YMMV / Star Trek Text Game

• Good Bad Bugs: Of the minor variety.
  • Even if the player's short-range sensors are damaged or completely offline, the "SCAN" command can still provide the coordinates and damage levels of enemy ships within the quadrant.
  • The player can still have their crew beam down to a planet with a "destroyed settlement" on it — and obtain dilithium, "energium" or other Power Crystals by doing so.
  • In the Commodore 64 version, if you destroy a starbase accidentally (by firing a photon torpedo in its path) you get "Starfleet reviewing your record to consider court martial". You get this same message even if you destroy a second starbase. But if you look at the code, there is Non-Standard Game Over where "You are stripped of rank and will spend the rest of your life mining dilithium!" You never get to see this ending, no matter how many starbases you destroy (or if there was only one starbase to begin with).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Federation at war with the Klingons, and one ship is crucial to the war effort? Sounds a lot like the first season of Star Trek: Discovery more than 45 years later. The Discovery even looks vaguely like the Lexington (which was called a "heavy Research/Battle Cruiser") from EGA Trek!
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • "Long range tractor beams" in EGA Trek. Need to get to that Distress Call on the other side of the sector block? Nope — you just spent all the time and energy you had to get there, likely dooming whoever you wanted to rescue, and you ended up in the sector right next to where you started, and got dumped into a battle anyways for good measure.
  • Damage to the Computer subsystem. Having to input travel coordinates in "delta-X" and "delta-Y" is frustrating and unintuitive enough, but then there's the Interface Screw of losing your vessel's star charts of the sector block, meaning you either have to remember the locations of starbases, enemy ships, etc. yourself, or fly around all over again to make sure you know where they are. And with the Luck-Based Mission, this can happen repeatedly during the course of the game, sometimes completely at random, especially on higher difficulty levels.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off:
  • The Sinclair / ICL port to the ZX81 files off any Paramount trademarks — the game becomes "Star Trail", the starship becomes the Endeavour, and so forth.
  • Same goes for the EGA Trek line — Klingons become "Mongols", Romulans become "Vandals", the Federation becomes the "Union", the Enterprise gets a visual change and becomes the Lexington, dilithium becomes "energium", phasers become "lasers", photon torpedoes become "energy" torpedoes, and so forth. Less prominent details, like subsystem names or planet types, remain the same.
  • Averted in the early years. When the game was first created and gained popularity, Star Trek was just another little remembered (except, at the time, to a fringe audience) cancelled TV show from the previous decade. It had yet to generate a significant fan following as the ubiquitous reruns hadn't yet begun. Also, during much of the first two decades of the game's existence, the game was distributed for free, with the code often published in computer magazines. Although expy versions of the game did exist during The '80s (like Stellar Track, understandably as it was an Atari 2600 game), Paramount didn't start to aggressively defend the copyright until years after the popularity of the franchise really took off.
• That One Attack: Mongol plasma bolts in EGA Trek. As difficulty goes up, even standard Mongol battleships can deploy them, they do hundreds of points of damage all at once, and regardless of your ship's shield strength they typically deal Subsystem Damage to multiple parts of the ship (usually with casualties too). Barring having a plasma bolt shield on hand and using it right away, the only other option is to avoid being hit by warping away to another quadrant. And good luck if your engines are already offline!
  • On the upside, you can also obtain these by raiding Mongol supply bases and supply ships, and then turning them on their former owners, typically for a One-Hit Kill, or a One-Hit Polykill on tightly grouped enemies — assuming it doesn't fail to detonate, that is. And then, they still tend to deal damage to the player's vessel, even when used from a distance.
• That One Level: "Admiral" level difficulty in the various versions.
• That One Rule: Aiming torpedoes. The makers of the Star Trek III.5 variant of the game actually sold aiming charts, so that you could figure out exactly what bearing to fire your torpedoes at, depending on the sector the Klingon ship was in. (Averted in EGA Trek, which allows the player to specify coordinates to fire the torpedoes at, although they can still miss.)
• We Win, Because You Didn't: If your ship is destroyed, the enemy wins, period. If you run out of energy, you can't complete your missions and the enemy wins.^note Evidently, not only is the Enterprise the only armed ship available, but there are no transport ships available either to refuel it If you don't destroy every last enemy ship in the galaxy by the deadline, the successful invasion of The Federation is treated as a foregone conclusion, even if there are only one or two enemy ships remaining.