Voyager: Elite Force

I beat Alice - more exactly, through my intervention, Alice Liddell beat the forces of madness arrayed against her. Yeeagh! Next up, Voyager: Elite Force, also known as "that Trek game wot isn't total sh!t".

At the time, 2000, gamers had a glut of Star Wars games to choose from: TIE Fighter, Dark Forces and its sequel, and Shadows Of The Empire among them (and the best would be yet to come). Trek fans, on the other hand, had nothing good. There'd been a Voyager game mooted for some years but it was never finished. In 2000 Raven Software figured, hey, why not a shooter. Dark Forces is doing well over there; and the Trek lore has Borg, for your implacable foe with poor AI.

My problem was that "at the time" thing. My computer in 2001-2 was a semi-upgraded Gateway (remember those?) with a Pentium II and Windows 98. VEF crashed on it. And I didn't get around to installing this game on subsequent computers; given my Alice woes, I'd likely not have succeeded.

Anyway: I got it working here in Windows 10 for 64bit. What you do is to follow these instructions - remembering above all that you must not run setup from the mainline, which is a 16bit app unauthorised for modern machines; run that setup from the Setup folder. It is also possible, and legal, and necessary, to find the 1.2 Patch. Rather less legit is the "NoCD" pair of replacement EXE files; but if you own the CD as I do, and you don't want to fumble with it (I don't want to fumble with it), it is unlikely Activision will hassle you. My display works up to 1280x1024 resolution.

It's a Quake III game, like Alice. It is, however, older than she is, so I changed its controls from default, to be more like hers. I put the spacebar to jump, C to crouch, Enter to use.

Not necessary was "Mesa for Windows". On the other hand, the graphics here really are not good, even compared to Alice a mere two years later (F.A.K.K. made the difference, apparently). I am told of a mod to upgrade those graphics. It seems incomplete and the "Expansion Pack" is recommended for it.