Club Admiralty

v7.3 - moving along, a point increase at a time

Club Admiralty Blog

A blog about life in general, in as many languages as I can manage. Ενα ιστολόγιο περι ζωής, πολυγλωσσο - σε όσες γλωσσες εχω μεράκι να γράψω.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Harbinger | Done


Back in the day, when "multimedia PCs" were new, and I had just returned from Greece, I used to spend a lot of time (relatively speaking) on Saturdays at Tower Records on my way to the Public Library. It was truly a multimedia wonderland, with music (in various formats), videos (also in various formats), and different types of video games (mostly of the computer games variety, I don't recall seeing console games at the time).  As a big Star Trek fan, I honed in on this game: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Harbinger.

Sadly, this isn't a game that I had an opportunity to play back in the day because the version that Tower Records sold was the MS-DOS version, and I had a Mac. I would still eyeball the nice box it came in and would have loved to have a Mac version I could buy, but alas, no Star Trek game for me... Years later, I found it again, on an abandonware site, and this seemed like the opportunity to play this game


In this game, you play Bannick, a Tirrion Envoy on special assignment to a newly discovered race in the Gamma Quadrant. On the return trip through the wormhole, Bannick is attacked by some sort of alien drones and, despite assistance by Deep Space Nine, crashes into its docking ring while on emergency approach.

Once Bannick arrives on the DS9, he discovers most of it has been abandoned except for some senior staff due to a plasma storm in the vicinity (this reminds me the plot device used on TNG's episode Starship Mine). The Defiant is conveniently not near DS9 (on evacuation duty? I don't remember) so there are only two runabouts and an ambassadorial ship from the alien race Bannick was negotiating with docked at the station.

Almost immediately after Bannick's arrival, DS9 is attacked by the same hostiles that attacked the runabout. After driving them off (he's got a high weapon rating, despite being a diplomat), Bannick attempts to contact the ambassador, only to find him murdered (dun, dun duuuuun!). By talking to the various folks who remain on DS9 (which often revolves around going the long way around for things because things are mostly shut down due to the plasma storm), you end up solving the murder mystery. As part of this discovery, you get to find out how the new aliens (none of these aliens are races we've seen on the show) know of the drones that are attacking the station in increasingly strong waves. So, you discover where the factory for these things is, and Bannick and Major Kira take a runabout and mount an attack on the drone factory homeworld, attempting to stop the final assault, which will destroy DS9  and swarm Bajor afterwards if it isn't stopped. 

This isn't a "raid the Deathstart" sort of situation.  You crash in the factory, and Kira is hurt, so you need to figure out (1) how to get transporters operational, so you can get her out, and (2) how to stop the drones.  This involves solving various puzzles, and again lots of backtracking many times to figure out how to address/resolve things.  This is sort of a Metroidvania, but in first person (which isn't a ton of fun). Anyway, as part of this, you find the factory's holoprogram that's keeping tabs on things... only to find out there is a control program and an attack program, and the attack program has been slowly disabling the more pacifist control program... so you gotta deal with that too. The nifty thing here is that you get to see holoprograms malfunctioning, which we see on screen in the various TV shows later (I don't recall how much of the TNG/DS9/VOY series showed this). In the end, Bannick thwarts the attack has the station build him a custom drone ship so that he and Kira evacuate, and they destroy the Nemesis ship that the drone factory sent out to destroy DS9.  And...roll end credits.

Overall, the game was fine. It's essentially a point-and-click adventure game in which you gotta talk to people to get info, solve puzzles, and pick up tools to get the job done. These kinds of games aren't my kind of thing, and if this were another property, I would most likely not have bothered with it, but because it was Star Trek, I needed to get through it. The thing that annoys me about this kind of game is that it's VERY picky about how to click and how to position yourself to activate the speaking options, which was initially very frustrating. I did get through this using a guide, which is true for about 90% (oh, who am I kidding, 100%) of the games of this type I've played in the past.

 I will say that the game felt very much like a Star Trek episode. Not a lot of "pew pew," and a lot of talking and investigating to get to the bottom of things, so it was good in that sense.  If the world of VR weren't so volatile, I think that updating this and making an HD/VR remake would be awesome. The exploration and movement elements of the game would fit well within a VR space.

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