Star Control II ~The Ur-Quan Masters~
*Jumping Peppers!*
*Happy campers* have now been *enjoying the sauce* at *heavy space* *playgrounds* for thirty orbital cycles of *friend*'s homeworld!
But some *silly cows* still have not yet *become* *campers* and are still *many bubbles*. This makes Orz *frumple*!
Orz *fingers* will show you the *GO! GO!* in *bright* *parties* so you too can *squirt nice colors*.
Here and now is *time* to become *together* and have *picnics* with Orz.
Today marks, as close as research can tell, the 30th anniversary of Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters' original release on PC. Its one of the very few adventure games from the 90s that stands the test of time, and is still enjoyable today, thanks to its
open source port to modern Windows and its new
HD port. I talk about it often, but that's because it really is one of the finest video games every made, and years ahead of its time. Its certainly in my top 5 of all time best video games, and something I revisit about every other year. Some people play things like Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time on a yearly basis: I'd take Ur-Quan Masters. Every time I play I end up doing events in a different order, and it keeps it fresh, despite maybe a dozen or so playthroughs.
Star Control II is a sequel to 1990's Star Control, an overhead one-to-one spaceship combat melee game developed by the small Toys for Bobs developer headed by programmer Fred Ford and writer/designer Paul Reiche III. Toys for Bob would letter become known for the Skylanders series of modern NFC-capable interactive software-enhanced toys, of which Nintendo Amiibo are a direct descendant. While the first Star Control has not aged well and is no longer considered a great game in any regard, it did establish the framework for the series, and, with some simple scenarios to play, introduced the main conflict: a war for supremacy between Earth and the Alliance of Free Stars against the slaving Ur-Quan and their Hierarchy of Battle Thralls. The game took place during an undefined
point in the middle of the war and does not resolve which side ultimately wins. Most people these days are introduced to the original Star Control through emulation of the Genesis/Mega Drive ROM image.
Star Control II jumps the story forward 20 years. Earth and the Alliance was ultimately defeated by the Hierarchy and are now slaves, most reduced to agrarian societies on their homeworlds, forever locked under impenetrable shields. A small band of humans, marooned on a distant planet discover a secret on their new world: a nearby cave houses a massive factory complex capable of building starships of the ancient and powerful Precursor race. Such a ship could be just what the Alliance needs to defeat the Ur-Quan, but only enough materials exist to complete the skeleton of the ship, with barely enough power and resources to make the trip back to Earth. The game opens with the player in control of the basic, woefully underpowered Precursor starship and must both reassemble the Alliance and build up the ship's strength to be a worthy competitor in a hostile galaxy and somehow defeat the Ur-Quan armada. This task involves travelling the stars, collecting mineral and biological data from the worlds orbiting thousands of in-game worlds, performing both diplomatic missions with and combat actions against a cast of over 20 alien races.
The game introduced a number of game elements we now take for granted, such as open-world design, character animation (moving mouths.) While you can't simply fly straight to the final battle right away like in Breath of the Wild, you can, within the means your starship allows, explore any star system within your reach. The story has multiple simultaneous arcs that can completed in whatever order the player desires, many of which are entirely optional and only for fun or to improve your ship in some way. And there are thousands of lines of dialogue, with each distinct race getting a unique font and animation on the conversation viewscreen. The fictional universe of Star Control II has been hailed as one of the grandest pace opera environments ever devised, and the developers of games such as Mass Effect and Fallout cite Star Control II as a heavy influence to their game's design. The game won several Game of the Year Awards (including Computer Gaming Monthly, which was sort of the king of all PC gaming magazines back then) and continues to be present on All-Time Top 100 and Top 50 lists to this day. In 1994, the game was ported to the 3DO system and, taking advantage of the increasing CD space, the music was resampled and dialogue become fully voiced.
A third game in the series was developed in 1996 but was developed by a different studio. Toys of Bob licensed Star Control copyrights to Accolade in order to make the game, but these rights would expire when the game was no longer generating royalties, returning full control of the intellectual property to Toys for Bob in 2002, though Accolade would retain the Star Control trademark.
Reiche and Ford consider Star Control 3 to be a non-canonical sequel as it did not follow the plot they had in mind for the third game (which they even teased in the credits of Star Control II.)
Accolade published the original three games but could never find the right developer to continue the series for a fourth installment. Infogrames bought Accolade in 1999, and in 2001 had also bought Atari, which had recently been bought and then spun-off by Hasbro Interactive. Originally, the Star Control trademark was pursued by Toys for Bob as well, but Infogrames/Atari would not sell, leading Reiche and Ford to retitle the game "The Ur-Quan Masters" when they released it as an open source port in 2002.
An attempt to reboot the series was made in 2018 by StarDock Entertainment, who believed they had purchased the rights to both the Star Control trademark and its intellectual property during Atari's bankruptcy in 2013. A misunderstanding of what rights were actually acquired brought a series of back-and-forth lawsuits. As a result, Star Control: Origins effectively operates in an entirely different universe as the original with none of the same history, mythology, or alien races, though numerous plot sequences are near copies to those in Star Control II (which initiated some of the lawsuits which were ultimately found in Reiche and Ford's favor.) Any future games in the series carrying the Star Control name would similarly be entirely distinct from the Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III product, banking on name recognition only.
Toys for Bob was acquired by Activision in 2005. In order to pursue their long-desired plan to make a proper Ur-Quan Masters sequel, Ford and Reiche eventually turned over control of Toys of Bob to new leadership in late 2020 and left the company, having purchased the rights to the Ur-Quan Masters intellectual properties as part of their departure. Toys for Bob has been mostly concerned with the Crash Bandicoot series over the last several years and is now a small part of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition being pursued by Microsoft.
The Reiche-Ford sequel has yet to materialize but is eagerly awaited by millions of Ur-Quan Masters fans.
If you haven't played it, give it a shot with either the
original port (be sure to add the extra content packs for 3DO music and voice) or
HD remakeIt's a great game, though it does take a few hours to get going. To be more realistic, you are expected to spend a good deal of time (8-10 months of game time) harvesting materials from nearby star systems in order to improve the Precursor starship so you can both harvest more materials from even further away and start reaching out to distant systems on diplomatic missions. It can also be painfully brutal to new players who don't pay attention: hot worlds like Venus, or those with strong tectonic activity or rough weather should be avoided early on as trying to land on them will likely result in the destruction of the planet lander, as would dangerous alien creatures. There are also tumbling red probes that can be randomly encountered, and these are tough to take out in an early state - saving often (and in more than one slot) and reloading on failure or a no-win scenario is strongly encouraged. If you have what it takes to put up with the first few hours of resource collection and failure avoidance, you'll be able to enjoy a deep story of galactic history, solve current problems both humorous and serious, rescue endangered species, form alliances with friends old and new, blow away hostile alien starships in combat, and not just rescue Earth from fallow slavery but save the many races of the galaxy from certain extinction from an even greater threat than the Ur-Quan. Of course, it's not all roses as you'll find in trying to understand the nearly incomprehensible Orz, among other difficult-to-deal-with races. But you do get your full Captain Kirk on and make it with a sexy alien babe - What's not to like about that?!
