Some games are old, some are new-ish, but they’re all experiences we’d love to share.
Greetings, Arsians! We love games here at the Ars Orbiting HQ, and I’m not just talking the latest AAA blockbusters—we love all kinds of games, from modern to ancient and all points in between.
With that in mind, we’re trying something different for the next few months to see how it goes: We’ve partnered with the folks at GOG.com to create a store page featuring a hand-curated list of some of our favorites from GOG’s catalog. At the end of every month, we’ll rotate a couple of titles off the list and add a few new ones; altogether, we have a list of about 50 games to set in front of you.
(Please forgive the messy affiliate link—it points to https://www.gog.com/en/partner/ArsTechnica if you’d prefer to go there directly, but arriving on GOG’s site via that affiliate link gives Ars a small portion of revenue for anything you buy during your session once you’re there. This helps us out quite a bit!)
About twice a month, we’ll publish an article like this one, where we’ll feature one of the games from the list—perhaps a retro game you’ve heard of, perhaps a modern title you missed. Regardless, GOG will have a DRM-free version of the game ready to go.
This is the first step in what will hopefully be a broader partnership where we’ll offer neat stuff like GOG discount codes; keep your eyes peeled and I’ll have the second July post in a couple of weeks with more details!
This week’s game is Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
There weren’t a lot of great Star Trek gaming options in the early ’90s. If you wanted to put on your genuine licensed Starfleet uniform and save the galaxy in a starship named Enterprise, you were limited primarily to janky text-based titles like Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative.
That changed with the 1992 release of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, or ST25 to its friends, which brought the original series Enterprise and its crew to life in glorious 256-color VGA. And to players’ vast relief, it was not a half-baked effort—locations like the Enterprise bridge were lovingly recreated, with beautiful atmospheric sound effects lifted straight from the TV show permeating every scene. The character art is sharp, and it’s easy to tell Bones from Spock. The entire game is like a love letter to OG Trek.
Ah, that old Enterprise bridge feeling.
Credit: GOG / Interplay
Ah, that old Enterprise bridge feeling. Credit: GOG / Interplay
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the time, ST25 is a mouse-driven point-and-click adventure game. It’s broken up into seven discrete chapters, with each chapter being a self-contained mission with problems to solve and objectives to accomplish. Starfleet Command is always watching—complete the minimum number of objectives and an admiral will give you a middling performance review. Go above and beyond and do everything, even your bonus objectives, and you’ll have lavish praise heaped upon you by a grateful admiralty.
The missions themselves tend to follow a pattern. Each starts with the crew of the Enterprise on the bridge as Kirk makes a log entry. Starting with the CD-ROM issue of the game, all the lines are fully voiced by the original cast, so every mission kicks off with Bill Shatner’s familiar “Captain’s log…” lead-in telling us what we need to examine, investigate, locate, or shoot at. (Sadly, the only major voice cast omission in this one is Majel Barrett as the computer.)
Then there’s what I always felt was the weakest part of the game: Most missions kick off with some sort of space battle, where the player has to awkwardly maneuver the Enterprise with the mouse, dodging phaser blasts and photon torpedoes (or just eating them because the controls are just that awful) and trying to blow the other ship up before it does the same to you.
That’s never a good sign.
Credit: Interplay / GOG
That’s never a good sign. Credit: Interplay / GOG
Then, if you survive the mandatory space battle, you’ll find yourself as Jim Kirk beaming down to a mysterious planet or over to an abandoned ship or station, scanning things with your tricorder and shooting things with your phaser. You’re accompanied by a small landing party, most often made up of Spock, McCoy, and a redshirt, and no, the redshirt does not always make it back to the ship.
There’s the sparkling Bones-n-Spock repartee we know and love.
Credit: Interplay / GOG
There’s the sparkling Bones-n-Spock repartee we know and love. Credit: Interplay / GOG
The game is at its best during these away missions, each of which is unique and all of which are absolutely swimming in note-perfect TOS nostalgia, from the sound effects to the visual design and intent. Layer on top of that some banter between McCoy and Spock while you work through some good ol’ combine-object-X-with-object-Y adventure game puzzles, and you have an engaging and atmospheric little game, with enough complexity to keep you busy for at least a dozen hours or so.
Small containers of colored liquids? Smells like an adventure game puzzle to me.
Credit: Interplay / GOG
Small containers of colored liquids? Smells like an adventure game puzzle to me. Credit: Interplay / GOG
And great news: If you really fall in love with the game, there’s a sequel: Star Trek: Judgment Rites. Judgment Rites is essentially a straight continuation of ST25, made with the same engine, voice cast (this time with Majel Barrett), type of missions, and commitment to detail.
Feel like giving Star Trek: 25th Anniversary a whirl? Grab it for $9.99 on the GOG store! The GOG-packaged bundle works out of the box on Windows and Linux, and since the GOG version is powered by DOSBox internally, making it work on a Mac should require only minor surgery.
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Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.
