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Stellar Track (Atari VCS, 1980)


Mezrabad

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Stellar Track (Atari VCS, 1980)

 

The genetic precursor to Stellar Track is a main frame computer game called Star Trek, based on the franchise of the same name. You can read all about the history of the Star Trek Game at Wikipedia. It isn't that I'm too lazy to just paraphrase the entry, (though I am), but I'm more or less trying to keep this about the particular game rather than its history.

 

When you start a game of Stellar Track you're given a mission screen. Here is an example:

 

If you choose to accept it. HA. You have no choice.

 

A good beginner's game is recommended in the manual to be between 25-35 Aliens with as many Stardates as you can get. In my experience, those sized games are the most fun.

 

You exist in a galaxy consisting of a 6x6 grid of quadrants. Amongst the 36 quadrants are the number of aliens you're hunting as well as your two starbases. When you start the game, you don't know where anything is. Here's what your Galaxy Map looks like at the beginning of the game. You can see that it tells you you're located at Quadrant 3,2 (third quadrant from the left, second from the top).

 

You can't see anything. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

 

At the moment the only thing you know is that you're in a Red Quadrant which tells you you've got alien ships near by. If you perform a Short Range Scan, you can see them.

 

He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him. I'll chase him 'round the Outer Nebula and 'round Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!

 

(That example is taken from a different playthrough, so don't let that quad coordinate confuse you.) Yes, you're the ship that looks a little like the Enterprise, and your enemies look a little like Klingon starships.

 

If you found yourself in a green quadrant, you could be more relaxed and take a Long Range Scan to see what occupies the quadrants immediately adjacent to the one you're in. Here is an example of what the galaxy map looks like after I've scanned it from two locations: 3,2 and 3, 5.

 

No, this isn't drawn to scale.

 

You can see that in the quadrants surrounding my scans, there are numbers. A "20" means there are two alien ships and zero star bases in that quadrant.

 

Later on, from this next scan, you can see that I've found a Starbase, shown by the indicator "01" at quadrant, 6 (across) 5 (down).

 

Finally! I hope their restrooms are clean.

 

The strategic part of this game is being aware that you have a limited amount of Stardates to spend, and knowing that every time you warp from one quadrant to the next, you're burning up a stardate. For instance, warp to a location three quadrants away and you're burning up three stardates. The game demands that you balance searching for aliens with slaughtering them. You also have to consider repair trips to your starbases as well.

 

Coupled with the strategic aspects of this game are the tactical aspects. When you do warp into a quadrant with enemies in it, you have two ways of taking them out. Weapon 1: Photons can only be fired in a straight shot down a row, column or a diagonal in a quadrant, but are guaranteed to hit and obliterate target in their path. Weapon 2: Phasors are a sort of radial destruction beam that dissipates as they spread like ripples on a pond. They are guaranteed to hit the enemy ships in the quadrant but damage decreases with distance. You choose the direction to fire the Photons, but their main disadvantage is that you may need to scan the quadrant before firing, leaving yourself vulnerable to attack. You choose the power level of the Phasors, the advantage here is that you know you're going to hit whatever is in the quadrant, but you don't know necessarily how much damage you're going to inflict. If it isn't enough, then expect return fire.

 

Here is an example of a quadrant with no enemies and a starbase in it.

 

Check the tires, change the oil, but don't try to sell me a new air filter, dang it.

 

The gray background is indicative of a starbase's presence. To dock at a starbase, just warp on top of it. So, why dock at a starbase?

 

Well, you use up energy as you travel from quadrant to quadrant (100 units per quadrant), you use it up warping from sector to sector within a quadrant (10 per sector), you lose energy when you are "hit" by the enemy, and you use it up firing phasors (up to 999 units in a single shot, though that's overkill). So, one good reason to visit starbase is for fuel. However, in addition to losing energy when hit by enemies, your various ship functions can be damaged. You can lose your Short Range Scan, your Long Range Scan, your Photon Launcher and/or your Phasors! I have found an effective combat tactic to be warping into the center of a quadrant, and firing off a good sized phasor blast before even scanning the quadrant. This will usually take out two or three of the aliens in the quad. If I waste time doing a short range scan just to see where they are, then they all get a chance to try to damage me after that scan.

 

This is a game I wish I had discovered back in the day. I'd seen Star Trek on a home computer or two (probably a TRS-80, but I wouldn't swear to it) and was very curious about this type of game. Now that I've found it, while I don't think I will choose to spend a lot of time playing it beyond what I have for this article, I can say that were I to have had this back in the day, it would have been a huge time sponge. Each time you start a new game, depending on where you are in the galaxy, and depending on how many aliens and stardates, you have to plan your strategy differently. There are difficulty switches which control the effectiveness of your shields and your phasors, but I've been keeping them on Novice. Here is what I'm used to seeing when I finish a game.

 

Seriously, NO ONE wants to be Ensign Crusher.

 

Which means I suck. :D However, I find it hard to believe that if I wiped out 60 out of 61 aliens and ran out of time, that we'd still need to surrender to them, but the game needs to have boundaries I guess.

 

I have gotten as high a rank as Commodore.

 

Commodore (64) On the Bridge!

 

:)

 

I think I've played about a dozen games now, and I've only won once :( . The highest rank achievable is Admiral and it's based on your use of resources in addition to actually defeating the aliens. Okay, truth be told, I'll probably continue to play until I see an Admiral ranking. So far, I prefer the recommended "beginner" games, with between 25-35 aliens and 35-40+ stardates. The games with less aliens also give less startdates. Since the aliens can appear in quadrants in groups of 1, 2 and 3, with less aliens it's possible to find your targets spread out over the galaxy and hard to reach with the amount of star dates you're given. When you get many aliens and many stardates, you may have plenty of time to track them all down, but it can be a long and tedious process.

 

I've found screenshots of this game on the webanets, but they'd been taken with an emulator which grabs just a single frame. Due to the programming technique used to display the text in this game, the only decent screenshot is a good ol' fashioned picture of the TV. Here are some of the remaining screenshots.

 

When you warp into an occupied quadrant, it's good to do so with phasors firing.

 

To the last, I grapple with thee. From hell's heart, I stab at thee. For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.

 

This is what you want to see after you've fired some phasors blindly.

 

Kirk, my old friend, do you know the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space!

 

By the way, it looks like I've just killed an alien but still have a full compliment of photons and energy. The status displayed here is the status displayed prior to me firing any phasors. To see my current status, I'd have to use the Status command again. The Commands are selected all via moving the joystick left or right and pressing a button to make your selection. It seems awkward at first, but one gets used to it quickly. Programming in warp coordinates also quickly becomes second nature, though I won't get into that here. I do recommend you play this game with the instructions!

 

The background is green - the quadrant is clean!

 

I had to ruin the Star Trek quotes to make a Ghostbusters reference. I apologize to everyone.

 

This is not an action game by any stretch of the imagination. It is a "thinking" game, and it is a chance to play a game formerly limited to big computers on your itty bitty Atari VCS. While there's little chance of interesting my son in Stellar Track (as long as we've got Spore sitting on our Mac), it has certainly kept me engaged the last few evenings. heheh, 'engaged', that's, like, a warp pun...

 

Next entry: Steeplechase. Yeah it's another Sears game, why the heck not?

 

(EDIT Jun 2022: fixed the photo links and associated an album, though I don't know why the TI 99/4a picture is in that album.)

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I can say that were I to have had this back in the day, it would have been a huge time sponge.

Very true. When I got my VIC 20 I picked up Basic Computer Games and one of the first games I typed in was Super Star Trek. One of the problems I had to work around was SST used an 8x8 Galaxy Map, and it used 3 digits instead of 2 to denote #stars, #klingons and #bases. The VIC's display was 22x23, but you could adjust the number of columns and rows via simple POKEs to the video chip. As I recall I made the display have 25 columns and output the galaxy map something like this:

 

--1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8-

1111222333444555666777888

2111222333444555666777888

3111222333444555666777888

4111222333444555666777888

5111222333444555666777888

6111222333444555666777888

7111222333444555666777888

8111222333444555666777888

 

The built in PRINT routines were hard coded for 22x23, so I'd switch back to 22 columns when done viewing the map.

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Great review! :ponder:

 

Stellar Track was one of the games I wanted when I got my 2600 in '81, but for some reason I couldn't find it at the local Searses (Searsi?). Maybe it had already gone out of production by then, or was just never a big enough seller to bother keeping in stock. Finally, I managed to find one about the time the bottom was falling out of the game market, although I seem to recall being perplexed as to why its price hadn't dropped as much as everything else and I think I resented having to pay $15.99 for it, while everything else was under $10. ;)

 

I always liked the game, and according to my old high score sheet I managed to reach Admiral at least once. I had played the TRS-80 version before, and was really impressed with the 2600 version because it actually drew cool-looking ships, instead of just an 'E' for the Enterprise and 'K's for the Klingons. ;)

 

(And incidentally, Stella allows you to take screenshots with "phosphor mode" now, which correctly displays games like Stellar Track. But I like photos a lot better. More authentic.)

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I wanted this game so bad for x-mass, along with the other two Sears exclusives at the time. I ended up getting Super Breakout and Steeplechase but not Stellar Trek. Sadly Sears were all out of them and stayed out of stock for some time. Eventually I gave up and focused on other games. I wish I would have been more persistent. I'm certain I would have loved this game back then and put a great amount of time into it. Sadly, I still don't have a copy but wonder if my lack of patience these days would allow me to enjoy it as much now.

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Darrell,

 

Hey, thanks for bringing up SST and for linking to that classic listing of David Ahl's version. I found it particularly interesting because I'd been wondering why they were calling them quadrants! ;)

 

I have a feeling of deja vu when I ask this, but is there a "modern" version of BASIC available anymore? And by "modern" I mean, the same old BASIC, but usable on a modern computer? I want to show my kid good old fashioned spaghetti code (which is what my BASIC programs always became, so much so that instead of calling it BASIC, I called it PASTA (Perpetually Aggravating and Severely Twisted Algorithms) ) I supposed I could just show him it on the C64...

 

Nathan,

 

Thanks! :ponder:

 

That's really strange that it didn't drop in price with the rest of the games. Maybe they'd just gotten tired of marking things down before they'd gotten to the titles starting with "S"?

 

I didn't know about "phosphor mode", that's a great idea!

 

Sadly, I still don't have a copy but wonder if my lack of patience these days would allow me to enjoy it as much now.

 

Ya know, I think if you gave it a chance you'd find yourself quick to warm up to it, if only for an evening of playing. The manual makes it seem very complex, but after one play through it's very easy to have it down cold. I was surprised at how after about 20 minutes I felt driven to complete at least one game successfully, if only to get a ranking other than ensign!

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Atari2600.com has one - for a dollar less than I paid! ;)

 

Or, if you want to go the cheap route, and get the cartridge only...

 

It's really interesting looking at the program for Super Star Trek. I dabbled in BASIC a little while, and looking at all that reminded me why I'm not a programmer. :ponder:

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Stellar Track is an interesting cart from a historical perspective, and it almost manages to put Star Trek into 4K, which is quite an accomplishment. A few points not yet noted:

 

-1- The joystick entry routine defaults to the last value selected, whether it was a command number or a digit. So command #4 will always default to "4" as its first numeric entry; command #3 will default to "3", etc.

 

-2- The game's final rankings seem to bear no regard for the difficulty of the original mission. Playing very well and barely winning a nearly-impossible scenario gives a lower ranking than playing leisurely through a much easier scenario. That IMHO is the biggest defect in the cartridge.

 

-3- People not familiar with the computer game probably wouldn't have been terribly interested in the cart, but I would expect those who'd had exposure to it back in the day would have thought it the greatest thing since sliced Cheez-Wiz. Incidentally, I'd played the computer game BITD (on an HP-2000 with printing terminals), but not known of Stellar Trak until recently.

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With your review in metaphorical hand, I'll try to make some time soon to delve into this one, channeling my grade-school self (who would've certainly dug this game!) as best I can. I never heard of Stellar Track back in the day, but my mom had a Model III on loan from work for some months, and I really enjoyed the handful of simulations and text adventures that mysteriously came with it, many of which would probably frustrate me to no end now. I'd imagine that the TRS-80 version of Star Trek would've gotten some major playtime had I owned it back in the day.

 

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to your Steeplechase review!

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Too bad the pictures in this entry are gone. :( I'd like to see the ship graphics in all their glory!

 

I'm being lazy on this one and won't play it because I've already played a few Star Trek games during my computer retrogaming of the 70s. I really liked the genre, but I can't play all Star Trek clones out there - and they're quite a few.

I couldn't find it at the local Searses (Searsi?)

 

:D

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On 11/27/2013 at 12:18 AM, Nelio said:

Too bad the pictures in this entry are gone. :( I'd like to see the ship graphics in all their glory!

 

I've done a horrible job as an archivist for the videos and photos I'd taken of this "project" (it's really more of a "lifestyle choice", but I digress) back when I started. I'm trying to take your wise advice and just start "moving forward" again but it does bug me to see what's gone missing now. Thanks for setting up the Previous and Next entry links that you did! I think it's a feature of the blogging software now, so yay for that.

 

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Hi! Been a while!

 

Yes, it seems the previous/next links are no longer needed. Actually strange that they ever were on a blogging platform... I hope they were helpful for some!

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On 3/25/2021 at 7:10 AM, Nelio said:

Hi! Been a while!

 

Yes, it seems the previous/next links are no longer needed. Actually strange that they ever were on a blogging platform... I hope they were helpful for some!

Oh wow, you've been here! I came back thinking "well, it's only been a few weeks since I finished Atari 1980, let's get started on something else... what... a YEAR!?

 

Also, I need to setup mail notification again. I had no idea you'd commented. >_<

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