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"Greetings and various apropos felicitations!"
I remember it well. I was in high school. My PC was finally at a
fast enough speed where I could play a few of the good games.
One of the games I got at that point was a little game called
Star Control II. To fully appreciate this game you had to have played it at the
time it was made. Nowadays, it'd hold up pretty well, but not to the point that
it had been back in the early days of gaming. A game so awesome, that not only
myself, but numerous other gamers, as well as game developers consider this the
BEST game on the PC of all time...even eclipsing their OWN creations.
If you wondering, all the random quotes that litter the review
are from the game's text, some of the funniest stuff ever written in a game. All
of these have been gleaned from the painstakingly compiled pages
here. Go
there and give them mad props forthwith.
"Ah Human visitors! What a treat!"
The story start out with you bringing your ship back to Earth to dock. Only you
find a ship out in the middle of space that tries to kill you. Early on in the
game, it's pretty damn formidable. I think this is probably the first PC game I
played where I died a couple times before getting 2 minutes into it.
After dealing with the probe, you find out that Earth has been
encase in a slave shield, and that the planet that you once knew has been
enslaved, and now operates a starbase as a debt of fealty to the Ur-Quan. You
have to go and help the base rebuild their radioactive cores into order to get
fabrication going, to save the lives of the people on the starbase. Once you
take care of that, and a small matter of destroying a moon base, they decide to
go ahead and ally with you and your big Precursor ship to take down the Ur-Quan.
This is only the start of your journey.
 "Bring back lots of minerals, Captain."
The first thing you have to do in the game is start collecting mineral resources
for your ship. To do this you'll take a little lander and go piloting on the
ships surface. Early on your ship is early 80's moon rover technology. Plastic
and tin foil. You can pick up minerals until your lander tells you its full.
Unfortunately, the planets don't cooperate with you just going
down there and taking minerals off of its surface. A lot of planets have violent
thunderstorms and earthquakes, and all of these will destroy your ship early in
the game. You only have two of the landers to start with, and they cost money to
rebuild, so you really don't want to be blowing them up too often.
Later on in the game, you get more armor, shields and speed
increases for your ship so they can go into different environments and actually
bring their cargo back. Also, eventually, you'll start getting resources from
blowing up enemy ships, and that proves to be a welcome change.
But, the mineral harvesting gets to be what would be called a
mini-game now, with you searching for the elusive "Rainbow Worlds" that are
completely benign offering you their resource laden "Free Radical" nodules to
pick up.
"This game has been brought to you by: Frungy! The Sport of
Kings!" There are 24 unique races in the game. All of
them have their own ships, and all of them have their own personality and
dialogue. Star Control II had some of the best dialogue I'd ever seen in a game.
Even today, nothing seems to be quite as off-the-wall but consistently funny as
what this game had.
Here's a rundown of some of the major races you'll encounter:
The Spathi A cowardly race, their
main weapon is a rear-facing missile, to aid their running away as quickly as
possible. They look like Tinker Toys with eyeballs.
The Pkunk The Pkunk are a funky race
that would probably best be described as New Age Hippies. They had ancestors,
the Ilwrath who strove to achieve perfection...and went the tiniest bit past,
and wrapped around to become pure evil. The Pkunk ships reincarnate if they blow
up, and are the quickest in the game.
The Zot-Fot-Pik The Zot-Fot-Pik have
the best lines in the game. Their story has 4 of them living on their homeworld
and achieving sentience at the same time. Only the 4th race, the Zebranky,
developed a troublesome source of food...namely, the Zot, Fot, and the Pik. So
the Zot, Fot, and Pik annihilate the Zebranky, and have existed on their planet,
playing Frungy, the Sport of Kings.
The Chmmr The Chmmr are a hybrid
race, formed by the merging of the Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrm. Their ships, on the
surface, are probably the most beefy of all the fighters, but after a while,
you'll develop tactics and preferences towards other ships.
They are also the race with the most knowledge of what the heck's
going on.
"Hey, space is a tough place where wimps eat flaming plasma
death." Combat plays a major role in the game. In
fact, the first Star Control was just a combat game where you took your ships
and fought to the death. The Melee.exe file was put on the disk so that you
could play in that mode if your preferred it.
 In combat, you got your ship, for the most part, your huge
Precursor thingy, and used it to blast other ships to smithereens. Especially if
you got the Hellbore cannons. But, basically, your ships had two actions. Fire
weapons, and your special attack. Take for example, Druuge, who sacrificed crew
members in order to speed up and fire again.
You also had to worry about the gravity of the planet catching
your ship in its grasp, and you're totally screwed. The best ship is no match
for poor piloting. "This game was about war, slavery, intolerance heroism,
justice, and the inevitable triumph of Good over Evil!" Yes, yes it was. The
game's coherent, rich plot is what ties it all together, and makes it feel like
a complete game, and a rewarding experience. You meeting each of the different
races felt like another part in a grand story, and you'd inevitably need
something from all of them. It was ahead of its time...a space combat/RPG,
almost.
No game has successfully ties in all the genres like this game
did, and no game probably ever will. After the disaster that was Star Control 3,
it's unlikely that it'll get remade, since I think Accolade still owns all the
rights to it. Also, the original developers,
Toys for Bob are going to work on something new. Something called Minions,
which they've said would be like "Star Control 2 in a fantasy setting". I can
only hope.
"So what am I doing out here, you ask? I'M TRYING TO GET SOME
REST, THAT'S WHAT!!! I'll be lucky if I don't have a heart attack soon. You have
no idea how hard it is to personally replenish an entire species!"
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