Star Trek Voyager Elite Force (PS2, 2001)

Taken from the game’s credit sequence rather than the usual title menu that I show.

Otherwise known as Star Trek Troopers. I played this back in June and wrote this around then, but held it back until a little after the midterms because I assumed I’d be doing some political content. This’ll get ya through Thanksgiving anyway.

Non-Sequitur, but I think Species 8472 look like a race of mutant Mewtwos. Maybe the legendary Mewthree? I say Mewtwo is more adorable than 8472- just a big ol’ grumpy kitty.

Species 847Mew2.

The Story

Your starship was transported into an alternate dimension, its power is being drained, and this is totally not related to the plot of “The Void” which is the same thing but probably was made a few weeks after this game. While in the void, you must fight other folks who were sucked into it and the creators of said void.

You play as a member of the Federation Starship Voyager‘s designated fighting team for places outside the ship. Given that normally there’s a detachment of Marines on ships for this kind of thing, I guess this makes you a Space Marine. Unlike other Space Marines in video games who load a ton of weapons on their backs, this game actually gives a logical explanation using existing technology from the Star Trek universe for why your character doesn’t appear to have a ton of weapons and isn’t weighed down by all of them yet still has access to all of them in combat. This automatically boosts it a couple of points in my view.

They had the TV show’s opening credits, but with the game’s credits (that’s where the first screenshot on this page is from). Except the music was replaced with exactly what you’d expect if you said “can I have something like the Voyager theme but legally different?”

The Game

It’s a first-person shooter using the Quake engine. It took me 19 years or more to beat it legitimately, based on an old save file on my memory card that showed it took me almost 9 hours to reach a spot that this time around it took me less than 4. Maybe the improvement has something to do with the fact that leading up to this I played all the Doom FPS games and only finished playing the add-ons for Doom Eternal a few weeks prior. Some of the same strategies apply, in fact this game even has its own version of Doom 2016’s/Doom Eternal’s Hell Knights except most of the time you fight them they don’t have the space to jump and they have projectiles.

The Bad

The graphics are… well, it is 2001. For the in-game people, it’s like if someone tried to upgrade GoldenEye 64 for the PS2. Not a far trip between the two. The graphics for the stages were pretty good, though once in a while they’d glitch up on you.

Speaking of glitching up, it DOES NOT like skipping cutscenes. In the final boss battle I skipped a cutscene and it kept freezing me in place long enough to take a hit, but that was still better than the first time I skipped the cutscene which led to the entire game freezing. It does like to freeze, at one point I had only played it for like 6 hours according to the save menu and yet it must’ve frozen 3 or more times in that short period of play. One time it even froze in the middle of a battle while the controller still had the “vibrate” command coming to it, so the controller just kept rumbling even a few seconds after I restarted the system.

Now we come to one other thing- framerate. It runs nice and smooth when there aren’t that many enemies, but there are sections where you get swarmed like in Doom 2016/Doom Eternal (or Doom 2 Map 10). Then the framerate drops to where it’s hard to aim and move. It goes from the framerate on the smooth PC Doom to the framerate on Doom 3DO. Luckily it’s usually not long, all you need to do is kill a few enemies and unlike in the Doom games that I mentioned previously as having framerate issues the level design has nothing to do with it. It’s just too many enemies running around.

The Good

The environments are pretty good, and there are some I’d have loved to see more of or spend more time in (namely the original Enterprise-lookin’ areas and Voyager itself). Disappointingly one of those wasn’t available on multiplayer, but there is a map for Voyager in multiplayer for you to run around with some friends trying to kill each other.

I think engineers, architects, and computer science folks have nightmares that look like this: 4 starships from different species at different levels of technological evolution (and from different universes too!) somehow merged to form a space station.

Multiplayer is another high point on this one. You just need your one console to do split screen… and a big enough TV which is no problem now but back 19-20 years ago when I first got this it was.

They actually got the main cast for Voyager to come in and do the voices, and even had some minor characters from the series reappear- and voiced by the same actors. Pretty cool! And the voice acting was actually good, everyone seemed to be taking it seriously.

The story as well was good, it felt a little Star Trekky. You meet aliens that start hostile but turn out friendly, you try to reason with enemies sometimes. While you shoot everything that moves, there’s always an explanation like either a misunderstanding or the enemy ignoring friendly overtures, and in some cases shooting it out is not even the preferred method of advancing through the game. Contrast that with Star Trek: Invasion where the Star Trekky stuff is pretty limited, where almost all of the game is just blowing stuff up while making sure your own stuff doesn’t get blown up- a story set in the Star Trek universe rather than a Star Trek story.

My Opinion

I liked it. It’s too long and involved to be more than once every several years, but it’s good. And did I forget to mention that it’s the only “Star Trek Voyager” video game? So that combined with how well done it was should be a major selling point… to someone somewhere I’m sure.

I should probably try the PC version; the graphics look better. I doubt it has the framerate issues and some glitches this version had. The PC version and the PS2 version are about the same price as of this writing for the disc alone, but you might need a CD key and might have trouble running something made for Windows 98 on modern hardware (I’ve tried running some contemporary games in “compatibility mode” on modern hardware, but had lousy results) so I’d say the PS2 version would be easier to get going.

Seems I forgot to grab a Game Over pic, though sometimes when I beat the game I don’t bother with one. Anyway, here’s the game’s version of the Doom 2016 Hell Knight.

Star Trek: Invasion (PlayStation, 2000)

I played it towards the middle of June, but kind of put off reviewing it and posting in general as usual.

The Story

Sometimes you have to tow things to your “mobile outpost”

Starfleet decided to build an aircraft carrier, even though technically a couple of ships they already have could serve as one and probably do a better job. So to up the ante they also made their aircraft carrier “a mobile outpost”, whatever that means. It’s not particularly big- it’s half the size of the average capital ship Starfleet used (it’s about the size of America’s second and third aircraft carriers, commissioned in 1927, though while those could carry 78 contemporary aircraft the Typhon can only carry 26 starfighters. You never see that many in the game though…). Your “mobile outpost” is deployed to a small section of the galaxy that oddly looks like a galaxy of its own and must chase away four foreign powers plus some space creatures trespassing on Federation turf.

It’s ironic that you are here enforcing the Federation’s borders when a mere 22 years after this game came out (and about that many years in-universe after this game takes place) we would learn that the Federation thinks having a border is racist, but there you go (then again, that whole story arc in the 2nd season of Star Trek: Picard started with a fleet of warships being assembled to murder border crossers and the butcherers were supposed to be the GOOD GUYS, so that show’s messaging is all over the place. But it was written by the same people who repeatedly voted for kids to be put in cages, voted for the humanitarian disaster at the southern border, voted against someone who prevented crises like this, then lied about border agents brutalizing illegals and tried to hide that there was a crisis, and now are building the very border wall they said was racist, so I guess really it’d be a surprise if the messaging WAS consistent from these hypocrites.).

Also, if you thought Voyager made the Borg look weak, wait’ll you play this!

The Game

You fly one of several fighters in this space dogfight simulation. For those Star Trek fans out there who watched the new Top Gun this year and were like “I wanna do that with Worf giving me the orders” then this is the game for you. In later stages you begin having a variety of fighters to choose from, each with unique weapons. There are secret weapons you can pickup by doing random things you’d never ever in your life think about doing, and some of these are worth getting. You also have three possible endings, though one of them you won’t see if you beat a certain bonus level early in the game… however, there is a weapon in that level that makes the game easier. You can’t just pickup a weapon and exit a level; you have to beat the level too.

Sometimes you aren’t just shooting stuff. You get to plant mines and tow things too. One particularly frustrating level has you towing a shuttle with a glass keel and paper hull that the enemy shoots lasers at with the striking power of tactical nukes.

Once in a while it shifts from flying your fighter around to manning one of the A.A. batteries on the Typhon. Looks like there’s only two of them on the whole ship, and they never are used when you are flying a fighter, but darn are they powerful! 10 years in-universe before this game took place, a Borg cube went unscratched after 39 starships bigger than yours attacked it. But now your puny little turret singlehandedly scares them away. (I guess they adapted or whatever because in the books a fleet of cubes wipes everyone out, in contemporary video games you need a couple of ships to take out a Borg cube, and in Star Trek: Picard set as I said over 20 years in the future we saw Starfleet send a whole lynch mob to take out just one Borg ship when they stepped on the white-supremacist-ignorant-redneck-Federation’s lawn.)

My Opinion

I played this and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on the N64 around the same time, so it is of course inevitable that they must be compared. This is like Rogue Squadron on the PlayStation, so you get inferior graphics. Unfortunately your enemies are tougher than TIE Fighters so it takes many hits to knock them out, and they don’t sit around making that easy for you. The Borg are bad with this in particular- they take a lot of hits, have tiny fighters, and one level they show up in has a background so dark it is very hard to find their ships (I had to play it at night, though maybe modern TVs won’t have the issue that my vintage-2001 TV does). Still, it’s not bad or anything, but very violent and the whole “Star Trek” theme is kind of missing as an overarching plot (a minority of the missions sort of go in that direction, but of those most are optional sidequests). You’re not trying to make peace with anyone, you’re not studying anything, you’re not exploring higher moral issues or making social commentary, you’re just shooting anything that moves. If anything, Rogue Squadron had a more Star Trek feel to it because of the Imperial pilot joining you, showing that your enemy isn’t entirely a faceless evil. So I guess this is a good game, but not really a good Star Trek game, just a good game set in that universe. It’s also the only Star Trek game on the PlayStation.

Your missions take place in these trapezoidal sections of space… of what looks like a galaxy with enormous planets orbiting. What the heck is this supposed to be?

Trek Wars: A Star Story (Star Trek Arcade 1983, Star Wars Arcade 1983-1984)

I started writing this a year ago, I think. That last rant at the bottom was all I had to show for it by the time I picked this up. The timeline is tricky. I played the games I review here at the beginning of June 2018. Whatever. So why am I combining reviews for a Star Wars and a Star Trek game? Well, neither game has much going for it on its own. And as for the rant… well, this blog and certainly some of my earlier posts tied-in opinions on social and political issues with games. It’s also a good thought experiment and once again shows that you can always out-Progressive a Progressive, relating to a point I made a while ago about them eating each other.

Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator

Atari 5200

This came out for a few systems and computers, but I only have it on the Atari 2600, 5200, and Colecovision. The arcade version looks pretty awesome, it’s like you’re playing in those vector graphics that we see on the viewscreen in Star Trek II during the opening scenes. But not on the home ports-they just did sprites for those. The sounds are about what you’d expect- beeps, boops, and static.

Colecovision- it’s supposed to be in color but A: the system gives you the option to do black and white and B: the cord or the system was messing up so all I got was the black and white image.

The premise of the game is appropriate for the vector-graphicked version: you are a cadet playing around in a simulator just like at the beginning of Star Trek II when we saw the aforementioned vector graphics. You fight Klingons, and then Nomad for whatever reason as sort of the final boss. The game doesn’t really end- you get a congratulatory screen for beating Nomad, then you go back to the beginning and do the levels all over again. They come in a pattern- a couple of Klingons assaulting a starbase (dock at it to repair and reload your ship), then an asteroid field you have to navigate, then more levels of Klingons attacking other starbases, then the Nomad fight, rinse and repeat.

Atari 2600 version. You’ll note that in all 3 screenshots in the bottom half of the screen I am targetting the same type of ship (Klingon Battlecrusier) from the same angle (the front), and in each game it looks different.

Such a complicated game! So much so that you need the Atari 2600’s joystick AND the single button on it! Well, like I said, there just wasn’t enough about it to warrant its own article.

Star Wars Arcade

Those little fuzzy balls you see two of on the right of the screen in between the TIE Fighters are energy bolts of some kind. When of them hit my X-Wing, it made my Colecovision’s video output change from a clear black and white to this grainy colorized image.

I only had this on the Atari 5200 and Colecovision.

Atari 5200- going against the towers

You re-enact the climax of the first Star Wars movie by fighting your way through TIE Fighters and then running along the Death Star’s trench. Once you beat that, you are taken back to the TIE Fighters, but then once they’re cleared you’re treated to a new stage: you skim along the surface of the Death Star blasting the towers (shield towers I think is what they were called in Star Wars Rogue Squadron II). After that, you’re back in the trench. Then back to the TIE Fighers. Rinse and repeat. See? Not enough to float its own post!

Atari 5200- trench

I do have a bit of a gripe with this game though, a gripe I extend to some segments of Star Wars: Rebel Assault. Aiming the crosshairs (except in the TIE Fighter swarm) also moves your ship around. So if I’m aiming at a tower to my left, then move the crosshairs over there, the whole ship is going to move over towards it. That makes me somewhat reticent to actually aim at anything, and it makes dodging things a slow process because your crosshair has to go all the way across the screen before you lurch in that direction.

Trek Wars Section III: The Last Rant

Yup, this would be way too short, so I’ll use the above discussion of Star Wars Arcade as a farcical justification for this total non-sequitur. Besides- above I gave the “Trek Wars” mentioned in the title, so I owe you a “Star Story”.

Here’s a long overdue critique that I touched on in a previous post (a 16 month old post). But I haven’t really gone after culture warriors or elaborated on my earlier remarks, so I might as well get that taken care of here. Maybe these remarks are still sort of current at the least because there hasn’t been a new Star Wars since I wrote them.

I ran into a reddit thread where the gist was that if you hated any of the recent Star Wars movies you were a sexist. That was the view held by every person in that thread. So I’m sexist, because Last Jedi was less enjoyable to watch than the Holiday Special. At least the Holiday Special had Jefferson Starship and Harvey Korman! Last Jedi on the other hand was a racist and sexist dumpster fire.

Rumors that David Duke designed the Mary Sue Asian character after attending an anime convention have so far not been substantiated. Image from Politico

You read right- it was racist. First of all, let’s start with the “diverse” human cast. If I were to ask a Klansman to build an anime fangirl from the ground up, he’d come up with Rose (I found it particularly ironic that “Twitter user @fangirlJeanne tweeted, “This isn’t just ‘hate of the character.’ This is sexism and racism. They don’t like Rose because she isn’t a racist stereotype of Asian women. She’s not sexually objectified, not demure, and she doesn’t have purple streaks in her hair. They resent her being a actual person.”” Because guess what, she is a hilarious racial stereotype! Asian female otaku Mary Sued into the plot, to use the parlance. The Trade Federation were subtle and nuanced in comparison.). Second, let’s get to the human-centric nature of the films. Star Wars takes place in a galaxy where millions of sentient lifeforms exist, yet Last Jedi revolved solely around humans. I thought the message was diversity? Why am I watching a human-centric film where humans save the galaxy? Are all other races inferior to the human race? #GunganLivesMatter. And what about the human races NOT represented? Blacks, Asians, Whites, and Hispanics, but where are the Indians and Native Americans? I don’t recall any Somalians or Samoans or Saudi Arabians either. Hmmmm… only blacks, whites, asians, and hispanics matter?

You read right about the sexism allegation too- where were the trans characters? We had some skin color diversity and a mix of males and females, but what about transmen and transwomen? Where are they? Were any homosexuals represented? The filmmakers left that out. And where was the Muslim character? Seems the filmmakers forgot a few boxes on their diversity checklist. Having more than one skin color and a smattering of male and female humans does not make your cast diverse, especially when you have a whole galaxy of races and genders and sexualities that are not represented, or in this case implied to be inferior because the cis humans are the only ones that matter. Liberals complain about how Western-centric world history and culture is, yet here they are showing that we are supposed to support such a thing in a galaxy far far away.

Can’t even rely on the ol’ rainbow flag to symbolize Star Wars’ diversity. How many species in that universe can’t see one or more of these colors (for that matter, how about the colorblind in the human race?)? How many species can see MORE than the colors the human eye is capable of seeing? Infrared and Ultraviolet are probably colors to a sentient Star Wars race. Image from Wikimedia

Beyond their agenda for diversity exposing how racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and Western-centric the scriptwriters really are, we also get to just plane bad writing. The First Order can’t target capital ships far away, but can target the much smaller escape pods of those capital ships when they get even farther away? If going into lightspeed to destroy an enemy fleet is so easy, why was the Death Star so big a threat? Why was the planet superweapon in Force Awakens such a big threat? And those stupid speeders on that salt planet- first of all their existence is an abomination, but also why was that scene even needed? If all they had to do was shoot at the cannon that was about to destroy the base’s front door as the cannon was getting ready to fire, why didn’t they wait until it was closer to being ready? Why didn’t they just aim a cannon at it from in front of the base and shoot it? The way they make it sound, and the way the blasters on the speeders are, you’d think that if Han shot first with his trusty DL-44 then the cannon would explode like Cannon after a wafer-thin mint (a warning to the squeamish- that wafer thin mint link goes to the relevant clip from Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life)! And Princess Leia suddenly learning to use the force while dead in space- where did that even come from?!

Oh, and one more thing- the Resistance and First Order ships spent much of the movie constantly accelerating at sublight speeds.  Well, for those versed in relativity you should understand that while minutes were passing for the people going at that speed on the ship, days and years were passing for the rest of the galaxy. Look up the twin paradox. So when they went to find Benecio Del Toro‘s character, to the Resistance ships that whole segment should have lasted only a couple of minutes if not seconds. I bet the real reason no one responded when Princess Leia asked for help at the end was that decades passed for the rest of the galaxy while the Resistance and First Order were at relativistic speeds. With all the Resistance and the might of the First Order travelling out of time in that one area, the rest of the galaxy could easily have forgotten about all of them by the time she signaled for help. Now, for the audience too it probably seemed like years, but that had more to do with bad storytelling than it did with relativistic travel and time dilation.

However, to the people in the reddit thread I read, none of the above matters because I’m sexist, I’m just mansplaining why the female head of the Star Wars franchise should be replaced by a man or something according to the redditeers. The irony of course is that I didn’t know and didn’t care who that Kennedy lady was; I only judged by what I saw on the screen. Besides, if she was around for Solo: A Star Wars Story then she made up for Last Jedi, because Solo was a good one… at least until the end, but my friend told me that if I had watched some of the non-live-action stuff then that ending would sort of make sense (my complaint had more facets than what you might think, which is why the non-live-action stuff didn’t answer all the issues raised).

To make my point succinctly: stick it in your exhaust port! And this is the Colecovision version of the game.

For those stinging from the remarks that the franchise head Kennedy made about not needing to cater to male fans, let me just say that this alone isn’t a bad statement and in the context presented at the link she’s right. Male fans make up the bulk sure, but you want a product for everyone if you’re a big studio. Star Wars I don’t think was ever designed just for men, maybe just by men but not just for men. Even in 1977 it wouldn’t fly if Lucas told a big studio like Fox that his film was solely for men; they probably wouldn’t even take a chance on it. Besides, poor Ms. Kennedy has to worry more about criticism from her Left flank since that’s the Achilles Heel of every liberal in Hollywood and could easily bring her down. If you don’t like her, pile on where it hurts. As you hear in this quote they pretty much just added Rey because they wanted to sell toys to little girls, not because feminism or anything noble. Capitalism is why we get Rey, and isn’t the male-dominated capitalism the enemy of the female-friendly-inclusive-socialism? Thus wouldn’t Rey, a product of male cisgendered heteronormative capitalism, be actually more a thing for the female Trump supporters than any woke SJW warriors?