2 years ago, after playing both Star Trek: Resurgence and Star Trek: Infinite, I started thinking about how the ludic genres of "point-and-click"-style adventure games and grand strategy games are both very good ludic genres for the Star Trek IP. I had originally planned on creating a short, 20-30 minute video talking about these 2 games, specifically, and how they manage to faithfully adapt the source material. And I wanted to contrast these 2 games against a few other Star Trek games in other ludic genres, such as Elite Force (a first-person shooter), and some of the old starship operation games like Starfleet Command.
However, as I worked on the script, I kept wanting to talk about more and more Star Trek video games, and I kept reading about other Star Trek games that I had never played. So I expanded the scope of that original project to start to include more examples of adventure and strategy games, as well as to talk about Star Trek games in other genres. I bought some games to try out, and fell into a rabbit hole of playing every Star Trek game that I could get my hands on, and watching let's plays of all the games that I couldn't play.
Before long, that 20-30 minute project had ballooned to over an hour of script. At that point, I decided that this was too much for a single video, and I decided to do 2 things:
- I would split the video up into multiple parts (originally, I expected 3 or 4 parts),
- I would make each video be about games in a particular ludic genre (such as adventure games, shooters, strategy games, etc.).
This necessitated more research, and more play-time with other games in other genres. Eventually, after 2 years of on-again-off-again work, I ended up with over 2 hours of videos talking about the different ludic genres into which Star Trek had been adapted. I talk about which ones work, which ones don't work as well, and also what I would like to see from Star Trek games in the future.
In the meantime, just as I was getting ready to finally release this epic project, 2 new Star Trek games were announced: Voyager: Across the Unknown (not to be confused with a Star Trek tabletop game called "Into the Unknown"), and Star Trek: Infection. So I may talk about those games in a future update video. Infection, in particular represents an entirely new ludic genre for Star Trek games, since it's a VR horror game -- the first true horror game that I've ever seen for the Star Trek IP.
The first part of my retrospective series is now available on YouTube, after a short period of Patreon-exclusivity:
The first part of a 5-part retrospective on Star Trek video games is now available on YouTube.
The other 4 parts are already available to Patreons at the following link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/exploring-new-of-137678510. I will be releasing each new episode every few weeks, but Patreons are able to view all 5 episodes now.
I hope that everyone enjoys these videos. I put a lot of time and work into creating them (and had a lot of fun doing it). And if you would like to support the creation of further content like this, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Proceeds from Patreon go towards the maintenance of this blog, the license for the software that I use to create video content for YouTube, and for any research material that I purchase. COVID was rough on a lot of people, and I lost nearly all my Patrons at that time, and have so far not been able to attract any new Patrons. So every little bit helps. I also periodically put up polls for Patrons asking what content I should make next. So in addition to supporting my content creation, Patrons also get some influence over what content I create. They also get early access to many of my projects, previews of upcoming projects, and I have also started offering Patreon-exclusive content (such as exclusive access to some of my let's plays).
Thanks to all Patrons, past, present, and future, for your support. It really means a lot to me.