History VideoGame / JudgmentRites

* AmbiguousDisorder: (InUniverse) Generally true for the passengers of the Compassion in "Though This Be Madness". They display various symptoms of mental instability and/or deficiency, but none of them are diagnosed with anything specific. Even [=McCoy=] has a hard time figuring it out. As it later turns out, [[spoiler:this is intentional, since the ship is a deliberate puzzle set up by the Brassica]].

** Episode 6, "Museum Piece", starts with the ''Enterprise'' finally headed to Nova Atar for shore-leave, but just as Kirk reassures the bridge crew that it's ''finally'' time to wind down, he gets a call from a Starfleet Admiral asking him to do some official business while he's down there.

* ColonyDrop: At the beginning of the penultimate episode/level, a giant colony ship housing an assortment of invalids and head cases is set to land smack in the middle of a Federation colony in the Klingon Neutral Zone. The object of the mission (ostensibly) is to convince its computer to keep it from doing that.

Unlike its predecessor, ''Judgment Rites'' also includes a StoryArc that runs through most of its episodes: An alien species is attempting to [[spoiler: make first contact with the Federation and the Klingon Empire]] and is peppering the plot with various tests to determine whether [[spoiler: to establish diplomatic relations with either government]]. This culminates in the last two episodes in the game, where Kirk and his crew are being explicitly tested.

* SuperOCD: Puzzlewitt, a passenger on the Compassion (in "Though This Be Madness"), was obsessed with learning as much information as possible from the ship's computer library, not matter how inane or insignificant it was, in the hope that learning it all will help explain some grander purpose. When the data-reader was destroyed by another passenger, she crossed the DespairEventHorizon and became a vegetable.

''Star Trek: Judgment Rites'' was the second AdventureGame based on the ''Franchise/StarTrek'' franchise, developed in 1993. It is a sequel to the successful ''[[VideoGame/StarTrek25thAnniversary Star Trek: 25th Anniversary]]'', following the same concept: a surprisingly-faithful continuation of ''[[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries The Original Series]]'' in video game form.

* AmbiguousDisorder: Generally true for the passengers of the Compassion in "Though This Be Madness". They display various symptoms of mental instability and/or deficiency, but none of them are diagnosed with anything specific. Even [=McCoy=] has a hard time figuring it out.

''Star Trek: Judgment Rites'' was the second AdventureGame based on the ''Franchise/StarTrek'' franchise, developed in 1993. It is a sequel to the successful ''[[VideoGame/StarTrek25thAnniversary Star Trek: 25th Anniversary]]'', following the same concept: a surprisingly-faithful continuation of ''[[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries The Original Series]]'' in videogame form.

* AmplifierArtifact: Trelane has four of these: [[spoiler: a clock, a blackboard, a locket, and a triplane]]. All four must be destroyed in order to weaken the forcefield guarding his castle. After this happens, you find out that Trelane has at least one more (a painting) in the castle itself, but Spock points out that the castle is likely full of them, and that Kirk would never destroy them all before Trelane got mad at him and did something nasty.

** A notable example is during the second mission ''The Sentinel'', where despite doing everything right for a maximum score in the mission, at the end your choices are to either shut down a computer archive with advanced scientific knowledge, or shut down a power generator that's protecting the planet's civilization from being contaminated by a vat of dangerous pheremones. If you choose to shut down the generator and save the archive instead, you complete the mission and are beamed back onboard. However on the Bridge you're instantly informed that [[spoiler: the planet's civilization is doomed to a life of aggression and violence, and Admiral Richards berates you for your choice and relieves you as captain of the Enterprise...]]

* {{Technobabble}}: As in the original television series, this game is very light on the Technobabble for the most part. However it is ramped UpToEleven in "Though This Be Madness" - the penultimate mission - whose writer seems to have gone wild with writing exceptionally long dialogue lines crammed full of technical terms. In the [=CD-ROM=] edition you can hear the actors struggling with their lines, up to and including a few recordings of completely-botched readings that were (accidentally?) left in.

* BeliefMakesYouStupid: The science officer mentioned above is unusually religious by Star Trek standards, and quickly falls for appearances when one alien species looks demonic and the other angelic.

* SpaceWhaleAesop: "Light and Darkness" deals with appearances and morality. Two races appeal for Kirk's help in destroying the other race. One race looks angelic, the other demonic. While GuestStarPartyMember Ensign Jons swoons over the angel's "goodness" and rejects the demon's "evil", Kirk notices that the demon is in fact the passive one and the angel is bloody-minded. Nevertheless, he does his best to ignore their appearance and eventually convinces the two races to be joined genetically. When things come to a head with Jons at the end of the mission, you'd expect Kirk to convince him that appearances don't matter, and that actions count more than words (a sentiment he himself expresses earlier in the mission). NOPE! Instead, all you need to do is make Jons realize that these are single-celled life-forms incapable of morality, and that the creatures they're seeing are just automated holographic projections. So while the moral of the story starts as "don't judge a book by its cover", it somehow ends up being "genetic tampering is OK if the subjects are primitive life-forms."

* RoyalBlood: At one point during "Though This Be Madness", Uhura must convince a man who thinks he is a king that she is descended from the rulers of Kush and Timbuktu to get him to speak with her. Failing to do so renders the mission UnwinnableByMistake in earlier versions of the game.

* UnwinnableByMistake: An unfinished piece of code makes it impossible to complete the mission "Though This Be Madness" if the wrong dialogue choice is selected during a certain conversation. [[spoiler: It's when Uhura talks to the "King" of the alien space craft to convince him to leave the room]]. The latest [=CD-ROM=] version solves the problem -- not by fixing the dialogue, but by dumping all the missing items into your inventory if you arrive at the final scene without them.

** In "Sentinel" the team encounters a computer holding the secrets of 3D holographic technology - tech that the Federation would not have in service [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration for another 100 years]] - but they're given a MoralDilemma: Either take the information and doom the planet's inhabitants to remain guinea pigs in an experiment that is turning them ever more aggressive; or allow the information to be wiped clean but release the inhabitants from the test. Canonically, Kirk goes for the second option.
** In "Light and Darkness" the team encounters two single-celled species that are being represented by [[ProjectedMan automated projections]]. This is a SecretTestOfCharacter to see whether the appearance of the projections (one angelic, the other demonic) will fool the team into thinking there is a MoralDilemma here, even though there is none: Neither species is even remotely sentient. When Kirk and his team finally combine the two species together a third projected figure appears - being received from some distant location in space - and reveals the extent of the Brassica tests throughout the quadrant.

* DisproportionateRetribution: Kirk thwarted Breddell's plan to take over his homeworld's government a decade ago. He then foiled Breddell's plans to manufacture {{Effective Knockoff}}s of Constitution-class Starships in ''25th Anniversary''. So naturally, Breddell now plans to [[spoiler: blow up Earth and destroy the Federation]].

* PortalDoor: One appears at the end of "Though This Be Madness", and takes you to the next mission. It's unclear whether it's actually a portal, or whether the whole thing is [[spoiler: nothing more than a holographic illusion]].

* {{Zeerust}}: One of the exhibits at the Smithsonian Annex is the working prototype of an "Aurora Generator". It is a bulky platform, as big as a pool table, that can wirelessly project electricity to any device over a short distance. Given how the away-team uses it later in the mission, however, the table-sized device is essentially what we would nowadays call a cellphone charging pad.

* TakeYourTime: None of the {{Ticking Clock}}s in the game will actually run out, no matter how long you wait.

* TickingClock: There are a few nominal ones, but [[TakeYourTime none of them actually affect gameplay.]]
** Breddell sets his DoomsdayDevice to fire at [[spoiler:Earth]] just before he's arrested. As Spock says, it could fire "at any moment".
** The alien ship "Compassion" is ''about'' to land on a Federation colony, and must be stopped [=ASAP=].

* BrokenAesop: "Light and Darkness" deals with appearances and morality. Two races appeal for Kirk's help in destroying the other race. One race looks angelic, the other demonic. While GuestStarPartyMember Ensign Jons swoons over the angel's "goodness" and rejects the demon's "evil", Kirk notices that the demon is in fact the passive one and the angel is bloody-minded. Nevertheless, he does his best to ignore their appearance and eventually convinces the two races to be joined genetically. When things come to a head with Jons at the end of the mission, you'd expect Kirk to convince him that appearances don't matter, and that actions count more than words (a sentiment he himself expresses earlier in the mission). NOPE! Instead, all you need to do is make Jons realize that these are single-celled life-forms incapable of morality, and that the creatures they're seeing are just automated holographic projections. So while the moral of the story starts as "don't judge a book by its cover", it somehow ends up being "genetic tampering is OK if the subjects are primitive life-forms."

* WarIsHell: In the best outcome to "No Man's Land" Kirk confronts Trelane about how historically inaccurate his recreation of World War I is, and offers to "improve" it by referring to the historical data on the Enterprise's computer. The end result demolishes Terlane's romanticism about Earth wars.

** The Prime Directive is mentioned when dealing with the native population of Balkos III. Spock counters the natives are already being manipulated by what is clearly technology from some earlier alien visit, and thus interfering to remove this alien influence is permissible.