Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. In the third part of Star Trek Month, it’s time for a trip to the Federation’s darkest corner – the hub of politics and intrigue that is Deep Space Nine.
Deep Space Nine is almost the anti-Star Trek. Where the others were fervently optimistic, it was realistic. Its Captain lied and cheated and did back-room deals to get the job done. Its crew included a former terrorist, a genetic outlaw, a thief, and a lost member of the baddies with a tendency to forget his loyalties. It showed that the Federation had dirty-tricks divisions, that even Paradise isn’t perfect, and that there is no more horrible sight in the universe than a greedy Ferengi in drag.
Most importantly, it remains the only Star Trek series so far to really dig into the implications of the seemingly utopian Federation. What happens to those of us who aren’t perfect? What happens in the face of a threat that can’t be conveniently dealt with in an hour – or 42 minutes, including adverts? Sure, Babylon 5 covered much of the same ground, but much of the fascination of Deep Space Nine was seeing how Star Trek specifically fared in the ‘real world’ when the chips finally went down.
(It’s also the only series in history whose creators specifically released counterfeit merchandise, just to give collectors everywhere the pleasure of holding it up with a hiss of “It’s a FAAAAAAKE!” Or so I encourage you to believe, tell your friends, and add to respectable wikis everywhere.)
But what of the games? Surely they’re just as brilliant as the show? Yeah. About that…
'Station Log: Today I met the most boring person ever.' 'Hey, I'm RIGHT HERE!' 'I am aware of this.'
Though it wasn’t ever likely to be this…
As a counter, in The Next Generation, you could be fairly sure what the status quo would be. There may be a few changes here and there, like Troi becoming a command officer or Worf’s backstory being revealed, but those are minor details. Picard would be giving speeches, Riker would smile smugly and Troi would still crash the bloody ship. The Next Generation was conveniently reliable like that.
Deep Space Nine on the other hand was anybody’s guess. The premise, of a small mining station that becomes a hub of importance with the discovery of a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy on its doorstep, soon went from ‘alien of the week’ stories to all out war. Every season was different, from the weak opener with episodes like Move Along Home and If Wishes Were Horses to the political upheavals of the second. As a specific example, it wasn’t until the third series that it was revealed that there was a hostile empire called the Dominion on the other side of the wormhole, and that idea itself wasn’t invented until almost a couple of years into the show. Even so, any attempt to use the wormhole to tell stories that didn’t factor this in was going to seem silly. And Deep Space Nine was anything but silly.
(Probably the worst ever case of this was for Farscape: The Game, which was atrocious anyway, but really suffered particularly from being set at the end of the first series and so focusing on stuff that hadn’t meant a damn thing to the show for literally years. Its plot can be summed up as ‘a mysterious forest appears on a planet and for some reason you care’. Only it was even duller than this sounds…)
Couple this with the fact that Deep Space Nine was an acquired taste that split Trek fandom with its attitude, and it’s not too surprising that there weren’t many games. In fact, there were exactly three on PC, all with a certain “What the hell do we do?” feel of desperation dripping from them. There was another in development, simply called “The Hunt”, but it got cancelled and only exists now in this preview. It doesn’t look very good, though, especially the bit where Science Officer Dax has an arse on her chin.
Ah, Ops. A little bigger than on the show. And with far more people called suCKmyCOLLECTIVE_89
Arriving, you’re first warned that some work has been done to the place – this is developer Cryptic’s way of saying “don’t expect perfection, fanboys!” – and the cast of the show aren’t around, but visually it’s pretty good. You can go shopping on the Promenade, and visit the upper level to check out the wormhole. You can head up to Ops, where you’ll probably see a random bunch of people jumping on the consoles like gibbering monkeys, and visit Sisko’s office to check out his baseball. Like the rest of the game, it’s all a little oversized, but the sentiment is there. You can also beam down to Bajor proper if you want, where a cute custom ground region awaits your crew, and one of the missions involves walking around on DS9′s hull. There’s even a whole episode of the in-game story devoted to a dropped thread from the show – a fleet of invading Jem’hadar ships eaten by the wormhole.
Not to be crass, but I'm not sure that's enough... ah... polygons for Leeta.
(To give her credit though, it worked out – not least because Rom eventually developed into a heroic figure who became the leader of his people. So, yeah. Way to go, Leeta, I guess…)
Ah, the Promenade. Two levels of shopping, but mostly geeking out.
Sadly, building a room capable of creating anything in the universe proved beyond Star Trek Online’s designers – the wusses – so forget about having a hot stardate, milking the franchise, cleaning out Jeffrey’s tubes, whacking off with Weyoun, penetrating the galactic barrier, implanting a Trill, turning O’Brien smiley, touching Q’s finger, worshipping the Celestial Temple, spooning like Cardassian voles, making first, second and third contact, using the Vulcan kegel pinch, riding a runabout, venturing into the pink wormhole, fondling your Tribbles, bumping Pakleds, making Odo splash on the floor, adopting the Emissary position, distributing some ketrasex-white, waltzing with Bashir, relocating some Space Seed, warping to fourth base, giving Bones double-duty, doing the Efram Cochran, promoting the bald Captain, digging into fresh gagh, being fingered by the hands of the Prophets, giving it the old Badda-Bing Badda-Bang, communing with a couple of Bajoran orbs, getting some glop-on-your-stick, engorging holosuite safeties, going to subspace with the Dominion, lapping the habitation ring, jerking the Kirk, docking at Deep Space Sixty-Nine, buggering a Borg, or setting phasers to spunk.
At least for now. Maybe in a future expansion pack…
Welcome to Derp Space Nine.
The first proper attempt, Harbinger, was an adventure game designed to test the limits of human boredom. You play Envoy Nobody of the Planet Nobody Cares About, on the way back from Operation: Whatever. The trip is rudely interrupted by an attack by drones that even the Daleks would make pepper pot jokes about, and you end up crashing on an almost deserted Deep Space Nine.
Hello? Anyone there? Should I come back later? Like... in 2012?
To make matters even worse, the dialogue is endless, the drama non-existent, the animation hyper-limited, and instead of music, Harbinger opts for a constant ‘woomph woomph’ ambient thing that acts like white noise. They should use this game as a sleeping aid. For the dead.
I have a Borg teddy bear bought from the Star Trek Experience, and even I'm calling bullshit on that.
Here’s your friendly neighbourhood Let’s Play. How long can you stick it out?
Yeah. I can’t outright say that nobody involved with this game cared even a little about it, but that’s very much the vibe you get from it. It completely wastes the show’s canon wherever possible, and the only reason to play it at the time was that it was at least a way of wandering around the station. Now, it’s so boring that if you used it as a frisbee, your dog would fall asleep instead of catching it.
Ah. Captain, it appears our universe is incompatible with modern graphics cards.
Story-wise, it takes place in the sixth season of the show (of seven) and features most of the cast. Avery Brooks didn’t show up, and was replaced by a Sisko apparently ordered to actively not do an Avery Brooks impression, while Colm Meaney (who played the station engineer O’Brien) was punished for his non-appearance by forever knowing he inflicted one of the worst Oirish accents ever on an unsuspecting world. Every line his replacement speaks ends on a silent ‘Faith and begorrah!’
Ah, so that's what happened to Leeta's polygons...
The wormhole turned out to be home to a race of mostly nice god-aliens called the Prophets – a bunch of swirly confusion balls who pretended not to know about linear time, but were pretty clearly just dicking with everyone. However, over time it turned out that there was another set of not-so-nice god aliens who had been banished from the wormhole for constantly dismissing everything. For this, they became known as the “Pah!” Wraiths, and condemned to labour forever on Bajoran high-streets as baristas in a chain of coffee shops called “Costa Mojan”. Or something like that. It’s been a while since I saw the show.
Tell Ensign Jones that next time he screws up, reporting it by singing 'Ops, I did it again' will result in his death.
As with STO, arguably the best bit is ambling around Deep Space Nine itself between missions – with a few of the actual characters like Quark and Garak and Morn in residence rather than a bunch of new people you don’t care about. There’s not a lot to do, but you can check out Quark’s, visit the Bajoran Shrine, and get around a hell of a lot more easily than in Harbinger. There’s even a few people there. Not many, but some! And some is always better than none, except in MMOs where people suck.
Here’s Not-Sisko in action for the actual game part though. Enjoy the awful acting, the inevitable third-person crab-walking, and those ‘beautiful’ early 3D environments from the era before people learned to program lightswitches and complicated geometry in the Unreal engine.
It’s tough to say that Deep Space Nine ‘deserved’ better. Even during its run, it was the show that nobody really expected to get an awesome game out of, and the attempts faded from memory incredibly quickly. Still, at least it got a couple. More than you can say for Babylon 5.
Next week, Star Trek Month concludes with… ugh… Voyager. Can the most insipid of shows without the word ‘Enterprise’ in the title lead to some of its most memorable games? Maybe. And while the high points are pretty well known already, it may not even need an elite force to make it so.
Our favorite deal this week is