14 DAY TRIAL // The first few months of 2010 have been pretty busy in terms of quality videogame releases due mainly to publishers being scared (with good reason, it seems) to actually put their titles up against behemoth Modern Warfare 2. And there are quite a bit of games that I still need to play more of, like The Awakening expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, which I want to play through with the Orlesian character, and Dawn of War 2 – Chaos Rising, which I have failed to complete until now.
I also want to take another swing at Hearts of Iron 3, playing the Italians or the United States. But, despite all of this, I will find myself playing Star Trek: Birth of the Federation, as it is the biggest, latest strategy release out there.
It might be the fact that I've recently begun to watch the Star trek feature length movie, with the intention of then sliding into re-watching the original series. It might be that I spent Easter with my girlfriend and her severely underpowered laptop somehow had this game installed in a directory with my name on it. It might be memories of playing Birth of the Federation ten years ago and loving it like nothing else, despite the fact that my computer would slow things down to a crawl once I hit the 200 or so turn.
Bearing the full title Star Trek: The Next Generation: Birth of the Federation, the game arrived in 1999, an era when Microprose still put out games similar to Master of Orion in terms of mechanics. There are minor races to woo diplomatically or to conquer, tech to research, 3D software rendered battles to direct and powerful enemies like the Borg to take on. Apparently, the memory leak is still affecting the end game.
Incredibly, more than ten years after its launch, there's still a community interested in it and not just one but two projects, Birth of the Empires and Star Trek Supremacy, that seek to scratch the same strategy Star Trek itch.