Let's Play: Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters

Welcome to my Let's Play for Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, one of the greatest games ever made for the PC. Star Control II is an interesting hodgepodge of systems. In brief, it combines the exploration and resource collecting feel of Star Flight and Elite with the combat from Spacewar and its own unique sense of humor.I'm going to try to introduce the game slowly as it comes up naturally in the course of the narrative. Other than that, the open-endedness of the game means I'm going to try to keep this playthrough fairly interactive. Let's see if the collective wisdom of talking time can free the quadrant from the Ur-Quan Hierarchy!

First, a brief side note: there is absolutely no reason why others can't play along with me. A few years ago Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III, Star Control II's creators, released the source code into the public domain. Enterprising volunteers have compiled the software and created a handy front-end for a number of platforms, including Windows, OSX, Linux, and BSD. The trademark to the name Star Control remains with Accolade, so the re-released game has to bear the derivative name "The Ur-Quan Masters," but it's all still there with the option to mix-and-match music and features from the original PC version and the 3DO remake. It's all available here. So you have no excuse for not playing along at home!

The game has an entertainingly written manual, available here. It fills in the backstory a lot better than I could, but it isn't, strictly speaking, necessary. You can pick up pretty much everything you need from the intro sequence and the exposition in diplomatic conversations.

Speaking of which:

oh man. this is seriously one of my top two games ever. Hell, on a good day, it even beats civilization.

I have one demand for you--you MUST keep a pkunk with you! pkunk rock the fucking house so hard.

and get the rainbow worlds!

And you're deposited on the system screen, which you'll be seeing a lot of in this game. While I do plan to run this Let's Play interactively, there's not much choice in what to do at the very start of the game. Except for perhaps the game's most important choice:



The captain's name . . .



. . . and the flagship's name. What say you? I'll be out of town for a couple of days, but the next post (if this thread doesn't get locked) should come Sunday night.

Nota bene: My first time playing this game I was on a Star Trek kick, but the 9-character limit on flagship names meant I was captaining the USS Enterpris, which sounds, in retrospect, like an obscene reference to Bubblegum Crisis.

FWIFFO!!!!

Also, as per the rules of Let's Play, your captain must be named Pants.

Your ship should be something like The Persona.

It's always good policy to keep a Pkunk around. How can you possibly hope to defeat the Ur-Quan without the powers of crystal energy?

This idea has legs.

I have nothing more to add.

Yes! The Pkunk and Spathi are my favorites ships and favorite species in the game.

As for name, I'm happy to keep the TT Pants tradition alive. I feel like your ship should be a clever play on that. Like the Suspender, or the Nomura.

You know, the spine of the ship does look like a zipper if you squint...

Dare I speak out against Pants?

Perhaps set a precedent for Shirt, or Gloves? Maybe Shoes?

Not really. Though I do think a bit of variety would be nice.

Oh, and the ship should be called the Executor. For when we bring laser and missle induced death to the rest of the galaxy.

Captain Pants is a must, though I have no opinion on his ship's name.

I tried to play this once about a year ago.. and kept losing to every single combat. Which happened any time I tried to enter hyperspace, because something would see me and chase me down.

It was disheartening.

Interested to see how the game is supposed to go.

I was playing this, but I seem to have lost the note book I was using, and without notes... the game becomes somewhat harder to play through.

Anyhow, I have no objections to Captain Pants, since if I did, it wouldn't matter anyway. But I'm quite insistant that you call the ship The AssKicker. Conquer the Ur-Quan where I could not!

Oh god I never finished this game because SPOILERS the Kor-ah sphere totally fucked up my entire universe and I had NO IDEA WHAT TO DO OH GOODDDDDDDD but my goodness is it absolutely brilliant and I want to play it again, like right now!

As many rainbow worlds as possible, please! I want to see if you can lowball the game with a minimal amount of equipment on the ship, too, if you think you're AWESOME ENOUGH. Not improving your landers and still being able to get enough materials would impress the hell out of me.

* It might also be kind of fun to show what happens when you LOSE the game, after the LP is finished.

In case my earlier post didn't make it clear, I am voting for the SS Nomura.

HELL's yes.

Downloaded and played through this game about a year and a half ago. It's got a ton of personality and some of the most memorable alien encounters in science fiction. Has anyone played the sequel (part 3)? I've heard mixed reports, but i'd still be interested to give it a go at some point. Of course the main sticking points are the story and characters. Is it as good as part 2 turned out?

My starship was christened Rama, after the Arthur C. Clarke novel from my childhood.

It's... Okay. It's considerably simplified. There's some genuinely funny moments, but I think SC2 was a better game overall.

What sequel? It never happened.

Never. Happened.

I can't speak form experience, but Star Control 3 is usually held in the same high regard as a staphlococcus infection among fans.

I think my brother got a pirated copy of this from his friend where we cold only play the battle option, where you just pick a ship and a ship to fight. We soften did vs. matches but we had to use the same keyboard. Never played the actual game though... I downloaded it and looking forward to trying the whole package this time!

Tell me - did you have to do a google search to figure out how to spell that? I sure hope so!

The best part about Star Control Th-*KHHHKH* is how if you do one particular arcane thing out of order you cannot, in fact, finish the game.

Oh, there's several ways to render yourself unable to finish the game. Trust me on this one.

i played the ever loving crap out of sc3 back in the day. it's not great, but it's certainly not a monstrocity.

The lowdown on Star Control 3 (so far as my understanding goes):

The creators of Star Control, Fred Ford and Paul Richie, had no involvement in three. After the success of SC2, some bad blood developed between them and publisher Accolade. Apparently, Accolade wanted to pay them the same amount for SC3's development as SC2's, which Toys for Bob (Fred and Paul's development team) wasn't too keen on, as they spent several months working on SC2 without pay. Accolade passed development duties onto Legend Entertainment, and a legal battle ensued over the rights to the franchise, and the results were a mess: Toys for Bob kept a number of concepts, plot points, and races, Accolade got the rest, including the Star Control name. This is why so many races from SC2 are absent in SC3. This is also why, when SC2 was re-released as freeware, it was simply re-titled as it's original subtitle, The Ur-Quan Masters. At that point, the 'Star Control' name was the only thing that they hadn't gotten back yet.*

As a game, I've heard SC3 it's decent. Not nearly as good as its predecessors, but still a solid effort. It's also considered not canon, for those that care.

*They have the entire rights to the franchise back now, by the way, and they really want to make a sequel. Head over to their website and shoot them an e-mail telling them you'd like to see it too. They've been collecting all the fan support they can get the last couple of years to convince Activision to green light a new game.

Depending on what you did, there might be a very good reason why you got your butt kicked so frequently. I mean, beyond the obvious skill-based explanations. I will get to this in the very near future (probably not the next update, but shortly thereafter).

Man, when I was a kid I saved up for months to buy Star Control 3 when it came out. Then I blew it all the week before it released when I accessed a BBS without my parents' permission and racked up a huge phone bill. I spent months looking at it forelornly in the Electronics Boutique. Then my parents finally gave it to me as an early birthday present. I was so excited to play it! And it turned out to be. . . Actually not that terrible.

I remember being disappointed as I played it, but not "this game killed my parents and ran over my dog" disappointed. I didn't actually mind the new ships or the graphics, which seems to bother some people. It was annoying that some of the legacy ships were missing from Hyper Melee, and that some of the species were absent from the main game, but I didn't get to exercised about that. I was upset at the colonizing/resource gathering system, which was a major step down from the first game and boiled down to a lot of sitting around and waiting for your colony to refine enough fuel to go whereever you wanted to. And it gave you no real incentive to colonize outside certain limited contexts, so I never found some plot points that were based around having a certain number of colonies, like the Kzer-Za/Kohr-Ah split.

As for the writing, I noticed it wasn't as snappy as 2's, but it was serviceable. The plot seemed to wrap things together pretty well. There was some ret-conning, but it wasn't horrible.

All told, I'd say it was satisfying. It continued the story of 2, had most of the Star Control feel, but wasn't nearly as good as the second game. Still, I like it better than the first game, so it's got that going for it.

Captain, I don't think you meant to ask about the sequel. Didn't you mean to ask about flowers?