In the YEEEEEEAR 2000, Raven Softworks released the absolutely fantastic QIII engine game "Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force.
I was recently asked a question about the Hazards operation deck in said game. Specifically, the ship is pretty beat up, so moving about is limited by force fields so they didn't have to map out much of the decks.
But what they do map out is pretty fantastic. The "Hazard Team" who are said elite force, have an entire deck (deck 4) mostly to themselves. They've got a transporter room, briefing room, locker room, armory, holodeck, and a lounge. No toilets though, Star trek is weird about those.
It is really weird seeing stuff that shows up in later games that have nothing to do with star trek, or QIII.
For instance, the hazard suits and helmets are a lot like ODST from the halo series, and one of the missions is on a dreadnaught whose front end is a giant cannon. The crew were frozen in pods almost identical to the one you wake up from in the first Halo: Combat evolved.
10 does not like this game. Attempting to run the installer gets you a solid no from 10. It flat out says the game is incompatible with 10, and won't even try to install. This is because the installer was 16 bit. To get around this is pretty easy, you open the disk as a folder, right click setup.exe, and tell it to run in compatibility mode for XP SP3.
Several sites claim other problems, such as the CD protection not working, or the opening cutscene being stuck in a boot loop. To get around the opening cutscene, one merely has to hit ENTER. The CD check doesn't seem to cause me any problems.
GRAPHICS
It's the QIII engine. For it's time, it looks great, but character models are pretty close to lego men. Additionally, ATI cards don't like OpenGL for some reason, so my max res was 1024x768. Attempting to go past that causes the engine to crash with a message about OpenGL.
Elite force never hit any of the online sale shops, so Amazon or the high seas are probably your only bet.
The sequel, Elite Force II, runs an insultingly high $27.99 for a used copy, so I probably won't be reviewing it any time soon.
I find dusting off Elite Force, it is surprisingly fun. A lot of things that cause me gamer fatigue are absent from Elite Force simply because they didn't exist at the time. It makes me sad that they really don't make games like this any more. STO would do well to play through elite force to fix their abysmal shooter mode.
[UPDATE]
The last boss fight is a lot more QIII than it is star trek. Fire all your biggest guns until you run out of ammo or the monster dies, but the Ending, the ending is just straight up voyager. Spoilers below:
The game plot is fairly simple, you start out as a security officer in an enhanced away team. You get a special suit that deploys medical nanites when injured, and the suit itself is hardened against many external factors. When coupled with a helmet, it can be used as a space suit, which is pretty cool. I already mentioned the helmet, so lets move on.
I'll skip most of the missions, they're fun and I don't want to ruin them for you, but the end, well it's dumb. Not from the game standpoint, but the command decision.
Essentially, you find out the bad guys are the reapers from mass effect, but they call their troops "reavers" instead. They build these star forges. Yes, they call them star forges, like in KOTOR. They research a species, add their distinctiveness to their own, and unlike the borg, they kill the poo out of you.
They've got the mental torture thing, and the baddie - Vorsoth even does the "you pitiful creatures don't understand jack" thing.
So you wreck his army and kill his ass. It's similar to the mass effect end fight, like creepy similar, but your two squaddies are removed, unlike mass effect.
So you kill the repulsive bug lord, and then voyager blows up the forge. Wastes more of their limited photon torpedos (They left earth with 39) and roll out.
They don't even try to recover the crap the aliens stole! Let alone forge out some goodies, like extra food, spare warp cores, maybe load up on photon torpedos, crap like that. Even the computer files would have helped out, the Vorsoth claims to know everything there is to know about humans! A bunch of crew die in the game, so it's weird to argue that status quo must reign. But it is a good understanding of the batshit insanity of Captain Janeway. Anything that pisses her off dies.
extra points if the crew suffers.
Now I'm playing the expansion, 7 tried to ask meathead on date, meathead was too stupid to get it. that's hilarious.
