TJ Hooker star William Shatner will once again play overweight promiscuous space maverick James T Kirk as a new videogame based on the Star Trek franchise is coughed up this October.

Fans of the dead horse have had little to cheer about since Paramount gave up flogging it by canning Star Trek: Enterprise - the one with the fella off Quantum Leap - last year.

Interest in Star Trek has waned, a fact not lost on Shatner. He told Reuters: "The interest in Star Trek has waned."

Star Trek: Legacy is being developed for PC by Bethesda Softworks. Details are sketchy, but we imagine it'll involve lots of aliens that look like people with bits of rubber glued to their heads.

"If it's a good game, keeping true to the characters the best they can and having an interesting story that branches, I think a game can bring a freshness to a franchise like Star Trek," hoped the 75-year-old star of Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous.

Explaining his return, Shatner said: "I couldn't imagine someone else playing Captain Kirk, even in a video game, so I kind of got a little territorial."

Following a five-hour brainstorming session The Register's casting department has written to Paramount to insist that Shane Richie gets the plum job in due course, assuming Bill isn't immortal. ®