Ronin1325

Join Date 09/2014

Experiencing SC2 for the first time, from an SC1 Veteran

It seems there are all too few who have experienced what kind of a revolutionary game Star Control 2 is, even with the free Ur-Quan Masters having been out for years now. Even fewer, seem to be those who experienced the first game, and how good it was for its time.

Shortly after SC1 was released, a friend of mine had it on the IBM PC & we both regarded it as a stunning combination of action & strategy. When I heard it was going to be released on the Sega Genesis by 1990, I looked forward to it eagerly. Though the framerate sometimes suffered a bit during intense melee battles, it was everything I hoped it would be & more.

Having it on the Genesis made playing with two-players vastly easier & was where the strategy portion of the game *really* took off. Each strategy story was carefully crafted to bring specific advantages to each side, but each side could win if they had the right combination of strategic know-how & fast reflexes. Even someone who didn't have the Fastest Joystick in Space, could pummel their more action-oriented opponent, if they were clever about what they built & where.

I delighted in playing the Alliance, in forcing my Hierarchy opponent to constantly take their big-massive Ur-Quan Dreadnaughts into battle against my poor-pitiful Earthling Cruisers. By the time my rival realized what I was doing, it was usually too late. See, the Earth Cruiser could be built for less than 1/3rd the cost of 1 Dreadnaught, but clearly was designed to do massive damage to those bruisers. With any luck I could destroy 2 Dreadnaughts before my Cruiser got taken out, but that meant I had only spent 9 credits, while my opponent had spent *60*.

So the first Star Control was so much more than just a 'Shoot 'em Up'. It was a well-crafted Strategy game, told within the engaging story of a Galactic Conflict. There was nothing else like it at the time. Not even the Great-Granddaddy of all RTS games, Herzog Zwei, could match its flawless combination of so many gaming skills. My friends & I played it constantly for a long time.

When the 2nd game came out, I was too busy living life to look into it immediately. (No Internet, Remember.) However, when the way-too-far-ahead-of-its-time 3DO player came out & I learned this would be adapted for it, I splurged. I never regretted it. (It's amusing to me to hear so many people complain these days about 'how expensive' VR systems are. Translated into 2017 dollars, the $870.00 I spent on the 3DO & SC2 would be about $1500.00 today. But I digress...)

So, I fired up the game & was treated to a pretty decent CGI intro telling me who I was playing & how I had gotten there. 20 years had passed since the first game? Oooh-kaay... Then I get to Earth and... well, you who have played it know the rest.

Already being so well-versed in the Star Control Mythology, I was floored with what the creators had done, where they had taken it. Venturing out into the Galaxy, to find out what had happened to my comrades in the Alliance, was simultaneously wondrous, terrifying, bittersweet & mournful. I applauded what the Shofixti had done, though swore I would make the Ur-Quan pay beyond their imagination. When I was forced to give some of my crew to the Druuge, I quietly reloaded my closest save, went to their homeworld again and spent the next 3hrs or so (I don't remember exactly, it's kind of a blur) destroying their ships. When I felt I had exacted enough revenge, mentally at least, knowing that each homeworld was protected by an infinite amount of ships, I reloaded again & made the deal.

I never hesitated to destroy any Druuge ship I met in space though. Sometimes going way out of my way to make the kill.

The point I was most deeply involved in the game, indeed, the point at which I have been most deeply involved in *any* game, was by the time I met the Utwig. By then, I well understood what was at stake & what I needed to do. So it was extremely boring to listen to the Utwig leader drone on and on and on... I took a look at the playback bar for how much more dialogue there was. Cripes! The thing had barely moved! I wasn't about to fast-forward, in the fear that I might miss something important, but it was almost impossible to pay attention to this whining drivel! I spaced out. I might have even dozed off, but then-

"ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME!?"

My eyes jumped open, my neck whipped around fast enough to give me whiplash. I almost said, "Yes! Yes! Right here!" in instinctive response. You bet sir! Paying attention sir! I've never had verisimilitude like that before, or since.

As an analogy, going from SC1 to SC2, was like living all your life up to this point, inside a house. It's a big, well made, comfortable house, but it is, after all, only a house. You don't feel like you're in prison, but there is still something missing... Then, one day, the door opens. You look outside the door with a bit of trepidation, but then realize this is what you've been looking for all along. It's the World, bigger than you could have imagined, now accessible to you & waiting.

I've often heard it said that, "It's the journey, not the destination." I couldn't disagree more. It matters far *more* where you end up, than where you started. A story that starts out well & with promise, but ends on a flat note is nothing compared to one that may start out badly, but end well. Rarest & most precious of all, are those that both start well and end even better. Which one is the Star Control Saga? Well, we don't know. It's not over yet...

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I can never forget playing SC1, when it first game out, with my best friend in my tiny little apartment... on a 286/12, haha!

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It gets such short shrift because the 2nd game *is* such a quantum leap over it. But to me it's like comparing a Chevy Camaro to a Bugatti Veyron, just because the Veyron is so much faster, that hardly makes the Camaro slow!

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Ronin, you nailed it. There's something incredibly special about the game that makes it a very fragile thing to poke at.

I had SC1 for the Genesis and was blown away when I stumbled upon Star Control II at a computer store. (I remember - - no internet!) I played melee first and checked out all the new ships but then tried the RPG. I was instantly hooked. Watching that precursor vessel take shape, emerging in the Sol system and taking the slow first flight towards the space station truly made you felt like you had nothing. (Well, nothing except for a precursor service vessel and a severely damaged Terran cruiser.)

Hours spent pouring over that star map, trying to find interesting things and new homeworlds... Slowly gaining the trust of allies and building a fleet, upgrading the precursor vessel so it handled better than the Titanic being commanded by the captain of the Exxon Valdez. Everything in that game felt like you earned it, clawed your way from nothing to get.

Even at the end, I can't ever remember feeling such grit and determination in a game. You execute the final plan (no spoilers), move in for the kill, and pull it off. Barely! That music kicking in as you open your eyes again was perfect.

Going back to melee games, suddenly those battles had more meaning. I can still see my brother dropping the joystick and walking away after I took a Shofixti against his Dreadnaught and won. (It took a long time.) But that battle meant more than just showing him up, it was revenge!

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That's actually the one thing I have been concerned about all along, when you mentioned how you felt as though you had to scratch and claw your way to barely make it through the game. SC2 is from a different era of gaming, when games were much harder. 21st century gamers generally want their hands held and to be walked through a game on easy mode. Most games made today are intentionally made to be easy and never impede the players progress, and in most cases to literally hold the players hand and just walk them through it. My biggest concern about SCO has always been that the game design culture of today won't allow it to be hard in any way, and you would just easily walk through it with the focus being on not interrupting the story.

I'm sure that, in 2017, it won't be the "hardcore hard" as I would like to see it... but I hope that it is at least challenging and not just a walk in the park through the story.

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Honestly, it isn't *unreasonable* to have difficulty levels. As long as SCO has them, with 'normal' being in the same Ballpark as SC2, that'll be okay. Perhaps like the original DOOM- 1-Tutorial, 2-Easy, 3-Normal, 4-Hard, 5-Insanity. That's fair, isn't it?

What really clocked me in the noggin with how modern gaming had changed though, was with Mass Effect 3. Difficulty levels for the action? Sure. Okay. But the option to turn off the Roleplaying Elements? In a ROLEPLAYING GAME? No, Electronic Arts. Just no. You can't make a Niche game that appeals to everyone. Some games are just that, a Niche. Adding Dating Sim elements to a Football game is not going to work & You will not get people who are not interested in Football to play that game by adding them. You're also going to tick off the Football fans who don't want to slog through getting the right girl (or guy, I suppose), for each of their team's members to make sure their morale is topped off.

Ugh. I could blather on about *that* pile of nonsense for way too long. But not in this thread at least.

Now, I know that some people out there were probably already thinking, "But Ronin, what about the SC series? One of its greatest strengths is just that! It combines multiple genres into a single game!" And I would be foolish to say that it doesn't. However, clearly the Great Ones, in their Great Wisdom, when they created SC 1 & 2, thought long & hard about what various game genres could WORK together. They didn't just throw the kitchen sink into the games, in order to maximize market share.

It seems to me, what they did, is look at various Sci-Fi series & stories that they liked & thought, "How can we create a game that has all the aspects of our favorite stories?" and then proceeded to work on programming games that could contain those aspects. That's just my off the cuff thought though. I hate to say it, but I don't remember any of the interviews they did. For Shame, me.

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It's not so much difficulty level as it is the way the games are made. Modern games are made almost so that you can't lose, more a walk through a story than a game. There are occasionally exceptions, but most computer games want a child to be able to make it to the end of the game without ever feeling impeded in their progress. Once you've done that, "turning up the difficulty level" on it isn't the issue. The game you wind up with isn't the kind of game that would be challenging in a good way. SC2 itself is a good example of this. In SC2 you can fail to the point of having to start over from the beginning. That one concept alone is one that you'd have a lot of trouble convincing someone to let you do today. And SC2 is fundamentally more difficult than most games made today in other ways, as well.

There is a place for both types of games. Neither is "wrong" or "right"... its just that the "serious" or "hardcore" games have become very uncommon these days. That's one of the many reasons I like Faster Than Light and still usually play at least a few games of that every week. Because you can lose. You can just flat out, nothing you could have done about it, lose. That is not a possibility in most games that are made today.

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Quoting Kavik_Kang,

reply 6

(...) That's one of the many reasons I like Faster Than Light and still usually play at least a few games of that every week. Because you can lose. You can just flat out, nothing you could have done about it, lose. That is not a possibility in most games that are made today.

FTL sessions are very short, though. To be forced to restart SC2 from the beginning is a very frustrating experience. That kind of difficulty doesn't make a game more fun. A game needs to be challenging, but to also respect your time.

Super Meat Boy is a very challenging game, but you're never set back more than 2 minutes, because each level is short. The same idea applies to FTL, where a session typically doesn't last more than... 20 minutes?

Anyway, I'm a huge fan of challenging games, but I will probably uninstall a game I put several hours into in which I'm forced to restart.

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Right, that isn't appropriate for Star Control Origins in 2018... and yet SC2 worked that way. It was just one example of what I was trying to convey. Today games are made a lot easier, in general, than they used to be. I am just hoping there is at least some feeling of playing a game and not just being walked through a story. In SCO, you would obviously do that with the "game-within-the-game" that the mothership has the potential too be.

I don't want to be forced to re-start such a long game, either, but I also hope that SCO won't be hobbled by a "any child should be able to make it through the game on their first try" mentality, either.

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One thing I really appreciated about Star Control 2 is that you could put the combat on computer control, and the computer would do a good job. So it became a case of understanding what ships had favorable and unfavorable matchups and play to those strengths, and so I was still making important tactical decisions and affecting whether or not I would succeed, even if the second to second gameplay of the melee was out of my hands.

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This post does a great job at conveying the exceptional immersion SC2 provided. Thanks for sharing it!

I never hesitated to destroy any Druuge ship I met in space though. Sometimes going way out of my way to make the kill.

Philosophically speaking, that's a horrific way to handle it You might be killing a handful of Druuge, but also dozens of slaves.

One might argue you're putting them out of their misery, but that should be their choice.

You should have earned a second scolding by the starbase commander about not caring about other races' enslaved citizens and how their leaders might react.

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Only issue I see with the game is the Orz

why couldn't you use them to kill off all the ur quan by use of THEM?

be much easier then flying around so much. best i won the game was by only letting about 60% of all sentient life get 'cleansed' first

think all that was left were the Orz, Humans, Pukunk- later got wiped out. And those talkative gas bags things

oh and some of the Ur Quans who can cleanse in a few thousand years.

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I remember SC1 back in the 80's if I recall right... about the same time Civilization 1 was out I also had the genesis version and if I recall right they had game genie codes for it ...I still recall the lil barky noises of the chenjesu dogi's

the 2nd one I picked up at a swap meet along with dune 2... they were on the lil 3inch a drive disks (that btw setoff safeway store alarms) It was missing the dial-password/code thing but if you guessed at it enough you could troubleshoot it out. I believe I had a 486 at the time and absolutely no knowledge of the game and no resources to draw on...so there was alot of wandering about and scribbling down cords of planets. was no recorded voice but you didnt expect it (totally replayed it again once I saw uqm

I still recall meeting the sole survivor shofixti with his broken glory device and having a trash talk competition oh wait the green guys dont cus me out and tricking the red spiders with raidio transmission and fixing that damn ultron (I loved the sleek simplicity of the Yehat terminators and thier given names of Sleep Sleep...Neep beep and weep weep

I think only real letdown from 3 was the scary looking syreen.. you went from smexalicious in 2# to ...omg no.. I think the big points Ill give to 3 is I loved the voice acting (google orz with thier juicy bubbles or the mycon with thier reeeeesources and juffa wupp) I loved the story overal the 3dish ships and the chmrr and mhrnrhmmm joining suprize (sp. going off memory)...(and especially after you drop the key and find out who and what I just dont recall the name of the race that wore the huge robot suits and talked about crushifying things...also still a bit miffed over the daktaklakpaks arrgh here's hoping for the best with origins good or bad Ill deffinately play

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I'm not sure what you meant by: "When I was forced to give some of my crew to the Druuge". You are never forced to give your crew away, it's always the Captain's decision to do so and although I forgot which item you needed to obtain, I think it's something to fix the Ultron but there's another way to do it in the game to accomplish that task without selling your crew.

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Quoting JacquesGauthier,

reply 13

Ronin1325's post captured well my own feelings experiencing Starcon 1 and 2, except for that same statement "forced to give some of my crew to the Druuge". There was an artifact you could trade with the Druuge, and no slave trading required. I only found out about the results of slave trading later, when watching a friend play (getting a rebuke by the commander, and crew prices jumping up).

After being introduced to SC1 by a friend, I was overjoyed a few years later to find a copy of SC2 for $29.95 (a lot of money for a kid in those days). Anyway, I purchased the game, and it was much more than I had expected.

In all the time since, though, I've been dreaming of a strategic game like SC1 (with the colonies, mines etc.), but where you can utilise all of the New Alliance ships (or New Hierachy, or other factions). More than 2 players would also be nice, in this internet age. If anyone knows of such a game, please share.

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Well you've got to understand, at the time I had no *clue* there was an alternative way to obtain what I needed! If I had known I certainly would have utilized it. From my perspective, I was fighting to save the Galaxy from extermination and I had NO CHOICE. I hated it, I was genuinely emotional about the event. I didn't want to give up my crew & I'm sure my captain had many sleepless nights about the event. It would be a dark stain in his past he would never forget. That *is* why I spent 3ish hrs ravaging the Druuge homeworld.

But what you guys have mentioned also shows even more how great & ahead-of-its-time SC2 was. That they would offer alternate ways to accomplish the same goal. That is the essence of a Roleplaying Game, allowing the player choice. (Yes, yes. I know SC2 isn't classified as an RPG, but it has so many of that Genre's characteristics it's still more like one than some modern games that are classified as such.)