What is Star Trek: Borg?

It makes a weird kind of sense that this game would come on a hybrid CD. After all, the raison d’être of the Borgs, the eponymous villains of this episode of the venerable Star Trek franchise, is to “assimilate” alien races — i.e., take into their “collective” the technologies (and bodies) of those they come across.

That said, this CD-ROM’s developers should have spent a little more time studying the Borg’s methods. Star Trek: Borg doesn’t have the OS smarts to switch screen resolutions to the mandatory 640 x 480 pixels. (If you launch it at any other resolution, you’ll get an error message stating; “You must change your monitor resolution and restart your computer.” Hello? You don’t need to restart a Mac.) Other irritations include a strange save scheme and no way to open a saved game from within play in case you make a wrong move.

Speaking of making wrong moves, that’s what you’ll be doing, mostly. Gameplay consists of watching from a first-person perspective what seems to be an episode of Star Trek, and suddenly having to click at Point A or Point B at “Decision Points,” which are usually cued by charac- ters who turn to the camera and say, “What do you think?” A few puzzles are simple enough if you’ve checked out the scene with a special tricorder given to you by Q (oh, he’s the “omnipotent godbeing” who’s tossed you back through time to save your father from the Borg invasion 10 years ago and... well, John deLancie is great as Q, and gets all the good lines). However, many of the puzzles’ answers are obscure, and some even require sort-of cheating: Sometimes the only way to continue the game is to quit and restart at the last saved point. (Here’s where a “restore” function would’ve been nice.) If you fail, Q may reset the game to the Decision Point, or you may watch a grisly endgame, but either way, there’s a long video replay to sit through. Tension and fear may be a valid experience in this game, but frustration shouldn’t be.

That said, there are reasons to recommend Star Trek: Borg. As long as RAM Doubler or Virtual Memory is disabled, the full-screen video runs nearly perfectly on a 7600/120; the sets and costumes and sets are. Likewise, impeccable (a fan said); the acting is good; there seem to be fewer plot holes in this game than in the average episode, and at times, there is a genuine urgency and intensity to the experience. In fact, this adventure might be, at times, too grim for children.

Simon & Schuster is to be commended for releasing this product simultaneously for the Mac and PC (and coincidentally close to the release of the new movie, “Star Trek: First Contact”); however, given some of the technical frustrations, an extra week or two in development could’ve made the experience that much more stellar.

Turner, D. D. (March 1997). Star Trek: Borg. MacAddict. (pg. 81).

Download Star Trek: Borg for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

• MC68040 or PowerPC
• System 7.5
• 8 MB RAM
• 20 MB hard disk space
• 16 bit colour
• 640 x 480 colour monitor
• 16-bit sound card

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver