How to play Star Trek online
The original cartridge came with a plastic overlay for the joystick because every direction does something different. On the keyboard it works like this:
- Turn anticlockwise / clockwise: left / right arrow keys
- Thrust forward (impulse): up arrow; up plus left or right turns and thrusts together
- Fire photon torpedo: down arrow
- Fire phasers: Space bar
- Warp drive: hold down arrow and press Space
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
The screen shows your gauges, a radar map of the battle zone and a view from the bridge. Your supplies are energy shields (green squares), warp drive units (blue lines) and photon torpedoes (red squares). Phasers are unlimited but hit only one target at a time. A coloured band at the bottom warns you as your shields run down, from yellow through orange and light red to dark red, when your defences are gone.
Each of the ten sectors has six rounds. Rounds 1, 2, 4 and 5 are Klingon encounters. Red Klingons ignore you and go after your starbases; if they destroy one, they turn white and come to ram you, and the purple Klingons, which normally keep their distance and shoot energy orbs at you, turn white and join in. Yellow anti-matter saucers can latch onto the Enterprise and drain its warp energy. Fly into a green starbase to repair damage and top up a shield, a torpedo and a warp unit; each base can be used once per round and then turns blue. Round 3 is an asteroid field or meteor shower with no enemies, where you can only steer. Round 6 is the hunt for NOMAD, which fires missiles and scatters mines. Destroy it and you move on to a faster, harder sector.
| Action | Points |
|---|---|
| Destroy a Klingon cruiser | 100 × (sector + 1) |
| Collide with a Klingon | 100 |
| Destroy an anti-matter saucer | 5,000 |
| Destroy NOMAD | 30,000 |
| Each green starbase left at the end of a round | 2,000 in sector 0, rising in later sectors |
| Each blue (used) starbase | 500 |
Tips
- Line them up. Get Klingons to chase you in a row, then turn and destroy several with a single torpedo.
- Turn to catch saucers. Anti-matter saucers always flee, so spin around quickly and fire.
- Dock early, skip docking late. Build up supplies in the first sectors; later, untouched green starbases are worth far more bonus points.
- Tap, don’t hold, in asteroid fields. Short taps left or right make small course corrections; hold only for wide turns.
- Don’t shoot NOMAD’s mines. They explode and cost you supplies. Watch where the mines cluster to work out where NOMAD is heading.
The story behind Star Trek
Sega’s arcade Star Trek was designed by Sam Palahnuk and ran on the company’s G80 colour vector hardware; the deluxe cabinet had a seat styled after the bridge in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Home versions followed for the 2600 and several computers. The 2600 cannot draw vector graphics, so the port uses ordinary raster graphics instead, and many fans felt this suited the game well. Its main difficulty was the controls: turning, impulse, warp, phasers and torpedoes all had to fit on one stick and one button, which is why Sega included the overlay.
Similar games to play next
- Star Raiders – Atari’s space combat game with starbases and sector maps
- Starmaster – Activision’s take on first-person space battles and starbase docking
- Solaris – a deep space shooter with a galactic map and many sectors
- Asteroids – the same rotate-and-thrust ship controls