Star Control III

Star Control 3 is not an unplayable game. Not quite. It is, however, following in the footsteps of a great game, and everything in it ends up looking worse by comparison. Not that a lot of it wasn't bad. Where Star Control 2 had a clear, unambiguous 2D starmap, perhaps slightly overpopulated but easy to navigate around, Star Control 3 returns to the original game's rotating spherical starmap, which worked in the original because any given star had the routes from it clearly marked, and any one of those routes took one action. Simple, clear. In SC3, not only is it impossible to tell where anything is relative to anything else, you HAVE to know where things are relative to other things, since it operates on the fuel system from SC2. But you'll have no way to intuit how much fuel you're using, since the fantastic Hyperspace environment from the second game has been abandoned in favour of instantaneous "warp bubble" travel. And should you run out of fuel? Star Control 2 solved that problem by having the enigmatic traders mysteriously show up just when you needed help and sell you enough fuel to get home at an extortionate price. In Star Control 3, you're stuck wherever you happened to be, and have to set up a permanent (and probably vastly suboptimal) colony there of whatever aliens you have to hand, then wait for them to very, very slowly produce fuel. Or you could have a load of them pile into the construction yard and hope that they get the message and don't start building ore refineries or whatever. Colonies... well, taking away the planet lander minigame from SC2 is a tragedy in itself, but even examined on their own merits they're just dumb. For a start, it's basically impossible to tell from a scan of the planet what kinds of aliens will thrive there, or where they'll thrive best, unless you try it and see. Worse, the fact that there IS a pattern, if an incredibly obtuse one, means that the beautiful planetary surface renderings from Star Control 2 have been replaced with an eye-bleeding thermal map - at least that's what I assume it is. Ugh. The population assigned to each building in the colony is controlled by sliders, but in a difficult to estimate proportional sense - for instance, having all the sliders exactly halfway up is the same as having them all the way up. This system was later used for music frequency in Super Smash Bros Brawl, and it sucked there too. At least in Brawl the music didn't really matter from a gameplay point of view. That leads me nicely onto the music. It's dull and boring, fairly standard MIDI fare with no abundance of memorable and quirky tunes and sounds. SC2's MOD files, with their inbuilt sound samples, allowed for all kinds of things to make their way into the music, from the Taco Bell to Scooby-Doo, and the composers made the most of almost every track. By far the worst offence is the combat music - SC2's tense, understated track is replaced by a horrible, overly-busy MIDI cacophony that distracts from the battle. And oh dear, those battles. "How could they mess it up?" you might ask. "They're exactly the same as Star Control 1 and 2!" Hold your horses, my friend. There's a couple of serious differences. Firstly, the fact that every time you booted up the game, the battle defaulted to side-on, pseudo-3D view, which was a nice idea except it was actually a horrible idea given that a) it's a top-down game fought in a square arena, b) the 3D technology at the time was still entirely sprite-based and c) in space, you have no point of comparison for perspective. You can shift back to the traditional top-down, and I heartily recommend you do so if I somehow fail to put you off playing this game, but the button for that isn't clear either. I believe it's F5. Secondly, the AI is completely retarded. Either it'll fly into you at top speed, or if it's faster than you it'll turtle at the other side of the screen forever (the screen covers half of the arena in each direction, so turning around and going the other way doesn't help. Just for fun, try the Arilou vs the Chmmr. The Chmmr is a big, bulky ship with a short-range laser and point defense satellites, which keeps opponents in range with its tractor beam. The Arilou is a tiny, quick ship with a short-range laser that's immune to the tractor beam. The AI therefore decides its only option is to literally never die. And you can't exit out of battles in progress, so time to reach for that CTRL-ALT-DEL, or just fly into the planet a few times. Of course, even if you didn't mean to fly into the planet, if your ship's large enough that pretty much spells instant death cause they didn't have enough things to fuck up in the name of 'improvement', so they turned gravity up a bunch. Did I mention that Star Control battle arenas always have 4 destructible asteroids flying around which are liable to smack you right into said planet? Well now you know. And no, the asteroids don't serve any other purpose. Star Control 2 played with it a little, having one ship which regenerated its weapon energy by absorbing asteroids. That ship's gone now, along with a bunch of others that don't appear in the single-player. Seems reasonable? Shut up, it's not. Star Control 1's ships were all balanced against each other, and Star Control 2 made sure to include all of them in the vs mode, even if they didn't appear in the story. It wasn't just good for nostalgia, or seeing how the new kids stacked up against the Old Hierarchy. It was part of the game balance. Star Control 3 threw a lot of races away, even ones that by rights should have been there, painted all the returning ships grey and made them hideous and then added a bunch of new ones, most of which were also grey and hideous. The Supox was a particularly insulting case - a valuable contributor to the New Alliance in SC2, they even came with you to SC3's sector but mysteriously disappeared before the start of the game, possibly in a misguided attempt to 'up the ante' and make a certain other race seem more threatening, or possibly because the Supox ship, with its rapid-firing gun, would have seemed too similar to a good 3 or 4 of the new ones. Shitting on old things seems to have been the order of the day, really. Not only are the ships uglified, the new puppets for SC3 look nothing like SC2's beautiful animated paintings by such illustrious artists as Erol Otus, whose name may be familiar to DnD fans. Colour shifts, redesigns, outright ruination in the case of the beautiful blue space babes, the Syreen - appealing turned into appalling somewhere down the line. Also, the fact that the puppets were being recorded in real time meant that they were jumping between different poses every time they started or finished a new section of dialogue, the most infamous example being the Harika eating his symbiotic Yorn partner - who instantly reappears in his pocket for the freeze-frame afterwards. The dialogue is mediocre, with the best bits having been blatantly ripped wholesale from Star Control 2. The voice acting is mostly fairly bad, and utterly fails to coincide with anything from SC2's 3DO dub. Admittedly those voice actors were amateurs, mainly staff and their family members, but the fact that they did a much better job than presumably paid professionals is dire. The best you can say for it is that it does the story complete justice - because the story's rubbish too. Well, it's not COMPLETE drivel, but it's fairly poor. Again, following the policy of "rip Star Control 2's head off and shit down its neck", pretty much every dangling plot point the creators left open is grabbed, stretched beyond the point of credulity and tied together into a nice bow, then sprinkled with glitter made from pure fuckin' DNA magic. Even things that already had satisfying answers get dragged up and reanswered for no reason at all. Why do the VUX hate us? Because they're preening narcissists who place way too much importance on their own beauty and see us as incredibly ugly? No, fuck you, now there's a new reason that we just made up and makes perfect sense because DNA can do anything! What happened to the Precursors? Answers! What's up with the ambiguously-weird-threatening Orz? Answers! What's up with the ambiguously weird Roswellian Arilou? Answers! What exactly are the true details of how the Mycon turn green, lush planets into shattered molten slagheaps? Answers! wait nobody wanted to know that. Without spoiling anything, the two main ideas behind the game's story are that DNA is magic and that sentience is a thing, possibly some kind of 'energy', that you can move around and give to people, with a healthy dose of "answering questions makes things more interesting". Massive infodumps that only destroy the interesting ambiguity behind every mystery in the game are fun, right? No they're not, and it's a good thing pretty much everyone in the admittedly-small fan community, including the creators of Star Control 2 (who had nothing to do with this game except having written the directly-ripped dialogue), consider this travesty non-canon or they'd have nothing to talk about. The true nature of the Orz, the Precursors and the Arilou are still topics of question to this day. If you skipped to the end when you saw how long this rant was, congratulations, you've proved Star Control 3 is not the game for you and can save yourself the time and money. Go play something more fun. Like Daikatana. If you read the whole thing, I hope I've managed to convince you to do that anyway. This game was an insult to the series and barely stood up on its own two feet even without the pressure of having to live up to SC2. Oh, did I mention that if you do certain things in the wrong order it's possible for the game's event engine to just lock up and refuse to make anything story-related happen ever again? Cause that happens! Bye!