Star Trek: 25th Anniversary PC Game
Interplay Productions released Star Trek: 25th Anniversary for IBM PC MS-DOS 2.1 in 1992.
In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary the player assumes the role of captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is a hybrid of adventure game and space sim(-lite). The campaign is comprised of seven scenarios: Demon World, Hijacked, Love's Labor Jeopardized, Another Fine Mess, Feathered Serpent, That Old Devil Moon and Vengeance.
At the end of each scenario Star Fleet Command assigns the player a score based on their performance. Commendation points result in increased crewmen efficiency on Enterprise.
There are two modes of play: Bridge and Landing Party.
On the Bridge of the USS Enterprise commands can be issued to the crewman and starship systems and a space map can be accessed. The starship is controlled in a sprite-scaled viewport, as in Wing Commander of 1990.
Kirk handles the Captain's log and transporter; Scott handles power allocation and repairs; Chekov handles warp-speed navigation and weapons systems; Spock handles sensors and library computer; Uhura handles communications; and Sulu handles orbiting, starship-maneuvering and deflector shields.
In dogfighting the Enterprise goes up against Klingon Battle Cruisers, Romulan War-birds and Elasi pirate ships. The Enterprise can fire phasers and photon torpedoes.
In Landing Party mode Kirk is controlled as per LucasFilm point-and-click adventure games. However, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary features more in the way of dialogue and descriptions via crewman. In essence, Spock and McCoy can be queried in order to solve puzzles (they auto-act depending on context). Spock uses a Tricorder for sensing and scanning whereas McCoy uses a Medical Kit for diagnostics. Security Officers accompany the landing party.
Verb commands are Talk, Look, Get and Use. Items are added to an inventory when collected. The landing party wields phasers that can be switched between stun and dematerialization.
Icon-based menus overlay the drawpaces in both bridge and landing party modes of play. Hotkeys and hardware mouse cursor are employed.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary displays in 256-color VGA 320x200 or 16-color EGA 320x200.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary requires an i80286-10 MHz CPU and 550K of free conventional RAM. The program can take advantage of EMS RAM. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary supports keyboard, mouse and joystick controls.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary audio supports PC Internal Speaker, Roland LAPC-1, Roland MT-32, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro and Pro Audio Spectrum.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary was distributed on 5x 5.25" 1.2MB HD floppy disks or 8x 3.5" 720kB DD diskettes and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Interplay Install Utility. The install size is 7 megs and consists of 7 files.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary was designed by Elizabeth T. Danforth, Jayesh J. Patel, Bruce Schlickbernd, Michael A. Stackpole and Scott Bennie; programmed by Jayesh J. Patel and Paul Edelstein; and drawn by Todd J. Camasta and David A. Mosher.
Overall, I give Star Trek: 25th Anniversary 6/10. It's a good Star Trek game, no question. However, on a technical level the game is no masterpiece. For example, the ship sprite-scaling and actor pathfinding are poor even by 1990s standards. In addition, the graphics are too dark and the landing party scenes do not always take advantage of full resolution (320x200).
More dogfighting in space:
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