Have You Played... Star Trek The Videogame?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives and PC miscellany. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

My favourite thing about Star Trek The Videogame [official site] is definitely the name. That's partly because everything else about it is a whopping bumturd the size of a mountain, but also because of the ridiculous marketing mess it describes.

Relaunching old things anew and then giving them the original name is really stupid. It was stupid only last week when a second Prey game was released and called Prey, despite not having anything at all in common with the original Prey. And it was super-extra stupid when JJ Abrams bloody awful Star Trek film was called Star Trek, despite that being the name of the TV series that started off the whole daft franchise.

So what do you do when you're naming the game-of-the-film? You can't just go and call that "Star Trek" too! That would be madness! Best to distinguish it from the film in case anyone bought it from a game shop and then tried to watch it on their TV and got angry - pop a little clever subtle clue into the title, like "The Videogame". There, perfect. There haven't been any other Star Trek video games, have there?

Still, better than the game itself, which is a quite astounding mess.