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Star Trek:Borg

Borg is billed as an "interactive movie," and reviewers have described it as such -- no puzzles, just story branches -- but I think that neither the people who advertised or reviewed the game could have played it because, while there aren't many puzzles and they would not, for the most part, given a decent interface, be difficult, there are things to solve.

I'll talk about the interface in a minute, but first I might as well let you know what Borg is. It's basically an interactive episode of the TV show, only no one from that show is on it except for John de Lancie, who portrays Q, the best character created for "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Q has sent a cadet into the past to battle the Borg, that half-robotic species that are sucking up the galaxy one creature at a time. You are that cadet, and make his decisions for him, with Q being his usual snide, funny self.

Borg is basically a continuous movie that stops at predetermined points where you are expected to make a decision, decisions being made by clicking on something on the screen when your cursor has turned into a "decision cube." These are points at which this little cube appears and you have to click on something on the screen, with what you click on determining what happens next. Most of the things you click on will cause disaster, at which point Q will give you a lecture ("everybody is dead and it's all your fault") and send you back to try again.

My first problem was actually a result of poor documentation. You have a tricorder which you can use to get information on what you see. If you're playing the game, let me tell you the basics of the tricorder, which are simple but badly explained. When the movie is playing you click the left mouse button and the movie will freeze. Move your spinning cursor over anything that makes it stop spinning and click on that and you'll get an explanation of what you're looking out. Double click to continue the movie. If the decision point cube is displayed then you can't use the tricorder. Had I had it explained this clearly to me I would have had less difficulty in the beginning.

But later on it wouldn't have helped. As long as it's a movie things are fine, but the decision points are remarkably poorly thought out. You are given a very brief amount of time to do something. Very brief. And the area to click on is often small and poorly defined. Often at decision points I clicked all over the damn screen (or as much as I could in the 2 seconds they gave me) with nothing working. Even when I knew exactly what I should be clicking on!

There was one particularly nasty place in the game that put me into a state of red hot anger. First I want to hit this guy; I know it's the thing to do but the interface won't let me. So I get turned into a borg. Then I'm struggling with a guy (as a borg) and the decision cube is up but nowhere I click has any effect. Then Q lectures me on what an idiot I am and I go back to where I wanted to hit this guy, only this time I can do it (Borg is one of those games in which sometimes you can only solve a puzzle by doing the wrong thing first to learn what the right thing is).

Alright, so the guy's on the ground, and the only thing I see to click on is his belt, or whatever it is, so I click on it and nothing happens. I die and go through the same thing again and again and again. So I look up a walkthrough and sure enough, I'm supposed to get the phaser out of his belt. So the second before the decision point cube appears I use the tricorder to figure out exactly the little area they consider appropriate to click on. Then I click on that area and get the gun, at which point I briefly turn it over in my hands and put it back. I'm supposed to do something with the phaser, but it doesn't stay still for more than a fraction of a second and when I click on what I think I should click on it's apparently too late or not quite the right position and I die and have to start all over again. I spent 40 minutes trying to get past this. I even got a cheat for the game in which typing the word HUGH would cause the right decision to be made. This got the guy unconscious, but it wouldn't work on the phaser itself (cheat codes only work when you are in the movie, and there was no movie between getting the phaser and examining the phaser).

Something to note here. There is no way to skip through any part of the movie. If you do something wrong then a whole huge section of the movie will play again. And again. And again. John de Lancie is a fine actor, but you don't want to hear him say the same thing 20 times. And while you can save a game, you can't restore while you're playing (you heard me right) so you can't take the simple precaution of just saving right before a problem spot and then restoring each time. No, you have to watch the damn movie over and over again, and sometimes you have no choice but to quit the game and restart it in order to get back to your save point. This is so incomprehensibly wrong that it boggles the mind that anyone would have done it this way, but this is, in fact, how it was done.

By now I was apoplectic and could only think, there was no beta-testing done on this game. I stop playing and post to a newsgroup where someone tells me that yes, the thing I want to do with the phaser is the right thing and yes, it's really hard to do. After a few weeks I go back and after a number of false attempts I finally, miraculously hit the right spot and the movie continues on.

The sad thing is, it's a pretty entertaining game, with intelligent dialogue, good performances and generally tolerable little puzzles. But it's such a chore to get through that I couldn't recommend it to anyone. If you are going to play the game though, you should know the cheats, so I'm going to tell you about them. It's very simple: while the movie is playing you have to type a word. Sometimes it won't work, but it usually will.

BORG: go back to previous scene.

OBEY: skip ahead to the next scene

HUGH: make the optimal decision

These are so necessary that they should have been in the documentation!

(By the way, the 2 1/2 star rating is a compromise between the 3 1/2 star for the movie and puzzle design and the 0 stars for the programming.)

If anyone who worked on this game reads this review, please feel free to send me an abject apology.

-- Charles Herold -2000

Glitches:Occasional bizarre glitches. Also to run in Windows 98 you have to run a patch, as it fails to realize that Windows 98 would probably be compatible with Windows 95 (idiots!)