I Don’t Fear The Man
19 Likes
one bloodpotion was not enough i fucking loved this post
1 Like
If you sell crew to the Druuge, after some time goes by, the space station hears about it and the commander has outraged dialogue laying into you for your total immorality. After that event, the crew cost goes way up (I forget to what exact amount, but I think it might be as high as 100RU).
Also, have you discovered the secret trigger that makes the Ur-Quan tell you the chronicle of their slave rebellion against the Dnyarri?
Actually, the main subject matter of Star Control 2 is slavery, which each alien species representing a different point on the spectrum of possible reactions to it (stony-faced withdrawal, escape, laying low with hidden plans, commercial engagement, enthusiastic collaboration, fearful collaboration, suicide, rebellion followed by enslavement of the former masters, rebellion followed by genocide, rebellion followed by reconciliation). It’s the thematic backbone that ties together the disparate stories and makes the dialogue so engaging and memorable. The Druuge interaction is the only place where the player themselves is asked to make a moral decision on it, I believe.
It’s a weighty theme for a videogame, well-explored, and SC2 doesn’t get enough credit for it, since it’s hidden just behind the surface of a light-hearted genre adventure.
Yeah, the pricing of the crew doesn’t make sense. It might’ve been more logical for crew to be free, but the price of everything else creeps upwards every time you take one of them off the station, since there are fewer people to do the work.
Nope, the Androsynth were wiped out by the Orz, so it’s all 100% biological humans.
Also, I forget what explanation was given for Earth even being allowed to have a space station to begin with. Seems like a bad idea, as indeed was proven to be the case. And the Chenjesu didn’t get one.
While I’m complaining, why is Chenjesu primary weapon DPS so underwhelming and its secondary energy drain doggy so harmless and easily shot down? Although that’s really a Star Control 1 complaint. No wonder they lost the war.
Makes sense.
Also, Chenjesu projectiles exploding harmlessly in mid-air due to your opponent’s keypresses on a keyboard without N-key rollover is the single worst thing.
Ah right, I forgot about the deserted Chenjesu starbase.
I’m surprised with all your SC2 knowledge you had a game that went on so long and that cost you so many crew. I find it all a bit too easy after multiple playthroughs. I just save on most travel time by rushing to quasispace, and win all battles by rushing to the free Orz craft, then buying up Thraddash in the late game. You can also tech up your flagship into a one-shot homing monster without any planet-landings really, if you remember a few rainbow world locations and sell off the mediocre free alien ships to get the RU for it.
Man, it would be sweet if SC2 had a randomized starmap. EDIT: there’s an ongoing mod project for that, https://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=6212.0
I tried UQM years back when a friend gave it to me. Gave it a few tries, but every venture ended the same way: did some mining in the Sol system, upgraded my ship a bit, set a course for the next nearest star system, meet talking crystals, get annihilated.
Kinda put me off, really.
Yeah those crystals are a bit too strong and unavoidable, I think my first few games were the same thing in 1993. I think the Spathi craft on Pluto is decent-ish to fight them (although I usually avoid them early on by buying max engine speed ASAP, which also saves time).
Sometimes I think about playing Star Control 1, because I bought it for the Genesis in, like, 2006, kind of played it a bit with my buddy, and then never really played a game of it.
Should I just play Star Control 2 instead?
Yeah. Star Control 1 is just Star Control 2’s melee minigame with fewer ship options and a lame strategic mode attached to it. It’s more fun to just play Star Control 2 melee with a self-imposed point limit than it is to play Star Control 1. SC1 is kind of frustrating in that you spend all this time on strategic management, and then the player who’s better at the action mode just crushes it regardless and makes it meaningless.
But the real appeal is the huge RPG campaign in Star Control 2 anyway which SC1 doesn’t have at all, that’s why Star Control 1 is rarely mentioned.
So what’s the best way to play it? Are there significant version differences, or would whatever I pirate be the same as the GoG version and the…apparently there’s an Android version?
Edit: Oh, should I just play Ur-Quan Masters (the free version)? Is it the same or superior?
SC2 was open sourced, you don’t need to pirate. It’s called Ur-Quan Masters in open source form, just play the Windows version. Don’t use a gamepad, it only works well on keyboard.
It’s a bit superior in a few ways, there’s no reason to pirate the original. The biggest improvement is a better camera in melee, as I recall. There’s also voice acting but that might be best disabled.
1 Like
Awesome–thanks!
I still maintain that if this game had gotten a (totally viable) SNES port it’d be remembered as an all time great western / action RPG, way ahead of its time at release, and though it’s not exactly obscure now it is astonishingly playable compared to its contemporaries.
1 Like
Video games aren’t art but OP is
We’ve had this discussion earlier, but despite the surface fit, SC2 would definitely have needed to be compromised in some ways to fit into the SNES. It’s kind of hypothetical whether the essence of the game would’ve survived those compromises. It’s a case where a lot of design decisions should’ve been made differently in the first place the if SNES was a target platform. In those days 4MB carts were very expensive and it would’ve probably aimed for like 2MB --probably it could’ve been packed from its ~10MB size by taking a close look at better reuse/runtime generation for planet landscapes, rotated sprites and so on, but it would be a shitton of work and dropping content to make the remainder would be tempting. And there are a lot of minor degradations like that the SNES couldn’t handle so many thraddash flames and ur-quan fighters.
That said, Another World and its vector art got onto the SNES against all odds, so anything is possible. No question that porting to the 3DO instead was a total waste of time, and that the better technical fit of the 3DO’s hardware is worth nothing if nobody has one.
Yeah I kind of forgot about it because I instead experience the game as imbalanced in the easy direction nowadays, but I agree they’re an enormous game design error. There is nothing fair about them. They’re a viciously hard counter to the terran ships it encourages you to buy for self-defense, just why? Felix just claimed it’s “astonishingly playable compared to its contemporaries”, but there’s still places like this where it’s wonky early-90s-western non-playtested game design shows through.
Yeah it’s a good idea, especially because the VUX seems specifically designed to have an interestingly balanced encounter against the similarly priced Terran in SC1 (Terran secondary counters VUX limpets and has a massive range advantage, but if the VUX manages to close in it will DPS the Terran down). Whereas the Slyandro was clearly designed as a cool ship on paper without giving any thought to matchups whatsoever.
Okay, so anything else I need to know to enjoy this other than investing in thrusters? Is there some sort of walk through I should be referencing?