Company / Developers – Microprose/Hasbro Interactive No Official Homepage Genre – Strategy / Galactic Conquest
Introduction
This game has been around for a long while, and is hardly breaking technological barriers anymore. The game may be old, but don’t let that discourage you. Underneath the old age lies a commendable game, which is still every bit as fun as was back then. I have yet to find a Star Trek, or any other Sci-fi strategy game to date that is as good, and I eagerly crave for another game to retire this gem.
Birth of the Federation is at least 3-4 years old now. In fact, you will be lucky to find this in the shops anymore. But if you ever spot this in a bargain bin or on an Internet auction you should probably consider getting it. Don’t even think about getting much help from Microprose, they don’t put it on their list of games anymore. Hasbro as well have nothing to do with this title anymore. I suppose it’s not to surprising being an old game and one that wasn’t really particular well received all that time ago. So compatibility with newer systems could be a problem, and you would be “up a creak without a paddle” in terms of assistance if it didn’t work. Saying that I have had no problems and neither has others I’ve spoken too.
Compatibility
It’s funny. Even with my system the game slows down badly when you get further into the game. With big space battles, even wielding a 32MB graphics card, they can chug along! The more RAM you have the better too the minimum recommendations are just plain old rubbish.
The game runs fine (with the last patch to be released) for the most part, but every so often it runs like a dog. It doesn’t matter how fast the computer, when it wants to play up it will do! This is a real shame, because you can spend hours playing the game and then it decides to run like an old age pensioner. You then usually become so bored of waiting for a turn to complete that you switch off.
This is perhaps the greatest problem that really lets down BOTF, and perhaps why gamers didn’t receive it particularly well. Even for me, a real fan of the game, this becomes tiresome and it is a sign of poor programming. And the fact that Microprose and Hasbro no longer provide patches for the game I doubt this will ever get solved.
