The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I've never finished the game myself, but one of my friends recently did, and commented on how uncanny this reference was, here's a direct quote from the game.

""Dr. Breen-..ancient stars colonized by sentient fungi. Gas giants, inhabited by vast meteorological intelligences. Worlds stretched thin across the membranes where dimensions intersect...Impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary!"

Mycon, Slylandro, and Arilou covered in one there.

Having never played Half-life 2, I for one would like to know what context Mr. Bean [or whatever his name is] was supposed to have said this in.

Aparantly he was trying to convince the good scientists to join his side and such.

Why? Was he part of the "League of Sentient Races"?

Nope, he was just a villian sort of character who sided up with some humanoid alien invaders (who act a fair amount like the Ur-Quan in that they've enslaved humanity and are trying to say that they're the good guys) and such.

Interesting.
Had these aliens enslaved the Half-Life 2 Mycon, Slylandro, and Arilou counterparts? Or were they just after humans? And what about the weird critters from Half-Life 1? Where did Nihilanth and the grunts and the head crabs go?

Yeah, there do seem to be some parallels to Star Control here.
Do you actually get the option of joining the freak squad in the game?



Hooray! I've been promoted!

Not really covered, but no, you don't get the chance to join such species, this is purely just a reference me'thinks.

Thats pretty cool, even if it isnt an homage, its so spot on!

Actually the Combine act in much the same manner as the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za...

Enslaving races and using them to fight their wars, they have the opinion that they are doing a good deed by "protecting" us from "other evils", and the Combine species themselves resemble slugs or giant slimy meal worms.

As for the races that they've "acquired" i really haven't seen any references to them or what the others look like.

Of course i'm not to reveal the "truth" of what they are and what they are trying to accomplish, since someone here hasn't beaten the game yet.

Although the idea does definitely sound very enticing, I really do not think that HL2 has intentional references to Star Kontrol.

• Although Mycon are sentient fungi, they don't colonize stars.
• Slylandro are never mentioned as being "vast", and atmospheric beasts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_beast) didn't originate with Star Kontrol.
• Falayalaralfali isn't by any means a "world stretched thin across the membranes where dimensions intersect". It's in a bubble of TrueSpace that's suspended in QuasiSpace, that's all.
• I'm surprised that you didn't say that "impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary" is a reference to Orz best-fits; if you did, I'd have replied that this actually sounds like something similar to "words cannot do justice to blah blah blah" rather than "concepts unfathomable to our minds/translation device".
• Enslaving alien races that claim that they're actually good guys isn't too uncommon either; indeed, it seems that people eventually get bored of the cliched alien invaders and want to paint them in some shade of moral ambiguity.

Besides, with a game such as Star Kontrol, that covers so many science fiction themes and motives, it's unavoidable to find similar elements in other works. This alone doesn't make them references. A reference has to be quite obvious if it's intended to point at such an obscure game.

good points made there  :D

Then again, the references don't have to be 100%. It's possible that they have taken strong influence from SC2, but have then altered the species a bit 1) in order not to be complete copycats and 2) to make the species fit better in their game. But this is only a possibility, a theory. Having never played any HLs, this isn't actually very important to me.

Just my two (euro) cents (so that they don't lose their value)