Three Classic Trek Games To Return
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Trek gamers will be happy with the news that three favorite Star Trek classic games are now available.
The games will be offered online.
The games include Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Star Trek: Judgment Rites, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary was released by Interplay in 1992, and included the entire cast of the original series as voice actors. The game was a definite hit, scoring 940 out of 1000 in a review.
In 1993, Star Trek: Judgment Rites debuted. It was “very similar” to Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, but featured “improved graphics and sound.”
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, released in 1997, was a “starship flight simulator peppered with FMV sequences featuring William Shatner, Walter Koenig, and George Takei.”
“It’s Star Trek‘s turn to shine on GOG.com,” said Oleg Klapovsky, GOG‘s vice president of business development. “Our sci-fi fans should now be pretty much covered. We’re always excited for the chance to restore lost videogames to modern PCs. There are very few that deserve the GOG.com treatment more than the Star Trek classics, and we’ve done everything to make sure they work flawlessly.”
Each game will cost $5.99, and can be purchased at the GOG.com site, located here.
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> three favorite Star Trek classic games are now available
They’ve been available for decades. Did they redo the graphics and music? Or did they just tweak them just enough to run in some hosted environment?
I’ve never played Starfleet Academy, but the other two are DOS games, so they should work just fine in virtual machines. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get old DOS games to work in VMs, but so far every classic Sierra game I’ve tried worked pretty much out of the box on HyperV–which is notoriously *not* game-friendly. Can’t imagine VMware or VirtualBox doing much worse.
I’m pretty sure I’ve moved these from floppies and still have them burned on a CD somewhere.
I’d be interested in playing Klingon Academy again. I enjoyed that one. I was never able to get it to function quite right in Windows XP or the operating systems that followed. However, I did manage to get it set up and working in multiplayer LAN mode and my three sons and I all battled each other. It was fun, but they would be bored with such games now.
Are VM’s like emulators? VirtualBox, is that like DOS Box?
I owned Starfleet Academy and I loved it! I would definitely play that one again.
I forgot about DOS Box. These games may run just fine with it. Can’t say I’ve spent much time with it.
A virtual machine (VM) is a whole virtualized computer running its own operating system (OS), and is managed by a hypervisor, which virtualizes the hardware it’s running on. You run an OS in a VM just as you would on a physical computer (Linux, Windows, OS X (if you try hard enough) and there’s even an x86 version of Android). You can run multiple VMs side-by-side on a host computer without having them affect each other. Emulators replicate hardware functionality through software, so they’re a lot slower than a hypervisor, which is simply there to manage the access to the hardware. It’s not *as* fast as “installing an OS on bare metal” (as the saying goes), but pretty close to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor can probably do a better job of explaining it than myself, though I don’t know how technical you wanna get. 🙂
If you have Windows 8 Pro, you already have Hyper-V, though it’s not enabled by default. Your BIOS may also need a tweak. But once it’s up and running, it’s a great way to experiment with software you might not necessarily trust to run on your computer. Back to the topic at hand: If you install plain old DOS, these old games might run without much tweaking (provided you remember how to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat) 🙂
But, I still wanna know what these guys did for the $5.99 they want–whether this is the old games tweaked to run on modern hardware, the old games simply running in a hosted environment, or (not likely) redone from scratch.
I’d love to see miniatures of those ships
Still got Starfleet Academy on CD ROM from the 90s. Was a great game at the time before the Playstation generation took over.
Uhg, I was hope they would have done Star Trek: Armada II, the best Star Trek game in my books, I play it at least twice a week, while I listen to audiobooks.
I have several of the GOG packages. They typically use WINE or DOSBox. They do include a license to run the game legitimately, the CD’s or DVD’s in ISO format so you don’t need actual media, extras like PDF maps and manuals, soundtrack MP3’s, etc., and they’ve already done any tweaks to get them up and running in the virtual environment. That ain’t bad for six bucks, particularly if you DON’T own the originals.