Download Star Trek - Judgment Rites

After publishing the marvellous Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Interplay did not take long to chuck out a sequel. If you ask me, they made a good move!

Star Trek - Judgment Rites looks, plays and sounds almost the same as 25th Anniversary - in fact, the music and graphics are exactly the same stuff you've gotten used to in the previous game - but that's not a bad thing. Afterall "if it aint broke, don't fix it", and this way Interplay's crew could concentrate on coming up with new scenarios to use in the game.

Differently then 25th, Judgment Rites offers you an option to change the difficulty of starship combat - apart from the standard difficulty, they can also be completely disabled (useful if you find them too difficult to manage) or, conversely, fought on an increased difficulty setting.

That said, my personal impression is that the overall game difficulty has increased a fair bith since the last one - it's harder now to acquire best ratings, so be warned. While the floppy version displays your score in percentage ratings and Commendation Points like in the last game, the CD version drops that in favor of descriptive ratings and thus makes obtaining the perfect score that much harder.

Like in 25th Anniversary, many of the problems in the game have multiple solutions (that are up to you to figure out). Of course, how you solve each of them will affect your final score at the end of the mission - thus leading to increased replayability, as opposed to the complete linearity present in most of the adventure games out there.

Judgment Rites is the pinnacle of oldschool adventure gaming, definitely worth spending time with.

The archive contains the original floppy version combined with the SFX and movie addon kit. Not the CD version, but definitely the next best thing around. It is also worth noting that this version of the game also has a large collection of Star Trek trivia (accessible through the main computer of Enterprise) - not all of this content was present in the later published CD version. Some of the Tricorder scans are also more descriptive.

Apart from using DOS, DosBox and VDMSound, Judgment Rites can be ran in plain Windows XP with full sound and music, altough that requires a bit of fiddling. Right-click on the game executable and select [PROPERTIES]. Then go to [MEMORY] tab. Change all drop-boxes to "automatic" and put a tick in the "protected" checkbox. In order to get the sound running, run the game's setup and select "Roland SCC-1/General Midi" for music and "Sound Blaster Pro" for sound effects. While reason would dictate using the latter for both, it only results in the game playing with sound effects but no music.