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Performa 5260/100 Mhz and a PowerMac 8600/300 |
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Reviewed by Jonathan Dreyer, MGA Editor In Chief
Note:(Feb 2/98)
On my new PowerMac 8600/300 I can play SFA with all options
and sounds on (i had to have VM on as I only have 32 megs of
RAM) and it played great! Smooth as can be!
"Take a seat in the captain's chair as the USS Enterprise warps into space. Starfleet Academy allows the player to command 4 Federation class ships in combat against thirty 3-D rendered space ships from a cloaked Klingon™ Bird of Prey™ to a Romulan™ heavy cruiser. Reprising their original STAR TREK roles, William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Walter Koenig as Commander Chekov and special appearance by George Takei as Captain Sulu appear in full-motion video and interact with the player as never before. A original music score by Ron Jones and the script-writing talents of Dan Greenberg, Andrew Greenberg, Bill Bridge, Sandy Fries, and Star Trek novelist Diane Carey make Starfleet Academy a truly galactic experience." -- Interplay PR
Gameplay
Starfleet Academy has an unusual interface. It successfully combines an adventure game with an action simulation. Before each mission you are usually presented with a video where at certain points you have to choose what your character says, these segments will greatly affect the outcome of the game so you must be very careful when you select. Following the the video segment is your mission, in each mission you will be given a list of objectives to complete before you head back to the Starbase. Sounds simple, yes? No, not only do you have to be a great combat pilot to complete the mission, you have to think like a Starfleet captain, starfleet's orders are not always right, to complete the mission you have to find the right way to complete the objectives, you may have to take the mission a few times.
I suggest that you use a joystick for the combat simulation segments. The combat segments are usually very fast paced, you must react very quickly to defeat your foes. The key to winning in battles is setting your damage and energy levels for combat before you actually get into combat, to end your battles quickly give your phasers as much power as possible.
Interface
Although Starfleet Academy's interface is very intuitive, I have one complaint: I can't find one Mac-like dialog box anywhere in the game, it uses completely graphical buttons. Other than that, I loved the Interface.
Difficulty
SFA allows you to select from the standard 3 different difficulty settings. On the first difficulty setting, "Plebe", you shouldn't have any trouble completing the game, that's why I strongly suggest that you play on the medium difficulty setting.
Bugs
I have only encountered one bug: in the second mission with you have voices turned off the game would crash. I promptly sent in e-mail to MacPlay's tech support and received a reply 2 days later. To get around this bug they told me to turn on voices for just that level, and viola...
Conclusion
In conclusion, Starfleet Academy is a great game that will give you hours of enjoyment. I must note one caveat, the system requirements: they're pretty hefty:
80 Mhz PowerPC or better
25 megabytes of RAM FREE
First of all, 80 Mhz doesn't cut it. Anything less than about 180 Mhz will require you to turn down the graphic option. As for the RAM, the game will run with Virtual Memory or RAM Doubler activated but the video segments will be VERY choppy.
So I say, if your machine can run this game, you will love it even if you don't like Star Trek.