But the wait is over. Come the end of August ("definitely no later" than the first week of September), Starfleet Academy will drop you smack into the Trek universe, right in between movies five and six.You will be able to hang out in the cadet lounge, mess with the controls in the engineering room, chat casually with Admirals Kirk and Sulu - more than four hours of film footage were shot with William Shatner and George Takei - and, of course, launch missions to stomp the evil empires and save the tremoring galaxies from the forces of chaos and destruction. And if you're lucky, you may even graduate from the Academy and begin a long and distinguished career with Starfleet. (Of course, if you're of a wickedly perverse turn of mind, you can wait out the unspecified period of time until Interplay releases Klingon Academy and then be a bad guy.)

We've compiled a detailed list of ships to command, missions to accomplish, weapons to fire, good characters to work with and bad ones to threaten, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the game. Not that we're giving it all away; plenty of strange new life and adventure will be left for you to seek out and discover - as long as you own at least a P-90 with Windows 95, 16 MB of RAM, 120 MB of hard drive space, a 4x CD-ROM, a Windows 95-compatible soundcard, and SVGA graphics of course.