Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

The 25th anniversary of the original Star Trek series was treated as a special event back in 1991. I distinctly remember even seeing a prime-time TV special about it. Naturally, it was the perfect time to release a Nintendo game. Instead of making a game based on the movie that hit theaters at that time Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country, Interplay decided to make a game honoring the original series. They had plenty of good ideas. It's just a shame the execution of those ideas was a mess.

The plot of the game involves a rip in space that sends the Enterprise out of control into uncharted territory. Kirk and the crew need to find their way back to Federation territory and seal the rip. The plot wouldn't be out of place on the show, and there are lots of cool call-backs to the series like the spitting flowers from the episode "The Apple" and everything on Sigma Iotia from the episode "A Piece of the Action". In some ways, it follows the show too much, but more on that in a moment.

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The visuals are quite stunning for the NES. The characters are large, amazingly detailed, and well-animated. The planets are impressive looking, too, with plenty of variety to the sights. There's no visual fatigue, although the flicker when too much was onscreen did get annoying. Even the beaming effects are almost spot-on. The music and sound effects can be blaring, but there's plenty of variety in both, all of which are authentic.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is where the game got hit with the cordrazine overdose. Even though the exploration on the away missions was okay, the lack of a map was extremely annoying. I ended up having to check walkthroughs too often. The tile-based movement made simple navigation irritating more than once, especially when trying to navigate around obstacles. Also, in an attempt to replicate the show as closely as possible, there is WAY too much dialog in the game. Dialog boxes interrupt the gameplay way too often. In fact, right when the game is started, the Captain's Log entry takes about five minutes to read through by itself! There are other annoyances like how the tricorder has to get whipped out for nearly everything and how stunning enemies only works until they're offscreen.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary isn't a terrible adventure game. It was clearly developed by people who wanted to honor the show. Unfortunately, it has a bunch of annoyances that do add up. There's some enjoyment to be gained for die-hard fans of Kirk's original adventures. However, casual gamers should just leave this with Oxmyx and move on.