A sinister force now controls the city of Neutropolis. A once-thriving city full of beauty and light, Neutropolis has been reduced to a a stagnant pit of apathy.
Well, we crash-landed that UFO in the desert and Bubba says he wants to go home. Heck, I don't blame him 'cause there ain't no place like Hickston. But according to my map, we're gonna have to blast our way through jack o' lope farms and a riverboat as well as a brothel 'fore we get home again.
Fasten your seat belts, bring your seat back to an upright position, you are about to pilot a Federation Starship on a wild roller coaster ride through the final frontier.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is a point-and-click adventure with multiple solutions and moral choices, combined with a first person starship simulator. As Captain Kirk, you'll control phasers, photon torpedoes, shields, and communications during eight separate space and ground missions. Visit different worlds and then join a landing party sent down to map and interact with alien races and artifacts.
Piloting the U.S.S. Enterprise is a thrill in itself, but the actual voices of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols will make your adventure truly out of this world.
The game mechanics were based directly on those used in the tabletop role-playing games Tunnels and Trolls and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes created by Wasteland developers Ken St. Andre and Michael Stackpole. Characters in Wasteland consequently have various statistics (strength, intelligence and luck among others) that allow them to use different skills and weapons. Experience is gained through battle and through use of skills. The game would generally let players advance with a variety of tactics: to get through a locked gate, a player could use his picklock skill, his climb skill, or his strength attribute; or he could force the gate with a crowbar - or a LAW rocket.
The initial band of Desert Rangers encountered a number of NPCs as the game progressed who could be recruited into the party of up to seven. Unlike those of other computer RPGs of the time, these NPCs might temporarily refuse to give up an item or perform an action if ordered to do so. The game was also noted for its high and unforgiving difficulty level and for such combat prose as "reduced to a thin red paste" and "explodes like a blood sausage", which prompted an unofficial PG-13 sticker on the game packaging in the United States.
Wasteland was one of the first games featuring a persistent world, where changes to the game world were stored and kept. Returning to areas later in the game, one would find them in the state one left them in, instead of being reset to their original state, as was common for games of the time. Since hard drives were still rare in home computers in 1988, this meant the original game disk had to be copied first, as the manual instructed one to do.