EmP's Star Trek Starfleet Academy: Starship Bridge Simulator review

I can't recall ever playing a menu-heavy based game on an older console, where actions took place in real-time, and having a good time. At the very least, the games I remember with heavy menus paused the action when accessed.

Looking at the images, the 3D in this game, based on the slow movement described, seems like it could have easily been done on a normal Genesis or a Super Ninten... oh.

Good review, and congratulations on finally reviewing every 32X game for the site! I actually thought you would never touch this one, and it got to a point where at one time I actually contemplated playing the SNES version out of morbid curiosity.

I hated writing this review, and I've been trying to do it for near on 10 years now. The only reason I pushed through to the end now was because that awful T.V. show of the same name was loosing relevance by the second and I didn't want to rewrite the intro for the dozenth time. I remember it started with 'this show has been announced' and then 'this show is being made', then 'this show is out', 'this show's season has completed', 'this show has been cancelled'. Even then, it belonged to a completely different review because I'd tried to write something based on talking about a single playthrough but realised it was painfully unfunny and dull. And that was after I'd scrapped one which was more of a hard comparison between the SNES and the 32X strains, which meant I put hours into both bloody versions (the SNES has less missions, less ship models does not have the pool mini game and, unsurprisingly, looks pretty bad by comparison). And now we have this; something with a casual intro and the rest just stuffy, hard facts. I had an easier time writing for the text-heavy strategy game released solely in Japan...

But now it's done and I can stop. I think there's a very good chance that I've spent more time with 32X games than anyone else in the world and that the end is this game is kind of fitting; it was an idea whose ambition was destroyed by the technological limitations of the time. It leaves me only with the memory of a mission where I had to fight through the labyrinth of sub menus to try and find the order to turn on the tractor beam under a very harsh time limit, and I ended up ejecting the warp core instead. I did not pass that class.

Thanks for reading this and the rest of the 32X reviews no one asked for. Genuinely, I'm not sure I would have powered through this nonsense if I thought I was writing stuff that was just dropping into a void, so I appreciate all the feedback from yourself and everyone else.

Congratulations on reaching that milestone. It was exciting to watch, even if I didn't always have anything to say in the moment.

"I had to fight through the labyrinth of sub menus to try and find the order to turn on the tractor beam under a very harsh time limit, and I ended up ejecting the warp core instead."

Something tells me Kirk & Picard had better computers than that...