Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
Strategic Command
You've just embarked on the most challenging field of study at Starfleet Academy:
Command College. Your instructor, the recently-promoted Captain Sulu (still two
years away from his command of the U.S.S. Excelsior), arrives just a little bit
late for his first lecture. Your initial missions include such tasks as destroying
minefields, but your assignments soon grow in both complexity and risk. Not only
must you battle alien threats in Starfleet's most advanced simulator, but you must
also get your crew to cooperate and learn how to lead them.
(Interplay, 1998)
Though it's mired in the mid-1990s trend of endless cutscenes and movies, inside
Starfleet Academy is actually a fun little game, really more or less a 90s
update of the old Star Trek
arcade game with much flashier graphics (not the least of which is the
full-motion video foreground of your crewmembers at the helm and at other stations)
and a slightly different storyline.
One of Interplay's biggest selling points for this game when it was first
released was that it was the first Star Trek
game to include any of the original cast members as anything more than voice
actors. Some of it is interesting to watch, but (A) I want to play a game, not
watch snippets of an unmade Star Trek movie, and (B) Shatner's in it. I know
dear old Bill has his defenders out there, and hey, even I liked how he
played Captain Kirk a lot of the time. But in the video cutscenes for Starfleet
Academy, he's ill-at-ease, shiftless, and - when he opens his mouth - just a
wee bit hammy, an accusation I realize that the much-beleaguered actor has
never before faced. Maybe it was the oddity of having to work on an empty
bluescreen set over which computer-generated sets and backgrounds would be added
later...but Shatner should be used to that by now. If the only original series
actors who had shown up had been George Takei and Walter Koenig, I would've been
happy with it. There's more of a rapport there than there is between Shatner and
Takei anyway.
The game itself is more or less an arcade action first-person ship-shooter,
with a few elements of strategy and resource/personnel management thrown in for
good measure. The controls, though they can get a little bit intricate as you
progress, become instinctive pretty quickly.
The graphics are decent, and the music - by Ron Jones, who was fired by Rick
Berman after turning in too much music the producer considered too energetic for
Star Trek: The Next Generation - rocks.
But really, when you get right down to it, it's a lot like the old Star
Trek arcade game, just with better audiovisual elements and lots of movies
thrown into the mix. Granted, they're new movies, starring some of the classic
Trek actors, and the CGI model work is very cool, but when the intro movies start
to squeeze the game for CD-ROM space, there's too much playback and not enough
play.
Fortunately, Interplay's next Star Trek title was vastly
improved.
Worth repeat play...but Shatner's in it.
