ULYSSES: The Pegasi Incident

A sci-fi storygame by tsmpaul

Player Rating5.56/8

"#149 overall, #4 for 2006"

Based on 373 ratings since 04/29/2007
Played 11,497 times (finished 382)

Story Difficulty4/8

"March in the swamp"

Play Length5/8

"Not going to lose any sleep"

Maturity Level3/8

"Must be at least this tall to play"

Contains content that may not be suitable for persons under age 10. If this were a movie, it would probably be between G and PG.

Tags

Previously Featured

Serious

-26th April 2007-
Hi everyone! For those who have played the previous version of this web story-game, there have been a few minor changes. The story is the same, I've simply updated the text to remove errors, correct some grammar, fix spelling mistakes, etc. I've made the demo a little bit shorter as well - no point in giving everything away in the demo!

For those who don't know, this is a demo, consisting of aproximately the first half of my paperback gamebook novel, "Ulysses: The Pegasi Incident", published via www.lulu.com. (That's a big demo for a book!) This first book in my new sci-fi series should be available for purchase late June or early July 2007. For more information, please visit www.pjtgamebooks.com.

BACKGROUND:
The Federation of Worlds contains six different species' home worlds, with hundreds of colonies, space stations and outposts. The FSS Ulysses is a multi-role human starship designed to carry out mission such as scientific exploration, diplomatic duties, emergency evacuations, and the like.

A distress call has been recieved at Starbase 14 from Pegasi Station. All the humans there have fallen mysteriously ill, and the starship F.S.S. Ulysses has been dispatched to examine the situation, and hopefully develop a cure before the humans die. So far, the non-humans (aliens) at the space station all seem to be fine, and the Admiralty is worried that someone might have created a virus that targets humans only - and could therefore be a threat to the entire race! The Ulysses is around 24 hours away from the space station, but is the closest ship, and responds to the distress call with all due haste. They hope that when they arrive, the humans will still be alive...

In this story-game, you are not a particular character. Instead, as events happen, you determine how different characters respond to what is taking place, or solve problems they encounter. By your choices, YOU will be determining how the crew handles the situations they are faced with, and ultimately, whether they succeed or fail.

Player Comments

This should probably be re-tagged "fan fiction," as this is without a doubt "Star Trek" in a very thin disguise. Some of the terminology has been changed up ("Federation of Worlds" instead of "Federation of Planets," and "teleportation device" instead of "transporter," to name some of the more obvious examples) but otherwise this story reads like a draft script for a Next Generation episode. I even helps if you imagine the voices of Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes as you read the dialogue contained herein.

But "Ulysses" brings nothing new to the genre, I'm afraid. The story is comparatively well-written as far as spelling and grammar go, but there are no new ideas here. There are, however, a few plot holes. To wit: If I just teleported across space in the blink of an eye, from my starship to this space station, then how in heck is a closed door a problem? Instead of 18 choices to either hack the door or ask my telepathic counselor (*cough*TROI*cough*) to see what useless information she can provide, why not just ask Scotty to beam me over?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm a life-long Star Trek fan, and seem genetically predisposed to seek out (and pay money to watch, if necessary) any studio production with the words "Star Trek" in the title... even if it's crap directed/produced/inspired by J. J. Abrams. I'm old enough to have seen every single Trek movie in their original theatrical releases. And more relevantly, I recently published my own story on this site that was itself an homage to Gene Roddenberry.

This story was published on this site in 2006, which is significant because that was about the time that fan-produced Star Trek lore exploded on the internet, apparently to fill the void after the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005. There were not one, but two exceptionally detailed recreations of the original 1960s Star Trek sets, each the basis of elaborate, well-funded, and almost professionally produced unofficial episodes. These in turn inspired more and more fan-produced episodes of varying quality. Much of this is probably still available on YouTube, even though CBS cracked down on this phenomenon when one production made the fatal error of running a successful go-fund-me campaign.

I've watched a good portion of that fan fiction--some of it even produced by honest-to-god Star Trek veterans like Walter Koenig and Tim Russ--and most of was, well, meh at best. One episode produced in Georgia about an Orion slave girl really stood out, but most of this was more about an individual's interpretation of the character James T. Kirk--either the swaggering action hero, or the thoughtful and considerate 23rd Century gentleman.

All of these fan episodes were content to exist within the format established by the Paramount versions of Star Trek, where every single planet looked like southern California, all of the aliens were just people disguised by whatever the makeup department came up with that week, and every civilization seemed to be governed with all the pomp and circumstance of a town council.

So having just recently survived that era, and now in a position where I'm eagerly anticipating the airing of Star Trek: Picard later this year, I read this story fully aware of what I was probably getting myself into.

And I was neither disappointed nor surprised. Not only is the name "Ulysses" is hardly original in the grander scheme of western literature, this story in general is not a stand-out in the grander scheme of "Trek." The list of characters is identical to the list of bridge offers about the titular starship (in Trek, if you're not a bridge officer, then what the hell DO you do?), they come across a mystery, they encounter adversity, and they overcome obstacles by the excessive quotation of technobabble. It's just that the professional writers who worked for Paramount did this so much better.

And then I got the ending that, judging by the other reviews, everyone seems to get: a cliffhanger that directs me to a website link (no longer functional 13 years later) to buy a book if I want to find out how the story ends. Considering that I didn't even want to go back and see if there were any other endings, I hope the author isn't holding out hope he might have made another sale.

I have read at least one other story on this site by the same author, and now that I think about it, that one reminded me of Robotech, or one of those similar weekday cartoon series from the 1980s. So I'm going to hazard a guess that the author is about my age, and like too many members of Generation X (here's looking at you J. J. Abrams, Seth MacFarlane, and Quentin Tarantino!) the temptation to emulate the pop culture fixations of our youth is simply too strong to resist.

— Bill_Ingersoll on 6/2/2019 3:15:00 PM with a score of 0

Alright I played the game and went through all it's options and loved it. At first I thought the story was guided but then realized that there were different options and it was not always a happy ending. In fact different ends which I love. Great game and well written.... I'm looking forward to the actual books.

— chocobot on 2/8/2007 10:48:43 PM with a score of 0

Absolutely excellent story with nicely branching paths that lead to different events. I noticed no problems with tenses. I'm not sure what you could change to make this better - it's great how it is. Nice pictures, too.

— madglee on 1/4/2007 2:08:28 AM with a score of 0

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— bit.ly/ggscifi2 on 10/7/2019 3:21:32 AM with a score of 0

what u never played tubersimulator yet.

— kirb joestar on 10/7/2019 3:19:20 AM with a score of 0

It's a fun read. Too bad it's not long enough, and no option of opening fire on some ship.... ;)

— TestingJest on 8/30/2017 3:52:06 AM with a score of 0

10/10 best choose your own story!

— Cat muffin on 2/8/2017 5:56:13 PM with a score of 0

I was annoyed when the story cut off abruptly asking the reader to visit another website (which seemed unavailable) in order to finish. I feel as though an unspoken agreement btwn writer and reader was broken; we invested the time to immerse ourselves in the plot, learning characters, setting, etc... and no payoff.

Additionally, the story seemed somewhat uninspired in that it blatantly ripped off Star Trek. Virtually every cast member was a tweaked carbon copy of mostly TNG's characters (some TOS in there, tho). Couldn't the author do something less...predictable?

— Annoyed on 1/19/2017 11:50:12 PM with a score of 0

Good, but forced me to visit a website to finish the game!

— happystory on 9/29/2016 8:42:35 PM with a score of 0

As amazing as this is supposed to be, I couldn't find myself immersed in the plot. It's cliche and I really didn't want to read on by the time the book ended. Perhaps I didn't follow the most interesting route, but this was slightly funner than homework. I have really fun homework.

— Rookie on 7/11/2016 6:29:40 PM with a score of 0

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