The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I'm new to the forums here, but was wondering if anyone can tell me what goes on during the third installment of the game, all that it says most places is that the game in no way lives up to the standard set by the first two games.

Also, I think it would be interesting if the Sentient Millieu somehow was revived, maybe something like the Antarans in Master of Orion 2? I guess that would make them similar to the Arilou as well?

Non Spoiler version:

During your escape from the Sa-Matra, you have a vision of the every sentient being in the universe being destroyed, which you only remember later on. Hyperspace breaks down, but you find a new ship capable of creating a "warp bubble", and using this ship you and your some of your allies make a jump to another quadrant, which was somehow connected to your vision.

Because of the long jump, the ships are scattered over this new area. You'll have to find all your allies, and make contact with the new races in this quadrant, as well as find a way to stop the destruction of the universe. The Sentient Milieu is in no way involved.

SPOILERIFIC VERSION

Pretty soon you make contact with a group of aliens races calling themselves the Crux Hegemony, who are hell bent on conquering the galaxy. You have to defeat them, by luring various races away and battling others. You discover that the threat that will destory the universe is called the "Eternal Ones", a race that eats sentience. They periodically returns to our planes of existence and eat everyones intelligence, killing them in the process. You also found out the hyperspace is broken because some idiots dumped antimatter on their rainbow worlds. eventually, after many hijinxes, you manage to create a sentience distiller, which somehow funnels small amounts of sentience away from everyone without killing them, thus satisfying the eternal ones without having everyone die.

In the process, you find out that the Precursors have been devolving into cows everytime the Eternal Ones came around., that the Arilou escaped by hiding in Quasispace, and that the Orz are friends of the Eternal Ones. And some other stuff.

I skipped a lot of minor annoying plot points such as "Meld Vux and Vyro-Ingo DNA to make one happy creature instead of two pissy ones" and lots of "The Pkunk/CHMMR/Utwis/Friggin everybody break down. Fix them."

I would like to know what happened in it too... whats with the arilou? what have they been doing with the humans? and how exactly do the orz help the eternal ones? and what do the heralds, owa, and exquivan I read about do? they seemed interesting.

The Owa were the idiots who dumped anti-matter on the rainbow worlds, causing hyperspatial collapse. The SCnot3 premise was that the rainbow worlds were a precursor tool to stabilise hyperspace (1).

The Eternal Ones consumed galactic sentience, ripping hyperspace (1) to open portals to transfer their essence(?) to perform their unholy feast. The Heralds were those who had fought them before, and as a "reward" for showing balls were permitted to announce the eternal1s to the next table. The Orz were supposedly agents of the eternal1s to let them know when a galactic table had been set.

The Arilou apparently were suffering from genetic "decay" and thus were using humans as genetic donors to help them with this - more or less without our consent or even knowledge.

The answers SCnot3 gave to SC2 mysteries were highly disappointing.

Um, bear in mind I played SCnot3 in 1997, so my memory is very probably hazy. I also wasn't paying too much attention to the backstory anyway (which was lackluster, the parts that weren't lifted and paraphrased from SC2) since I was getting progressively more and more pissed off with the game engine. SCnot3 was the FIRST and ONLY game that I needed the walkthrough to finish, purely so that I could not miss all those random arbitrary cues - half of which were broken anyway. What little I do remember about the backstory is that I was highly unimpressed. This is after playing SC2 and deciding that it is the game which I will benchmark other games to - and still do, today. But I digress. Anyway.

hmmm... maybe if they make a new star control game they will ignore star control 3 and make it over again. i obviously havent played it, I suppose if I ever find it at a yard sale for 5 bucks i might try it  :P. when I was looking at the plot from a website I thought the whole eternal ones thing looked pretty good, but Ive never played sc3 or even seen a video of it so it was probably executed poorly.

but looking at the pages of now and forever (www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol in case anyone here has  not heard of it for some reason), I thought that some of the new races looked cool, but all the old ones looked really odd and discolored.

The whole eternal ones thing really WAS executed very poorly.  Done right, it could have given the game a nice H.P. Lovecraft feeling to it and would have made the game much creepier.

Some of the new aliens had the potential to be pretty cool (the K'tang were funny at times), if the developers bothered to actually...you know...DEVELOPE them.  As it was, almost all the dialogue was directly ripped from SC2.  In a paraphrased version.  I remember my first contact with the Harika consisted of an EXTREMELY disappointing "What do you want?"  First freakin' contact between two alien races, and THAT is the best the developers could come up with.

The new muppet look for the League races was also something that could have been very cool, but ended up sucking.  Syreen?  Sucked.  Ur-Quan?  Sucked.  Mycon?  Sucked.  Pkunk?  I kinda liked the new semi-dinosaur look.  Chmmr?  Err...really weird looking.

I will say this for SC3 though:  I think they did a good job with the Orz, both with their look and their voice.  Thats really about all I can praise though.

Maybe for the next star control game they might make, they should redo a similar eternal one plotline but change a lot of the races, bring some old ones that werent in sc3 (yehat, slylandro, melnorme, etc.) and have better explanation for the arilou.
also look at this: www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/starcontrol3/review.html

I guess not everyone hates it.

What happened to all of the other SC2 races?

It doesn't really say on the classic gaming page and I haven't found anything else out about them.

Races such as the Shofixti and the Yehat were barely even mentioned, if at all, in an effort to move the SC line away from FF and PR3's original vision.

In a slight addendum to whats already been said though...

The Sentience thresher (if I recall the name correctly) was what leeched sentience from the galaxy at large. Apparently the Eternal Ones couldnt be fluffed about efficiency though, which is where you come in and fix it to be far more efficient then it already is (apparently 99% of the sentience collected was wasted).

The Crux as an enemy were utterly pathetic. I honestly cannot imagine an empire arising out of such weak idiocy.

What they did to the Arilou was nothing short of monstrous. There was one particular animation where... the arilou... sucks his head in and out... it's difficult to convey the full horror. As a race, the Arilou died right then and there...

And lest we forget what the did to the Syreen. From exotic gypsy dancing sirens to androgynous arbritrarily sexless... blue... things... **shakes head**

I only inflicted that game once upon myself, just be certain that I wasnt being swayed by public opinion. I subsequently deleted the game, microwaved the CD, snapped it, and threw all the pieces into a fire while dancing around shouting incantations to ward off the evil spirits no doubt released and attracted by the destruction of that demonic hellspawn.

What?

Cronos... for what you did to the SCnot3 CD... wasn't that a little... you know, insufficient? Please tell me you merely omitted mention of the priest?

The long version:

The races not seen during SC3 are:

Ilwrath, Thraddash, Yehat, Shofixti, Druuge, Supox, ZoqFotPik, Umgah, Melnorme, Slylandro

Explanations for each (either explicitly stated or hinted at during the game, or logically deduced to the best of my ability):

The Ilwrath and Thraddash are assumed to have mutually exterminated each other during the events of SC2.
The Yehat and Pkunk are still attempting to manage the merger of their species, and apparently it was decided to only send representatives of the Pkunk side of the relationship.
The Supox were included in the expedition, but all of the colonists were wiped out by the Orz before you reach them. It was a very hinky way of removing the race while still mentioning them in-game.
The Slylandro remain confined to their homeworld.
The Shofixti, Druuge, Umgah, Melnorme, and ZFP are excluded without explanation. As stated above, this was most likely an attempt to distance the game from TFB's source material as much as possible.


Better just to let this sad attempt at a plotline die, as it should have on the drawing board back in the mid-90's.

And to answer a racial question posed earlier, the Exquivan are a race of holier-than-thou dolts that believe that they can escape the Eternal1's sentience purge by reducing their thoughts to nothingness, and disdain anyone who doesn't share their beliefs. The end result is that they tend to be violent and very difficult to negotiate with. They also bear more than a passing resemblance to Ewoks, which is a crime against nature in and of itself.

The Priest? I'm sorry to say but what happened to him is illegal to witness in several countries. In fact I may have to go underground just for alluding to it.

You want to know what happened to the priest though? Think The Excorcist. Multiplied by about a hundred times. THATS what happened to the priest.

As an addendum, before I go in for plastic surgery and move to an undisclosed location and live underground (literally) for the next few years to evade the wrath of the legal system, the fireplace has refused to burn anything further since. Any fire that goes near it immediately extinguishes, even petrol wont light on fire. Electricity also happens to want to avoid the place as no electrical appliance wants to work in the vicinity. Furthermore, animals that haplessly wander too close either get the living hell scared out of them, or they mysteriously wind up dead somehow, their remains gracing said fireplace.

Quite an addendum but worth mentioning. Now if you'll excuse me, I do believe I hear the ASIO sirens approaching...

If sc3 is so unholy as to bend the very laws of nature, then why do the only good reviews I can find on the internet give it a 9 out of 10? I guess the only way to see if you hate it or not is to play it yourself.

Those reviews must have been written either by corporate shills or someone who is playing it before they played SC2.  I was sickened the instant I started having conversations with the Spathi, and realized that whole sections of the conversations were stolen verbatim from SC2.  Then I tended to solve plot points out of order or too quickly, thus breaking the game.  I was forced to restart multiple times so that a broken time-based plot point would work.  It was poor in terms of game play.  It was poor in terms of general plot.  It was poor in terms of consistency (deep children are sentient Mycon, not planet busters?).  It was poor in terms of graphical quality compared to its predecesor(s); grey, ugly clamation.  It was poor in terms of music (flat, dry).  The only good points were the Ktang's misuse of big words and small words ("Crushify!"), and the idea to make the Precursors "go away" right under everyone's noses.

Ignoring SC2 for the moment, SC3 is actually a decent (although far from excellent) adventure game. The problem with SC3 is that, if you've played SC2, you notice that pretty much everything Legend added to SC3 is pretty weak. The colony management's saving grace is that you don't have to worry about it most of the time. The horribly unbalanced Melee with weak AI doesn't matter; you hardly need to fight in SC3. Basically, SC3 is a Legend text adventure with the typing part and the descriptive text (Legend's strengths!) removed. What remains is the point-and-click interface for routine tasks (map view and movement) and dialogue (Gateway 2 has almost the same dialogue system). Similarly, the soundtrack is Legend standard fare: it's OK as background music, but instantly forgettable. While I liked Gateway, I didn't want the sequel to SC2 to be made in its image!

Furthermore, most of the SC3 budget seems to have been dumped on claymation and 3D animation. This could have been cool, but for some reason, most of the graphics are greyish-looking (3D rendered) or lumpy and grotesque (claymation). Both SC2's and Legend's pixel art are famous for their attention to detail; who convinced Legend to use a technique they are unfamiliar with?

And, as has previoously been stated, even if you haven't played SC2, chances are you'll end up breaking the game a fair few times. This is really annoying and frustrating. I never *minded* the story that much, as I tend to appreciate any half-baked story. What I did mind was having to reload/restart the game several times because some time based event failed to execute.

You belatedly realise that it's gone 'hellup!' when you're sitting on day 6273 or thereabouts and nothing's happened for about the past 4000 days, give or take a month.

Clearly, their testing/QC department had all bunked off to surf in hawaii or something equally irreverent. Bastards.

I'm pretty sure they were using puppets, like in star wars and such, and not claymation.

this was in response to the people who said it was claymation, but I forgot to put a quote in...  :P

My mistake. I've seen them referred to as both, and I'm trying to forget what SC3 looked like.

I don't think sc3 looks very good, although to those of you who have played it this must sound like "I'm starting to think water causes things to be wet". I thought most of the new races looked pretty good, but here's an example:

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/herald.gif)

all of the captains appear to be standing, so close to the camera you can only see their heads, alone, in what appears to be a spare room that looks nothing like a bridge, and has no door. here are some more examples:

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/spat_sc3.gif)

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/vux_sc3.gif)

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/aril_sc3.gif)

maybe the Arilou are standing in a microwave, that's what it looks like.

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/exq.gif)

I actually like the way the Exquivan look, and there seems to be another sitting in the background. But in the end this one has the same problems as the others.

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/lk.gif)

Maybe he's in a log cabin.

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/doog1.gif)

Where the heck is this doog standing?

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/dtlp1.gif)

*see Doog*

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/urq_sc3.gif)

Cheese, Gromit! Yeah, none of you get the joke.

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/syre_sc3.gif)

The syreen are just ugly.

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/huma_sc3.gif)
I think he's eating a leech

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/v-i.gif)

(http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/images/h&y.gif)

this is a Harika. and I just realized that Yorns are crawling all over him.



I probably went a bit over board with the pictures, but I actually thought most of these were pretty good until I started looking at the backgrounds.

My eyes!!!  I cannot see!

Now I understand all the hate here, I guessing the no-talent dorkass Legend hired breifly saw the SC2 character designs about a month before actually starting work on SC3.  The aliens of SC3 bear only a little resemblence to their counterparts of SC2.  And, if I'm not mistaken, SC3 came out at the end of the multimedia craze of the mid 90's.  That would explain how the captains are presented. 

If there is a fourth Star Control, I hope they don't call it SC4.  Just call it "Star Control - [Insert subtitle here]".  Without a numerical designation, it'll be easier to sweep SC3 under the rug and forget about it.

I've been watching some youtube videos of the SC3 races, most of them suck but they actually managed to make the Utwig cooler, by a fair amount aswell :D.

The Arilou video, NYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol is the most complete source for star control 3 info as I can find, if you wanna go see.

I have not seen any videos of sc3, but I can only imagine how much worse it could be...

And for the star control 4 title, they were going to make in 1998 called Starcon but it got scrapped. To be honest, it might have been for the better because it looked like it was gonna be mostly a combat game.

A YouTube user named ZarlaSheenaza has posted numerous video clips of the different races from SC3, if you're really curious. Just as a warning, there may be a few spoilers contained in them here and there.

The Kzer-Za (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wdidT-L904)
The Pkunk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGwRDMr-IKw)
The VUX (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHRwBNP5sOE)
The Arilou (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgskA2Tu2j4)
The Spathi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPUC-qS4c0s)
The Mycon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiN0i48vrA)
The Syreen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH57VFpUGj8)
The Chmmr (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2dQ42t32As)
The Orz (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqepQ_fWZbg)
The Utwig (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0FqTQvG72A)
The Doog (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVAG_LpLZTM)
The K'tang (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OUad17_Pzo)
The Vyro-Ingo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N95CtKrCRgU)
The Harika and Yorn (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScwquQ8wjvo)
The Clairconctlar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R8hQ0gX8ek)
The Exquivan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S8sgjTupI8)
The Daktaklakpak (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRKMljvb19Q)
The Xchaggers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asHniOZVFGw)
The Owa (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXjGB-Ra7Yw)

*sigh* What a first post to make, huh? :-\

Those videos are even worse than i thought they would be.

I liked the Orz though.

What was it about them that you liked? The voice, the puppet, or both?

I like the voice, but I'm a little iffy on the puppet. It's too evil looking for me. I always thought of the Orz as a "race" that are goofy, silly, wierd, and maybe even cute...until you get them talking for long enough. Even then, it's not their voice or strange way of speaking that scares you, but it's what they say.

That's how it was with me, anyway. They were charming little goofballs until they started talking about the *silly cow* Androsynth, and saying things like "Next it is the *party* and you will *become*" and  "enjoy[ing] *the change*". Then I got creeped out.

Maybe I just prefer a more subtle horror.

I liked pretty much all of it. The VUX puppet I thought was pretty good, but the voice was... odd.

Animatronics.  Rubber puppet thingies with mechanical insides.  I *think* that was what was used, and the effect isn't totally bad for the very alien races, (the VUX, for instance, are given a much more gruesome looks that I found pleasing, and the new alien races can be judged purely on their own merits), but most of the old races (the Syreen, Arilou, Spathi, earthling, mycon, etc.) were not nicely done.  The Ur Quan look rather good however.

You have to realize that animatronics were all the rage back then, particularly for creating creatures that wern't 'humanoid,' that is not capable of being portrayed by an actor with sufficent setup, and was cheaper too.  An experiment if you will, like the expensive movie productions of Wing Commander.  While Wing Commander's movies were successful imagewise, this was not;  While they portray very alien bodies (like the Ur-Quan) well, they do not do well in replacing humanoid looking creatures.

This all was shoved aside when 3d art and computing advanced to the stage where this sort of thing could be made better, and cheaper, so we don't have to worry about a disaster like that happening again.  At least in that form...

Good. I always liked the Owa when I was reading about them, but after hearing the voice they sound like they're insane. I suppose they are.

I really liked the Daktaklakpak. They did a good job with them.

I also like the way the Exquivan look, but their heads are always jerking back and forth... they, along with the Arilou, REALLY look their "neck is broken". Quoted from the VUX of sc2. And the Exquivan mouths are bizzare.

In SC3 you were chasing ghosts until the very end of the game, where you suddenly met with the Heralds out of the blue (those were one of the more interesting aliens, but they made just a short appearance), and found out that you were fighting Gods that were powerful enough to devour all sentient life in the galaxy. Come on ! I think this is ultra lame, and that it's a shame that I had to play hours to find out about this.
The game itself was about solving lots of minor quests, and to find allies. You don't know why you need these allies, except at the very end of the game, when you suddenly have to hurry to get their help to craft some miracle device that can feed the gods. That is also lame, imo.
So, except for a few of the smaller quests, and some races that were fairly nice (Equivan, Harika), the game was not very good, lacked the nice humor that was present in SC2, and was not worth the money I paid for it. I think it's worth about 2 euro - 1 euro because it's not completely bad and it had some enjoyable moments, enough to keep playing, and 1 more euro for the courage to make a sequel for a game like SC2, which is pretty hard to do imo ;)

(shudder) revisiting repressed memories was bad enough, but those clips... eurgh...

morbid fascination is a suicidal trait, imo. that was even worse than i remembered.

The 3D animation technologies/capabilities/skills available back then were MORE than sufficient to have given us decent and believeable aliens. The humanoid races (syreen, earthling, arilou ens) were somewhere between sad and depressing. I mean, really, the Syreen were supposed to be alluring, ero- I mean, eXotic, desirable... the SCnot3 Syreen would only be considered attractive by a blind, desperate nympho, and then only if it was wearing a bag over its head. The arilou were just disturbing.

On the Exquivan mouth movements being 'odd' - if I wanted to be nice I'd say that's because the Exquivan aren't actually speaking english, but rather exquivanese or whatever - probably a very sibilant language, judging from the oral motions. Actually, I think it's just because the people doing it were lazy, incompetent, or both.

I find myself compelled to share my opinions! I'll just touch on a few things that kind of jump out at me here.

Of the alliance races, the Utwig were very well done. There was a good reason they all wore the same mask, the new dialogue was passable, and they even managed to take a cruddy repeat of the Ultron quest and give a reasonable if somewhat unsatisfactory explanation for it. Best of the alliance races in SC3, hands down.

The Spathi were mostly a rehash, but I found the first bit of new dialogue to be pretty funny. I'm speaking of their account of annihilating several hundred creatures on their new colony world out of fear before discovering they were actually just gentle herbivores. Well it did get a chuckle out of me anyway. The SC3 Spathi looks different from the SC2 design, but taken by itself it's pretty good. Terrible animation though, and I much prefer the gooey eyeball.

The VUX were too different. I mean, I guess I can imagine there are purple skinned VUX(es) out there, ok, but the new dialogue was pretty bad. The VUX in SC2 were bigots but at least they were intelligent and somewhat articulate about it. The disgust displayed by the SC3 VUX was rooted in a sort of instinctual anger. This is not completely unlike the SC2 VUX, who seem to display an instinctual revulsion to the physical appearance of humans. But at least in SC2 they were intelligent enough to be ashamed of the fact that they were bigots. They knew there was no rational foundation for their hatred. So on that point SC3 got near the mark but ultimately missed. The new dialogue didn't fit with the VUX nearly as well as the new stuff did for most of the other alliance races.

Ok, now for the Crux. The Daktaklakpak take the cake here. I liked the concept and the execution. The design and animation were even pretty good, imagine that! The only other Crux race I liked was the K'tang because some of the dialogue was funny.

None of the other new races were really that appealing to me and the other alliance races were too bland to leave much of an impression on me at all.

Pretty much every other opinion I have about the other aspects of the game have already been expressed so I'll stop here.

I kinda like the Xchagger and some of the other Crux races, but that was only due to the fact that the animatronics were appropiate for them, the humanoids should have been done by real actors...

However, the voice acting was well done, if you close your eyes when meeting the Syreen, the voice fits well, but the script doesn't help at all...

Geez, after reading this thread I'm glad I didn't get SC3...

Why the heck do the VUX say "PLEASE inform the VUX of the manner in which we can best assist our GOOD FRIEND, the human captain?" so much? they say it at least two times in most of those VUX videos.

And the Exqivan talking about secrets that no one should know sounds creepily like what happened to the Androsynth, although im not sure if it was intentional or not...

They're being ironic. They really don't want to help you, nor do they really consider you a good friend. One of the highlights in the game (to me at least), is when you start finding VUX groups in different systems, and they try to explain how they got there.

Yeah, but I can't tell if they're being sarcastic or if they're just lying badly.

Both probably. They are lying, but they think you're stupid enough not to notice the heavy sarcasm in their tone.

Can anyone explain the Xchagger plague, VUX Vyro-Ingo dna, and and other major subplots?

I didn't really play SC_not3 that much, but I did find a youtube video about the plague: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JMaAMR3RGjM

I found the plague story confusing too.  I kept reading theSC_not3 walkthrough, and I read something about reviving the Chenjesu.  Does that mean that they're involved in the story, or is that just some non-linear task in the story?

*sigh*

Here's what I remember from my last playthrough in '96.

Vyro-Ingo / VUX DNA: As we all know, the VUX are notorious for being xenophobic, surly, and generally difficult to deal with. During your travels in the new quadrant, you run across a neutral race native to the area called the Vyro-Ingo. They appear to be extremely mentally disturbed, showing clear signs of a split personality, one of which is passive and obsequious, the other of which is agressive and violent. This also makes them difficult to deal with, until you figure out that their weakness in negotioations is flattery, since they also seem to have a fierce inferiority complex. Suck up to them long enough, and they'll agree to join the alliance.

Later on, as a time-based event, the VUX will betray you and start working with the Crux (the main enemy organization of the game, at least until the very end). This is an unavoidable event (and actually is rather convenient, because as soon as they abandon the alliance, they no longer are an active nuisance). Even later, as you explore, you'll encounter an artifact called the Vyro-Ingo Encrustation Matrix, which you scientists will tell you appears to be an artificially engineered, but incomplete, segment of DNA corresponding to the Vyro-Ingo genome. Asking the Vyro-Ingo about it will make them very angry, provoking their inferiority complex to come to the fore again, and only some major butt-kissing will get them to calm down again (and is necessary, because you need them as alliance members in order to complete the quest).

Still further along, you will discover another artifact called the VUX Encrustation matrix. This is similar in form to its Vyro-Ingo counterpart, and coincidentally, the two encrustation matrices are a perfect match when combined together. Following up on that idea, you must add a Vyro-Ingo ship to your fleet, travel to a VUX colony, and send it ALONE (or else the VUX simply respond to the presence of your flagship and attack) against the VUX fleet stationed there. There will be a short cutscene that shows the two ships engaged in a silly chase sequence, and then they will dock together. After realizing that their races are apparently two halves of the same whole, both will become much nicer and friendlier, as their reunification apparently inexplicably repaired the flaws of each species.

When you encounter and are able to converse with a Precursor near the end of the game, you are given the option to ask about the VUX and Vyro-Ingo. The Precursor reveals that they are responsible for the genetic division of the two races, and they were attempting to examine the development of species divided in such a manner before they were devolved (I forget whether this event is a trigger for joining the matrices or not, so I may have my order screwed up a bit).

Xchagger plague: When you first encounter the Harika-Yorn, who are natives of the game's quadrant, they reveal that they are suffering from this affliction and it is destroying their race. In an attempt to stave it off and discover a cure, they joined the Crux, who have pledged to research the cure to the best of their efforts. However, discussions with other Crux members (particularly the K'Tang and DakTakLakPak, as I recall) will reveal that the Crux is not interested in finding a cure in the least, since they are responsible for starting the outbreak in the first place. Being the good guy, you decide to boldly step in and aid the Harika-Yorn, and obtain samples of the plague from infected individuals.

Research on the plague reveals a cure that will eradicate the disease before too long, but it also reveals something else unexpected: the Xchagger plague is actually caused by another sentient race (collectively known as the Xchagger) infecting the Harika-Yorn. Respecting the right of these newly discovered sentients to exist, you decline to use the cure on the Harika-Yorn immediately, pledging to attempt to save both races. Through some more asking around among the Crux (details of this part are sketchy in my mind), you are able to discover the location of one of the breeding centers of the Xchagger. This turns out to be one of their ships, and you are able to converse with them. You discover that they are indeed sentient, and have been unwillingly forced to infect the Harika-Yorn by the DakTakLakPak, who refused to acknowledge their sentience. However, they possess the means to extract their bretheren from the Harika-Yorn without harming either, and now that they have been freed from the Crux, they share that means with you. Using this, you are able to extract the Xchagger plague from the Harika-Yorn without harming either any further. Once all of the Harika-Yorn worlds have been freed from the plague, they become furious at how they have been used by the Crux, and join the alliance. The Xchagger join the alliance as well, pleased that their sentience has finally been acknowledged and they no longer need to be exploited as a biological weapon.

The Chmmr: The Chmmr arrive with your initial expedition, and set up a colony in the new quadrant. However, shortly after you learn to understand the DakTakLakPak, they request an urgent meeting with you. The purpose of this meeting is that they have apprently discovered that the Chmmr are actually a sentient summoning beacon for the Eternal Ones, an all-powerful race that devours all sentient life in the galaxy periodically. Their premise is that the Chenjesu are agents of the Eternal Ones, placed in the galaxy by their masters to monitor the progress of sentients in their development. Once they have determined that sentience has reached a suitable point and the Eternal Ones can commence feeding, they endeavor to fuse with the most advanced mechanical species they have encountered, and in this new form, transmit a signal into the alternate dimension where the Eternal Ones dwell that indicates that everything is ready. The DakTakLakPak claim that their fusion with the Mmrnhrm to create the Chmmr was the beginning of this process, and that they are, even now, attempting to summon the Eternal Ones to the galaxy. Pretty flimsy theory, eh?

The DakTakLakPak reveal that they have developed a device to bifurcate the Chmmr back into their original races, and thus stop this signal from being transmitted and preventing the arrival of the Eternal Ones. You, of course, refuse, but the furious DakTakLakPak vow to go ahead with their plan, with or without your cooperation. They bifurcate the Chmmr shortly after, in an event that is not preventable. The Chenjesu are left behind on their colonies in a comatose state, and the Mmrnhrm are taken by the DakTakLakPak. Upon recovering the comatose Chenjesu, you are able to revive them with the help of the Syreen, who (inexplicably) can psychically communicate with them, but this is of little help; the Chenjesu are very weak, and their bonding with the Mmrnhrm had progressed to the point where they now cannot survive on their own. If they remain separated from their mechanical counterparts for too long, they will perish.

Over the course of the game, stuff happens in various other subplots, but there is little you can do to rectify the Chmmr's sorry state until much later. However, during the course of other events, you learn that the DakTakLakPak (unsurprisingly) made the whole story about the Chmmr summoning the Eternal Ones up, and their true intent was to bifurcate the Chmmr so that they could then enslave the Mmrnhrm, as they saw themselves as the superior mechanical lifeform. However, the process was just as traumatic for the Mmrnhrm as the Chenjesu; the DakTakLakPak found them to be damaged beyond their ability to repair, and instead of risking them falling back into the hands of the alliance, they discarded them somewhere where they were positive that nobody would be able to recover them.

Eventually, you will acquire the ability to explore and recover artifacts from the rainbow worlds. On the surface of one of these worlds, you will discover the heavily damaged remains of the Mmrnhrm. Through some sort of plot device (once again, my memory fails me exactly as to what), you are able to physically repair them, but you still lack the means to restore their true functioning; like the Chenjesu, the Mmrnhrm had progressed to the point where they were no longer able to function correctly without their partners. The solution, of course, is simple: you just need to find a Sun Device in order to enable the two races to fuse once more. Coincidentally, a race known as the Lk have exactly that. Who knew the Precursors made so many of these things?

The details of your dealings with the Lk are also somewhat sketchy in my mind, but I seem to recall you having to make a devil's deal with them; somewhere in your travels, I believe that you acquire an item that is able to shield a small region of space from the Eternal Ones' perception. The Lk demand this device in exchange for the Sun Device, and you of course provide it. I also seem to recall that the joke is on them; someone mentions at some point that the device either does something entirely different from what the Lk expect, or that it simply was a failure, and never functioned correctly at all. Suffice to say, though, the Sun Device is the final ingredient necessary in order to fuse the Chenjesu and Mmrnhrm, and the reformed Chmmr once again rejoin the alliance.

There are lots of other (irritating) subplots in the game, many of which I don't remember until elements of them are referenced by name. Feel free to ask about any others; while I didn't enjoy the game particularly much, I haven't tried to actively repress the memories of it like some others around here (though as we've seen, my memory is far from infalliable), and I would be happy to spoil it for others if it means they can spend their time doing something more enjoyable.

um... er... ok. That was sort of creepy. Thanks for posting it though.

...wow, that was really convuluted and confusing.

I do like some of the races in SC3, though.

Here are some of the races I like from watching the Youtube videos and reading about them on star control sites:

Chmmr
Orz
Daktaklakpak
Utwig
K'Tang
Exquivan

Some of the others have good puppets, but not good voices or dialogue. Like the VUX.

Yeah, the story for the Chmmr is creepy.  I like the SC2 version better:  They joined DNA so that they are powerful enough to defeat the Ur-Quan.

Thanks Draxas for your post; I never really understood really what the heck is going on in it anyway...

Oh man, I had forgotten how horrible the music was in that game. So bland and irritating compared to the excellent MODs that SC2 had.

Unless I'm completely mistaken, you find another Mother Ark or some such, to repair them with.

I believe you are correct, thinking about it (painful though it may be) some more.

*sigh* So many silly plot devices packed into one awful package. What still gets me to this day is how much of that game you spend running around, performing activities that really earn you zero net gain. Examples are the Chmmr quest, saving the Pkunk, fixing the Ultron, etc. etc. etc.; they seem like they were thrown in for filler and to take up more time, since the net effect is simply returning you to ground state, with your allies returned to the alliance and happy again.

I actually thought the Xchagger plague was Star Control worthy. Intelligent parasites; saving the host means killing the parasites.

Wow...I was actually thinking of buying that game one time when I saw it in a discount bin for like $5, but the aliens on the back looked stupid, so I declined. Glad I did.

What I found particulary frustrating was the implication of this on your colonies. It seemed like half of your colonies were depressed/bifurcated/incapacitated for most of the game. There's nothign as annoying as trying to build a working system of clonies when every race except the humans is predestined to fail you for large portions of the game.

Come to think of it... the Spathi chaneg sides. The VUX change sides.  The Ur-Quan split so you lose half the colonies. The Pkunk become psycho-repressed. The Utwig lose the Ultron. The Chmmr get bifurcated. The Supox get blasted out of existence before you meet them. The Orz side with the Eternal ones. Sowhat functioning allies do you actually have? The Syreen and... is that it? Really great people to work with.

Don't forget the Mycon... Who also abandon you. Blech.

I also found this particularly annoying, but then again, save for the sequence with the Doog, I never found my colonies to be terribly useful for anything except churning out escorts. Considering that there are very few encounters that you can't talk your way out of (and the game seems to ruthlessly discourage combat with the League's constant warnings against agression), it wasn't long before I had a full fleet, in addition to hordes of combat vessels surrounding all my colonies. I very rarely had to do anything significant at a colony other than stop to pick up reinforcements on occasion. Still, it was particularly annoying to find out that those carfully planned colonies of particular races simply up and abandon you, or cease functioning, or whatever.

I admit, I thought the Xchagger subplot was one of the better ones... But that's not saying much. It also negates any sort of moral dilemma when you (rather quickly) realize that you could just as easily extract the Xchagger as kill them. Why gain only one ally, and save only one race, when you can help two? Besides, the game is notorious for having dead-end-decisions that end your game immediately; I wouldn't be surprised too much if killing the Xchaggers is one of them (I never tried it).

Killing the Xchagger will most likely give you the 'Hello I am a dumb terminal with a God complex and am now ending your game' screen. I hated that. Also, all of the 'My allies are broken' quests can be nothing other than their simply realising that the plot is so linear and idiotic - and bearable due to shortness - and screwing it up further.

Not to mention that if you do go throught all the trouble and fix everyone up you end up allied with practicaly everybody in the game!! I mean, thats worse then annoying, at the very end you don't even have a real enemy, just that one Ploxis Plutocrats ship and a bunch of Heralds, Orz and so forth who just don't give you the feel you felt when battling Ur-Quan in SC2. I mean, the game simply sucks so much that it doesn't deserve to be called Star Control in any universe.

I just realized something... the League quadrant, Kessari quadrant, and Crux quandrant can't cover more than 1/4 of the galaxy at best... so I guess the rest of the universe got destroyed.

Or hasn't been explored yet. Or maybe 3/4 of the galaxy was destroyed during the Ur-Quan migrations (Kohr-Ah, maybe).

Why? I'd assume that the Eternal Ones would all be happy with the sentience collector and use it on the entire universe, rather than be wasteful and break everything except these quadrants.

Mmm, well I think the only races that are true SC material are the Yorn and Harika, the Xchagger (definantly, they were one of the only with character) and the K'tang ("Space Orcs that think they're Elves," Ace).

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. For some reason I was thinking it was something else.

And galaxy != universe.

If I remember correctly, the sentience thresher ripped open hyperspace to do its job. Often destroying entire galaxies in the process. Most likely, with the time elapsing between eternal1 visits, new galaxies formed or something.

The Precursor rainbow worlds were supposed to maintain hyperspace and prevent it from collapsing and destroying the galaxy every time the eternal1s visited.

Actually, how do we know that the precursors didn't travel to other galaxies and set up rainbow worlds there as well? I'm sure they had the technology to do that, if they had the tech to build planets.

Soooo, just what do these eternal ones look like? Do they even show you in the game?

Nope! You just dump some glowy orbs into the galacitic core, and everyone goes home happy. ::)

Bah, I expected as much. ::)

You know, fighting a faceless, nameless enemy isn't nearly as interesting as a Ur-Quan. At least they had a backstory and personality.

The Yorn and Harika, Xchagger, and K'Tang all seem pretty cool though. And maybe the Llk (or however you spell it), although I haven't seen any videos of them yet. From what the PONAF says, though, they seem interesting.

Actually the idea of  a faceless nameless enemy has some potential.
If done properly it could totally freak you out.
You could be were aware of the danger coming but unsure of it's nature or cause. Some mysterious accidents would keep happening to you and your friends, and anyone coming close to finding out the truth would end up dead. The New Alliance on the border of collapsing due to unbareable stress of fighting an unknown force, allies accusing eachother of betrayal.
As you learned more of the danger (but without uncovering it's nature) it would become obvious that you'll have face the final battle alone, as you fin yourself surrounded by fewer allies every day.

... could be fun, tough like I said it has to be done properly. And tough the starting setup is easy the ending would be hard to make, because once you get answers to questions that freak you out, you tend to be disappointed.

Prophetic vision after blowing uop the Sa-Matra, check.


Dead Supox, check.


Orz and Syreen accusing eachother, Dak's accusing Chmmr, check.


Every other ally you brought fails in one way or another, check.


Sc3, check.


Oh so very much SC3, check.

So I guess you liked the game then :)

Ahem


;)

But yes, when I was writing that post, it came to my mind SC3 could have attempted what I was talking about.