I only had a PSOne as a kid, so when Star Trek: Invasion came out around 1999, it was a HUGE deal. The Valkyrie fighters from it recently showed up in STO, actually. Eventually I hit a brick wall in it and couldn’t get past one certain mission, but thank God for those days and cheat books with codes!
You were a fighter pilot on a ship called the Typhon under the command of Worf, investigating why some captain had gone off the rails and reawakened some unknown alien species, who ended up being the Hur’q.
Then on PS2, we had the port of the first Elite Force, of which MANY hours was poured into. I remember losing my mind when I got to the Scavenger base, and part of it ended up being an old Terran Constitution-class ship. One of the NPCs onboard it used Alexandria Monroe’s face, which was a cool easter egg. I also had multiple save files for each section where you got to explore Voyager, just so I could go back to them whenever I wanted. My favourite was getting beamed back to Sickbay after a mission, and the Doctor scanning you and others, while he absentmindedly sang “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
Bethesda held the license for a brief period then, and we got Encounters and Conquest in the later years of the PS2 era, sort of consolation prizes while the PC, PS3 and 360 got Legacy (which I never played).
I played the much maligned PS3 game with Chris Pine and Quinto. It was OK… I remember parts of it desperately trying to be stealthy, but Spock’s AI was so daft, he’d just walk in front of Gorn and it constantly turned into a firefight. Seemed to remember it too that the retconned the Gorn into being from another dimension or something? However, I did enjoy the levels where you go to explore the Enterprise, cos I’ve always loved games where you get to explore parts of the ships you never get to see on TV. And that game has a KILLER soundtrack from Michael Giacchino’s assistant.
Then STO, which I have poured thousands of hours into it across PC and PS4. I know some find it to be a controversial game, but they do care about the franchise. And honestly, I’ve preferred some of their story choices as to the post-Nemesis era than what’s ended up on screen. I LOVED their TOS/Temporal Agent expansion, and tying up the Temporal Cold War with other time travellers like the Vorgons and the Krenim. They’ve a really beautiful recreation of DS9 in the game for the past few years, and it’s top notch. It’s worth just checking it out for that, just to walk around it and take it all in. And it’s twinged with some sadness now, but a gift to have Aron and Rene come back for what turned out to be their final performances as Nog and Odo.
I played some PC games when we had the old giant desktop everyone had in the 90s and 00s, but I was never that good at them. The first two Starfleet Commands, Away Team (which I could never figure out how to get past the Romulan base in the third or fourth level), Hidden Enemy, New Worlds, Armada… I wasn’t too bad at Hidden Enemy, but Generations was probably the one I was the best at. Lot of them were strategy games, and I was not a patient enough teenager to deal with stuff like that!
I remember being on holiday once for a few days up the county, and buying A Final Unity in a secondhand bookstore on our last day away. Came home, opened up the case, and it was just the second disk of Klingon Academy that was inside of it! God, was I pissed off.