Old school space masters

why do you show me a broodhome when you won't let me

I can't do a counter since the Ur-Quan Masters isn't exactly a steam game. Provided free, the UQM is a port of a thing of a something, of Star Control 2. I am old enough to have played the Sega Genesis ports of Star Flight (done by EA) and Star Control (done by Accolade) which gives me a pretty decent historical grounding in this game. I'd read about SC2 as a teen and always felt a bit sour I couldn't - or hadn't, really - get a copy of it. It sounded great.

The game is regarded as a classic and it's hard not to see why, assuming you can see past the dated graphics and woefully dated gameplay. To get all the positive out of the way so I can get my complain on, for a classic game - fuck, for a game AT ALL - the voice acting and story telling is excellent. I love just listening to people talk, and the stories they tell are richly varied, if 80s as fuck. The combat is based around simplified physics of inertia and acceleration, but this gives flying the ships a real learning curve. It feels rewarding, though the AI is a tragedy. The music is wonderful and the world is vast, if a little hollow.

So it's good, and I like it, on the most part. But let's complain, because man is this game easy to complain about. If you are a huge fan of this game, don't read on, because while I "liked" Star Control 2, I think it's largely a majorly overrated turd of a game (though I admit, this could mostly be down to issues with the port)




Game design on the most part has moved ahead in the last few years, and in spite of the fact I was raised in that generation, games are better now. Sorry, straight up, full on, they are better. I don't mean the graphics are better (they are) or the aesthetics are better (they mostly aren't) but that games are generally more fun. They are more fun on a very basic level for a very basic reason.

One of the crutches programmers came back to over and over again years ago is this weird, hard to define idea that a game must punish the player - often at random - for playing. Part of this is in the name of challenge, but there's a deeper current to this principle that at times seems to step over into a weird unthinking sadism. It's hard to really reference this concept, because modern game design precludes this sort of style. The best example I can think of is the changes between EQ (a game I did not play) and WoW. The basics lay in the idea that EQ viciously punished mistakes and dying, to the point of eating hours of your life up.

The reasoning - I'm told - is that it built a sense of skill into new players, or a sense of danger, or the almighty excuse of challenge. EQ, as such, managed some moderate number of players that commanded a fairly hefty sum of profit. World of Warcraft, inversely, sold millions upon millions of copies. The one, a bare footnote, the other stole all the first's ideas, made it more fun, put in talking cows and became a cultural milestone that entered the mainstream. One is objectively better.

It's not up for discussion. One of the big things is that WoW gradually removed all the sadistic torture traps and put in softer elements, which meant people just had more fun. Fun, by and large, is the core element of all gaming. There's many kinds of fun and many ideas of fun, but challenge is always and should always be subservient to fun.

So when you go back to classic game - be it Castlevania, Herzog Zwei, Star Control 2 or whatever else, sometimes you're going to slam into really jarring moments of olde time game design. Do I think ill intent of the programmers who constructed these ideas? No, not at all - I think it takes time to figure out new paradigms, and these were the ideas that floated by at the time. The game is still fun, it's just that it has what feels like odd ideas about how fun is to be portioned out.

Combat in the game, as I said, has a learning curve. This is good, as it builds a feeling of satisfaction and skill. The 2d plane "wraps" around and zooms in as the two ships get closer. This is ... Unbelievably irritating. The zoom feature is absolutely ridiculous, as it creates a constant shift in your perspective. Ship to ship combat can sometimes be based around getting in close and picking on the enemy's aft while they stumble. Unfortunately in several situations, the tight zoom in makes it so you no longer know where other things "are". Asteroids run into you, knocking you off course. You smash into the planet, a planet that is always on the map even when you're in deep space (exoplanets I guess?) and worse enemy weapons that home in can smack your ship while you're disoriented.

It's bad. Hilariously, it's the sort of bad we'd still see in the modern day. Like I said some things haven't changed and a willingness to obscure the player's view for some graphical quality is still largely, reliably present. It's of course more jarring here because while the ship designs are aesthetically good, they're pixel-y messes that look pretty bad in the modern day. Even sillier is several enemy ships are based around perceiving which way elements of the opposing ship are facing (thrust is not necessary for maintaining inertia, which makes sense except this is also true of changing directions??)

Of course the worst element of this - which baffles me, like absolutely - is that the tub in space maneuvering extends to the game's "system" maps. Often, star systems are utterly choked with starships, none of which you feel like fighting (I'll get into this later) and you have to guide your leaky tub through space. It's uh, well it does have a learning curve and its tricky, but it's a chore with no rewards.

The AI is awful and really unenjoyable in the campaign mode. It certainly does not "cheat" - it is absolutely fair, as best I can tell, but is programmed to react to stimuli a human would find fundamentally difficult to perceive. Fighting the Druuge Mauler ships is an exercise in futile stupidity. Thank you for putting more awful fights in this game! I am glad you programmed in a ship that can pinpoint target a one pixel marine from across the map, and I am unable to close with because it accelerates to the highest speeds in the game.

Now, what bads does the game carry over? One of the big one is the "probe" plot. Basically from very early on in the game, you encounter alien probes. There's a whole story to it - A story I really like, and a plot hook that carefully leads you towards deeper parts of the mystery - but that story is obscured by the insanely frustrating element of the probes themselves. They engage you in a dogfight. They are ridiculously fast and nimble, to the point of basically humping your early ships and dodging almost everything fired at them. Once up close, they unleashing an autotarget lightning attack that wears you down.

Fwiffo is great

They do not "recharge" their weapon, instead breaking down asteroids for fuel. I think this is a balancing mechanism, except remember the zoom? You can't see the asteroids to avoid recharging the enemy repeatedly. So you just die, reload, die, reload, finally kill the thing. After a while I got very good at killing the probes, certainly. But they're painfully common to the point of being a ridiculous pain in the ass. At times, I would be forced to fight through more than three at a time, with each encounter a luck based crap shoot or an exercise in reloading. Unfun, and largely to what end? A challenge? There are like 10+ alien races out there, each with their unique ships. And you fight, most of the time, stupid probes. Probes that just sit on you and murder you.

(I should mention I've read online that the Spathi Eluder can simply bombard the probe with its rear firing missiles, but ... Every time I did this, the probe would simply dart away and return while my energy was low, with the missiles simply expiring before striking every time - issues with the port? Maybe. I don't know. Issues with player skill? Also quite possible, but why am I having such difficulty with a basic enemy unit?)

a little unnecessary here guys

Admittedly much of the ship to ship combat is infuriating. The decision to make enemy battle groups multiple fights is frustrating, as it can take a long time to defeat a mid-sized group, and often you've already lost enough or lose enough on the last guy you just want to restart. It's a bad sort of tension. Many of the fights in the game centre around you utilizing faster, but lighter armored ships, meaning you have to dodge and weave to defeat the enemy. Doing this 4-5 times in a row really wears you out. Doing it in a situation where the ship you're using requires absolute finesse is just exhausting, especially given the whole 'whoops an asteroid ran into me and now I'm dead' bullshit the game delights at spewing into you.

The AI, as well, plays in a manner I find infuriating. It makes simple mistakes, like running into planets, but it also pulls off ridiculous maneuvering and pinpoint shots well beyond normal human capacity.

But the worst element of the game - which ultimate led me to cheat out a new save upon realizing my current, hours of effort file was basically sans value at this unwinnable point - is the game is on a largely unspoken of timer! You have only a certain amount of play time, which dwindles quickly while exploring the stars. The open ended, enjoy sailing the stars element of the game? Apparently, someone within development felt this was horse shit, as you are under a relatively restrictive timer that ends the game in failure. Which it does not tell you about, so no matter what I don't think anyone can argue its a good idea.

There's no real reason for this, it offers nothing to enjoyment of the game. It serves only to punish the first time player, operating without a guide, for enjoying the spacefaring. Since the design is, to me, forcing me to repeat endless busy work that the start of the game entails, I didn't even feel the slightest twinge at cheating. To be honest - if I couldn't cheat this - I wouldn't even play it again, period. I would just write up about how total dogshit game design used to be and muse on how ridiculous nostalgia is for people. Without access to the internet it would take multiple play through to finish the game. Yeah, the game is fun and I like it, but the idea of replaying a roleplaying game from the start repeatedly is vomit inducing.

It's a lesson, from a classic spoken of in ridiculous awe, about just how bad games used to be. There's lots of things I miss about gaming from my childhood - even beyond the simple glee of nostalgia. The original Star Control was one of my favorite games as a kid, and getting to play Star Control 2 is a delight all these years later ... Even if, to be honest, the game is actually pretty awful, if not downright shitty. The core mechanics are... not great, though as I mentioned, the AI is an exercise in tedium to repeatedly engage in combat. The resource gathering is boring busy work, the lack of decent ships in the early game frustratingly repetitive.

It is tempting to give the argument that the game is either some sort of forerunner, or should be judged according to its time. The forerunner concept is outright false; the game is based on Starflight and Star Control, it is little more than a combination of the two. The writing is great of course, but the actual 'game' component is made up of those games even down to about half the ship designs. The writing takes a ton from Star Flight as well; I don't know if SF2 was made before or after SC2, but between the two you have much of Star Control 2's story.

so the asari are ripoffs as well as sexist?

Then there's the "era" argument. In that sense, the game is vomit, and perhaps one of the worst games I've ever played. Without access to walkthroughs and other tools, I would be forced to replay the boring resource grind and fast forward through endless chaining dialogue trees. I suppose ... I suppose you could make a save game after the resource gathering minigame is fundamentally concluded, then work from there, right? Yeah, that's it, except ... Why put the fucking timer in the fucking game at fucking all then? Oh to make me repeat tedium over and over again to extend the game? Shitty design, end of story. Fighting a raccoon with a rake is a challenge. Raking up raccoon shit is tedium. This is the latter.

I should note I never finished the game, which is an unusual mark of irritation. The game's writing is great and I enjoyed the story, especially the multi-layered plotting that ties together several timelines and references multiple historical periods. But upon reaching the end and realizing I needed to spend an hour learning how to beat Dreadnoughts with this ultra tedious AI opponent, my reaction might be best recalled as 'revulsion'. Ship to ship combat is violently, grossly unfun after a while and any protracted engagement is just too much for me to want to commit anymore effort to.

Also this game makes me sad in that I really wish the second Star Flight game - Trade routes of the Cloud nebula - was available in a somewhat more presentable form. SC2 looks good enough for me to play, but SF2 unfortunately is just too far back to handle visually. Unlike SC2, SF2 isn't popular enough that someone will spill the ending for me, and I never did finish it a decade ago.