Resistance Is Futile Against Star Trek: Borg
April 19, 2010
Back during the PC multimedia revolution of the mid-1990s, just about every popular television or movie property that had a high percentage of sci-fi fans in its base was on track to become an interactive point-and-click Dragon's Lair-type adventure using film clips to move the story along. Star Trek was right there in the middle of it all with an interactive technical manual of the USS Enterprise-D in which Will Riker himself narrated your primitive sandbox tour of the ship, a Klingon adventure, and - most notably - a title in which the omnipotent Q plays with the space-time continuum by sending the player back in time to the Battle of Wolf 359 to assist the USS Righteous in combat against the Borg.
Released in 1996, the interactive movie Star Trek: Borg gave actor John de Lancie the chance to gleefully ham it up as Q yet again and provided the Borg with one of their final opportunities to function as mysterious and threatening villains. The Borg game itself is long obsolete thanks to a programming decision to lock the game to Windows 95 and Windows 95 only, but thankfully the entire game has been put on YouTube for fans of The Next Generation-era Star Trek to enjoy. The non-Q acting is off, the story bogs down halfway through, and some Trek lingo is cringingily outdated (at this point in history it seems that "Borgified" is the term in use for assimilation into the Borg collective), but it's all worth it to see the timeless Q in his prime. Watch it right now. Resistance is futile.