Star Trek S.O.S (C64) - Sega 1983 - Playguide and Review - by Lemonc64.com

Описание: Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator was first released in the arcades by Sega in 1982, as an early vector based first person space shooter. The Commodore C64 conversion came along about a year later, and was instantly forgotten by almost the whole community. So here it is.

Production Notes:
-----------------------------
Captured: 10 April 2020
Edited: 21-23 April 2020
Narrated: 23rd April 2020

Its fair to say I'd never heard of this game before making this review. It was only when I stumbled on this game recently in Mame did I get to find out. The arcade version at the start of this video doesnt quite do it justice, but needless to say an open world free flight space sim before the on rails Star Wars arcade cab came out, seemed a very interesting concept.

This lead to the conversions, and lets just say off the bat that they are all good. Even the Atari 2600 version, as ridiculous as it sounds, with the Vic-20 version being not so bad, perhaps due to some cartridge memory? The conversions use sprites instead of vectors, so the pace is kept up to speed, and like the arcade version the the map and main viewing area are swapped around. Which means you still have to look at two screens, only in the opposite direction to what feels normal. This seems strange considering they could have the grey mantle surrounding the viewing area at the top, and the map at the bottom, but this is true to the arcade as well. I'll forgive the lack of voice speech, as this was a bit out of reach of most systems, at least from a memory limit point of view.

Overall, I'd say this is a very good conversion. If this had been a straight port of the arcade version, this would have choppy frame rates like the Battle of the Planets game we saw last week, and so wouldnt probably do the game justice. Especially on the Vic and other systems. So they took their best (upside down) conversion idea and ported that around instead. The action and atmosphere is nothing like the arcade, and feels extremely easy, so its gets ranked down for that. If it had the arcade sound effects then this would have made up for a general lack of atmosphere, and no doubt be worth an 8. So its gets 7.5 for me - very good for its day but just too easy.