Star Trek: Generation Info

MicroProse launch, and their trek license suffers

Star Trek: Generations was the last film to feature William Shatner as Captain Kirk and the FIRST film to feature Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard.

MicroProse thought it would be a good idea to make a game based on the film...so they did...with disastrous results.

The game itself was a mix of 2 different engines, FPS and standard 2d scrolling for the ship type scenes. By opting to incorporate a first-person viewpoint, the developers have attempted to bring the player closer to the action and at the same time introduce a strong exploration vein a la System Shock. Generations most certainly isn't a 3D shoot 'em up. Sure, you have to pull out your phaser in the game, but if you start getting too trigger-happy, you'll just end up in a bit of a mess as far as the campaign/storyline goes. Consequently, a lot of the game is spent exploring the different environments and getting your bearings. This would be okay if the engine could cope with detail. Sadly, it's just not up to it. When you consider that nearly half the screen is taken up with your control console/inventory, it doesn't make sense. Even when compared to the latest 3D Realms stuff, such as Blood and Shadow Warrior or LucasArts' Outlaws, it looks cumbersome and dated. There just isn't enough going on. The characters move like the wooden cut-outs in The Great Escape and the levels all look very angular and sparse. It's like walking around a half-dressed movie set. On the plus side, there are lots of them, and they're pretty varied, but they're just not interesting enough and you never feel as though you're immersed in what's going on. It would help if you could have conversations with other characters, but ultimately it's all very limited. If they'd opted to license the Quake or Unreal engine, it would have been a different story. Maybe next time?

As far as the structure of the game goes, it's pretty much based on the plot of the film, and therefore it's pretty linear. The player supposedly has access to a bit of the universe (roughly eight or nine different 'systems'), which must be explored to get to McDowell and the next 3D Doom-like section, but really you have to follow a set path otherwise you'll find that nothing much happens.

This is all done in Stellar Cartography, with Picard and Data exchanging concerned looks and brief musings on the nature of evil, and makes up one of the three main sections of the game. The idea is that you scan a system to find signs of Soran, and then you nip over there at Warp Nine and beam down to his location to try to stop him.

This would have been fine if it had been as open and free as was intended. What actually happens is that you just nip from one system to another doing absolutely sod all until you either find him or run out of time and have to watch another star system get destroyed (which signals the end of your game).

The game itself COULD have been something good, but the players who bought the game felt they were cheated and MicroProse never really recovered after that.

For more details....

NO SITES FOR Generations

Write up by Nikki Venra

29/10/2002