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A playthrough of Spectrum Holobyte's 1994 license-based action-adventure game for the SNES, Star Trek: The Next Generation - Future's Past. Star Trek: The Next Generation - Future's Past, later released under the name “Echoes from the Past“ for the Sega Genesis, is a game that aims to recreate the feel of a Star Trek TV episode. It places you on the bridge of the USS Enterprise alongside Captain Picard and his senior officers as they travel through the Neutral Zone, and the story begins with the Enterprise receiving an SOS from a Vulcan scientist whose worksite is being attacked by the Romulans. Like Star Trek: 25th Anniversary on the NES ( ), the gameplay focuses on interacting with your crewmates on the starship and searching alien worlds with your away team, but this game also tosses space combat into the mix. From the bridge, you can answer hails from other vessels, chart your course, sit in on briefings, organize your away teams, read some insanely detailed computer records (seriously, the pedantry on display here is a Trekkie's wet dream!), and repair damaged ship systems. The ground missions have you exploring various places solving “puzzles“ with a four man team of your choosing. Most of these areas involve blasting through aliens and false walls with phasers, activating switches, and finding random items or people. They start out simple, but they quickly turn into massive labyrinths filled with dead ends - not something that I'm particularly fond of, especially when your characters are constantly getting stuck on edges of the scenery. All of the favorites are here: Picard, Riker, Worf, Geordi, Dr. Crusher, Troy, and Data are all selectable, and each have their own talents which, in theory, should encourage experimentation. In practice, however, there's no reason to ever pick anyone but the strongest members. (Hint: There's never a good reason to not pick Data!) When you aren't on an away mission, you'll be warping from place-to-place. At least, you would be if you weren't being relentlessly ambushed for one reason or another. Once the alarms go off, you will find yourself facing off against a random aggressor in a space battle. The idea in these segments is to drain the enemy shields with your phasers and then lob torpedoes at them until they surrender. The shooting sections take their inspiration from Asteroids, but the controls suck. They're sluggish and mushy as though they were intended to give the ship a sense of weight, but the lack of responsiveness does little but to make things frustrating. Unfortunately, things only get worse from there. If you win the battle, you'll need to make repairs immediately - otherwise, there's a good chance you won't make it back to the nearest supply depot alive. You have to reallocate energy to the damaged systems to repair them, and then watch as a bunch of little red damage indicators slowly tick down. And when I saw slowly, I'm not exaggerating. The battles are usually quick, but you can easily spend ten minutes or more, in real time, watching those red bars. If you're really lucky, you'll get attacked again as soon as the repairs are finished, so then after another two minute battle, you'll get to sit through yet another exciting ten minutes of repairs. You can read the computer entries while you're doing this, but the repair process isn't entirely automated and you can't monitor its progress outside of Engineering, so it isn't usually worth the effort to constantly juggle menu screens just to stave off a few moments of boredom. The repair mechanic absolutely destroys the pacing of the game, and for me, it was the final straw. I could've overlooked many of the game's faults and still found some enjoyment in it, but the repair system turns what was an otherwise charming but flawed game into an irredeemable one. The graphics are nice, the sound is alright, and the game's concept is solid, but there's too much wrong with the gameplay to make it worth your time. It's not complete garbage like Wolverine: Adamantium Rage and Road Riot 4WD were, but there are literally hundreds of titles in the SNES library that I'd recommend ahead of Star Trek: The Next Generation - Future's Past, and that's a shame. I really wanted to like it. _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete () punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
