Beloved Games: Star Control 2

Star Control 2 is another game that got me into playing video games. This is an RPG/Adventure game full of great humor. You play as the captain of an ancient alien vessel dug up by some Earth colonists on a mission to reconnect with Earth. Once there you find that the planet has been encased in a force field by an aggressive alien race. Your mission from then on is to free your homeworld. Along the way you’ll encounter a wide variety of alien species, build up a fleet, do a little interplanetary trade, and engage in ship-to-ship combat arcade style. Choices of who you ally with and how you interact with the alien species can have consequences for the rest of the game.

The combat phase is interesting in that you have ships fight one-on-one. Nowadays, I’d probably prefer a more tactical, turn-based approach to fleet management or some sense of fleet-on-fleet combat but the arcade nature of one-on-one combat did make the game fairly accessible.

Some of the game’s humor is a bit juvenile. For example, the Spathi are a race of cowards whose ships are equipped with a rear mounted Backwards Utilized Tracking Torpedo launcher. You’ll see a bit of that kind of humor if you look at the video clip below. It is all in good fun though and it was back in the day when games were much more kid-oriented. When I last played through it, I did find this refreshing. There wasn’t the wanton need to be “edgy”.

Intro Video:

Melee Combat:

Conversations with Aliens (Spathi):

You can download a version of the game based on the free source code from Toys for Bob here. Every now and again the folks at Toys For Bob mention that they’d like to do a real sequel. I wait with bated breath for that day.

One game that I’d love to see ported to mobiles is a casual game that has some similarities to Star Control 2, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space. I actually prefer the mechanics of combat (which involves your entire fleet) better than the mechanics in Star Control 2.

~ by shaunkime on April 19, 2010.