For the past couple of weeks we’ve been looking at Star Trek games that never had their chance to shine because of Activision and their prematurely killing the “golden age” of Trek games. This time we’re going to go back to the mid-1990s and a little SEGA Genesis game called Star Trek: The Next Generation: Echoes From the Past.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Echoes From the Past begins, much like your typical episode of TNG, with a Captain’s Log. Unfortunately because of the limitations of the SEGA Genesis instead of hearing the calm, dignified voice of Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard, you’re greeted with a literal wall of text that reads almost like a very bland blog entry. Worse yet you have to read it while Captain Picard stares at you with judging eyes.

…freakin’ creep…

Anyways, once you skip the Captain’s Log screen and jump into the game, you are immediately met with a distress call from a Vulcan Archaeologist who is being harassed by Starfleet’s resident pain in the ass, the Romulans. After you arrive at the archaeological site and engage in the diplomatic negotiations with the Romulans (read: shoot them in the face), thus saving the Vulcan from immediate danger, you return to the Enterprise and are immediately attacked by a Romulan scout ship. After dispatching this minor nuisance (by either blowing them up or almost blowing them up), you receive a message from Starfleet Command telling you go to clear across the damn galaxy to deliver some cough syrup to a race of backwood Druid-types. However, as you approach the planet in dire need of Nyquil, you come across an alien spacecraft that sorta looks like the Griffin Thunderzord.

Congratulations! You’ve finally reached the main game plot! After one of the longest story set-ups I’ve ever played through, you finally start off on your quest to discover the links between a long-extinct alien race, a missing Romulan research vessel, and a galactic superweapon.

Once you get into the game, you’ll find that it’s actually fairly well-written, keeping enough of a sense of mystery about it to want you to continue until you figure out exactly what’s going on. Thank God the writing is good, too, as there is a whole hell of a lot of it. Captains Logs, Conversations, Sensor Logs and a full Computer Database of useless knowledge add up to there being a whole hell of a lot of reading in Echoes From the Past.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Echoes From the Past is a little bit 2D space combat, a little bit puzzle game and a whole lot adventure title. When you’re on the bridge you have access to many separate subscreens:

Conn: Fly towards stuff.
Communications: Talk to stuff.
Ready Room: Mission stuff.
Transporter: Transport stuff.
Engineering: Fix stuff.
Computer: Read stuff.
Sensors: Read more stuff.
Tactical: Shoot stuff.

You navigate through the menus by moving through a quasi-3D still image of the bridge, with each of the bridge officers representing one of the key systems… except Troi. Fitting, considering she was completely useless on the show, too. It should be noted that some of the screens are more important to the game than others. For example, I’ve been playing this game since 1994 and I’m still not entirely sure what purpose the sensors screen serves.

When you’re not on the bridge, you’re usually on another planet or alien vessel. At this time you get to pick your away team from a pool of about 30 people. Of course you have the core cast of the show (sans Wesley), but you also have a slew of redshirts at your disposal. While it’s tempting to build an away part entirely of nameless redshirts just to watch them die in the most horribly gruesome 16-bit ways, if at any point in the game you lose three crew members the Enterprise is recalled and the game ends. So don’t do that.

To avoid having to dispose of a pile of dead extras, you would do wise to pay attention to each of the character’s four ratings: Health, Strength, Technical and Tactical. Health and Strength are self-explanatory. Technical is how savvy with puzzles a particular character is; Data has a very high technical rating, which allows him to see in the dark and find hidden items. Worf has a high Tactical rating, which basically allows him to dole out the harshness at his will.

These ratings do provide a smidge of strategy when trying to determine your away team, though more often than not you’ll wind up picking Data, Geordi, Worf and Ensign Ricky because regardless of how much puzzle solving a particular level has, eventually you will have to shoot something. Whether it’s Romulans, Robots, Giant Moles, you will find yourself spreading Starfleet’s message of peace by killing everything you see.

Finally, you have the ship combat. You know that spiffy new Star Trek D.A.C. that people have been playing? The space fights play out exactly like that, with both phasers and photon torpedoes at your disposal. There are a couple of things that you should keep in mind, however: 1.) If you decide to be Jean-Luc the Conqueror and go around killing endless hordes of soulless Romulan scum, eventually the game is going to get damn near impossible to complete as every time you try to go to a different planet the entire fucking fleet will be out for you. 2.) You can avoid these fights altogether by using diplomacy.

That’s right – at certain points in the game you will have the chance to talk out your differences with the individual whose hellbent on blowing you to Hades. The dialogue choices, in keeping with everything else in the game, is painfully long-winded. But they’re also written quite differently in tone so it’s easy to tell which answer will get you out of a fight and which is the literary equivalent of a leather glove to the face. This is quite useful if you’re out of photon torpedoes or have significant damage… or if you’re a bitch.

SNES vs. Genesis

Interesting little factoid about Echoes From the Past: It’s a reworked port of a SNES game, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Future’s Past. The gameplay and the plot remain almost exactly the same, however the Genesis version improves on the SNES version in almost every way. For instance, when you beat the game in the Genesis version, you get resolution. You get to see how things play out and how your actions have effected the galaxy. In the SNES version you get a single “Congratulations” screen, whereas in the Genesis version you get a full, rewarding ending that actually explains shit. Additionally, in the SNES version, while on away missions your phaser only had so much power before they would drain. On the Genesis version, this is not the case.

But the biggest difference between the two games is the inclusion of a single mission that makes the SNES version of the game next to impossible to beat. Here’s the lowdown: Fairly early in the game you have a looooooooooooong conversation with a Chodak captain. When I say “long”, I’m talking upwards if fifteen to twenty minutes of doing nothing but staring at the screen and reading boring ass dialogue. After you finish your conversation, you then have to fight your way to a series of puzzles where you get one chance to solve them. If you mess up, game over and you start the game all over again. The worst part? It’s not until you beat it that you realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot of the game and really has no reason for existing.

This mission is in the Genesis version of the game, but thankfully it’s completely optional.

I do have to be fair and point out that the SNES does have a few advantages over the Genesis version:

1.) The graphics on Genesis when compared to SNES are complete ass.

2.) On SNES Dr. Crusher has a medical tricorder to heal away team members. For whatever reason, she lacks this on Genesis.

3.) On SNES, Dr. “T’Lirus” is hot. On Genesis, Dr. T’Laris looks like Kevin Rowland.

Yeah, #3 was a stretch. And I didn’t even get to use the image I wanted to use because of S&P. So I link to it.

Ultimately, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Echoes From the Past on Sega Genesis is a great game. Sure, the dialogue can bore you to tears and the story is slow to pick up, but it still works as a damn fine adventure game with just enough variety to keep you from ever getting bored. Even better is that you can get this game on eBay for about $7 so… you don’t really have an excuse to not play it.

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