Description
Following the on-going war of the first
Star Control game, the Alliance has lost. The Ur-Quan armada systematically hunts down the alliance races and imprisons them onto their homeworlds, including Earth. However unknown to the Ur-Quan, during the war, a small research vessel had been lost while sent to a distant star system looking for evidence of the ancient Precursor race. The survivors of this research team had come across the controls to a Starship factory and used it to build a Precursor supply vessel: one of the largest vessels in the galaxy. It's time for these Terrans to return to Earth...
Star Control II is a game based on exploration, space combat, diplomacy and resource gathering. Your main starship is the Precursor vessel and it can be used to travel between star systems; this uses up fuel. Raw materials are used as currency to make purchases in your space station headquarters; you can buy fuel, as well as improve your starship, buy smaller ships to accompany the starship as a fleet (to fight enemies), and hire crewmembers (who represent the "health" of your ships).
Raw materials are found on surfaces of planets and moons throughout the galaxy; you have to send a landing module to the planet and then guide it around the surface as it picks up the materials you found earlier with your scanner. Each planet is unique in the type of minerals and metals it is formed of. Some planets are plagued by natural dangers such as lightning storms, earthquakes or lava which can damage or destroy your landing modules. Non-sentient lifeforms can also be found and stunned to obtain biological samples. Special installations, objects and ruins can also be found on certain planets and explored.
While in "deep space", your starship can approach any star you come across, and then you can guide your ship around its system and land on its planets and their moons. Space is treated as two-dimensional and presented in a top-down view. There is also a starmap available which shows the entire galaxy and allows you to set your ship on auto-pilot to any star.
Throughout space are different alien civilizations. These are represented on the starmap by a sphere of influence. Within the sphere, the aliens have a controlling presence and their ships will venture freely. Outside the sphere, encounters are rarer. Aliens can be dealt with diplomatically, through a series of dialog options, or in combat.
Combat utilizes the same engine as the first
Star Control game, where action is controlled from a top view and influenced by the gravity of nearby planets. Each alien vessel has unique abilities. Combat can also be played as a standalone game ("melee mode"), separate from the main storyline.
Alternate Titles
- "The Ur-Quan Masters" -- Open Source title
- "Star Control 2" -- Alternate spelling
Part of the Following Groups
User Reviews
The Press Says
| GameHippo.com |
Windows |
Mar 30, 2009 |
 |
100 |
| Abandonia Reloaded |
Linux |
Sep 11, 2005 |
5 out of 5 |
100 |
| Abandonia Reloaded |
Windows |
Sep 11, 2005 |
5 out of 5 |
100 |
| Computer Gaming World (CGW) |
DOS |
May, 1994 |
 |
90 |
| Video Games & Computer Entertainment |
3DO |
Dec, 1994 |
9 out of 10 |
90 |
| Power Play |
DOS |
Nov, 1992 |
81 out of 100 |
81 |
| GamePro (US) |
3DO |
Nov, 1994 |
4 out of 5 |
80 |
| PC Player (Germany) |
DOS |
Jan, 1993 |
74 out of 100 |
74 |
| Defunct Games |
3DO |
Sep 24, 2005 |
72 out of 100 |
72 |
| 7Wolf Magazine |
Windows |
Jul 30, 2003 |
7 out of 10 |
70 |
Forums
Trivia
Cancelled add-on
Fred Ford and
Paul Reiche III confirm to have worked for four months on a add-on pack which was never completed due to Accolade's lack of interest.
Development
Ford and Reiche disappeared to Alaska and worked on this game for an additional six months without pay. Only that during this time, the game grew from two to nine megabytes, thousands of dialogue lines were added, the digital music appeared and a complete galaxy with hundreds of stars and thousands of planets made its way into the game.
Files
- The .SHP files are interchangeable meaning that you can rename them to swap them around. This can be used to change the ship you start with in the full game.
- All the music and victory ditties in the game are in .MOD format and can be extracted by a utility called a Mod Ripper.
Freeware release
The game was released free to the public in 2002 by its original designers. Everything except the name
Star Control (still owned by the publisher) is now freeware.
However, it not the true open source of the DOS version. When Toys for Bob set out to release their code they found that a lot of it had simply been lost. However what was available was all of the source code for the 3DO version of the game. So what happened is that all of that code was ported to the open source project and then several portions of it that were "different from the PC version" (mostly menus and interface issues) were then later re-coded. Incidentally many things in the game can be set to "3DO mode" or "PC mode" via command line parameters explained in the readme.
Influences
The game is suspiciously similar to the
Starflight series of games. A direct comparison can be made of such gameplay ideas as the gathering of raw materials, the exploration of space, the coordinate map, even the alien diplomacy/interaction that makes this game famous. The first
Starflight was able to do this years before
Star Control.
Mods
A large-scale open-source project has been launched with the aim of updating
Star Control II to run on pretty much all modern computers and operating systems, along with better graphics and other improvements. The homepage for the project is at
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/.
Music
Musician
Aaron Grier:
There was actually a contest for writing the music fo star control II advertised on comp.sys.amiga.audio. Nobody knew what game it was for, and Paul had asked a friend to troll usenet for entries. I submitted "Fuchia Fantasy" not even expecting it to be taken seriously, and ended up winning second place in the contest, (Riku being the big winner, of course,) which entitled me to $50 and a copy of the game when it came out. It took about a year after I was notified I had won for the paperwork and check to come, (along with an amusing apology,) and another six months or so after that for the game to actually get to me, (along with another amusing apology.) Both letters are still sitting somewhere in a box in my father's basement in Denver, and one of these days I'll have to dig through the files and post scans somewhere.
Dan and Riku (who met through SC2) got together and formed the 8-bit collective, which turned into KLF, which begat KFMF, and is still going strong.
Rainbow planets
If you discover the location of all the rainbow planets, they form an arrow pointing towards the galactic core (top right corner). The worlds were created by the Precursors and the arrow hints at where they disappeared to. The original purpose of the arrow was, according to the creators themselves, to point toward a single planet where the player would have an interactive conversation with the two creators. This was never completed.
References
- Several of the new races in the game (such as the Orz) were named from alien words on the copy protection wheel for the first game. "Melnorme" is a rather obvious corruption of the singer Mel Torme's name.
- During the game, when talking to Starbase Commander Hayes, if the player chooses "The United Federation of Worlds!" when being prompted to name the new alliance, Hayes will say: "That has a familiar ring to it... nonetheless, we will make it so - The United Federation of Worlds!" This is an obvious reference to the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek.
Stars and planets
Most of the Stars are named after real Stars, even though the distances and postions are mostly wrong. Their positions according to the starmap are actually hyperspace coordinates and not realspace coordinates. If you notice a little footnote in the bottom, it explains about this pretty clear.
The planet information is based on true astronomic readings and some of the parameters are calculated when you enter the planet. The planet surfaces are also calculated according to some of these parameters. When entering a star system, the planets are raytraced, which is the cause of the noticeable delay (on a 286 anyway) when entering a star system.
Awards
- Computer Gaming World
- October 1993 (Issue #111) – Adventure Game of the Year (together with Eric the Unready)
- November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #29 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
- November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #9 Most Rewarding Ending of All Time
- September 2006 (Issue #266) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
- VideoGames
- March 1995 - Best Adventure Game in 1994
Information also contributed by
Aaron Grier,
Aj Hege,
Arvin Chandra,
Big John WV,
Fafnir,
Luka Milutinovic,
PCGamer77,
Tiago Santos,
Tomer Gabel,
Toni Maki,
Vance,
WildKard and
WizardX
