The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Performing my usual community service, I figured some of you might not visit PNF often enough to find out that one of the fellows over there just posted a video grab from the canned StarCon, which he recently managed to get his hands on. Eventual goal is to release the proto itself. PNF front page (http://www.star-control.com) as usual.

Edit: Although since there seems to be some formatting issues (again), you might want to check out the story on SCDB, news or mod board.

I didn't like it at all !!
From the movie it looks like Wing Commander arcade game ... It seems to have nothing to do with SC games , ships are unrecognizable ... It seems from the reference to Crux they have taken Accolade's path , even though you defeat and befriend all it's members in  SC3 ... The only thing to connect it to SC world would be the brown Ur-Quan ...

Which move their tentacles like some sort of squid for some reason. But StarCon was supposed to take the SC saga further away from StarControl 1 and 2. I think the long range plan was to slowly cycle out most original content, since TfB had copyrights on that, until only the name remained to be used as sales material.

It's quite interesting to watch though. Such a different path to take.

Big files that can't be read. Fabulous.

Although I remember looking at a few screenshots at the time, this is the first time I've ever seen gameplay video.

Having said that, I'm really glad this game wasn't made. I think this would have made SC3 looked like an all time great. I remember reading that they were going for a Colony Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Wars) type game, but this looks a lot worse then anything I ever saw out of that franchise. Granted, this is basically beta footage, but I'm happy the Star Control franchise never officially went down this path.

I have no idea what this means. I downloaded it and it worked fine. Well, with VLC at least. Anthony also uploaded it to Viddler, so PNF frontpage or StarController gives you an option to watch it online.

It looks like the game was well-designed, but they didn't think too much about gameplay. Is that ship supposed to be a VUX Intruder, or is it just a sort of flagship?

Personally I don't think successful 2D games should be evolved into 3D games. Leave 2D games as 2D, and just let brand new titles be 3D.

It reminds me of Privateer, which wasn't a bad game. But it's no Star Control.

The archive 'decompresses' into a 0 kilobyte AVI.

Anyway, got it off viddler.

this... is not star control. I don't recognize anything but the Ur-Quan. Nav-rings? Seemed repetitive. The shots were all fast enough and the turrets all fluidly adjustable, so that dodging wasn't going to be terribly useful.

Your download must have screwed up somehow. It worked fine for me, and for Anthony as well since he managed to upload it.


I wondered about the Nav-rings as well. The Ur-Quan is pretty stupid, not very impressive.

The archive is password-protected for some reason, as the PNF announcement said. I bet you tried to uncompress it without specifying the password.

Yeah I also struggled to play the .avi.

But got it off starcontroller.com

All I can say is that it looked to be a turd of a game. I think it would have bombed big time if released.

And this is why we should leave such things to TFB, and not try to do it ourselves (I lasted up to 1:45 and then fast forwarded the rest). I greet the idea for making new SC games, but am revolted at what my eyes see - making a "shoot'em up" from SC??? Wth?! It looks like a bad copy of Freelancer or something :P

I'm all for innovations and all, but making a legendary space adventure game into an "space FPS" is simply wrong.

However much you bet, pay up. I entered the password exactly as given. Plus, why would it even produce a file, instead of just saying 'no'? Anyway, I got it off the feed, so whatever.

Truly bizzare. I wonder why it worked fine for some and not for others. Oh well, the main thing is that everyone got to see it. I think I'll download and upload the next one myself before making a news post, to save on the frustration.

Bumping this to let you know that a playable version of Starcon was posted by a guy over on the SCDB (http://www.star-control.com/forum/index.php/topic,1882.0.html). His link is long since dead, although he seems to be hanging around to answer questions in case any one is interested. It's been rehosted (http://starcontroller.com/?p=991) by Anthony over on StarController.

It's a piece of SC history, a thing that never was.