Overall this game is great, however there are some things that might be a bit taxing on the player's patience. On the one hand your character is still a rogue in learning, and starts out with a rather limited skill- and tool-set, not to mention that you start out with very little money. This gets resolved once you beat the first boss though. On the other hand there are several days on which you simply do not know what to do if you missed some side-quests, and spend them training even though you have the feeling that you are missing out on something. What is certainly true, by the way. After finishing the game I decided to spoiler myself a bit, and there would be a lot of stuff to do, if one just explored a bit more. That brings me back to the positive things: Exploring. This game has some timed events, but there's also a lot to discover simply by walking around and trying things out. If you want to, you can ignore all major quests completely, but you'll have to face the consequences if you do so. There are plenty of side quests hidden in the castle, and there's a lot of lore to uncover simply by talking to characters or reading item descriptions. The time system is an interesting gameplay mechanics, as time only progresses as long as you do something. If you stand still, no time passes. This allows you to tactically outmaneuver opponents while sneaking, but also puts some pressure on you not to discuss everything with everybody, simply because you don't have the time to. Combat starts out pretty simple, as you do not have the tools needed for a more tactical approach. Later in the game it gets quite a bit more interesting, especially with opponents having varied attacks at their disposal. Last, but not least: The social interactions in the game feel well written, and the characters are, while a bit predictable, still interesting enough to make the player want to learn about their background. I'll definitely play this again at some point.
SC2 is an awesome adventure in (2D) space. Find resources, upgrade your fleet, battle hostile aliens, uncover what happens to the various peoples in the last few decades. Maybe, if you succeed, you can even free earth, reunite the alliance of free stars (or [Your name]'s empire, if you like) and save countless lives from a threat that I won't uncover here, as that would be a massive spoiler. Oh, and be prepared: To say the dialogues are funny or humorous wouldn't do them justice. Even the term hilarious might be an understatement. Nevertheless, I wouldn't play the DOS version of SC2, as there's a "better" alternative: The data files of the PC version of SC2 have been released under a Creative Commons license, and the source code of the 3DO version of SC2 is available under the GPL. The excellent programmers of the UQM developers team have put an enormous effort into porting the 3DO version to modern operating systems (including, but not limited to OS X, Linux, Android, Windows, OpenDingux,...) under the name Ur-Quan Masters. UQM has decent upscaling, so the graphics also looks acceptable on modern monitors, and if that's not enough, there's also an HD mod available. Given the licenses mentioned above, one doesn't need to own a copy of SC2 in order to play UQM, but as it's an excellent game, one should seriously consider paying nevertheless.
