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After the amount of yammering on I’ve done about Star Trek games, I would be remiss to not review Star Trek: The Video Game, based on JJ Abrams’s version of the franchise and bridging (some of) the gap between the 2009 movie and this year’s Star Trek Into Darkness.  The game was described at E3 as a “bro-op,” alluding to the highly cooperative nature of the Kirk-and-Spock-centered gameplay the game intends.  To adequately explore this, I called on my friend and fellow Trekker Kristine Chester of Fanboy Comics to help protect New Vulcan from Gorn invaders.

Captain’s Log, Final Entry

In my ongoing quest to find the best games attached to the Star Trek franchise, I’ve delved into the depths of history, the formative years of PC gaming, the “golden age” of the fifteen years ago, and the slow death of the franchise in gaming.  Somehow, though, I always knew that we would come back to one of the earliest Star Trek games, one of the first I ever played.

The year was 1992.  The company was Interplay.

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Captain’s Log, Supplemental

After a brief detour to a strange planet populated by sentient, shape-changing robots, I return to my original mission.  Will I find what I seek in the star systems controlled by the entity called “Activision”?

Captain’s Log, Supplemental

My mission to revisit the history of Star Trek games continues.  With the first two decades of games dealt with (and a little more than that for console gaming), I set course for the last years of the 20th century, a time controlled by MicroProse and Interplay, but in the looming shadow of Activision.  Can I allow myself to hope to find a great Trek game in that long-gone era?

I know that it will come as a shock to regular Tappers that I’m kind of a huge Star Trek fan.  Understandably, then, I’ve been keeping a wary eye on the upcoming Digital Extremes-developed Star Trek, which got a new trailer earlier this week and bridges the gap (or at least part of the gap) between 2009’s Star Trek reboot and next year’s sequel.

There have been Star Trek video games since basically as long as there were video games, but that legacy is checkered at best.  Trek is notorious for having its name on bad games, and unlike some other shaky franchises, like Star Wars, there aren’t that many really outstanding ones to offset the disasters.

Revisiting this sordid history is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it (obviously).  Set phasers to…ugh, nevermind, I can’t muster a phaser setting joke.

Confession: I have logged an embarrassing number of hours on Star Trek Online since it went free-to-play earlier this year.  I’d played and enjoyed the game when it first released two years ago, just not $15 a month enjoyed.  But to its credit, STO was and is the only MMO that’s ever really got me considering paying that subscription fee.

Star Trek Online has its issues, sure.  Even now after two years of marked improvement, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.  There are some problems that really stand out, though: heck, a week ago, a Cryptic developer singled out PvP as a part of the game that still sucks.  And that is a very, very fair assessment.  Because it does.

So let’s take a break from talking about your World of Warcrafts and Guild Wars 2s and Old Republics (actually, does anyone care about that one anymore?) and break down what a sort of niche MMO can do to be greater than the sum of its parts.