Star Trek: Borg - The Ultimate Interactive Movie

Description

.com Next Generation game in which you inhabit the role of Cadet Qaylan Furlong, whose father was killed by the Borg. You will be allowed to go back 10 years in time, on the ship where your father was killed, and be given the opportunity to save him and the Federation. Review In Simon & Schuster Interactive's Star Trek: Borg, you're a green Starfleet Academy cadet, logging training hours aboard a Federation starship... and haunted by the memory of your father's death, at the hands of the Borg at the battle of Wolf 359. When the dreaded Borg suddenly show up on a beeline course for mother Terra, your ship is selected to join the battlegroup which will engage them, and all trainee personnel are ordered to evacuate. The Borg are a nasty, formidable enemy, and Starfleet Command doesn't need any new fish wet-ends like you panicking at the wrong moment in a battle where every action and second counts. The fact that you have reason to want to stay and fight - the fact that your father was killed at the Wolf 359 massacre, aboard the ill-fated USS Righteous - means jack-all to the high command. You can leave and like it... or you can just leave. As you bitterly pack your meager cadet's belongings, the infamous alien entity known as "Q" (played by John DeLancie) appears in your stateroom and offers you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: With his help, you can travel back in time to the bridge of the Righteous, moments before the ship was lost, and wreak a little vengeance. And maybe - just maybe - save him and change the future for yourself and for everyone else. Borg has it all: time travel; the smarmy, omnipotent Q; the scariest alien race ever to populate the Star Trek universe; and an angry, orphaned cadet's passionate (and very un-Federation) wish for brutal retribution. It's a promising broth very difficult to spoil. Simon & Schuster Interactive evidently has many, many cooks at its disposal. Borg is that most dubious of game prospects - an "interactive movie." Initially whisked aboard the bridge of the Righteous as a Christmas Carol-esque presence nobody can hear or see, you are witness (via full-screen video) to what may be the final moments of the ship (and your father) all over again - and then you are given the opportunity to directly interact with the past as the Borg invade the ship and attempt to drop the shields of the Righteous. At various times during the continuously playing movie that is 99% of the game, the player is given the option to solve puzzles, attack, or analyze people, objects, or Borg (which are, strictly, neither) with a modified tricorder provided by Q. Virtually every decision point in the game, if not every decision point, is a try-and-die affair, resulting in a short cut-movie with a rawthuh disappointed Q telling you what a moron you are, or giving you a condescendingly patient (and, I must admit, rather insultingly cool) primer on how to use the mouse on your computer. Borg is infuriating not only because of the lousy (indeed, almost nonexistent) gameplay, but also because of the obvious tremendous expense and potential of this absolutely lame FMV-fest. The talent involved could have gone to good use, somewhere. As the irritating, haughty (and ever-so-slightly swishy) Q, John DeLancie gives a superb performance that's wasted here. (In one spectacular, skin-crawling death-sequence, he stares at a Defense Systems panel, his eyes wide, shouting, "THE BORG ARE FIRING, WE'RE GONNA DIE!" Then - all the mock terror dropping from his face in an instant - he leers knowingly toward the camera and, with a horrible grin, whispers, "And it's your fault," as the ship and your father get blown to bits around him.) Ditto the dialogue and story elements - all fine in themselves, wrapped up in a quick-pick-a-path mess with the budget of a motion picture and the gameplay of... well, a motion picture. (And despite my usual stance on this sort of thing, I don't even feel bad about blowing any plot points or particular surprises. I figure I'll just end up saving you the trouble of buying this dog.) A few words to Trek enthusiasts: No matter how many times some game company out there does something like this to you, just close your eyes and keep repeating to yourself: Interplay's Starfleet Academy is coming. Starfleet Academy is coming.... --Chris Hudak --Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot ReviewIt makes a weird kind of sense that this game would come on a hybrid CD. After all, the raison d'etre of the Borgs, the eponymous villains of this episode of the venerable Star Trek franchise, is to "assimilate" alien races - i.e., take into their "collective" the technologies (and bodies) of those they come across. That said, this CD-ROM's developers should have spent a little more time studying the Borg's methods. Star Trek: Borg doesn't have the OS smarts to switch screen resolutions to the mandatory 640 x 480 pixels. (If you launch it at any other resolution, you'll get an error message stating: "You must change your monitor resolution and restart your computer." Hello? You don't need to restart a Mac.) Other irritations include a strange save scheme and no way to open a saved game from within play in case you make a wrong move. Speaking of making wrong moves, that's what you'll be doing, mostly. Gameplay consists of watching from a first-person perspective what seems to be an episode of Star Trek, and suddenly having to click at Point A or Point B at "Decision Points," which are usually cued by characters who turn to the camera and say, "What do you think?" A few puzzles are simple enough if you've checked out the scene with a special tricorder given to you by Q (oh, he's the "omnipotent godbeing" who's tossed you back through time to save your father from the Borg invasion 10 years ago and... well, John deLancie is great as Q, and gets all the good lines). However, many of the puzzles' answers are obscure, and some even require sort-of cheating: Sometimes the only way to continue the game is to quit and restart at the last saved point. (Here's where a "restore" function would've been nice.) If you fail, Q may reset the game to the Decision Point, or you may watch a grisly endgame, but either way, there's a long video replay to sit through. Tension and fear may be a valid experience in this game, but frustration shouldn't be. That said, there are reasons to recommend Star Trek: Borg. As long as RAM Doubler or Virtual Memory is disabled, the full-screen video runs nearly perfectly on a 7600/120; the sets and costumes and sets are, likewise, impeccable (a fan said); the acting is good; there seem to be fewer plot holes in this game than in the average episode, and at times, there is a genuine urgency and intensity to the experience. In fact, this adventure might be, at times, too grim for children. Simon & Schuster is to be commended for releasing this product simultaneously for the Mac and PC (and coincidentally close to the release of the new movie, "Star Trek: First Contact"); however, given some of the technical frustrations, an extra week or two in development could've made the experience that much more stellar. - D. D. Turner Good news: Decent acting. Ambitious attempt at the Holy Grail of "Interactive Movie." Bad news: Trial and error and error structure. Ignorance of Macintosh interface. Rating:2/4 ©1999 MacAddict -- From MacAddict -- Subscribe now!