Star Trek: Bridge Commander (2002)

Sometimes a good game is just a good game regardless of age.

And graphics in particular are often overrated, as design is often more important than resolution. 4k isn’t going to help a game that’s bland and uninspired.

I always use dark souls as an example; you zoom into the textures and it looks awful, but you look at it as a whole and it looks incredible.

But it was 3D!

One of the most modable games ever if you know what you're doing. In the install I have on my pc the only original file remaining is the .exe, its closer to 20Gb rather than the original 750Mb. Unfortunately the old mod repository died years ago, I have some backed up plus the ones I wrote but its maybe 1% of what was out there.

One neat thing is how robust the engine is, throw it enough power and it has no issue with huge models, or breaking universe.

Some old screenshots I found: https://imgur.com/a/FILLe0n (Pic uploader seems to be down unfortunately)

Awesome! Any way we could convince you to archive the mods somewhere? I'd seed a torrent or something for sure.
- I don't have many of the raw mods anymore, but I do have a ton of modified versions in my install of the game. Mostly modified from me moving around hard points and adjusting parameters to improve balance. I could probably share my entire install somehow, I'm pretty sure it'll work out of the box on most computers at least up to Windows 10.

Were the graphics bad for their time?

Graphics are overrated, and people who "won't play a game because it has bad graphics" are missing out on so so much

Old graphics/=bad graphics

Voyager: Elite Force

There are tons of RP mods for RPGx which is built on Voyager: Elite Force - the main community is TLO (The Last Outpost) who host the servers and run community events - although my experience with this was a few years ago, so maybe the community has shifted somewhat.
RPGx has a ton of custom maps including full size recreations of starships and random environments.
- Have you not played it? :o
  A fully voice acted (by the Voyager cast!) original story in the Delta quadrant.
  Assuming you like FPS games, you're in for a treat!
- I'm not going to pretend I've played every Star Trek video game, but I think Elite Force is actually the best Star Trek video game ever made.

Battlefield 1942 - Desert Combat mod.

I still play it with just bots to kill time. Its just so good. The apache flight model is a thing of pure beauty.

Cutting the nacelles off enemy ships with the sweet dynamic mesh effect never gets old.

Take out all their weapons, propulsion. Just life support and warp core left.

Still not surrendering?

Oh well.. torpedos, full spread!

- I haven't played in a while, I found it's usually about spreading their damage over your shields while trying to keep your damage concentrated on one of their shield zones, then targeting the shield generators.
  If all else fails, try spinning, that's a good trick

I should probably add this game to my list

I've been looking for fun wrestling video games and discovered Wrestling Empire, that ugly ass, janky game is fun as hell, even if it looks like a turd.

Oh boy do I have good news for you!

https://www.nexusmods.com/startrekbridgecommmander/mods/4012

There are games where everything about them sucks but I still love them.

Body Harvest for the N64 is a classic in my head.

Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force (1999)

You could do some dirty things in Bridge Commander. If you disabled the enemy shields I believe one of the actions you could take was transporting people off the ship.

Honestly that tactic is kind of universe breaking - imagine the thing to do is just beam the bridge crew into space with a large transporter; such an easy way to totally knock out a ship.

O'Brien did that in DS9 as a last resort

I only have the new one, that was made for VR. It can be played in flat space, but you can tell they did very little to make it work. The text is so small on a regular screen I can't read a god damn thing.

I never played the original, but I suspect it's probably better in every way except for the visuals (other than having readable text I mean).

Dwarf Fortress is my favorite game of all time now, though. It's not old, but it just uses ASCII or tilesets. And I've been playing since version 3, using the default ASCII because I think it looks more interesting than the tiles.