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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).

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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.

Play it again. It holds up. Maybe even more so!

I recently did an interview with the lead maintainer on this project, for the MADE's podcast. Very timely, and coincided with a major update last year, the first in a long while. https://art19.com/shows/the-madecast/episodes/f64c139a-5d76-...

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.

Did you ever find the Black Spathi Squadron?

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]

> I suspect it won’t live up to my memories.

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.

"Even the grindy resource collection aspect is oddly addicting." Absolutely.

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 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.

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.

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.

Star Control 2 (and 3!) influence is felt everywhere in Mass Effect games.

Are you aware of any games made in the last 20 years with writing quality comparable to Star Control II (or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri)?

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.

Lemmings 2 came with a novella setting the backstory. I probably spent more time reading the novella than playing the game.

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...

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.

I think that would be Michael Kirkbride. My understanding is that he is responsible for some of the more interesting elements of the lore.

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.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/129586-the-pandora-sequence

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].

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-se...

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...

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

Sunless Sea comes to mind.

Disco Elysium

Spiritfarer has some wonderful dialog.

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 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).

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

they still mostly fall into the lines of established genres. Where are my Strategy/Adventure hybrids like great Dune 1? [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(video_game)

Was Factorio an established genre?

What about binding of Isaac?

I've heard that noitka is pretty blendy

Minecraft launched a new genre

Auto chess is a new genre that came out recently

Factorio - minecraft on steroids

Binding of Isaak - action shooter

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.

Indie games is where it's at. There is so much interesting original content out there, you just have to find it.

Like Fallout 2? Check Atom RPG and Wasteland.

Like classic RPGs of 2000s? Check basically the entire 'Spiderweb Software' catalog.

Like Xcom? Check out Mutant: Year Zero

Metroidvania? There's a bunch (played Blasphemous recently, pretty good)

Zombies? Project zomboid

Pokemon? Monster Sanctuary

Lore you have to discover? Kenshi, Vagrus

Weird? Let's get weird: Library of Ruina

Isn't it a little odd to demonstrate the originality of indie games by explicitly equating them to a popular title?

"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.

Indie doesn't mean unpopular :)

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

> And I don't have my best friend living in the same house with Ethernet cables strung between the rooms ;)

Can't you just connect 2 remote virtual machines with an EthernetOverIP channel and bring up IPX to play old games?

Only worth doing if my project to create an AI simulation of my best friend also succeeds ;)

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?

Check out my game Eternal Starlight - https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/1918967004876383/ (also on Steam) It's not Star Control 2, but SC2 was one of my favorite games as a kid and it definitely inspired it.

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.

Niven's Known Space references are in a lot of places too.

The Uplift series of books are some of the worst books I've ever read.

You preferred Twilight? To each his own, I guess.

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 replayed it in 2008 or so, and it still held up. But then I am not much of a gamer, so YMMV

There were actually two completed sequels and one that died on the vine. None of them involved Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III.

The proper successor to Star Control 1 (the combat boardgame) was a PS1 game called Unholy War.

I wish we could get remasters of their Skylanders games.

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.

I've played it again fairly recently and it was still great.

I'd like a port or upgrade of the original 2-player star control strategy 3X game

Definitely the most engaging game on the 3DO sampler disk.

I have just never cared for the "rotate and thrust" Asteroid style controls.

I've played it several times since its release, including a year ago. It absolutely holds up! One of the best of all time.

> The Ur-Quan Masters

What's a comparable game? Masters of Orion?

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