electronickingdomfox
The Kobayashi Alternative (or the 1000 deaths of James T. Kirk)
Finished this game (a text adventure) recently, and oh God, what a glorious mess it was!
The frame story (which only appears in the manual, by the way) places you as a Starfleet Academy cadet, playing a simulation of one of Kirk's famous missions, as a sort of alternative to the infamous Kobayashi Maru test (hence the title).
But the actual game revolves around Kirk's mission, trying to find Sulu, who has disappeared in the Trianguli sector. And you're given complete freedom to explore the area and planets in whatever order you choose, and to mess the game in whatever way you want.
And that's my main point of interest here. I've witnessed so, SO many deaths for poor Kirk, because of my ill-advised decisions...
Falling into craters, being run over by lava from a (not-so-extinct) volcano, sinking in quicksand, being eaten by a dragon, falling into a moat (and then being eaten), beaming down to a planet with a temperature of -250° in just my uniform (because why not?), or the more gruesome version of beaming down to a no-atmosphere planet without a spacesuit.
It's also possible to return to Earth without finishing the mission, just like that, which gets you court-martialed.
Or beam down some unsuspecting redshirt to a dangerous area, and to his unavoidable death (which here causes a Game-Over, very much unlike the series).
Want to swear at someone until the crew arrests you for bad conduct? Check.
*For the record, these are the swear words I found to work: bitch, bastard, suck, c*ck, f*ck, ass (use them in any combination you see fit).
There's also many crazy things to do, which don't necessarily lead to a game over.
Leave poor Scotty stranded on a planet and depart without him (good luck when you need something from Engineering).
Or make Spock mindmeld with clay.
Or tell McCoy to enter Spock's quarters, and just leave him there for the rest of the game.
There's a planet with aliens that are offended by clothes and will put you in jail for wearing them (well, this is inaccurate, because James Tits-Out Kirk would definitely beam down naked, if it would help the mission... and make sure to video-call Spock right before doing so).
Anyway, despite being a primitive game from 1985, I'm impressed by the sheer amount of possibilities and open-ended options in this game. The graphic adventures from the 90's (25th Anniversary, and specially Judgement Rites) are much, much better games overall.
But I wanted to talk a bit about these, more obscure text adventures.
If anyone's interested in playing them, I've found the best way is through this custom installer here, which includes all three adventures: https://collectionchamber.blogspot.com/p/star-trek-first-contact.html
It automatically runs the games through an emulator for modern systems, and has the last version of Kobayashi Alternative (which is very important, since previous versions were buggy as hell).
First Contact uses the same engine of Kobayashi, but since it's a much linear and smaller game, it's obvious a lot of options go un-used.
The Promethean Prophecy is a more traditional text adventure. It has some ingenious puzzles, but I found its typical plot of "go there and collect gems" less Trek-like.
dduane
I had SO much fun writing this game. (As if it’s not obvious.)
And yeah: it seemed to me that if a favorite character has to die frequently, the deaths may as well be interesting. If nothing else, it’s a kindness to the player. And they’re who this is for, after all…
ETA: For my own amusement, I dug out my printout of the original "book" and game manual to see how many of these death scenarios I wrote.
As usual when I'm pulling documentation together, I tend to be pretty methodical about it, and as a result all the death scenes were tucked together at the back of my docs. There were forty-odd of them (some of them odder than others). Some were a bit ambivalent about the ways in which they might be used—left that way for the benefit of the game designers.
Some were fairly prosaic.
Or similarly:
Some are a touch more acerbic:
...And sometimes straightforward foolery, or Fourth Wall breakage, or both, pops out when the environment logically permits... because these results can't all be grim.
...Anyway, I had fun.
It became possible to wish, later, that the game hadn't been pushed into production before the design and implementation team had had time to thoroughly debug the game engine. But regardless, it was terrific to be part of this endeavor. :)
