Star Trek: Judgment Rites

Star Trek: Judgment Rites
Developer: Interplay Publisher: Interplay Platforms: DOS, Mac OS Classic Released in US: 1993 Released in EU: 1995 This game has revisional differences. This game has anti-piracy features.

Star Trek: Judgment Rites is the sequel to Star Trek: 25th Anniversary.

Revisional Differences

There is a DOS floppy disk version, a DOS CD version and a Mac CD version.

Cutscenes

The original DOS floppy version came on 11 disks. There was also an extra 5-disk "Movie and Sound Pack" available for the DOS floppy version. This adds several new 3D-rendered cutscenes at various points throughout the game, as well as some new digital sound effects.

Notable examples of the added cutscenes include:

1. a scene in the introduction with an alien ship exploding
2. an alternate cutscene of the Enterprise going to warp, used randomly throughout the game alongside the original version
3. cutscenes with the Enterprise taking up orbit around planets of several different colors, as well as matching graphics for the bridge viewscreen (instead of how the unpatched floppy version reused the same planet repeatedly)
4. the Enterprise being captured by the tractor beams of Espoir Station in the first mission, "Federation"
5. a cutscene of Trelane attacking the Enterprise in his triplane, if the player fights him in space combat and loses in the mission "No Man's Land"
6. at the end of the same mission, the Enterprise departing alongside the SS Shinobi
7. the Enterprise firing phasers at the surface of a planet in the mission "Light and Darkness"
8. an extended finale at the conclusion of "Yet There's Method In It", where the Brassican ship briefly morphs into a shape resembling a giant Brassican head before disappearing into nothingness

The extended intro cutscene can be seen on YouTube.

The DOS CD version included a few of these cutscenes (such as the ones of the Enterprise being captured by Espoir Station in "Sentinel", and the Enterprise firing phasers at a planet in "Light and Darkness") but most of them were not included. However, the Macintosh CD port included all of the extra cutscenes from the floppy expansion pack.

Dialogue Text

Unlike the floppy version, the DOS CD version features full voice acting by the original Star Trek cast. This was carried over to the Macintosh CD version.

However, in the DOS CD version, there are sometimes mismatches between the text displayed on screen and the audio recordings. In particular, in the mission "Though This Be Madness...", DeForest Kelley as McCoy repeatedly makes mistakes when delivering his lines or cuts them off too early, with audible errors frequently left in. However, the onscreen text is mostly unchanged. The Macintosh port alters the text in these cases to match the audio recordings.

Also, in the CD versions, in the final mission, "Yet There's Method In it", the dialogue text and the voice recording are both frequently heavily condensed compared to the text in the DOS floppy version.

In the floppy version, during the mission "Museum Piece", at one point museum curator Boris Breznia asks the Enterprise landing party to come to his office using the museum intercom. In the CD versions, the intercom summons comes from a character named "Kenal Len", who otherwise never appears. (It's possible this was inserted as a reference to Interplay's Ken Allen, who later designed their unreleased Star Trek adventure game Secret of Vulcan Fury.)

Anti-Piracy

The same copy protection from the preceding game applies here. The player has to select 1 out of 20 possible destinations on the star map every once in a while and has to check with the manual where to click. Selecting a wrong destination will result in undesirable ship combat and waste the player's time, making them want to stop playing.