What Does God Need With a Nintendo Game?

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
9/6/12
www.gamereproductions.com 

Another little oddity to add to the collection; what you see here is a reproduction cartridge of the abandoned 1989 game based on the fifth (and crappy crap) Star Trek movie: The Final Frontier.  Actually, saying that The Final Frontier is a crap movie isn't fair - it's not a bad movie, just a not-as-good movie as the others in the franchise (of which I am a huge nerd fan).  It has it's good moments, it has it's not good moments, but it's a movie I've seen a few times and never really hated the way many people seem to.

The game on the other hand?  Well, I played through the first couple of levels after opening the package today...and it's...um...not great.  Star Trek V is one of those games that suffers from lack of creativity and imagination.  You run to the right and shoot bad guys.  There's not much variety (so far).  Maybe things get spicy in later levels, but I haven't gotten that far yet.  It IS kind of fun to see the typos - particularly playing as "Scotto" in stage 2.

For whatever reason, the game was cancelled before it was released.  I've heard it's because the movie didn't do that well (even though it grossed more than $70 million worldwide) and/or because the game wasn't that good (which is true, but that didn't stop whoever was responsible for letting 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' out of the bag).  So all those teases for a new Star Trek game in the 'coming soon' section of Nintendo Power (RIP) were for naught.

But no matter!  All it takes to get a copy now is a PayPal account and an email to a NES reproduction artist - in this case it was www.gamereproductions.com.  What most repro makers do is take common existing carts, remove the circuit board, whip up some voodoo magic, slap on a new customized label and voila!  New Nintendo game.  The whole process is really cool - I wish I had the gadget know-how to pull them off myself.  Sure, most of the ROMs that the repro makers used can be found online for free, but there's something fun about holding an actual cart in your hand and playing the game on a real NES.

This was the first reproduction cart I've purchased, and I'm impressed with the quality of the construction (fun factor of the game notwithstanding).  I'll probably look into getting a few more - there are some PAL and Japanese exclusives and more unreleased games that I'd be interested in playing.

The only other cart like this that I have is the homebrew title Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril.  I loved this game - it's a cross between I Wanna Be the Guy, MegaMan and Metroid, programmed by one dude and manufactured with 100% new parts and released by www.retrousb.com.  Any NES fan owes it to themselves to purchase a copy and give it a spin.  Battle Kid is better than most officially released NES games that had entire development teams working on them.