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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Star Control & Ur-Quan Masters

19:00 / 22.09.06

Come, come with me back to a time when mouse control was an unnecessary luxury, that's right back to 1992 when Star Control was all the rage. It's a space combat game on the one hand like the (even older) Space Wars, two spaceships duelling near a planet with a wrapping screen. There are dozens of ships designed by different aliens, each with it's own characteristics and special weapons, you have a fleet of them and your opponent has a different fleet- it's like an enormously complex paper-scissors-stone in a way.

On the other level it's an explore-the-galaxy adventure where you befriend alien races, initiate plot events, battle a strange extradimensional menace and modify your ship with money made from mining planets for minerals. It's huge, and you buy ships for your fleet and fight aliens when they find you, the aim is to re-forge The Alliance of Free Stars and smash the evil Ur-Quan Heirarchy of Battle Thralls to free the Earth from the slave-shield the Ur-Quan have imprisoned it under.
They are evil and cunning predatory caterpillars 10 meters long. Look at their evil ugly faces!

Wikipedia says;

To many, the game's strongest aspect is its atmosphere. The carefully designed plot significantly impacts the game experience by requiring the player to explore every corner of the galaxy and make discoveries and connections independently; all this, occurring within a huge game world featuring numerous alien species, a vast number of star systems to visit, and dynamic events depending on the actions of the player created a powerful sense of openness, cause-and-effect functionality, and freedom; this gives the player the feeling that they are indeed interacting with a realistic universe instead of merely pitting their wits against those of the game designers."

The wiki is called the Ultronomicon which is cool, and you can download it free here- Ur-Quan Masters.

Janean Patience

09:36 / 23.09.06

Some of my happiest Amiga memories are of this game with two players. We never touched the strategy bit. It was all about the aliens, the combat, pitting the strengths of one craft against the weaknesses of another, and inventing our own absurd mythologies for the alien races.

Even just on arcade mode, it's easy to see that a great deal of care has been taken constructing very different aliens. As well as your ship in the gameplay screen, you see the pilot on the right - and as you move, the pilot does stuff. Pulls levers, flips switches, or light arcs from one crystal to another in the case of the Chenjesu. (possibly spelt wrong.)

For some reason, this obessive level of detail gave our young, weed-addled minds all the start we needed to construct an additional layer of crap. The Ur-quan, we claimed, were only murderous monsters because of the exquisite musical skills they possessed at the moment of an enemy's death. ("Another victory. Pass me my lute.") The ethereal Chenjesu only wanted planets so they could open low-rent businesses like chippys and bookies on them. Captain Falkenburg, one of the many Terran characters taken from sci-fi classics, was from a long line of captains and wore an eyepatch on each eye.

Sorry. Babbling. How are you playing it, on an emulator? Is it PC compatible? Am I being foolish, in hoping to relive wasted evenings of my youth?

13:42 / 23.09.06

Not foolish, it's just as good as you remember. It's PC compatible (version 5.0) and is about 2 meg, mostly sound, and SCII has loads of new scary ships including the Ur-Quan's more evil cousins who fire giant spinning ninja stars and use a Fiery Ring of Inevitable and Eternal Destruction (F.R.I.E.D). Wicked.

KABOOM! Pass me my lute.

17:45 / 25.09.06

Shit it's hard though. I've just had to start again after I took too long forming the alliance and the Kzohr-Ar went on a death march and annihilated everything inncluding the Earth. Dammit, modern games are easy.

18:30 / 27.09.06

Sigh... *fine, I'll download it...

20:16 / 28.09.06

And now I'm slightly hooked...

I recommend this to anyone thinking "well... should I download it? Or should I just sit right here on this fence?"

14:51 / 02.10.06

On my third attempt, now working out how to do the quests in the right order and how to kill the invisible Ilwrath without getting toasted by their flame breath...

16:55 / 02.10.06

I find the best way is to use the mothership with twice-upgraded guns - then they fire in a spread pattern in front of you and are more or less guaranteed to hit.

You will lose some crew, and taking on three or more in sequence will get you toasted, but it improved my chances.

Oh, and I love the oddball alien on Pluto! And the probes!

19:01 / 03.10.06

Two Hellbore cannon and a couple of Tracking devices do the job, as long as you have enough dynamos. Problem is, it's too late by the time you get that upgraded.

SPOILER WARNING this is the walkthrough guide to how to do it in the right order;
http://uqm.stack.nl/wiki/Walkthrough

Don't look until you've tried a couple of times though!

15:02 / 05.10.06

Eureka! The trick is to go through the Arilou quasi-space portal on the 17th (after retrieving the crashed Ur-Quan dreadnought's Warp Drive) and befriend them, so the greys can make you a warpgate spawner, so you don't have all the tedious trekking about through hyperspace.
Now all I have to do is destroy the Sa-Matra and watch the ending movie and I can get into DefCon...

16:54 / 05.10.06

You make it sound so simple!

00:40 / 12.10.06

After a bit of mining you can get a few fuel tanks and thrusters and go to Alpha Pavonis VII (top left area of the starmap) to get the Ur-Quan pod, the on the way back go to the Chandrasekhar constellation on the 17th-20th and gointothe portal that will appear in hyperspace. Then ignore the nearby portals and go up and right to the Arilou homeworld (look at the starmap in quasispace, the autopilot is handy- return and then shift).
The Sa-Matra turns out to be hideously difficult to destroy though, maybe if I carry a load of Shofixti kamikaze ships that might work..

18:17 / 13.10.06

Hmmm... I'm kind of wandering at the moment. I've sent the Ilwrath off to their doom by pretending to be their gods, and I'm trying to find the Shofixti... But I'm still, just, wandering, really...

14:20 / 16.10.06

The last of the Shofixti is at Delta Gorno, kinda bottom middle. I found if you hit / on the starmap and type a star or system name it will highlight it for you, which is pretty handy for the autopiloting.
I wandered for ages and then the Kohr-Arh killed everything in the galaxy and I had to start again, grr.