate time to explain how you can fail and replay. However, it was not fun.

On the other hand, by cleverly utilising actors Christopher Plummer and David Warner, Klingon Academy did well to tie the game’s events into Star Trek VI; General Chang would eventually have you pilot his Bird of Prey. The game definitely felt like Star Trek and it certainly was massive fun to watch your photon torpedoes shred holes in the hull of the Enterprise. Birth of the Federation was both addictive and true to the exploration and domination traits of the major powers of the Alpha (and Beta) quadrants. Despite this however, there have been few Star Trek games that have sufficiently captured both key features and with no current TV series and no serious movie tie-ins I find myself doubting that we will ever get another good Star Trek game. Part of the problem of course is that Star Trek isn’t easy to pin down. It’s a drama, it’s science-fiction; it’s space combat, it’s personal combat; it’s talky, it’s action-packed. How is it possible to capture the feeling of a series that is so broad?

I type this knowing that hardcore Trekkers/ies may well get upset with me, but I think that developers must look to Star Wars for inspiration. In 2003, Bioware brought out the seminal RPG, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. This is in my opinion the greatest video game ever and it would be very easy for Star Trek to adopt its model; a model which could cover a greater span of the Star Trek experience. A cadet joins with their crew to explore different planets, meeting and helping a myriad of alien life forms, solving problems, leading away-missions and fighting ship-to-ship, during which time the crew learn more about each other and form relationships. As long as the developer remembers to keep the balance between Trek and fun, then this could be the formula for a great Star trek game.

Comments

0 #4 Chris Earl 2012-01-30 16:56

Now that Star Trek Online ahs gone free-to-play, I've finally had a chance to get my teeth into it and have no idea where the bad reviews came from. It's definitely one of the better Trek games, if not the best. It would be nice to be able to chat with your crew members, but I suppose we can't have everything.

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+1 #3 Tom Roberts 2011-07-15 08:58

I was addicted to Birth of the Federation! I agree about the KotoR reference - and actually think that Mass Effect is a good template. There's something about building a crew, forming relationships and so on that - with a couple of tweeks - is a great Star Trek game hiding at Bioware.

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