Extropia’s Retro-Gaming: ‘Star Wreck’

During the 8-bit era, you could find games for the very reasonable price of £1.99. Of course, calling this price ‘reasonable’ depends on the quality of the game itself. Even £2 is too much if the game is total rubbish. You might be thinking that no game could be brilliant if it was sold so cheaply, but actually there were a few great games in this budget range. The first game I ever bought was ‘Aliens’, which I talked about previously. I bought the rerelease which came out on the ‘ricochet’ label for £1.99.

This time, though, we are talking about another game inspired by a sci-fi franchise. You might be able to guess which one from the title of this game, which is ‘Star Wreck’. If that is not a big enough clue, here is the game’s scenario. You take on the role of one James T. Cake, and you are the captain of the Star Ship ‘Paralysed’. Your ship is carrying a cargo of Trell and Reptillion Slime Beasts, and your mission is to see them safely delivered to the research station on the planet Dandrox.

Yes, this is a Star Treck Spoof. More specifically, this is a text-based adventure that puts a comedic spin on the TV show starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the rest.

For those who have not played a text-based adventure, playing such a game is a bit like reading a story with multiple possible plot lines. You find your way around by typing commands like ‘Go West, Go North’ (or just inputting the letters N, S, E, W if you’re too lazy to spell these coordinates around in full) and you have to collect stuff which you keep in your inventory. The real challenge is always figuring out where each item has some useful function, and what instructions you need to type in order to successfully complete each challenge.

Since such games are obviously very much story-based, whether they are any good depends on how interesting and entertaining that story is, as well as how crafty the challenges are. The best games of this genre had very well structured plots and challenges that somehow had you scratching your head in puzzlement for hours, only to realise ‘oh THAT is what you do! It’s so obvious!’, once you finally figured it out.

But what about ‘Star Wreck’? Well, sad to say, this game is the epitome of a wasted opportunity. An adventure game based on Star Trek could have made for a very entertaining way to spend your time, flying from one planet to the next and getting into scrapes that parody the famous TV show. But that’s not what you get, here. For one thing, you never really visit strange new worlds or seek out new civilisations. In fact, you only boldly go wandering around the many rooms and corridors of the star Ship ‘Paralysed’.

That would not be so bad if this one location was packed with things to discover, but alas while there are lots of rooms on this ship, the majority of them are just empty and described simply as ‘Crew Deck Section Whatever’. As you can imagine checking out one empty room after the other gets very tiring, a boredom alleviated only by the few cabins that actually contain something useful or somebody to talk to. These tend to be the cabins of your crew, and in keeping with the pun-tastic nature of these game, they are Zulu, Checkout, Spark and Yahoo.

If comedy names like that do not strike you as terribly funny, then be warned. This is about as amusing as this game gets. Oh, I should mention the graphics, because there are some. Not much to talk about here, really. You just get visual representations of the rooms, cabin and corridors. You never see any of the characters and what images there are soon become as repetitive as those endless empty rooms in the text.

You might have figured out by now that I do not think much of this game. I mean, it’s not like it’s absolutely terrible or anything. But it is kind of boring. Some budget games managed to provide great entertainment, given their cheap price. But Star Wreck proves some did not.

Thanks to Alternative Software for the images.