Topic: 2016/09: Star Trek (NES) - KingKuros

[JonLeung]

Star Trek

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to KingKuros's Star Trek (NES) maps.

"Space: the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.  Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

The Star Trek franchise celebrates its 50th anniversary this month!  The original series premiered on September 8. 1966.  Between then and now, a few games were made to celebrate its 25th anniversary, including this NES game.  Though the in-game title is just "Star Trek", the full title on the box is "Star Trek: 25th Anniversary", but not to be confused with the PC and Game Boy games of the same name.

In the NES game, while the Enterprise investigates the Sigma Iotia system - featured in the original series' second-season episode, "A Piece Of The Action" - they encounter a tear in space-time.  You will join the Enterprise's crew in investigating at least four planets, to over a dozen.  KingKuros has got you covered, no matter where you boldly go!

So to recognize the effort put into exploring strange new worlds, KingKuros's Star Trek (NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for September 2016.

[KingKuros]

Thanks!    Now that's the way to celebrate the 50th anniversary!

[YelseyKing]

Mmm. Nostalgia. I played this game as a kid; pretty fun little adventure game. Nice job mapping out the optional, minor planets, too... a lot of people would've missed those.

[TerraEsperZ]

I wish I'd been as into Star Trek when this game came out as I was a few years later during TNG and DS9 because I would have loved playing it then. Too bad the space map has all the planets scrolling by at different speeds, thus making it sort of unmappable. Anyway, great job KingKuros!

[JonLeung]

As today is the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, I admit and apologize if I've been condescending to Star Trek fans in the past, not seeing that I too can be an impassioned geek about the things that I like.

Though I am also not entirely oblivious to Star Trek, being the pop culture phenomenon as it is - and because my dad watched a lot of it, except for the Animated and Enterprise series.

Also, isn't it a bizarre coincidence that the few movies and full episodes I have seen all have to do with time travel?  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek (2009), TNG: "Cause And Effect", and TNG: "All Good Things..."  And as I prepared these Maps of the Month, for context of the last planet - which involves time travel in the game - I watched the original series episode "A Piece Of The Action", which involved a planet emulating 1920s-era United States, with gangsters, so it's time travel in the figurative sense, if not literal (except in the NES game, where it is).  Unless they're always mucking about with time, this is a weird coincidence, isn't it?