Star Trek™: Judgment Rites

These adventure games (25th and JR) are very faithful to what the series was all about. Going to planets and solving problems with a little bit of space combat. All the crew is voiced by the original cast and the sound and graphics are faithful to the series. The space combat is a little arcady, but I am ok with that for this game. What I am really after is the exploration and interactions with the crew. I can't recommend these two games enough if you are a fan of the original series!!

Star Trek Judgment Rites was one of my very favorite games as a child. I found it to be a better game than 25th Anniversary with a little more variety in the missions, more characters, small graphical tweaks, and an overall story connects several of the missions. If you haven't played the 25th Anniversary, why not? But you really wouldn't be lost jumping in here. Each mission begins on the Enterprise bridge and the first thing to do is check the manual for the location of the star system (copy protection). Once there, you may or may not fight an enemy ship in a similar, but simpler, version of Wing Commander/X-Wing combat. The game's difficulty settings only affect starship combat with the easiest removing all but one battle. I sometimes flew to the wrong system just to see if I could survive the battle. Once the mission proper begins, you take control of the landing party with an interface somewhat akin to the SCUMM engine. Bringing up the interface pauses your point-and-click adventure to select the different actions, look, use, talk, etc. The puzzles aren't generally frustrating even though there are a few combine-everything-together-in-the-inventory-until-I-figure-out-what-I'm-supposed-to-do types. The cluebook gives more and more specific hints but admits you will not not get a perfect score by following it. Depending on your choices you will be given a score out of 100 at the end of each mission. There is always more than 1 solution, some better than others. Do you negotiate or go for your phaser? The choices aren't always obvious, but peaceful is best. Some trial and error is required and it is very possible to die or completely fail a mission if you aren't careful. It will happen several times in the first mission alone. When I first played this I had to get my dad to upgrade the hard drive because those 11 floppies were too much for our machine. I never played the voiced CD version but having the original actors speak the lines is a great addition.

I was thrilled to see Judgement Rites and 25th Anniversary made available by GOG, and in a multi-platform release, as well. There is a small disappointment, though. Back when it was new, I played the Mac ports of JR and 25th, which I've now found out had several small improvements and bug fixes over the DOS versions. These are most noticeable in Judgement Rites. The music is lower-quality (probably due to different MIDI libraries between Mac and DOS), some sound effects in JR are off which were corrected in the Mac port (the transporter and bridge sound effects are wrong (odd, since there were correct in 25th), and Scotty's "emergency power" space-battle dialogue is flipped so the "activated" dialogue plays on the "failed" event and vice-versa), and the pre-rendered cutscenes *may* be lower-quality (I don't have my old copy handy to confirm), and at least one is definitely missing (a "prologue" showing an exploding Elasi ship as a voice talks about how they failed the test and they hope to have better luck with the Enterprise). The space combat also "feels" a little different, but that's almost certainly my imagination. I know that the way this whole thing works is based on how relatively simple it is to wrap up DOS games for use on modern computers, and that bringing a classic Mac game to a modern system is far more difficult, but it was still a bit disappointing to see overt, new-to-me bugs in a classic game. On the plus side, I remember hearing back then that developers would sometimes use the Mac port as an opportunity to polish the game above and beyond what was in the original PC version, so now I have an example of what that looked like.

This game is a masterpiece because it continues everything the previous game (25th Anniversary) has done right, with a better polish and some improvements in gameplay. The best thing about this game is, like in its predecessor, the voice acting by the original Star Trek cast. Since many of these great actors have passed away :(, the game has a high collector value for any Star Trek fan. The graphics are good for their time and the missions are quite interesting, with lots of twists and many options. The crew will face certain situations when you have to decide a course of action or a certain dialogue. At the end this will count towards a mission score, which also means more replay value. There are a lot of details in this game, you can interact with almost anything, by looking or by analysing with tricorders, a great feature for Star Trek geeks. What I also love about this game is that is so true to the classic Star Trek philosophy. You will feel more like a diplomat than a warrior. Today most SF games are dark, violent, and in many cases dystopian, unfortunately the case for the recent Star Trek movies. But Star Trek originally started with this unique positive vision of the future that you will experience in this game, a vision that I really want to come true one day. And in this game you feel part of that future, which is great.