Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is a video game that was developed by Konami and published by Ultra Games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game was later ported to the Game Boy under the name Star Trek. It begins as the Enterprise is approaching the planet from the episode "A Piece of the Action". They are confronted with a tear in space-time that sends them to an unknown area of space. Even worse, while attempting to escape, the dilithium crystals, needed to travel at warp speed, have been fused and are now useless. The Enterprise is trapped in a decaying orbit above an unknown planet, but luckily, Mr. Spock has detecting small amounts of the very crystals you need somewhere on the planet. Once the crystals have been found, the Enterprise still needs to get home (stopping for better crystals to continue the journey), figure out what caused the tear in space-time and find a way to fix it. When an away team beams down to a level, the gameplay shifts to a combination a graphic adventure game (a la The Secret of Monkey Island) and side-scrolling shooting. Most of the time, progress in the game requires you to interact with various life forms on a world, find objects and solve puzzles. While each character was equipped with a phaser, violence was often not the solution to any puzzle in the game. The game won praise for its graphics and sound, and it had a password feature that made the difficulty in the game manageable. Many of the levels, characters and storylines are familiar to fans of the classic television series. However, critics noted that once your characters beamed up in the middle of a level, you had to start the level over again when you beamed back down.
