Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace

The Good
The Star Saga games were an original idea, an attempt at escaping the limitations that storage and processing power put on CRPGs of that era by using the computer only to moderate interactions in conjunction with an actual game board and booklets of text.

This was also an early social game. Though, unlike most Dani Bunten designs, it could be played solo, most of the fun came from swapping story snippets and friendly competition with the other players.

Of the two games that saw commercial distribution (the trilogy was never completed, and the story thus never finished), the first had some particular moments that stick in the memory. In fact, one particular key planet and the events on it spawned a ritual phrase that I still find myself using despite the fact that I've long since moved away from the friends who understand the reference.

The Bad
Sadly, the games weren't very self contained. Though there was some attempt to introduce players who hadn't played the first one at the beginning of the second, I can't imagine the experience being that great. Even worse, while the first game reached a sort of resolution as your character prepared to leave the home sector and chase a bigger piece of the story, the second did not end as cleanly and the fact that the third game was never available really rankled.

The second game also seemed a little less intense than the first. At several points in the first game, you experienced an "aha" feeling, and discovered a new facet of the story. But the second game didn't add anything new. You found new nexi along the threads discovered in the first game, but there just weren't the same sort or number of surprises and twists.

The Bottom Line
A very cool game for its time, but sort of an evolutionary backwater. Eventually Moore's law has brought us 3D rendered worlds, and nearly infinite capacity for descriptive and conversation text. The idea of the text-booklet CRPG is obsolete.