« Other / Games - Star Trek Generations

Overview

Star Trek: Generations by Microprose, along with Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, is one of the best Star Trek games.
I've seen it described as the System Shock of Star Trek games, which is about right - except that the mission environments are much brighter and more beautiful.

For all that the game has its limitations, which were fairly apparent at the time of its delayed release, and is quite unforgiving, it is also a very charming and authentic-feeling game.
A lot of footage was recorded, alongside the Generations movie that was only to be included in the cutscenes of the game.

The game also features the full voice cast of the Next Generation crew, as well as William Shatner and Malcolm McDowell.

After playing the game in the days of Windows 1998, as far as I'm concerned, the Chodak aliens, the thorn-spitting plants, the Romulan base on Galorndon Core all might as well be things that you saw directly in the show.

---

Running it in 2025

The game is difficult to run on modern PCs and there is at least one level-breaking bug that occurs on CPUs faster than about 400MHz.
To get around all this, The Collection Chamber provides the game within a pre-packaged Windows 95 virtual machine.
You run the containing .exe, you see the virtual 166MHz machine boot up. Windows 95 starts loading, and then the game starts automatically. 
It really couldn't be made any easier.

---

Pre-release Material

One interesting thing is that, in the trailer and pre-release screenshots, the phaser works differently: casting a semi-transparent, constant beam, rather than a stream of red projectiles.
A similar change was made for the Klingon and Romulan disruptors before release as well.

The Cutting Room Floor shows the sprites for the Rick Sternbach-designed cobra type-II phaser, seen in TNG, which were used in the game prior to release.
The view model of the phaser was changed late-on to make it look like one of the concept sketches made for TNG season 3, which perhaps, the game makers thought was a more visually striking design.

Blake's Sanctum also has a good page about the game, which links to the trailer on youtube, as well as interviews with the voice cast.
You have to admire the honesty of the trailer, where they just point a camcorder at the monitor. 
It also features a voice-over from Dave Mallow of Digimon and Power Rangers fame.

---

Cut Mission

In the trailer, there is a brief shot, exactly 1 minute in, of a cut level that would have been available near the end of the game that takes place on an apparently biomechanical, alien ship with a red interior.
The player would've taken the role of Worf for this mission and the ship would've shown up in the Guernica system.
On page 7 of the game manual, there are images of an alien spacecraft that is also seen crashed and partly submerged in water on the Bersus level, earlier in the game, which would've served as some interesting foreshadowing of this completely unknown alien race.

Soran would have apparently been on-board this spacecraft, receiving a package, presumably containing trilithium, from a fellow El-Aurian: Hanuman, whose sprite can also be seen on the TCRF page.
In the game's STELLAR.BAT, there are sound files (HANU0015.WAV and HANU0016.WAV) of him sending a message to Soran and taunting Picard over subspace.

The occupants of the spaceship are encountered right near the end of Kirk's mission on Veridian III: the penultimate level of the game.
Some of the textures for the alien ship are used in the easter egg that is accessible by walking right to the back of the left-hand cave where Kirk encounters these "henchmen" aliens, which seem to be Hanuman's servants and fire a sonic or psychic blast from their oversized helmets.

---

Strategy Guide

I bought the Brady strategy guide for Generations, but it contains absolutely nothing about the easter egg or the cut mission, or any real background around the game additional to what you get from the game itself.
Despite it running to 200+ pages, it doesn't really go into much depth and is essentially a speedrun-style barebones description of how to complete each mission.
All it explains about Soran's henchmen is that the effect of their psychic attack diminishes greatly over distance.

---

Unused Content

In the COMBAT.BAT, there is a texture for an unused Ferengi ship, as well as Garidian versions of the Romulan D'Deridex warbird and scoutship.
There is also textures for what looks to me like a smaller Chodak probe vessel, which would make sense, as the Chodak dreadnought is a massive, powerful ship in the game and difficult to defeat.
Having a smaller ship, which looks similar to the human-sized probe enemies that defend the Chodak base on Epsion, would've given some extra variety to the space combat element.

There are also textures for a starbase, which would've been cool to see in the game as well, as you have in Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy.