Planescape Torment: Fromer’s guide to Sigil

I took my own advice and installed all of the mod packages for Planescape, which did a variety of nice things including fixing bugs, finishing incomplete quests, and allowing for a much greater resolution.  Since PT already had larger-than-Baldur’s-Gate characters, they still show up fairly well on a 1600×900 screen.

With the Dustman mortuary behind me, I tottered out onto the streets of Sigil, the main city for the game.  Sigil is reportedly the center of all the planes, kind of a hub station ruled over by a very scary lady.  It’s not that colorful either; PT specializes in drab grays and rusty metal, which continues to give me that Fallout vibe.

I chatted up a harlot for some direction and continued to piece together clues where to find this Pharod guy.  Next stop was a house where a surly man and his anxious wife tasked me with releasing the guy from a Dustman contract to use his body after he dies.  No problem, says I.  My wisdom score is now 19 and my intelligence is 18, meaning that if there’s a peaceful way through a scenario, I’m able to take it.  It also unlocks a lot of easy experience boosts through conversation trees.

The contract quest is pretty simple.  I popped over to a nearby Dustman bar and chatted up the named NPCs.  There’s a bit of XP to be made in this, such as chatting with an old lady who’s starting to doubt the Dustman philosophy (that life is “false life” and death is “true life”).  I also talked circles around an ambitious go-getter who had the contract, and he eventually gave it back to me.  Nevertheless to say, the contract signer was quite grateful and he became about the 10th person to tell me where Pharod is.  That guy does not keep a low profile.

Another Dustman at the bar gave me a quest to investigate a disturbance at the nearby mausoleum (this area’s big on the death theme, I guess).  I pop over there and Bob’s your uncle, it’s crawling with skeletons.  What’s new, really?  An agitated spirit says that there’s another intruder doing hokey stuff and he begs for me to deal with it.  No problem, says I.  I do ghostbusting with an iron crowbar.  The mausoleum looked more like the innards of an H.R. Giger painting than a traditional crypt, which is one of the reasons why this game is so engrossing.  Even standard places really aren’t that standard.

In my previous playthrough way back when, I used a walkthrough that helped me get through the game with minimal combat.  That’s roughly what I’m going for this time, although without the walkthrough, I’m finding that I get into more scraps than expected.  I had to fight my way through the place, netting a bit of XP in the process.  I found a back room where the necromancer was — twist! — waiting for me because he needs some of my blood to become an immortal lich.  Good for him, but bad for him too.  It took a few deaths (when you die in this game, you just respawn at the mortuary) to take him and his skeleton crew down, but down they went and into my pockets his goodies went.

Next time: Pharod, come out and playyyyayyyy!

Catch up on the entire Planescape Torment playthrough on the Nostalgia Lane page!

Planescape Torment: A morbid beginning

It turns out that you folks really, really want me to talk about Planescape Torment, and I am more than happy to oblige.  As I said in my poll last week, I have a number of titles in my GOG.com library (and plenty more on my wishlist) that I’ve wanted to play through and document on this here blog, so it’s good for you guys to kick my butt and get me started on it.  I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be playing each game to completion (although that would be ideal), as it really depends on how long it’ll take.  Tackling a 60-hour RPG very casually could take a few months.  So we’ll see.

Let’s get started with this game, though!  Planescape Torment is one of my favorite computer RPGs of all time. I’ve only played it through all the way once (back in 2002 or so), but it was absolutely captivating.  It opened my eyes to the fact that there were D&D settings that weren’t Forgotten Realms or Dark Sun, and although I haven’t seen any Planescape stuff since, this remains my favorite campaign.  It’s a bizarre fantasy setting that’s full of twists on standard tropes, a grungy run-down world, secrets and portals, and, y’know, floating talking skull heads.

One of the things that I loved about PT is that you could play it much like an adventure game with very little combat (I think that if you play your cards right, you only *have* to fight twice in the entire game).  With that in mind and with the resolve to not rely on walkthroughs for this series, I rolled up my Nameless One with as high wisdom and intelligence as possible so as to open as many memories, dialogue options, and adventure options.

The story starts with your character — a scarred, twisted hulk of a man — waking up in a mortuary with no recollection of who he is save for a cryptic tattoo on his body.  I’m instantly joined by Morte, the aforementioned floating skull, who becomes my first companion.  This unusual opening coupled with the odd dialogue (Planescape has a lot of localized slang that you have to get used to) draws me right into the setting.  There’s some voiced dialogue by NPCs, although it’s not fully voiced (I think the guy who does Homer Simpson’s voice does one of your companions later on).

I love Morte.  You wouldn’t think a floating skull could be that interesting, but he’s always got something funny to say and an interesting perspective on the situation.  For example, I start out in a room full of dead bodies and shambling zombies (who aren’t the enemy, but just workers).  Morte begs me not to slice up the female zombies, since he thinks he might have a shot with them.  How would that work, skull?  Actually… I don’t want to know.

Even with so much death around, the mortuary is pretty peaceful.  It helps that you’re not being attacked unless you attack first.  Pretty soon I bumped into Dhall, a “Dustman” who is more fascinated than angry with me.  There are great descriptions of the people and objects in the text window, and the whole setup reminds me of a nice hybrid of Baldur’s Gate and Fallout.  Sometimes getting those little text snippets can be really immersive, because it asks your imagination to join in.

Between Dhall and Morte, I’m given the rough basics of what’s going on.  Apparently I’m an immortal guy who can’t die forever, but loses his memories each time I’m put down.  Morte’s been my companion for a while, Dhall has encountered me fairly often, and the tattoo on my back tells me to read a journal (which I’ve lost) and find a guy named Pharod.  A little later I find out that my final purpose might well be to get rid of my immortality, although how to do that might be a problem.  That’s a good start.

Escaping the mortuary is the primary goal, but there’s a lot to be discovered if you’re patient and explore carefully.  Many of the zombies have secrets (“many things have secrets” is the game’s motto, I swear), and there are a few advantages that can be gained if you take the time to do a couple side quests.  Before I left, I got stitched up by a Tiefling, took apart a number of skeletons for runes, talked with a ghost who claimed to be my long-lost lover (not having memories, I had to take her word at that), and evaded a number of Dustmen who wanted to kill me all over again.  The place is just three levels, although I remember it taking a long time to escape when I first played it.  This time around it was about 45 minutes or so, and I got a level out of it.

I’m playing the game on the default settings, which means an absurdly low resolution.  I know that there are mods to allow more standard resolution, so I’m going to have to look into those.  I’m a little tired of only seeing 1% of the map at any given time.

Nostalgia Lane: BASIC games

That image right up there caused a huge pang of nostalgia in me.  It’s the spitting image of our first family computer, an IBM PC, along with the huge set of thick manuals that came with it.  The second book to the left, the brown one, was one I became intimately familiar with: the BASIC manual.

Without the internet, loads of stores selling software, or a shareware distribution system between friends, our first couple years of owning this machine was thin in the programs department.  We had a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a couple games (like breakout) — but that was it.  So as the family member who quickly became the most obsessed with the computer, I turned to making my own games as a form of entertainment.  Hence my adventures into the wells of the BASIC manual.

I loved BASIC.  It was easy to understand and pick up, although I had no concept of structure and clarity.  The manual itself was extremely technical and dry, with each page listing a command, a definition, and perhaps an example.  So it was left up to me to figure out how it all pieced together.

I had some help.  It seemed like BASIC programming was all the rage with the up-and-coming 80s set, so lots of magazines and books (like Micro Adventures) had sample programs that you could copy and run on your computer.  There was lots and lots and lots of typing involved, which I also taught myself (I was a two-finger typist until a high school class broke me of the habit and taught me the proper way to do it).  Above all else, it helped me grasp the fundamental pieces to start putting together my own games.

Dang, but I loved making games.  I *loved* it.  I couldn’t do much with graphics, although I tried hard to figure out ways to make ASCII doodles move (usually via scrolling or screen redrawing).  Mostly I made RPGs and text adventures.  I did program one series, Spaceship Combat Simulator, which proved somewhat popular with my family.  I think the second edition allowed you to choose a hull type of a ship, equip it via store purchases, and take it out for galactic conquest.

These games got obscenely long, too.  I was routinely topping 5, 10-thousand lines of code toward the end.  I composed my own music and experimented with musical pitches to see if I could simulate speech (I couldn’t).  I learned a lot about color pairing, in particular what would make the best background and foreground colors.  I had games that would print you off award certificates if you beat them.  And I was pretty much the only person who ever played them.

I think I loved all of that because I could envision a game and execute that vision single-handedly.  My parents really thought I was going to be a game designer, especially after I started taking programming classes.  But something happened in college after I picked up three or four other languages — I lost interest in it.  Programming wasn’t fun in and of itself, it was just a means to see my game vision come to life.  And it was getting more and more complicated.  I could see that we had moved past the point where a single programmer had total control over a project and I had no interest being a coding monkey.  Plus, figuring out where you went wrong in one line of code among thousands is a major headache.

So even though I graduated with a degree in computers from college, I stopped pursuing that path a couple years prior to graduation.  Perhaps that’s why I started making web pages (again, I could conceive and execute my vision by myself), and later on blogging.  I don’t know.  But BASIC will always have a special place in my memories, and I regret that I didn’t save the discs that had all of those programs.

Nostalgia Lane: The Sims

The year 2000 was a weird time for me.  I was fresh out of college, living in the basement of a family in Colorado while I went through a one-year youth ministry internship at a local church.  Having just moved to the state and being generally introverted, I spent the year more lonely than I had the previous five in college.  To fill the quiet hours, I purchased a new computer and spent a great amount of time gaming.

It was during this period that The Sims dropped in my lap.  I don’t mean literally; iTeleportation from Apple was years away, of course.  But I picked it up, curious at the thought of taking Sim City and narrowing it down to a single house.  I kind of liked the idea, as it sounded similar to Little Computer People, a game I had read about back in 1985.  One session into The Sims, and I was really hooked.

Since it quickly became one of the most popular computer games in the world, it’s hardly necessary for me to explain how it worked.  You built and furnished a house, populated it with semi-autonomous people, watched them generally fail at living, and attempted to guide their progress through a daily routine.  It was weirdly meta — you’re playing a game about someone living a life — but addicting too.  Maybe it was about control; you could try to perfect this virtual person’s life even if your life was less than ideal.

For me, I guess I always liked the build mode more then the living mode.  When I was a kid, I spent countless hours building structures with LEGOs, and here was a game letting me create whatever type of house I’d like.  Sure, I’ll be man enough to admit that I was playing dollhouse, but so what?

The other day I downloaded the soundtrack to The Sims 3 (which is quite excellent… the OST, that is) and found myself reminiscing about hours spent meticulously creating a house.  The music always relaxed me and set the mood, not to mention the charming little touches that the game would use (like its Simlish language) to make it clear that it was an alternate reality.  A fun one.  A not-so-serious one.

It wasn’t a perfect game and it didn’t keep my attention past a couple months (Sims 2 and 3 fared even worse in this regard).  I didn’t want to hand-hold these characters — I just wanted to build a cool place and watch them live.  But they weren’t the best at being left alone, and if you didn’t nanny a lot, you weren’t going to earn much money to build anything more than a very basic pad.

It also had a weird moral that stuff is the be-all, end-all to making you happy.  The more stuff and higher quality stuff you had, the happier your Sim ended up being.  Even other Sims could be replaced by certain items to satisfy social needs.  Looking at it from that angle, it was kind of sad.

Then again, you could get slightly sadistic and try to torture and/or kill your Sims.  The ol’ stick-them-in-a-pool-and-take-away-the-ladder trick was a personal favorite.  Hey, don’t judge!  I just wanted to see a ghost.

As I’ve said, The Sims franchise never did hook me back in after that.  It did lead me to playing The Sims Online, which just failed in so many respects to copy the qualities of the core game.  But at least for those few months in 2000, we had some good times, the Sims and me.

Nostalgia Lane: The Burning Crusade

Six years ago to the month, World of Warcraft released its very first expansion pack.  At the time I was a year away from becoming a blogger, still living in my old apartment, and enjoying my first year with my wife.  Sometimes I can’t believe how fast time passes, how these things that happened *years* ago feel like yesterday.

I was getting nostalgic for WoW lately, not enough to make me want to play it, but nostalgic in the sense of “I miss the old days, not what the game is now even though I know it’s technically better.”  WoW at the turn of The Burning Crusade felt like an incredible, magical time for the game.  It had become established as the premier MMO with a massive following, and I had just hit level 60 with my new Gnome Warlock who I had named Syp.  When we heard the news that there would be an expansion, everyone went bananas.  I mean, the game had never had one before.  We really didn’t know what to expect.  And we’d been slowly going stir-crazy in the same zones for over two years at that point.

There was a big to do at the portal gate in Azeroth prior to the expansion, and players such as myself who participated were treated to a tabard that shot out sparks every minute or so.  A cool little doodad.  Then came the night of the release.  It was one of the only — and the very last — times that I ever went to a store for a midnight release to get my copy.  My wife thought I was nuts.  I probably was.  It was cold, being January in Michigan, and I had to stand in a line outside with a whole bunch of strangers who made me profoundly uncomfortable.  As soon as I snagged my copy, I rushed hope to install it and make my new characters.

I was reading something on WoW Insider not too long ago where the author was bashing TBC as not that great of an expansion in retrospect, which I guess was his opinion and okay.  But he did say something that rang true, which is that whatever expansion WoW players first encountered seemed like it became the expansion that defined their experience and memories of the game.  I was probably more of a vanilla WoW player than anything, but TBC definitely left a huge impression on me.

Going through the dark portal to Outland for that first time was… incredible.  I took many, many screenshots.  Outland was so alien of a place, but it was new and exciting.  Up to that point in WoW history, the quest flow of the old world wasn’t the best, especially in the higher levels, but Outland featured a much more refined hub-quest model that provided enough XP and kept things moving.  Within a day, we all replaced our old gear with new (“green is the new purple” was the catchphrase of the time).  A bazillion people were in the first Outland zone, which made questing difficult (but not impossible).

I alternated with Syp and a brand-new blueberry space alien hunter named Ghostfire.  Those new races still seem exotic to me, even as they’ve long since become the old guard.  I loved the Draenei look and alien tech aesthetic, and I do wish that I had stuck with my Shaman that I also rolled back then.  Those totems looked wicked cool.

TBC created so many memories for me.  Who didn’t fall to death in Shatt a few hundred times?  Or didn’t complain about the poop-scooping quest?  Or wasn’t kind of in awe of the beauty of Nagrand?  It was the only expansion of pretty much any MMO where I became, temporarily, a raider.  Kara was such a fun instance to explore with a 10-man group.  Again, it feels like all of that was just yesterday.

Even with the new areas and tighter quest flow, TBC wasn’t without its flaws.  I still don’t think that Outland meshes well with the rest of the game, zone-wise, especially with all of the subsequent expansions.  I still maintain that flying mounts was a big mistake that trivialized exploration and content, a stance that feels backed up by how the devs had to keep coming up with excuses to “ground” us for the new expansions so we wouldn’t just fly over challenges.  The music was so-so, probably my least favorite of all of the expansions.  And the dailies were not enjoyable at all.

Wrath of the Lich King was a fine expansion and a lot of fun to return to later on, Cataclysm got my attention for about a week before losing it, and I sincerely doubt (but never say never) that I’ll see Mists of Pandaria’s content.  For me, The Burning Crusade was THE expansion of the game during my career there, and I still can’t believe it’s been six years.

Nostalgia Lane: TIE Fighter and X-Wing

The 90s weren’t a horrible time to be a Star Wars fan, not at all.  It was mostly prior to Lucas tinkering with the original trilogy and then shoving the prequel era down our throats, and that meant a pop culture reverence for the first three films and everything that came with them.  Star Wars had a ton, I mean a ton, of horrible game adaptions, but it seemed like there were a lot of great ones around then too: Shadows of the Empire, Rogue Squadron, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight II.  But above them all was one of my all-time favorite games, X-Wing.

X-Wing introduced a Star Wars-themed space combat simulator in 1993 and began a monster franchise in and of itself.  It was a genius move that combined a hot IP with a popular genre (flight simulators) — and it didn’t have to worry about modeling backdrops or anything, because it was in space.  Ever since the vector graphics Star Wars arcade game, I’ve always wanted to pilot my own X-Wing, and here it was given to me on a platter.

The game was a series of missions with multi-part objectives and a whole lot of dogfighting.  It took place prior to and then during the big Death Star fight in Episode IV, giving us a chance to not only pop into the cockpit of an X-Wing but a Y-Wing and A-Wing (fast little buggers, those) as well.  You had to juggle power between shields and engines as you fought, and taking down TIE fighters never got old.

But it really was 1994′s TIE Fighter that put the series on the map.  This sequel put you into the enemy’s role instead — and made it both engaging and sympathetic.  It was the life of a soldier who didn’t get much say in the big picture, but just carried out orders.  I never had previously thought about TIE Fighters being anything other than target practice, but the game made them pretty fun to fly.  Sure, they were a lot weaker than the Rebel craft, but faster too.  Eventually you got to start flying the tougher, better Imperial ships, and that’s when the getting got good.  I always got chills going up against capital ships (which looked huge to me in all of that new polygon 3D that was starting to get big around then), and the sense of speed permeated the entire series.

I didn’t play the later titles — X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance — so for me the series will always be boiled down to the first two games.  That was just fine, because it not only fulfilled a boyhood fantasy but it gave me a terrific gaming experience in its own right.  I suppose it’s a shame that multiplayer and online play wasn’t part of them, because my friends and I all played and would compare experiences, and I know that it would’ve been a lot of fun to blow the crap out of each other.  But I’m not complaining, because it gave me all of the trench runs and nail-biting excitement that I wanted.

Did any of you play these, and if so, what do you remember about them?

Nostalgia Lane: Kohan

I think I’ve talked before about how some strategy games provide the tools and backdrop so that my mind can come up with a story to infuse it with purpose.  Games like Civilization, Master of Orion, and even the recent FTL are all great at doing this.  But perhaps nothing was quite as effective as a rather unique RTS called Kohan.

Kohan came out in 2001, and as far as I’m aware, never really made it big.  It did decently enough to warrant an expansion and a 2004 sequel, but I’ve never, ever heard gamers talking about it.  That’s a shame, a real shame, because Kohan provided me with a different kind of game experience that I’ve been unable to get before or since.

So at its core, Kohan puts you in charge of a faction that usually starts out with one or two cities, and then tasks you with wiping the map with the other factions.  Each city can be upgraded — and should, since these upgrades help support your standing armies.  The armies are the true feature of the game.  Each are six-person squads that you can customize (as in, which classes make up the squad — 2 tanks, 2 mages, 2 archers, that sort of thing).  You can only field a certain number of squads based on the cities you own and the upgrades you’ve established.

And here’s the other interesting thing: If your squad is in territory controlled by one of your cities, it will regenerate health.  If it’s behind enemy lines, then you get no regeneration.  It simply demonstrates the concept of a supply train, and makes attacks on enemy cities nail-biting experiences.  Defenders always get the advantage, so you have to weaken them first, then come in hard and fast before you’re ground into paste.  You also had the options to entrench, to level up squads to veteran status, and so on.

Because of the squad customization, I grew attached to the different armies and would come up with little stories for them.  They reminded me of fantasy novels with large-action battles taking place and strategic movements across maps.

Probably the closes analogue to Kohan would be the much larger Total War series.  I liked Kohan’s perspective better, however; it was streamlined enough so that battles weren’t enormous surging messes, but detailed enough so that it was easy to pretend that each squad was much larger than six mere soldiers.  Kind of a thinking-man’s RTS.

Nostalgia Lane: Jet fighter simulators

Everyone goes through different phases in their gaming careers, and for a period in the early 90s, I was fairly heavily into jet fighter simulators.  To be honest, they were incredibly hard to ignore — like adventure games, they were Hot Stuff and big sellers in the PC market.  Computers were finally getting powerful enough to thrust us into 3D (and simulated 3D) gaming, and there was nothing quite like flight to show that off.

The earliest plane simulator I recall trying was Microsoft Flight Simulator.  This had to be one of the very earliest versions, because it was just black-and-white with few (if any) graphics to speak of.  We only had a copy of it and no manual, so I could never quite figure out how to operate it.  Oh, I could take off and crash spectacularly, and sometimes make little dots come out of my plane which I think were bullets, but that’s about it.

But when we started getting our hands on 386 machines, gaming got a lot better.  By far, my absolute favorite flight simulator was Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat.  It wasn’t a strict simulator, per se (in this field, you had the spectrum from arcade to by-the-book technical flight, and this was more the former), but it was hecka fun. What really made this game pop is that you had four eras to fight in, from World War II to Vietnam, and could set up all sorts of crazy fights.  I loved taking on scads of bombers with a fighter jet to see how many I could down before getting pulverized.

A lot of the appeal of these games was the combination of fluid motion and wanton destruction.  Plus, I could totally zone out and just relax as my then-tight reflexes took over.

Next up on my favorites list was F-15 Strike Eagle II, which took me into the (then) modern era.  Once again, this skewed more heavily toward the arcade side, but I wasn’t complaining — give me missiles galore and targets to hit, and I was in heaven.

Similar to that was A-10 Warthog, which let us fly those unusual bunker-buster planes.  I loved it because the gun on that thing could rip through tanks.  I spent most of my time in the game trying to figure out what I could destroy using that alone.

Probably the last of this genre that I gave serious time to was Falcon 4.0.  Now this was far, far more on the realism side of the spectrum, and there was a hefty manual that you had to study before attempting take-off.  Unfortunately, the specs were a little too demanding on my computer, and while it looked great, it played like a slideshow.

I’m not even sure if these types of games are around today, although I assume that there’s always a few niche developers.

Nostalgia Lane: Alone in the Dark

This is the face that caused me to scream out loud in our  basement, prompting my mother to yell down if I was okay.  Now it’s practically laughable, but that’s how scary stuff is: It gets you in the moment after you’ve been wound up for so long.

Let’s back up.  Today’s Nostalgia Lane entry is my very first survival horror game, 1992′s Alone in the Dark.  Obviously, with The Secret World going strong in my gaming life this week, the topic of scary video games has been swirling around my head.  I’ve only dipped my toe into the genre, because it honestly isn’t my favorite — game have such a greater potential to be terrifying, because you are an active participant instead of a passive observer.  What’s happening is happening to you by proxy.

But I didn’t know any of that back in the early 90s, so I really was unprepared for my first video game haunted house experience.  Alone in the Dark was kind of cutting-edge back then, graphically; it had static backgrounds with 3D polygon characters moving through them (much like Resident Evil and Silent Hill would later on in the decade).  Now the characters look primitive as anything, but 3D was a big, big deal in 1992, so give us a break for thinking it was cool.

The story of Alone in the Dark, from what I remember, was short and functional.  You were called to investigate a mansion for some reason or another, and after puttering your way to the attic, bad stuff starts going down.  You then have to make your way through the house finding items, solving puzzles, and avoiding/killing the creatures that suddenly appeared.

Drawing off of both the classic haunted house tropes and the Lovecraft mythos, Alone in the Dark was surprisingly effective in building up a tense mood that had me constantly feeling as though I was way over my head.  Right from the get-go you need to block the entrance to the attic or else, as I discovered to my detriment, a monster burst through and you had no means of fighting it.  Even when you did get weapons like the revolver or shotgun, your ammo was incredibly limited and it was often better just to run.

In a weird way, the crude polygons of the creatures made them scarier, since your mind filled in the blanks.  Plus, the game’s creators did a really great job making everything move believably, so the critters had motions that went a long way to unnerving me.

So back to that picture up there.  At the end of the game, your character finally escapes the mansion, does a happy jump, and hails a taxi.  I was elated to finally be back into the sunlight and finished with this scary game — and that’s when the taxi driver turned around and did a goofy little laugh.  I mean, it’s goofy now.  I appreciate the goofiness.  But I was totally not expecting it and I lost my cool in that moment.

For nothing else, that final stinger showed me just how effective a mere game could be in keeping me on edge and freaking me the heck out.

Nostalgia Lane: Star Trek 25th Anniversary

Right now the Star Trek franchise is celebrating the Next Generation’s 25th anniversary, which makes me feel old all over the place.  Seriously, I can remember watching one of the sex-filled first-season episodes with my parents and collecting Wesley Crusher cards from a Wheaties box.  It’s been some time.

In the early 90s, Trek had another 25th anniversary, but this was of the franchise as a whole.  In my opinion, the period of 1992-96 was the watershed moment for Star Trek (TNG, DS9, First Contact) and a terrifically fun time to be a Trekkie, which I was at the time.  While Trek never got as many video games as its big brother Star Wars did, it did not do terribly for itself.  The problem was that many of the games were just awful at best.  Even the 25th Anniversary games on the NES and Gameboy were atrocious, and I was worried that the computer edition would follow suit.

Happily, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary on the PC ended up being one of the greatest Star Trek games of all time.  I loved it so much — and I can’t believe I never played its sequel Judgment Rites.  That’s what you get when you don’t have the internet around to inform you of everything.

ST25A worked so well because it instituted a mash-up of two gaming genres.  It was primarily an adventure game, but there was also a starship simulator for the combat scenes.  While it wasn’t anything as advanced as how Star Trek Online ended up being, the space combat was pretty dang fun.

However, the adventure portion is what sticks out in my mind.  ST25A was structured as the “missing season” from the show, and therefore picks up after the end of the classic series’ third season.  As such, the game is broken down into seven “episodes,” each of which are mostly self-contained stories.  I actually ended up loving the episodic approach to this game and wish that more adventure games followed that route.  You didn’t have to wait forever to get to the climax, and if one of the stories tanked, well, there were six others to entertain.

A lot of the adventure portion was talking with the crew, visiting planets/starships/space stations, investigating, and (of course) solving puzzles.  You couldn’t let any of the main characters die, although the game helpfully supplied you with a red shirt that could be offed without severe penalty.

My specific memories of the episodes are fuzzy, considering the time that’s gone by.  I played this on my then-new 386 after school each day, and as a Trekkie it really did a lot to fuel my wish fulfillment when it came to imagining that I was part of the series.  The classic Star Trek series has always been my favorite (at one point I had every — EVERY — Star Trek TOS novel, screenplay, and obscure paperback in a massive collection), and the game lavished so much love on the familiar characters and settings.  Sometimes the game could be a little scary, but more often than not exciting and sometimes fiendishly tricky.  The final space battle took me numerous attempts to finish, but finish I did.

I’d definitely be interested in replaying Star Trek 25th Anniversary if I got my hands on it.  Adventure games, I find, age well, especially if they weren’t hard on the eyes (and ST25A certainly wasn’t).