Games developed by Arcanum Computing
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EGA Trek
EGA Treks is one of the best 'clones' of the popular Trek space combat simulation game of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Classicgaming. com's excellent review says it all: 'As the documentation for EGA Trek explains, EGA Trek is actually a remake of one of the earliest video games (or early Star Trek games, anyway), so old that in its original minicomputer form it was not uncommon to receive all program output through a printer.
The Federation is being overrun by Klingons and Romulans, or rather, the Union is being overrun by Mongols and Vandals. (I guess copyright lawsuits have always been around. ) Naturally, it's up to you and you alone (almost) to kick ass and eradicate every Mongol you can find in 64 sectors. And even more naturally, it's not as easy as it sounds.
All the Star Trek standards are here (albeit with different names): phasers, photon torpedoes, warp drive, various types of space stations, planets with dilithium mines, black holes, distress calls, death rays, viewscreens . . . Really, once you figure out how to get around (and since the interface is very old-fashioned, you may have to look at the help screen or even - gasp! - the manual), the most fun you can have is figuring out how it all works and finding the most efficient way to get rid of the Mongol fleet.
You have a limited amount of energy to power all systems, including lasers, which are prone to overheating, but are still the best way to blow things up. Entorps consume much less energy, but you can't carry many of them, and they're hard to aim, especially if there's a black hole in the way, but they're useless anyway if all your torpedo tubes don't work. You can always fire one at a nearby star and hope the resulting explosion will remedy your ills, or even blow you halfway across the galaxy, but destroyed stars cost you points at the end of the mission.
If you capture a Mongolian supply station, you may have a plasma beam or two to throw at your enemy, as long as you are far enough away from the blast radius to be unaffected. If all else fails, you can try that experimental Death Ray, which can destroy all ships in the vicinity, or blow you up, or make mutant crew members draw funny faces on the screen. . . . And that's just for starters. To say more would be to reveal too much. But you can be sure you'll have to figure out a thing or two to survive on Admiral difficulty level, where there are nasty varieties of Mongols everywhere, everyone sends out distress calls, and the ship's systems fail at a rate that would probably make Kirk throw Scotty into the brig just to shut him up. Oh, and the reinforcements keep coming.
EGA Trek is really a little game that will keep you busy for a while as you race around the galaxy trying to survive or even get a high score. Of course, after wiping out fleet after fleet of Mongol ships, you might start to feel like Picard in 'Conundrum', shooting defenseless Lysians . . or something like that'. Two thumbs up for this excellent shareware.
Note: The downloadable version on this site is the recorded version from the original release circa 1991, before Paramount demanded the removal of all references to Trek in the game ;) Many thanks to Rebecca for her contribution.
