Nerds That Geek Gaming Flashback - 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' - 'A Final Unity'

Written by John Edward Betancourt

There's been many a game I've played in my day and for the most part our strong sense of nostalgia has brought back some of my favorites over the years. The entire Mortal Kombat trilogy is on my Xbox, I can enjoy Lucasarts' The Dig thanks to Steam, but some games seem to be lost forever.   

One such game that I miss playing because well, the technology is no longer available to play it is one of my all time favorites, the awesome and epic, Star Trek: The Next Generation - 'A Final Unity'. Released in 1995 by Spectrum Holobyte, this game was a celebration of one of the hottest shows on television.  

One thing that made this game instantly awesome was the fact that the original cast came aboard to reprise their roles. At the time, this was a huge deal and it made an already promising game that much more enriching. But it goes beyond top notch performances from the cast, the game played out perfectly like an episode of the show complete with (at the time) cutting edge cinematic cut scenes and well, the story was engrossing. It revolved around the hunt for the mysterious Unity Device, created by an ancient race known as the Chodak. This device was something of great power, able to control all of time and space.  

So naturally, with a plot like that, the stakes were high in this game, leading to plenty of action and adventure and some impressive space battles, which leads to one of the other enjoyable aspects of the game, the amount of freedom you had to control the Enterprise. You could set up the game to do everything for you, or you could manually set a course, plot your transporter coordinates, hand pick the away team, and take Worf's station in battle. 

The only complaint I guess I have about this game, was that you never quite had the chance to explore the ship outside of a video tutorial and that's a shame. It would have been so cool to wander the halls of this majestic ship, but it's not something that will upset you. After all the adventure is either on the bridge or on a planet and that alone is engrossing enough to make you okay with the fact you don't get to poke around Main Engineering. Either way, this is another incredible game from an incredible era and I do hope someone (looking at you, Steam) resurrects it soon.

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