Every week, Richard Cobbett
rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from
lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. In the third part of Star Trek
Month, it’s time for a trip to the Federation’s darkest corner – the hub
of politics and intrigue that is Deep Space Nine.
Deep Space Nine is almost the anti-Star Trek. Where the others were
fervently optimistic, it was realistic. Its Captain lied and cheated and
did back-room deals to get the job done. Its crew included a former
terrorist, a genetic outlaw, a thief, and a lost member of the baddies
with a tendency to forget his loyalties. It showed that the Federation
had dirty-tricks divisions, that even Paradise isn’t perfect, and that
there is no more horrible sight in the universe than a greedy Ferengi in
drag.
Most importantly, it remains the only Star Trek series so far to
really dig into the implications of the seemingly utopian Federation.
What happens to those of us who aren’t perfect? What happens in the face
of a threat that can’t be conveniently dealt with in an hour – or 42
minutes, including adverts? Sure, Babylon 5 covered much of the same
ground, but much of the fascination of Deep Space Nine was seeing how
Star Trek
specifically fared in the ‘real world’ when the chips finally went down.
(It’s also the only series in history whose creators specifically
released counterfeit merchandise, just to give collectors everywhere the
pleasure of holding it up with a hiss of
“It’s a FAAAAAAKE!” Or so I encourage you to believe, tell your friends, and add to respectable wikis everywhere.)
But what of the games? Surely they’re just as brilliant as the show? Yeah. About that…
'Station Log: Today I met the most boring person ever.' 'Hey, I'm RIGHT HERE!' 'I am aware of this.'
The problem with a series like Deep Space Nine is that, much like Babylon 5, it was one of the first mainstream shows to really
do
plot arcs and story development instead of being largely individual
episodes written for syndication purposes. That makes it tough to slip a
story that actually
means anything into the mix – but worse,
means that developers have no idea what the state of play is actually
going to be like when the game comes out and thus what the players will
be expecting.
Though it wasn’t ever likely to be this…
As a counter, in The Next Generation, you could be fairly sure what
the status quo would be. There may be a few changes here and there, like
Troi becoming a command officer or Worf’s backstory being revealed, but
those are minor details. Picard would be giving speeches, Riker would
smile smugly and Troi would still crash the bloody ship. The Next
Generation was conveniently reliable like that.
Deep Space Nine on the other hand was anybody’s guess. The premise,
of a small mining station that becomes a hub of importance with the
discovery of a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy on its doorstep,
soon went from ‘alien of the week’ stories to all out war. Every season
was different, from the weak opener with episodes like Move Along Home
and If Wishes Were Horses to the political upheavals of the second. As a
specific example, it wasn’t until the third series that it was revealed
that there was a hostile empire called the Dominion on the other side
of the wormhole, and that idea itself wasn’t invented until almost a
couple of years into the show. Even so, any attempt to use the wormhole
to tell stories that didn’t factor this in was going to seem silly. And
Deep Space Nine was anything but
silly.
(Probably the worst ever case of this was for
Farscape: The Game,
which was atrocious anyway, but really suffered particularly from being
set at the end of the first series and so focusing on stuff that hadn’t
meant a damn thing to the show for literally years. Its plot can be
summed up as ‘a mysterious forest appears on a planet and for some
reason you care’. Only it was even duller than this sounds…)
Couple this with the fact that Deep Space Nine was an acquired taste
that split Trek fandom with its attitude, and it’s not too surprising
that there weren’t many games. In fact, there were exactly three on PC,
all with a certain “What the hell do we do?” feel of desperation
dripping from them. There was another in development, simply called “The
Hunt”, but it got cancelled
and only exists now in this preview. It doesn’t look very good, though, especially the bit where Science Officer Dax has an arse on her chin.
Ah, Ops. A little bigger than on the show. And with far more people called suCKmyCOLLECTIVE_89
There is one way to take a trip round Deep Space Nine though, in a form you may have missed –
Star Trek Online.
It’s free to play, and while I don’t particularly like the game itself,
it is worth finishing the tutorial, closing the quest screen entirely,
and heading into the Bajor system to check this bit out. You don’t need
to level up or do any pre-requisites to board. Just fly there and dock.
Arriving, you’re first warned that some work has been done to the
place – this is developer Cryptic’s way of saying “don’t expect
perfection, fanboys!” – and the cast of the show aren’t around, but
visually it’s pretty good. You can go shopping on the Promenade, and
visit the upper level to check out the wormhole. You can head up to Ops,
where you’ll probably see a random bunch of people jumping on the
consoles like gibbering monkeys, and visit Sisko’s office to check out
his baseball. Like the rest of the game, it’s all a little oversized,
but the sentiment is there. You can also beam down to Bajor proper if
you want, where a cute custom ground region awaits your crew, and one of
the missions involves walking around on DS9′s hull. There’s even a
whole episode of the in-game story devoted to a dropped thread from the
show – a fleet of invading Jem’hadar ships eaten by the wormhole.
Not to be crass, but I'm not sure that's enough... ah... polygons for Leeta.
Probably the best handled individual bit though is Quark’s Bar. It
looks decent by STO standards, and has a (almost) unique mini-game to
play –
Dabo, which is
Bajoran for “Roulette With Boobs”. This specific game is run by a
hologram of Deep Space Nine’s occasionally appearing Ms. Fanservice,
Leeta, who mostly existed to demonstrate that deeply spiritual peoples
can indeed invent breast implants, to provide any PG rated nudity that
the rest of the cast wasn’t up for, and remind the world that hotties
will occasionally turn down handsome, charming doctors in favour of dribbling orange trolls called Rom.
(To give her credit though, it worked out – not least because Rom
eventually developed into a heroic figure who became the leader of his
people. So, yeah. Way to go, Leeta, I guess…)
Ah, the Promenade. Two levels of shopping, but mostly geeking out.
What you won’t find in Star Trek: Online’s version of Quark’s Bar
though are the Holosuites – which are much the same as The Next
Generation’s holodecks, only with the understanding that no matter how
enlightened they are, no people with a machine capable of creating any
fantasy in the universe are going to just fight the Battle of the Alamo
and pretend to be Victorian governesses and the like. The main cast
never really indulged, but it was understood that not all of Quark’s
customers were so restrained – one episode’s B story was entirely about
an alien trying to get him to make a virtual love-doll of Kira, the
station’s first officer, and a woman doomed to always be described using
the dreadful word ‘feisty’.
Sadly, building a room capable of creating anything in the universe
proved beyond Star Trek Online’s designers – the wusses – so forget
about having a hot stardate, milking the franchise, cleaning out
Jeffrey’s tubes, whacking off with Weyoun, penetrating the galactic
barrier, implanting a Trill, turning O’Brien smiley, touching Q’s
finger, worshipping the Celestial Temple, spooning like Cardassian
voles, making first, second and third contact, using the Vulcan kegel
pinch, riding a runabout, venturing into the pink wormhole, fondling
your Tribbles, bumping Pakleds, making Odo splash on the floor, adopting
the Emissary position, distributing some ketrasex-white, waltzing with
Bashir, relocating some Space Seed, warping to fourth base, giving Bones
double-duty, doing the Efram Cochran, promoting the bald Captain,
digging into fresh gagh, being fingered by the hands of the Prophets,
giving it the old Badda-Bing Badda-Bang, communing with a couple of
Bajoran orbs, getting some glop-on-your-stick, engorging holosuite
safeties, going to subspace with the Dominion, lapping the habitation
ring, jerking the Kirk, docking at Deep Space Sixty-Nine, buggering a
Borg, or setting phasers to spunk.
At least for now. Maybe in a future expansion pack…
Welcome to Derp Space Nine.
There are three official Deep Space Nine games. The third of them is
the easiest described – it’s a really buggy, not very good strategy game
called
Dominion Wars
with little of note to really say about it save that it exists and is
deservedly forgotten. To fill some time, I shall hum a little. Dum de
dee de dum.
The first proper attempt, Harbinger, was an adventure game designed
to test the limits of human boredom. You play Envoy Nobody of the Planet
Nobody Cares About, on the way back from Operation: Whatever. The trip
is rudely interrupted by an attack by drones that even the Daleks would
make pepper pot jokes about, and you end up crashing on an almost
deserted Deep Space Nine.
Hello? Anyone there? Should I come back later? Like... in 2012?
What follows is one of the most sterile, tedious adventures ever,
with a cast that look like they were digitised based on action figures
rather than the actual actors, and the kind of voice-work that doesn’t
quite feature Captain Sisko going “Station Log: This morning I woke up
and decided to spend the day not giving a shit”, but really gets close
at times. It does at least feature Avery Brooks as Sisko, along with the
actors for Dax, Kira, Odo and Quark, but even their presence only helps
so much in a plot with so much padding and so much excruciatingly
tiresome technobabble delivered by a main character who sounds like he’d
be more comfortable filing tax returns than saving Deep Space Nine.
To make matters even worse, the dialogue is endless, the drama
non-existent, the animation hyper-limited, and instead of music,
Harbinger opts for a constant ‘woomph woomph’ ambient thing that acts
like white noise. They should use this game as a sleeping aid. For the
dead.
I have a Borg teddy bear bought from the Star Trek Experience, and even I'm calling bullshit on that.
The closest Harbinger gets to being fun is in a B-Movie kind of way.
One of the hardest puzzles in the entire game is walking round
Operations, which uses a Myst style first-person control scheme with
controls designed by Satan. Without a word of a lie, you can be trapped
next to an open door because you can’t find the bit of the screen that
turns you towards it, and actually navigating is toe-curlingly insane.
The only reason to endure it is to realise that yes, you really do end
up fighting a race called the “Tarragan” – the most dangerous herbs in
the galaxy! (Sadly, they don’t have thyme travel.) It’s like every
Christmas came at once and
all you got was a mountain of coal!
Here’s your friendly neighbourhood Let’s Play. How long can you stick it out?
Yeah. I can’t outright say that nobody involved with this game cared
even a little about it, but that’s very much the vibe you get from it.
It completely wastes the show’s canon wherever possible, and the only
reason to play it at the time was that it was at least a way of
wandering around the station. Now, it’s so boring that if you used it as
a frisbee, your dog would fall asleep instead of catching it.
Ah. Captain, it appears our universe is incompatible with modern graphics cards.
By contrast, the second game – The Fallen – hasn’t aged well, but was
an extremely solid release. It was weighed down by having one of the
worst names and box designs in spin-off history –
just check out this awful thing – but was an acceptable Unreal powered shooter for 2000.
Story-wise, it takes place in the sixth season of the show (of seven)
and features most of the cast. Avery Brooks didn’t show up, and was
replaced by a Sisko apparently ordered to actively not do an Avery
Brooks impression, while Colm Meaney (who played the station engineer
O’Brien) was punished for his non-appearance by forever knowing he
inflicted one of the worst Oirish accents ever on an unsuspecting world.
Every line his replacement speaks ends on a silent ‘Faith and
begorrah!’
Ah, so that's what happened to Leeta's polygons...
The main plot is fairly complex if you don’t know Deep Space Nine’s
backstory up to this point, but I’ll try to sum it up quickly. Before
Deep Space Nine was Deep Space Nine, it was a Cardassian mining station
called Terok Nor, where the oppressed Bajoran people were forced to
process ore to buy both food, and the essential little brushes required
to get gunk out of their pesky nose-wrinkles. When the Cardassians
finally withdrew, the Federation took over the station with a mind to
helping the Bajorans recover from the brutal Occupation and sign-up –
only to have a giant wormhole open up right next to the planet that
instantly turned it into one of the galaxy’s most important tactical
locations.
The wormhole turned out to be home to a race of mostly nice
god-aliens called the Prophets – a bunch of swirly confusion balls who
pretended not to know about linear time, but were pretty clearly just
dicking with everyone. However, over time it turned out that there was
another set of not-so-nice god aliens who had been banished from the
wormhole for constantly dismissing everything. For this, they became
known as the “Pah!” Wraiths, and condemned to labour forever on Bajoran
high-streets as baristas in a chain of coffee shops called “Costa
Mojan”. Or something like that. It’s been a while since I saw the show.
Tell Ensign Jones that next time he screws up, reporting it by singing 'Ops, I did it again' will result in his death.
Anyway, The Fallen is about them and their worshippers’ attempts to
set them loose, and it’s your job to stop them. Mostly, this is done
through standard third-person shooter methods – but not without a few
quirks. For starters, you can choose to play as three different
characters, Captain Sisko, first officer Kira, and token Klingon Worf –
and each gets their own path through the game and style of playing.
Sisko spends most of his time indulging in a mix of puzzle solving and
shooting, Worf shoots everything and smashes them over the head for good
measure, and Kira bounces comfortably between exploration and using the
power of the Death Note to execute criminals. Something for everyone
then!
As with STO, arguably the best bit is ambling around Deep Space Nine
itself between missions – with a few of the actual characters like Quark
and Garak and Morn in residence rather than a bunch of new people you
don’t care about. There’s not a lot to do, but you can check out
Quark’s, visit the Bajoran Shrine, and get around a hell of a lot more
easily than in Harbinger. There’s even a few people there. Not many, but
some! And some is always better than none, except in MMOs where people
suck.
Here’s Not-Sisko in action for the actual game part though. Enjoy the
awful acting, the inevitable third-person crab-walking, and those
‘beautiful’ early 3D environments from the era before people learned to
program lightswitches and complicated geometry in the Unreal engine.
It’s tough to say that Deep Space Nine ‘deserved’ better. Even during
its run, it was the show that nobody really expected to get an awesome
game out of, and the attempts faded from memory incredibly quickly.
Still, at least it got a couple. More than you can say for Babylon 5.
Next week, Star Trek Month concludes with… ugh… Voyager. Can the most
insipid of shows without the word ‘Enterprise’ in the title lead to
some of its most memorable games? Maybe. And while the high points are
pretty well known already, it may not even need an elite force to make
it so.
Oh yes. There is… another.
