Star Trek: Borg

Writer:

Hilary J. Bader

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Director:

James L. Conway

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Release Date:

1996

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm giving you a choice!

Star Trek: Borg is an interactive movie, but it's also a Star Trek story, so you can keep reading this article to get all the meandering, sci-fi trivia and nitpicks I put in a typical Sci-Fi Adventures review, or you can jump over to my other website, Super Adventures, and get a more focused, streamlined version which gets to the point. Stay here if you're a Star Trek fan who likes words, or go over there if you'd rather scroll past less text.

> CLICK HERE FOR THE SHORTER SUPER ADVENTURES STAR TREK: BORG REVIEW <

I really wouldn't recommend reading both articles. Well, unless you're into sitting through lots of the same content all over again, in which case I might have found the right story for you!

The game apparently came out in late 1996, just a few weeks before the movie Star Trek: First Contact. That film's all about the Borg so they had their synergy figured out there. That means that in grand scheme of Star Trek games, Borg comes after 25th Anniversary and A Final Unity, but before Starfleet Academy and Elite Force. It was released right at the start of the Trek game explosion that lasted until 2001, where every year would have three or more games, some of them not entirely terrible! In fact this wasn't even the only Trek game by Simon & Schuster that year, as they also released Star Trek: Klingon, which appears to be more of the same kind of thing.

The game will apparently run on modern systems if you download this ancient installer from the Internet Archive: Borgptch, but I don't really know how well it gets along with Windows 10 because I decided to run it in Windows 95 using the PCem PC emulator instead.

I usually only play for an hour or two, but this isn't the longest of games so I'm going to be playing all of it this time. So there's going to be HUGE SPOILERS for this game and maybe a few smaller spoilers for Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes like The Best of Both Worlds.

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The game begins with a starfield and voices, and that's all you get for the first 30 seconds. There's no title screen, no options menu, just a starfield. I was honestly starting to wonder if the game had crashed.

But my patience was finally rewarded with some stock footage of the USS Enterprise D flying past the camera! Though in this case I think it's supposed to be a ship called the USS Cheyenne, and it's currently receiving news of a Borg invasion fleet heading to Earth! It seems like the game's tying in with the plot of Star Trek: First Contact from the same year... except they mention that there's two Borg ships heading to Sector 001, not just the one that turned up in the movie, so I dunno.

The ship looks like the Enterprise on the outside, but the interior is all USS Voyager. I can't really blame them for that though, seeing as Next Gen's sets were replaced or adapted to make Voyager's sets.

That's background actor Tracey Lee Cocco on the left, who played several aliens across Next Gen, DS9 and Voyager, but is most recognisable as Enterprise officer Lieutenant Jae. She was never named on screen, but she was on screen a lot more than you'd think, as she was in 63 episodes and 3 movies!

But these are the only three people in the hallway, so once they've all walked off-camera the camera goes off in search of somewhere more interesting to be.

Hah, Duck Corporation.

Everyone's staring at the camera right now because it's a first person game and I've kept them all waiting. It's okay though as there's nothing really going on right now except for the impending battle with two Borg Cubes. Those aren't Voyager uniforms by the way, they're cadet uniforms, and we've all been called here so this lieutenant can tell us we're being sent somewhere safer until ships stop exploding.

My character is as silent as the other cadets, but the lieutenant keeps him behind for a moment to say that she knows he's eager to get revenge on some Borgs for the death of his dad at Wolf 359, but his request to stay has been denied. She also mentions that the Battle of Wolf 359 was 10 years ago, which means this scene takes place 4 years in the future... relative to the year the rest of the franchise was in at the time. So this is happening after the end of Deep Space Nine, but before the end of Voyager and the start of Lower Decks.

That was an impressive scene by the way: one unbroken take lasting over two minutes. All entirely unskippable.

Anyway, look it's John de Lancie! He explains that he's called Q (short for Q), and that he's an omnipotent being with godlike powers and nothing better to do right now but to tempt me into going along with one of his games. He's going to hold out a bag and a phaser for a few seconds and I've got that long to decide which I want to choose. If I want to follow orders and take a shuttle ride to safety then I need to click my little Borg Cube cursor on the bag. But if I want to get vengeance justice for his dad and shoot some Borgs, I need to take the phaser instead.

I'm curious though, so I'm going to pick option three: stand there doing nothing until Q's patience runs out.

Turns out that his patience lasts about five seconds, which isn't long at all when you're also trying to spot where your cursor is.

But Q's taken pity on me and has broken the fourth wall to explain how to move my little Borg Cube and click on things to make choices, seeing as I'm clearly having trouble. Wait, hang on, why is he wearing a Voyager uniform instead of the type the lieutenant was wearing earlier? And why wasn't she wearing the First Contact uniform with the grey shoulders? I suppose with Q around the answer could actually be 'a wizard did it' and I should stop thinking too hard.

Speaking of the lieutenant, when I got a second try I chose the bag and she walked in on us while he was in the middle of being disappointed with me. She immediately recognised him and called for an intruder alert, with surprisingly little panic for someone who just ran into a godlike being who could unmake her species' entire history by sneezing.

I suppose I got off lucky when he just gave me a game over. Though the game also quit to desktop right afterwards! That means I've got to sit through the entire intro all over again.

After four and a half minutes rewatching this weird first person Star Trek episode I finally got to choose between bag and gun for the third time and this time I definitely went with gun. Q was pleased with my decision to go with the barbaric choice over the cowardly one, but we're not actually going to be fighting the Borg with the Cheyenne crew.

No, we've taken a trip 10 years back in time to the USS Righteous, one of the ships that was destroyed off-screen during the Battle of Wolf 369: Starfleet's futile attempt to prevent the first Borg invasion.

Q chose this ship in particular because it was my character's father's ship. He's Lieutenant Furlong, I'm Cadet Furlong. That's him in the red, over on the right. Hang on, if this is set during season 4 of Next Gen, why are they wearing Voyager uniforms... actually, never mind, doesn't matter.

The important thing is that now I can properly compare the game to Starfleet Academy, another Trek game with plenty of live action video that came out a year later.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (PC)

Oh man, that 3D rendered virtual bridge looks terrible. Though the game does earn bonus points for actually having 640x480 video (and for using the right uniforms for the era).

Star Trek: Borg also runs at 640x480, but the video resolution is only 312x232 so it doubles the pixels and then puts interlaced black lines across it to try to hide it (which I've edited out of my screenshots, because it looks horrible). It also has the side effect of halving the brightness, and you can tell by my images that the footage wasn't brightened to compensate.

Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (PC)

Wing Commander IV, on the other hand, looks way too bright when you take out the lines. Fortunately the version you can buy these days is the DVD version, with higher resolution video at the correct brightness.

The game came out the same year as Star Trek: Borg and it also has proper expensive sets, only these were actually built for the game, not borrowed from Star Trek: Voyager. WC4 looks pretty cinematic at times... and other times they've put the characters in front of a green screen and it's pretty damn obvious. That's one advantage Borg has over a lot of games using FMV: it's all shot on real sets, all the time.

Command and Conquer (PC)

Here's a shot from 1995's Command and Conquer, because it's the first game that jumps to mind when I think of FMV and I'm sure it was feeling left out. C&C is the opposite of Borg, as it's all virtual sets and no interlaced lines. Plus the cutscenes eventually end and then you get to do stuff in it.

Anyway, the USS Righteous's bridge crew can't see Q and they can't see me either, so events are going to play out just as they did 10 years ago at Wolf 359... which is now.

Q explains that the main reason the ship blows up is because this guy in yellow is a bit crap. He's standing in for the ship's security chief, Lieutenant Sprint, who's currently dead and has been for the last four hours because the guy in blue, Dr Quint, failed to save him. No seriously, they're called Sprint and Quint.

I'm not sure this guy on the left even has a name, but when a Borg beams over and starts hacking their systems, he leaps into action, achieves nothing, and gets killed. And that's when the ship blows up.

Hey, the Righteous is an Excelsior class ship. Also this is footage taken from the pilot of Deep Space Nine!

I wouldn't have thought the Borg would need to do anything clever to blow up a Federation ship, they usually just cut things up with energy beams and they explode, but I guess they might have been bored and wanted to try something new.

Cadet Furlong ends up in a white void where Q offers him a new choice: he can avenge his father's death by killing Borgs, or he can screw around with the timeline and try to prevent it. Except there's not actually a choice here, we're gonna meddle with the spacetime continuum!

So Q rewinds time four hours to when Quint was unable to save Sprint from a Borg. That's Sprint on the left, played by Tarik Ergin, who also played security officer Lieutenant Ayala in Voyager. Ayala didn't get a whole lot to do or say in the series, but if you've watched the show you've definitely seen him, as he was in the background of 124 episodes. That's almost twice as many as Jae!

But this is the end of his appearance in the game, as Q swaps Cadet Furlong into Sprint's body, while he takes over Dr Quint! That's genius really, as he doesn't have to bother playing a role if he's disguised as someone who was already an asshole.

We've both gone from being invisible observers to being participants, which means I have a crucial decision to make.

Do I use the phaser or Q's special tricorder?

By the way, I have to give the film crew praise for getting the two objects held up to the camera properly. I don't know how these POV shots were filmed exactly, but I doubt they had a GoPro attached to an actor's head like for the movie Hardcore Henry. This would've been shot with a proper camera, shooting on actual film, so however it was done, they did it the hard way.

Using the gun on the intruder is probably the sensible option, but when does that ever work? I need to get some insight on how to stop the Borg so I'm going to click the tricorder.

Oh, Q just took it from me and smacked me over the head with it for being an idiot. Well at least my bad choice didn't send me back to the game over screen... but that doesn't mean it won't happen next time. Q has no patience and if I stop entertaining him I'm sure he'll just call the whole thing off and take me back to the desktop. Man, there's got to be a way I can save my progress and avoid watching all those cutscenes every time he gets bored with me.

Okay I looked it up, and it seems like if I press 'Q' to quit it'll save the game! And also quit.

It's a huge relief knowing I won't have to sit through all that again. Also look, a menu screen came up when I restarted the game! Look at that classic Windows 95 style window... they really didn't want to go to the trouble of drawing their own one.

There's still no options here, so I'll have to live without subtitles, but there is a 'Watch movie' button that gives me a replay of everything I've done so far, which is unusual. And kind of the opposite to what I want right now.

Hmm, if 'Q' quits, maybe it recognises other keys as well, like 'S' for subtitles? No, didn't work, but 'S' does let me save without quitting! That's going to save me a lot of messing around (even if I still have to quit to load them).

Anyway, I clicked the phaser and the cadet currently resembling Sprint shot the Borg! Didn't do anything, huge shock. But this time Q intervened and knocked the Borg out with a hypospray. Which is something Dr Quint could've done if he'd been smarter.

The Righteous is ordered to join the fleet at Wolf 359 to intercept the Cube, but seeing as they're already at the Cube they'll be flying alongside it the whole way. They're still on course to be blown up in four hours, only this time Sprint isn't dead (or at least I'm pretending to be a Sprint that isn't dead), so everything I do here changes history. For better or worse.

For instance, Ensign Targus originally survived for another four hours, but if I screw this scene up she'll die right here. I blame the captain though, for ordering her over to drag the unconscious Borg off the bridge on her own instead of sending multiple security officers.

This time Cadet Furlong chose the phaser by himself, so the decision I have to make is who gets shot. Q strongly recommends shooting Targus, which seems like the obvious wrong decision... unless the phaser's set to stun instead of kill! There's no point shooting the Borg so I might as well give it a try

Oh, Cadet Not-Sprint went and killed her, that's just awesome. It got me a great reaction shot from the shocked bridge crew though, just before the ship exploded. Q reset the scene and this time I shot the computer screen, which worked about as well as you'd expect. It killed the Borg outright and saved Targus! Exploding computer panels are lethal in Star Trek.

So I've finally defeated my nemesis, the Borg, for good. One of them anyway.

Unfortunately it seems like the Righteous has the most pissed off captain in Starfleet, and right now he's demanding that I reconfigure my security console so that I can control tactical B.... whatever that means. All I know is that the camera zoomed in on these four buttons, and that's all I get. No tricorder, no instructions, not even labels.

I suppose I'll try them in order and see what happens...

And Cadet Furlong is dead. Cause of death: being too stupid to live. That second button along carries enough charge to kill someone instantly, but no one thought to mark it as being dangerous because... everyone already knows, I guess? To be fair I think most people understand that it's a bad idea to mess around with electronics when they're plugged in.

By the way, Ensign Targus (on the right) was also in another Star Trek project the same year. The actress I mean, Marnie McPhail.

Star Trek: First Contact

She was one of the unfortunate engineers serving on the USS Enterprise in First Contact. It doesn't matter what ship she's on, she's always got Borg problems.

Right, Q seems to think that the tricorder's moment has come at last, but I can't figure out how to use the bloody thing. I mean it's not like there's a button on screen and there's definitely not a button on the keyboard.

OH! I have to click the mouse while the video's still playing, before my cursor has appeared! Well that's weird.

There's a beautiful chroma key fringe for you. Maybe Bijanis glow blue when they're using tricorders. That's what species Sprint is by the way. He may look entirely human, but he's actually an alien with the special power to make other characters continually say things like "I know you're Bijani, but that still had to hurt" and "You're staring like you're in a Bijani pain trance."

Bringing up the tricorder has also had the side effect of pausing the game and it seems to be the only way to ever get the video to stop. Even doing nothing in this game is making a choice.

That's clever; it's displaying a tiny video on the screen over the top of the video that's paused in the background. It's just regular sized video though, it hasn't been scaled up, so I can't edit out the interlaced lines like I've been doing with the other shots.

The tricorder video also has terrible sound for some reason. It's got great voice acting by Q doing his best impersonation of the computer, but the audio is really low quality. Plus it drags on forever. Just show me the order I need to remove the nodules already!

SOON

Alright, now that I've removed the nodules in the order listed in the tricorder I have to get down to the computer core using the turbolift. That means I'm up to the next puzzle: pressing these buttons in the order listed in the tricorder.

Usually in Star Trek a character will just say 'computer core' and the turbolift will get them there in the exact amount of time it takes to have a conversation with the other person in there, but I apparently can't speak, so I have to do this the hard way. Well I mean it's not hard, I just have to make sure I give enough time for it to register each click while I'm trying not to lose track of what number I'm up to.

The tricorder says that 150619 should get me where I'm going.

Okay this isn't the computer core. I think I accidentally pressed one of the numbers twice.

In some games a scene like this would be a hidden Easter egg, but this is just what Borg's like. It's all serious Trek drama and Q continually taking the piss out of it. He's being clever about it though, with the way he's got a fake version of the captain serving him a drink and speaking the words that the real captain is saying over the radio. Which is basically 'get your ass down to the computer core control room already'. But the steel drums on the soundtrack are telling me to chill out and take it easy, so I'm conflicted.

Fortunately I typed the code in right the second time and when I reached Voyager's main engineering the computer core the captain gave me shit for being so late that my dad made it here before me.

Now I have to make a choice. There's a mysterious Borg implant (their words) attached to the computer and it's clearly not something we want to leave there. There's two tools on top of the console, or I could just try investigating the implant by hand. I need to click on something quick as I've only got seconds to decide.

I decided to click on the implant... and I did not regret it! Mostly because it got me another shot of the crew looking down at the dead idiot who touched something electrified. I also got a scene of Q getting pissed off a me for touching what I didn't understand (again).

To use the tricorder you have to click the mouse before the video's reached the point where you have choices, but I was too late and accidentally clicked on one of the tools instead... which turned out to be a scanner! Our detailed readings revealed that it's a device that doesn't like being scanned, and it set off the ship's self-destruct system, blowing everyone up, and kicking me back to my desktop.

Well fine then, if the game doesn't want me to play it, I'm going to go look what else is on the discs.

Picard Dossier

The second CD contains an entirely separate piece of installable software called the Picard Dossier, which should actually be called the Borg Dossier, as it's a version of the Star Trek Omnipedia that only contains entries relevant to the Borg. Some of them are really tenuous though, like the episode Parallels gets an entry (and a trailer video) just because Giant Beard Riker from the Borg Are Everywhere dimension makes an appearance for 3 seconds.

It's entirely irrelevant now that the Memory Alpha website exists and has far more information about way more topics, but it does have one handy feature that's been lost to time: videos that don't auto-play.

Anyway I should probably go back to saving the crew of the Righteous. They'll all be doomed without my insights and intelligence.

Turns out that I was supposed to pick the other tool, which can be used to detach mysterious Borg implants from computer panels. Lieutenant Furlong was the one who pulled it off though and he's so damn happy that he saved the ship!

Except not really, as the self-destruct activated again and blew everyone up. Okay, I'm getting really sick of seeing the same scene over and over again, and scanning things with the slow-ass tricorder is just as bad, so I'm just going to look up the answer now.

Oh. The correct way to deal with the Borg implant is to do... nothing at all. I failed the patience test, as this is a puzzle you can win by systematically trying all options even if they seem pointless. The crew decide not to mess with it and for some reason this means that the self-destruct doesn't go off, even though the Borg's ultimate goal is to destroy the ship. Doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, the implant had to have been planted by another Borg and that means they're still lurking on the ship somewhere, hidden from sensors (apparently). So Cadet Furlong and his dad go off on a mission to hunt them down! The story's really getting moving now, or at least the music seems to think so.

And it's suddenly interrupted by a disc swap screen. Kind of ruined the atmosphere.

Oh, the buttons are labelled 1 and 0 because the Borg are all about binary. Probably. I don't remember that ever being mentioned, plus they're not robots, they're a cybernetic hive mind, but even I'm not going to start nitpicking the buttons on the 'insert CD' screen.

The two Furlongs make their way to a Jeffries tube, which means we get another set!

But it's important that they split up now so that one can walk into danger alone, and the cadet's dad tells Sprint that if he can guess which hand he's hidden his combadge in, he gets to be the one to go.

I feel like the correct answer is probably 'neither' but I'm not sure where to click to pick that. In the end the timer ran out, and then things took a turn for the worse.

Bad news, Cadet Furlong is now Borg RoboCop and has been given the new designation Third of Four.

Oh by the way, if you think the Borg on the left looks familiar, that's because he's Borg Q!

Or Q-Borg, whatever. It looks like they haven't got his headpiece put on right for this photo though, as his forehead is huge.

Q-Borg is like a regular Borg, except not, because it's still just Q dressing up and playing along. Unfortunately I'm not, as I'm now part of a cybernetic hive mind which intends to kill everyone and destroy the ship. Though not by using the self-destruct system, that's too sensible.

The cadet now known as Third of Four has stormed the bridge to kill everyone, but he's still got enough self control to let me press the button on this guy's phaser (if I'm able to click the right place on a moving target during this shaky footage). I hope I'm adjusting the frequency to make it capable of shooting through my shield, not that I think it would help much in this doomed timeline I've created.

By the way, the tricorder tells me that this character here won an Olympic silver medal for low-gravity horse jumping. It didn't mention that the actor also played the Klingon captain who was stupid enough to headbutt Data in The Chase. He's the ship's counsellor in this, so he's got some range to him!

Yay the counsellor zapped me, and I got another shot of my character lying on the ground looking up at the crew for my collection. This time though I've still got options, so I can call in another Borg to kill the bridge crew, even though I just deliberately got myself shot in order to save them.

Actually, sure, why not. I chose to contact Second of Four and he came in to assassinate all my friends. Everyone got shot, as the Borg apparently have Mega Man blaster cannon arms now. Though Q did a really terrible job of faking his death, and just stumbled off camera.

So now I'm back at the start of the disc, having to choose which hand Lt. Furlong has hidden his combadge in. This time Q's given me a hint: the cadet's dad cheats, but I already guessed that. I just don't know how to do anything about it! I've been clicking everywhere but his hands and nothing's happening!

Oh, I just knocked him out somehow. It was the only sensible thing to do! I couldn't talk him out of going first and getting caught because I can't speak, so I had to let my fist do the talking.

Though hang on, he's got a phaser there and my little assimilation adventure I just went through taught me the frequency I need to shoot through Borg shields! I can't adjust my own phaser though, that would just be weird. No, I have to adjust Lt. Furlong's phaser, then put it back in its holster.

The cadet went to go through the door, but then the Borg appeared behind him! Fortunately his dad woke up in the nick of time to save him with an effective phaser blast. So I guess I did everything right here? Maybe?

Either way, the cadet's dad takes a device from the Borg, which means that we can now do a thing!

The characters all returned to the bridge together so I decided to use the tricorder on them to learn a bit more about them.

They've dropped a few hints to why Targus has a computer port on her forehead in dialogue, but the tricorder lays out the full story... slowly. Turns out that she was captured by the Cardassians and tortured with a device that makes you happy. The torture happens when they take it away, and you find you're addicted to it, and will give away all your secrets to get it back. It's a bit like what Garak had in Deep Space Nine actually.

Anyway, the implant she's got is just treating her addiction, and she'll be done with it in maybe six months. But I noticed the Borg device Lt Furlong grabbed was a very similar shape to her implant and realised this could be how we access it! It'd be a bit of a waste of all that backstory if this isn't the answer.

And it worked! Targus used the device to make the Borg think that we're part of the collective already so we're basically invisible to them. But now I need to save her from its effects and my options are limited. Q has a hypospray that might do the job, but it could also leave her as a vegetable, so do I roll the dice?

Turns out that the hypospray was not the correct solution. Whoops. Using drugs to sedate her isn't going to work... but that doesn't mean I can't stun her with my phaser!

And she's dead.

Oh come on! Qaylan, please, learn to turn your damn phaser to stun before you shoot your own crew members. That's the cadet's name by the way, Qaylan Furlong. Q feels that he has to point out that we're supposed to be saving people, not killing them, but I'm not sure the cadet's getting it.

Turns out the correct move was to touch the dangerous object ourselves and get a near fatal shock! Just because it was the wrong move all those other times, didn't mean it wouldn't work eventually! Qaylan uses Sprint's Bijani pain trance ability to get the thing off even while being shocked to unconsciousness, so that finally has a payoff. Though I had to do it twice, because Q rewound time after my first attempt in order to 'give me time to think about it'. Because getting the right answer too early means not getting to see the other clips I guess. They spent money on that phaser beam and they wanted players to see it, dammit!

Now we're ready to send a three person away team over to the Borg Cube! Q volunteers, but no one likes him, so I'm going be the third member of the team.

This means that means I'm getting a rare opportunity to see the transporter effort from the perspective of someone being transported! I'll finally get to see what characters see when they're between one place and the other.

Oh. I expected something more interesting to be honest.

I'm onto the third disc of three so there's not much game left now. There wasn't much game before this either really.

Okay you've see what what the game's like already so I'm going to summarise the last bit to save you from scrolling past another dozen screenshots.

The three of us beamed over to the Borg Cube and discovered we didn't know the code to access the computers. Then I accidentally got assimilated again and learned the code that way. We grabbed a Borg gadget we needed, beamed back to the Righteous, and used it to deactivate the Borg implant attached to the ship's computer core. And the ship just blew up again. We need to grab a whole live Borg to pull this off.

Q rewound time and this time I tried to use a hypospray to knock a Borg out. Unfortunately I chose to use it on Q-Borg, so that didn't work, and I got assimilated again. Only this time I was in my Bijani pain trance, which blocked off the connection to the collective enough for me to retain my self determination! But everyone else got assimilated too, oops.

A few retries and I managed to reprogram the hypospray to make myself collective-proof, make myself the live Borg we need, and save the others. Then I successfully deactivated the Borg implant in the computer core and the ship didn't blow up!

All that was left to do was torment Q a bit. Why did that even work against an omnipotent being? I dunno, maybe for the same reason my human cadet has Bijani pain trances. He's taken Quint's role, so perhaps he gets Quint's pain. Why would you ever want to overthink such a beautiful moment anyway?

This got the counsellor to come over and discuss Q's personality issues, and how he's trying to get people to like him in the least useful way. Q claims that he's an omnipotent being and can just make people like him, but the counsellor points out that it wouldn't be real, and Q should just try be more likeable as a person.

Q doesn't take well to good advice.

And that's it... we've caught up to the scene at the start of the game during the Battle of Wolf 359 where a Borg beams over and the ship blows up.

Only this time I'm here as Lieutenant Sprint (Borg Edition) instead of the replacement security officer, so I have a chance to save the day. Incidentally no one seems to give a damn that I've been assimilated, they've just been chatting like nothing happened. I don't think the counsellor has even noticed.

Anyway there's a Borg on the ship, so that means I've reached the hardest puzzle of the game: figuring out what I'm supposed to do on this screen.

It's Borg vs Borg, but I can't just shoot them, I need to click on something. Unfortunately they've forgotten to give me anything to click on! There's no objects here, trust me I've clicked on everything. After a few seconds the ship explodes, Q tells me I can beat him, and then I'm right back here again. Over and over again.

Fine, okay, I'm checking the walkthrough again. This is only the second time though I think.

Ah, I was supposed to click the curvy part of the interface at the bottom of the screen, where that circle's appeared. Obviously.

Now I just need to click the right symbols in the right order and I've won! Trouble is I have no idea what the code is and I have no idea how to find it out. I'm struggling enough here just to make out the shapes.

I gave it a few tries, got the ship blown up a few times, then went back to the walkthrough to get the code and get it done so I can finally move on. Sadly it didn't explain where you learn the code in game, so that's still a mystery to me.

I saved the ship from the Borg at Wolf 359 and no one but Sprint got assimilated! But that's actually a serious problem as it kind of ruins the timeline by rewriting the cadet's own history and removing his motivation to go back in time. Fortunately that's easily solved: they make it look like the ship was vaporised by bringing it forward in time 10 years to the present day!

Also Q changes the cadet back to himself and explains everything to the crew, so now they know he's Lieutenant Furlong's son, and Dr Quint gets brought back as well! Lieutenant Sprint has to stay dead though, because... I have absolutely no idea. Lots of grins on this bridge considering that their old friend just got assimilated a few minutes ago and then killed four hours ago. Well, 10 years and 4 hours ago.

They've got good reason to be cheerful though as there's that other Borg invasion going on right now and they're just in time to join in the fight! So the story ends with the Righteous flying away to save the day, with the cadet sticking around to help out. Unfortunately Q doesn't stay to assist, so they're probably going to last three minutes.


CONCLUSION

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Star Trek: Borg is the worst time loop episode in Star Trek history, though not for the reasons I was expecting.

For whatever reason, whenever a Trek game invents their own characters they tend to annoy the hell out of me, but that didn't happen this time. It seemed like it was going that way at the beginning, but then they started growing on me, and the actors are all good enough for the lines they've been given. Especially John de Lancie, but then that was a given. The real problem with the game is that it's bloody Dragon's Lair in disguise! You get a few seconds to make a choice, then you probably lose and have to try something else. But instead of the beautiful Don Bluth animation you get unskippable cutscenes full of dialogue to watch over and over again! Even the bloody tricorder is full of unskippable dialogue. Though Q seems to think he's in a Space Quest game, with the way he mocks you after every death.

Plus it doesn't work very well as a puzzle game, because all the puzzles are based around fantasy technology no one understands. Sometimes you have to remember codes, sometimes you have to just try things until you stumble onto the solution that doesn't get you electrocuted to death, but I rarely felt like I was figuring things out. I did like how it sometimes lets you continue down an obviously failed path for a while until you get an idea how to solve another problem though, I'll give it points for that. Unfortunately that's about the closest the game comes to branching, as there's only really one genuine choice I can think of and that's whether to punch Q in the face or knee him in the groin. Every other time there's only one correct decision that will push the story forward.

But does it work as an episode of Star Trek? Well they had the actual Star Trek sets and actual Trek production staff working on it, so that definitely helps. The video quality isn't great and obviously they couldn't do the typical editing and direction when it's all from first person, but a few canon issues aside (uniforms...) the only way it could've been more authentic is if they'd just used clips from the series. Unfortunately they did use clips from the series, for the spaceship shots, and the obviously recycled footage makes it look a bit cheap. Not that the series themselves didn't use recycled footage.

Even the writer and director were both proper Trek veterans, in fact James Conway almost ended up directing Star Trek: First Contact instead. Okay Hilary Bader was never my favourite writer, but she could definitely make people sound like Trek characters. Unfortunately the story isn't that interesting on a first watch and it doesn't improve the second or third time you watch a scene. You don't learn anything to give the events new meaning, the character doing the looping can't react differently because he's silent, so the game just replays the last few minutes.

Proper time loop stories generally have a mystery unfolding, but here we know from the start that it's Q that's doing it. Plus the character in the loop often has to grow and learn something in order to escape, but this doesn't have a main character. There's a story here about Qaylan Furlong going back in time, meeting the dad he lost 10 years ago, and desperately trying to save his life... but it's a story that Q tells to you, you never see it. You're told that you feel these things, but that's not how storytelling or immersion works!

The most important question, however, is does it work as a Q trolling simulator? And the answer is yes! This isn't the version of Q that teaches you important lessons about yourself, and puts humanity on trial for its limited imagination and barbarism, this is the Mr Mxyzptlk 4th-dimensional trickster version of Q that likes to play games and troll people with his casual manipulation of reality. Also he's gone a bit Deadpool here with his fourth-wall breaking, as he only stays in character as Quint or Q-Borg or the tricorder computer voice for as long as it entertains him to do so. I don't know if John de Lancie had fun playing Q at his most comedic here but it definitely comes across that way, and he's really good at talking to the camera. Everyone else is playing it straight, but his presence means you can never take the Borg part of the story seriously. Which is good, because it's a bit rubbish.

The joy of the game comes from finding new ways to screw up and seeing Q's reaction, but unfortunately this also means rewatching unskippable cutscenes, so really the ideal way to experience it is to just watch the video files on the CDs or on YouTube (or pay $100+ for the mysterious unreleased Japanese DVD version that apparently exists). That way you get the most content with the least pain. Either way it seems like the game's going to last you around two hours, which feels like a good length for it.

I mean I wouldn't talk you out of playing the game, some people seem to really enjoy it, but for me the interactivity just slowed it down.

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's Babylon 5 season 4, episode 9: Atonement. Not a Star Trek episode, sorry.

I know it's really stupid of me to lure Trek fans over from Super Adventures with a Star Trek game review and then give them nothing to come back each week for, but I'm determined to get through this series!

Feel free to leave a comment by the way. Comments are good.