I think this was the most engaging video game I have ever played. Not because it’s actually amazing by today’s standards but I was the right age (must have been 12 or so) for it to catch my imagination perfectly. To this day I maintain that the alien races are some of the most inventive I’ve seen in any media, the storyline more compelling.
That said, I’ve not played it since (beyond some melee games via Ur Quan Masters) because I suspect it won’t live up to my memories. But man would I love to see a sequel (there was one but none of the original team were involved).
It did, indeed, have amazing alien races, extremely unique and original. Everything from the crystaline Chenjesu to the Used-to-steal-humans-and-probe-them-but-they're-not-aliens-they-are-pan-dimensional-beings Arilulaleelay, to the cowardly Spathi, to cryptic Melnorn.
Oh man, I’d kind of forgotten the Arilou plot. What an incredibly smart play on the “little green men” trope.
I suppose another reason I haven’t played is that I already know the plot back to front. I want to know more about the Orz (another subplot that fascinated me). Hell, I wanted to know if there was anything more to be learned about what happened to races like the Gg (the fact that I remember such minor plot points twenty years later speaks volumes). I was very disappointed when I heard that the sequel wasn’t going to touch any of that.
Iirc you could actually lose by not doing anything? [spoiler]The UrQuan advancing more and more up to a point were you basically just got a game over screen?[/spoiler]
As a 12-year-old kid (or thereabouts), I remember playing another DOS space shooter/RPG called Solar Winds, which I remember having a reasonably engaging shareware episode. I tracked it down later as an adult and played the full release and the sequel, and both felt really rushed and fell well short of the world that the shareware version offered. It was definitely an experience that didn't live up to my childhood memories.
On the other hand, I didn't play any of the Star Control games growing up, and so had no nostalgia for Ur-Quan Masters when I first played it around 2018 or so as a middle-aged adult. The game definitely holds up today, and even though the combat can be frustrating, the game's heart and character more than makes up for it. Even the grindy resource collection aspect is oddly addicting.
It's a shame what became of the Star Control franchise since. :(
Can concur though I played both Solar Winds and SC2 back in the day. Even at the time Solar Winds felt like a cheaper cash-in on the space RPG genre. The ship drove like a car, the ship modifications were pretty limited. Though it had a great power management system which could have formed the basis for some pretty inventive gameplay if it was properly leveraged.
I've come back to Solar Winds maybe once in the past 20 years, and replayed SC2 about 4 or 5 times since UQM was released.
Was looking forward to the next instalment but the quagmire of legal issues, divided fanbase, etc, has really left a sour impression on the future of the franchise for me, which is sad given the world TFB created initially.
I downloaded Solar Winds from a BBS when I was a kid, and I have played it several times again throughout the years. I get strong nostalgic feelings from playing it.
Solar Winds Galaxy is solid too, but not as engaging or as interesting of a story line.
UQM is definitely way more complex and involved. I remember dedicating days to it just to end up losing because of the deadline which I found pretty frustrating.
For me this is 1. developing an intuition for which stars will have resource-rich planets, 2. arriving at the planets and actually doing the mineral scans to reveal sometimes huge deposits of whatever minerals, and 3. actually picking up the minerals without losing all my landers.
The first time I played through I lost all my landers a few times and wrote off those rich planets as impossible and didn't keep track of where they were.. then when my landers became better able to navigate the seismic / weather incidents forgot where they were. Now since I have Forbidden Plot Knowledge I can just jump right to the part where I have all the tech I want and am nearly unstoppable right away.
I played it for the first time a few years ago and was pretty impressed. I haven't played a lot of modern games, but are there many that have a real time living world/branching story like this? It seems like that was more of a 90's trend (Colonel's Bequest, Exile III, The Last Express), and efforts since then have gone in the direction of everything being an amusement park (IE, everyone in the game world waits around for you to show up before they do anything).
And just to reiterate what others have said, the writing is superb.
The wonder and technology descriptions in Alpha Centarui were so amazing, I don't think they'll ever be beat. Like the rest of the game, they did a really great job of providing just enough information to let your mind run wild.
I miss when games used to provide giant reams of text like that. There was a game, "Lords of Magic" that came with, essentially, a small novel's worth of entirely superfluous setting information (in the form of a little book!). It had the kind of background fluff you'd normally find in a D&D manual. I think I spent about as much time with the book, as with the game.
Morrowind is much-beloved among fans of weird, complex video game fiction with tons of depth and plenty of text. I once read (on here, I think) that there was one person responsible for most of the weirdness and quirkiness of the setting in Morrowind (and the earlier two Elder Scrolls games, surely?), who left Bethesda after it was released, and that's why Oblivion and Skyrim feel so much more like a generic fantasy setting.
It's playable on any common desktop OS via OpenMW (you'll need a copy of the game for the art, level data, sounds, et c, though), which is also far more stable than the official binary, and has some nice QOL improvements baked in.
True! I guess Alpha Centauri really stuck out because it is so unexpected to have something like that in a turn based strategy game, they tend to be pretty dry.
All of the Elder Scrolls games (eg, Skyrim) contain ridiculous amounts of background text. I seen to remember lots of books in Pillars of Eternity as well. Oh, and the lore scattered around in Cultist Simulator is also quite something...
Totally different genre, but Disco Elysium must be one of the best written games ever. I think it's the only game from which I will occasionally look up quotes
Mass Effect 1. 2 and 3 are still not bad, but I can't quite say with a straight face they rise to that level. They coast on the writing in Mass Effect 1 in a lot of ways, and one way of reading the famously controversial ending of Mass Effect 3 is that's when the fumes they were coasting on ran out. The franchise after that sunk into mediocrity as the writers were just imitating what they didn't really understand.
I've never saw a mention of this, but I've assumed Alpha Centauri got a lot of inspiration from Frank Herbert's Pandora Sequence [1] - specifically the native ecology. Book 1 and 2 are flawed but have lots of interesting ideas; book 0.5 and 3 are more a bit more iffy, though book 0.5's concept of soldering your way to the singularity is a very 60's take.
If Alpha Centauri's concept of parallel colonization by a group of rivalrous and ideological charismatic leaders is explored in a book as well, I bet that would be fun.
IIRC, Alpha Centauri's manual had a set of influences listed at the end, and Herbert was definitely in there. It is arguably the clearest single influence to the setting.
Oh yeah, reading the PDF [1] the first fiction book listed:
"THE JESUS INCIDENT Frank Herbert
A speculative and philosophical tour de force by my favorite science fiction
author. You’ll probably have to search used bookstores for this one, but it’s
well worth it. My favorite science fiction novel ever. A clear inspiration for the story of Planet."
That manual is quite something! Moon comparisons, a long short story, tons of background material on each attribute of the planet...
The book Albion’s Seed presents an historian’s theory that the United States is the result of parallel colonization by four ideologically and culturally distinct groups. Slate Star Codex had an excellent review of it [1].
I played it at age 38 and it was great because of how it used every science fiction trope and voice acting effect that it could, to characterize all the aliens. All the plot twists and hints made sense and I don't think I ever consulted a guide.
I have to occasionally remind myself that games have not become bad. I've gotten old. I can only imagine what it's like to be 12 and play Fortnight. They can republish Command and Conquer, but that feel will never be real again.
Games have become less experimental and more streamlined in a chosen genre. Take Sc2: it has three games in it: arcade space combat, arcade planet exploration, and an adventure plot. Current gamemakers shy from such experimenting, and the resulting products are far less diverse, especially among big budget titles (too much risks, understandable, but still).
But to expand, Fallout 3 was nothing like Fallout 2 and neither was Fallout 4. We'll probably never get another Fallout title like F2, but we'll get indie games like it.
Same with pokemon, the last few (almost every?) pokemon game has essentially the same story, but Monster Sanctuary actually brings a new story to the table in a way Nintendo never will.
"Original content", not "originality". The contrast here is not being derivative per se, but vs. AAA gaming and its increasing convergence on being pretty much the same game over and over with superficial surface changes.
There's an explosion of creativity in the indie and open source space, this might be a survivor bias as we're only still talking about the games from the past that stayed in the public consciousness
others I haven't seen. But I'm talking of different thing. What is absent in modern game are the attempts of synthesis of different genres, which were frequent in 80s or 90s, and gave us such gems as Dune 1 and Star Control 2.
Binding of isaac is arguably an action RPG mixed with rougelike, both were developed genres before it was made, it was a synthesis of both. It helped launch the rougelite genre/achetype.
I feel like the Sierra ___ Quest games were like that too, multi-faceted. There were so many mini-games that would've made cute little releases on their own, but they served as tasks or plot points within the main story.
I also suspect that if someone were to do that today, reviewers would pan it for distracting from the main game or whatever. It's a different market, and more's the pity.
I've tried some games on Steam like Crying Suns or Bad North. There's something that makes them feel so mechanical. Sure, they might have great, stylized graphics and nice dialogue in places. But it feels like somebody took Star Control 2 or some other earlier games, simplified some aspect to a formula and then someone took the formula and made a game based on that, not having played the original.
For example, in Crying Suns there are three kind of fighters you can deploy. A kills B, B kills C, C kills A. Does everything always boil down into this? It's just not fun. It's a lazy gaming trope.
In Bad North, every map is procedurally generated. It just gets old after the first few ones.
The established formulas are less innovative, but those are they are inherently the most fun. A lot of indie games have fascinating visual and some unique mechanics but suffer from the core of the gameplay being a lot less fun.
Not to dispute your main point, but I recently got hold of the remastered C&C. I'd forgotten how good it was. The music really drives a lot of the feeling in it.
Having said that, I just don't have the time to really get into it again. And I don't have my best friend living in the same house with Ethernet cables strung between the rooms ;)
One thing about the original c&c. Even the installer was interesting. Pity they stripped that out when they ported it to windows and used installshield later. You were having fun the second you started that game.
I devoured Star Control II as a kid. It was such a great combination of the adventure, simulation, exploration and arcade shooter genres. I had the strategy guide that came with a huge map that detailed all the secret locations. I enjoyed the fighting bits but I think they feel a bit dated today. The other parts still hold up quite a bit!
In the 90s there were a lot of games that did interesting combinations of genres, like Star Control II, Magic Carpet, Dune CD, and others I'm forgetting. The cost makes these kinds of non-formulaic experiences so much rarer today...
One of my dream projects is a Star Control style game in VR... stay in your Precursor warship and dictate the battle from afar, or hop directly into your ally's cockpit... can you imagine the inside of an Umgah starship surrounding you in full 3D?
The game drew a lot from David Brin's "Uplift" universe (books), which I heartily recommend if you're into multi-species galactic civilisation with a dash of dolpĥin sex.
I came across it somewhat later in my life (early 20s maybe, when it was just the commercial version of Star Control II?) and enjoyed the hell out of it then, and replayed it again 7-10 years later and still enjoyed it. I started a replay of it a year or so ago (late 30s). I still haven't finished that playthrough, but still think it's a great game, and will certainly get back to it when I have some more time on my hands.
I played for years after it was 'out of vogue' but I too haven't touched it in decades. I played the sequel also, and it was good, but was just shy of the potential it could have been.
Part of me really wants to install this and give it a quick melee test. :)
I liked it in my teens (especially Melee mode) then tried to introduce it to my similarly-minded son recently, but he grew bored quickly. He favours Minecraft and Fortnite.
The original Star Control was one of my favorite games. It came out when I was in college and my friends I spent many hours playing the Amiga version in our dorm room.
I happened to know a developer at Accolade who asked if I had any ideas for new ships in the sequel they were planning. I sent an email that seems to have inspired a couple of their ships. Here's a blog post I wrote up about it a few years ago:
Yeah, they were. IIRC they were sort of optimized for attacking Earthlings, whose missiles were useless at long range when they were cloaked and which couldn't turn fast enough to counterattack at short range or accelerate fast enough to escape.
That was the idea, but in practice the zoom level and auto-centering of the combat screen meant that a good Earthling player could probably eventually win at long range. At close range the Earthling could turn quickly but couldn't output enough damage or accelerate to escape fast enough before the Ilwrath could kill it.
Earthling is slower than Ilwrath which can also fan out the flame thrower and destroy incoming missiles. Alliance should follow up with Shofixti after the Earthling is destroyed by Ilwrath.
Yeah, IIRC the Ilwrath is helpless against the Shofixti because the Shofixti is agile and has a longer-range weapon. You can shield from the Shofixti bullets a little bit with flames but basically unless the Shofixti player screws up really badly the Ilwrath has no hope. Usually the Chenjesu also utterly cremates the Ilwrath before the Ilwrath can get close.
a) I played it obsessively with my brother in all combinations, giggling and swearing at the same time. Shofixti vs Shofixti or the Spathi farting and being chicken is awesome
b) It was one of my first programming projects for just myself. I wrote a random team generator and am still quite proud of it.
c) I got my children to play it on the modern laptop and they loved the Melee just as much as me and my brother did
The sense of humor, the complexity of the storyline, all the easter eggs, it is just a wonderful game.
Shofixti vs Chmmr is still my favorite match up. The sheer terror for each person is hilarious. Desperately trying to get in close to detonate and hopefully take out his zap sats and cripple it. Meanwhile the chmmr pilot terrified to get in close to those suicidal maniacs. When the two get near, both people just scream until it’s over lol
My friend and I would play what we called 'frungy', where you just have two teams of all zoqfot ships and you have to stay in the gravity well and can only use the secondary attack, no primary.
Getting Fwiffo (the Spathi) early was basically a cheat code for the main plot. Kills Slylandros, Kohr-ah, and Ur-quan with a bit of effort at a point in the game before your precursor ship wipes the floor with everything. Funny how he's supposed to be weak but is worlds better than any of the other early ships (earthlings, zoq-fot-pik, shofixti, umgah...). Pretty sure you can beat the entire game with just Fwiffo and your own ship.
The real cheat code takes a page from Spathi's book: the most deadly ship in the game is the main ship, with one gun put in the rear slot. Add that guiding module, add some power modules, and you can rain homing projectiles at the enemy who is chasing you, without any risk of getting harmed. I rarely lost a crewmember ever, if only for a random collision with a planet.
Earthling cruiser can take out an Ur-quan. It takes some tricky gravity and speed management but you can usually do it.
I've never had much luck (or fun) with the Spathi. I guess you can just keep playing keep away and slowly butt gun them to death. I usually just try to get Orz or Thraddash as fast as possible. Thraddash is practically cheat mode. Agree that Umgah, shofixti, zoq-fot-pik are all worthless.
Earthling is risky because it gets owned instantly if you spawn too close to the dreadnaught. IIRC otherwise the ai would not pursue if you were moving away and shooting so you could keep going back and forth keeping them at a safe distance.
In the SC1 campaign mode, super cool with the orbiting stars, If you get a precursor artifact or two the Yehat never run out of power, always shielded, and are invincible unless they get limpet mined unluckily.
I encountered the original Star Control on the Sega Genesis (terribly underperformant.. I went back to play it a few years ago when I had my hands on the cartridge and a physical Genesis, and I did not remember the frame rate being that low).
I didn't even find out they had made a sequel until I got to college. Burned several weekends playing it. I can't imagine people having played through it back when you didn't have guides on the critical path... Playing so far in only to find out that the galaxy has a clock ticking against you must have been incredibly frustrating. But that was the style at the time, and it is a brilliant game.
Original came with a huge map in the box and which showed all the regions of control as they were at the time the precursor facility was initially discovered. This would give you good inspiration on areas to check out.
Then you would very likely encounter the Melnorme as you searched for resources and they would give you the clues you need.
Then it’s just a matter of making notes from all the aliens you talk to and following up on leads.
My brothers and I managed to finish the game in 1992 with no guides.
Origins was pretty bad and came off like a needlessly slavish and underwhelming copy of SC2 with little interesting added. Comically for as little of the SC2 storyline as they ended up using it could have just as easily been "Galactic Civilization Explorers" or whatever and probably been better trying to do its own thing.
Starcon2 is probably my favorite game of all time. As mentioned above, Starcon3 never existed. I've played a couple hours of Origins and just couldn't get into it, although you can definitely see their attempts to get the writing close to the Starcon2 style. I keep on thinking I should try it again, but just can't get motivated to do so. Maybe tonight...
I played through SC Origins and the expansion. It's a decently fun game and I'd say worth playing. But the writing is definitely not up to par with SC2.
It was fun to play this game a while back. The grand quest-style narrative is awesome.
BTW speaking of retro space games, I'm looking for something like an upgraded / more fleshed-out version of Space Trader (F-Droid, previously Palm OS), without any real-time combat elements (periodic combat wins/losses/side-effects as a draw-random-card type of effect are OK, but fundamentally I got a business to run in outer space here).
Anybody know whether something like that exists? (The closer I can get to checking the 30wma on asset prices in a given sector, the better)
If you missed Star Control II back in 1990s, try this. It has a wonderful storyline with a few forks. A number of space-faring civilizations, each with its own history, some related and intertwined. (Also, remember: owls are not what they seem. Be sure to collect more lifeforms and buy more info to find out.)
Also, it has a great original soundtrack, and one of the most beautiful soundtrack remixes (as a part of UQM rework).
Star Control 2 is the best video game of all time, period. If you are a newcomer, play it without internet spoilers, that's part of the fun. Finding a rainbow world gives such burst of joy, you just can't compare it to anything else.
Oh wow, the fond memories I have of playing my brother in SuperMelee. I can't believe that after 10 years of being largely dormant an update was released a few months back. I'm excited to try this out! If ever I can muster the spare time, I'd love to work on an extension/framework to allow this game to be network playable.
The writing in this game is one of the best of all time. Deep plot, lots of fluff/worldbuilding, fun exploration and progression. Not to mention the plot moves ahead with or without you. Worth a play, great in the 90s, and now you have it for free! Even better now with voices.
The lore surrounding the Ur Quan is so dark and well fleshed out.
Note, the company (toys for bob) that made this went on to make a billion dollar toy called Skylanders.
Such great memories! Star Control II was an unparalleled experience. I got the shivers when I entered hyperspace. I was scared shitless when I met the Kohr-Ah. And so many the other alien races constantly cracked me up!
I still have the giant fold-out hyperspace map at home somewhere from Star Control II and I think I have the DRM ring for Star Control I too! What a great set of games.
Playing 2-player melee on a single keyboard on my friend's 386 was so much fun.
I think it's a really fun game, and it's interesting how the stories of the alien races kind of move on their own regardless of whether you interact with them or not. The core game loop with the resource harvesting is a bit grindy and it was made before journals were invented so you have to keep track of everything in your head or on paper, but it still holds up I think.
I have to make amends to Fred & Paul because of dogarandkazon.com - I was following the original case there a few years ago (you know what I'm talking about) and I was extremely sad because it seemed that they engaged in that copyright issue just to make sure nobody else could make another Star Control game again - but it looked like they weren't interested in making one themselves either...
But today I learned that they were not just pretending, but are actually working on a sequel! I am so happy, here is bright and smooth. Campers are the best!
So nice that the original authors were able to maintain the rights to everything except the name (Star Control), so they could open-source the entire thing. Good on them for doing it.
I also loved playing Archon, another Paul Reiche game. There was a time when having "multiple gamplay modes inside a bigger game" was more of a thing, and Star Control definitely had that, with the little resource collection lander, alien conversations, hyperspace navigation, and space fight melee mode.
I feel like nowadays it's standard to just make one hyper-polished gameplay mode, and stick with it for everything, but I liked that variety. Perhaps instilled in my from the early days with Archon.
There's a famous and influential game designer who claims having one really good element trumps lots of "just good" elements. I've seen that quoted a lot, but don't feel like searching on my phone.
I disagree, but think it's part of why that tend has happened.
Aha, it's Sid Meier's "Covert Action" rule, discussed here[1] by someone who seems similarly as skeptical of it as I am.
[edit]
Reading that article more, it goes on to discuss ludologists vs. narratavists. It seems like SC2 that has the strategy as strongly narrative (the developers reported that they originally had procedurally generated planets, but ditched it because it wasn't as fun), while the tactics are more ludological(is that a word?) in the sense that many battles are random, so you'll have to play the matchups you get.
There's a category of broad video games, with a ton of different systems, none of which are very deep. Like Minecraft, or Animal Crossing. I think those support your disagreement as well.
Just started playing for the first time last month using the voiceovers from the 3DO version. Despite being before my time, I found it extremely engaging.
Clearly a classic, and with the open-source engine release, eternal. Download and play now if you haven't already.
I tried playing through UQM/SCII a couple years ago (massive props that the game is available in most Linux distros and you can simply search your standard distro repos for `uqm` to get up and running), but could never get very far.
Evidently I'm simply not playing the game with the correct sense of urgency. I spend the first couple months of in-game time gathering resources and exploring, and at some point the Ur-Quan invasion reaches me and I literally can't progress any further, because alien ships start making a bee-line for me and annihilate me in combat.
You aren't given notice by the game, but you have a pretty narrow window to build a few ships from the first alien race you ally yourself with; their ships can kite the heavy ships from the Ur-Quan with extreme ease, you're pretty much set for the game if you have three.
I loved this, but I was a bigger fan of Starflight, which I would love to see a slightly updated version of -- not a full reboot but just ... more visual detail on the planets, maybe some 3D effects.
I loved Starflight so much growing up. One of my favorite gaming stories—on a planet near to where you start, you can find an artifact that claims to solve all of the problems you have in the game. And artifacts in Starflight have silly names like "Whining Orb" or "Black Egg". So when this artifact was named "Red Herring", I didn't think much of it. Sadly, it took 50.1 cubic meters, and your rover can only carry 50 cubic meters. I spent a while trying to figure out how to pick that up. Years later, when I learned what the phrase "red herring" meant, I was like "sonofabitch!".
I liked Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, and played it long before I heard of Star Control 2. But being from 1989, it could use a bit of a modernization remaster. I found the combat crazy difficult the last time I tried to play it, but maybe that can be fixed with the right Dosbox settings.
I can highly recommend this blog for detailed, quality writing on computer RPGs from all ages. It is one of those internet works of love that keep on giving.
I'm happy to see this open source version come up!
If you want to influence the direction of the sequel to Star Control II currently under development it seems that you can do so on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/uqm2/
Absolutely fantastic game. Remember to have a pen and paper ready for the long game. And after you lose a couple times you can search for the walkthrough (try without it at least once)
That said, I’ve not played it since (beyond some melee games via Ur Quan Masters) because I suspect it won’t live up to my memories. But man would I love to see a sequel (there was one but none of the original team were involved).