Prerequisites: “The Squire of Gothos” (TOS S1E17), “Obsession” (S2E18)
For the game’s third mission, the Enterprise’s one-way ticket to Boredom Town, population 430 (scanning radiation clouds near Omega Corvus), gets canceled in favor of locating ships that have disappeared in the Delphi system. Upon arriving, Kirk encounters an old nemesis: Trelane, the omnipotent child that forced the crew to play with him in the first-season episode “The Squire of Gothos”.
While surveying Balkos III, the USS Demeter is subjected to an incredibly powerful scan—an occurrence you don’t generally expect from a species still in its stone age. Feeling uncomfortably exposed, Commander Gellman retreats and tags in the Enterprise, and the standard Kirk/Spock/Bones trio beams down to the site from which the scan originated.
Not to be confused with: Federation, the 1994 event novel by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
The Enterprise is on its way to the Glorious Pebbles Scientific Academy (a name I’ve always loved) when the USS Alexander falls out of a vortex in pretty bad shape. Its captain, Luke Rayner, warns Kirk that the United Federation of Planets will be destroyed eight days from now and implies that something new will take its place. Unfortunately, he isn’t able to spit anything else out before the Alexander is torn to shreds. The Enterprise traces the Alexander’s course to Espoir Station, and heads to the base to investigate.
This year, on December 1, Star Trek: Judgment Rites—one of the greatest point-and-click adventure games of that genre’s heyday, and the first extra-canonical Trek work to really grab my attention—turns 25 years old.1 To this day, it remains one of my top five all-time favorite games, irrespective of genre, and it is simply too important to me to allow the occasion to pass without comment. For each of the next eight Wednesdays, I’ll review one of the game’s eight “episodes”, such that we’ll have the whole game covered right as 2018 comes to a close.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
