The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I played Star Control 2 for the 3DO years ago.
It is a great game.
I am thinking of buying the PC game Star Control 3.
I heard that the people who made Star Control 2 didn't design it.
Is it a good game?
Will it run in WinXP?

It's the one that says:
The fate of  a thousand worlds is in your hands...AGAIN

The Adventure Starts Here...
Hyper-space travel has mysteriously stopped and the fabric of the universe is unraveling.
You are the Senior Commander of the League of Sentient Races and you must prevent a catastrophic future where the universe ceases to exist.

 

A string of puzzling clues points you and your small fleet to the unexplored Kassari Quadrant.

There, the fate of a 1000 worlds is in your hands
Make Friends and Influence Aliens
On your mission you will meet strange and exotic alien races, learn their cultures, gather intelligence, and negotiate tactical alliances.
If you're going to save the universe you'll need all the help you can get, even if it comes from the Pkunk.
Since everything depends on you, you'll need puzzle-solving skills and an alien sense of humor!
The fabric of the universe is crumbling and its up to you to find the answer somewhere in the unexplored reached of the Kessari Quadrant.
Your are in control of a star fleet searching hundreds of planets.
Your quest is to unravel the secret to the universe's oldest and deadliest mystery

 

 Pilot 24 different alien starships, use 48 unique weapons

·         Manage the resources of over 30 colonies and 24 races

·         Discover more than 40 ancient artifacts from an advanced technology

·         Deploy your starfleet strategically for victorious Hyper Melee Combat

·         Play Hyper Melee against the computer or a friend at the same keyboard, or across a serial, modem, or LAN connection

·         Interact with 24 aliens designed by Hollywood's top- SFX artists

·         An epic adventure with a huge universe to explore - over 1000 planets and moons!

It's not a good game.  The characters are puppets with very limited and repetitive movements.  There are bugs in the game that can crash the game, and sometimes the fast ships just run away and the melee never ends.

And there's mining, and colony management; personally, I liked the adventure of SC2 better...

No, it will not run in Windows XP.  You need to get DOSBox to run SC3.

Edit:  Actually, it does run on XP.

Honestly, SC3 isn't a bad game, just like the Godfather 3 isn't a bad movie. It's just that none of them can stand up to their legacies and thus pale in comparison. Don't play SC3 expecting more of what made SC2 good.

SC3 is a mediocre game at best. If you liked the dialog in SC2, you'll probably get a sense of deja-vu playing the game; a great deal of it was plagarized verbatim. That remains my most abiding impression of the game to this day, 10 years later.

If you want to save yourself some time, effort, money, and likely disappointment, check out this thread instead of playing the game (Warning: Super-spoilerrific for nearly every major event in the game):

http://uqm.stack.nl/forum/index.php?topic=3206.0

You know, that title probably made some people wretch and die as soon as they saw it.

Even standing on its own merits (excluding setting thrashing, copy/pasted dialogue from SC2, etc), SC3 is a bad game in my opinion.  I had to restart multiple times due to time-trigger related bugs, and just plain bad design.  The music was dreary; the colors were dreary; the basic plot in the game was dreary (you can't stop the big enemy, defying the whole concept of the epic story [the fate of a thousand worlds is in their hands: you had better grovel correctly!]).

I didn't like SC3 either.  Lots of nonsensical dialogue, bugs galore, poor storyline flow and writing, all of the above.

What truly killed it, though, was the absolutely horrid combat.  The "3D" view was only good for getting yourself killed, and even in 2D mode the ships weren't even vaguely balanced.  SC1 and SC2 both have very few matchups that are effectively un-winnable with any combination of ships, but such a situation is the norm in SC3, not the exception.  It made for extremely frustrating gameplay, as you were simply forced to use certain ships to counter others due to the impossibility of hurting them (due to ship speed or defensive power).

SC_not3 a good game?







Wonderful weather we're having lately, isn't it?

I keep hearing this over and over from people. While I agree that the SC3 story as a standalone wasn't that bad, I still don't understand how people can just ignore:


The story is not everything. If the game is broken (and uninspiring in every way to boot), the story will not save it. Hell, if I had had to restart SC2 as often as I did SC3, I surely wouldn't be on this forum now.

hmmm..... my sc2 version was buggy as hell.  :P  Lots of times when i selected a star in the starmap the game would crash. But the game was so awesome i would simply restart it immediately and continue playing. I think there are very few games where i would have put up with this.

anyways to add to the thread subject: Imho the worst about sc3 is the removal of several sc1 and sc2 ships, even from melee!

In a word, no.

Out of curiosity, was this the first version of the game that came out or something? I got the CD version containing SC1 & SC2 and never had any trouble of that sort.

I had the floppy disc version of SC2.  Never had any issues with the starmap other than trying to find specific stars.

However, that does bring something to mind - I do recall reading somewhere a while back that the *cough*pirated*cough* version had issues with the starmap...


Icemage

Yep, it was the crack that screwed everything up.

The game wasn't too bad for the five minutes it worked before some crippling bug crashed it.

Even Daggerfall wasn't that buggy.  And Daggerfall at least had some redeeming features.

Interesting. I assume there were several different cracks then? I know my CD version of SC2 actually came with a crack that disabled the copy-protection system. And as I said before,  my version workde just fine.

Also, if you obtain an illegal crack for a game, in my opinion you shouldn't really complain about stability.

Perhaps you are right, it is possible that I had an earlier version of the game.
My version came with a text file, describing Paul's and Fred's escape to Alaska in order to finish the game. It said they were found, but they went hiding again, and since it wasn't known when they'll show up again, they (the writers of the text file whoever they were) have released the version they had on them at the moment.
So, maybe I had a beta version of some sort.

[note: I might have gotten some facts wrong, I saw the file in question more then a decade ago]

...or it could be an earlier version of the crack...


But of course, I would have never dream of complaining, I was just trying to help clarify matters.
And perhaps the original complainer forgot about this minor aspect of his copy of the game when he wrote his post, it was a long time ago after all.

That file was in the official floppy release.

Probably. I think quite a few different cracks have been released for SC2.

That was in refrence to Icemage, not you. He stated that his version was buggy, and so far it seems as if only the illegal crack accomplished such buggyness. You merely expanded and explained. ;)

Yes, it was the crack that damaged the starmap. *cough cough*

I had the problem for a while, then lost sc2 for 3 months.
Got it back without problem the second time.

Multiple crack versions? makes sense...

Not true, i run it on XP just fine.

I stand corrected.

yup, it was a pirated version of sc2 which i first played :-[. I did buy one after i finished the adventure part tho because i just couldnt stop playing melee with my friends. I dont think i ever played the adventure part with the legal copy tho. I always assumed it had the same problem   :)

Daggerfall had more bugs in it than an anthill.  Can you seriously say SC3 was worse?

I've no idea, never played it. How is this relevant to anything though? Are you implying that just because something else was worse, SC3 should be viewed more leniently? If so, I argue that my first computer back in the 90s was extremly crap. Henceforth, noone else should complain about thier computers ever, because mine was worse than theirs.

Or are you just making random observations?

Yes.  Ignoring the bugs in SC3 still leaves us with a very linear plot and bad ideas which were poorly implemented.  Daggerfall had a lot of good ideas, and was incredibly non-linear.  If something was time based, you actually had _things_to_do_ while you waited.  Often, I ignored the plot, and just went around exploring (hmm, sounds like SC2...).  SC2 had bugs too.  But the bugs in SC2 and daggerfall made things fun (infinite resources, flying around in a cart, "falling" through stairs in a dungeon to skip portions).

Actually I was asking somebody else on page 1 that made the observation, I just forgot to quote it.  Suppose it would have made a little more sense that way.   ;D