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Star Control II

In this vaguely disturbing picture of Toys for Bob from 1994, Paul Reiche is at center and Fred Ford to the right. Ken Ford, who joined shortly after Star Control II was completed, is to the left.

There must have been something in the games industry’s water circa 1992 when it came to the subject of sequels. Instead of adhering to the traditional guidelines — more of the same, perhaps a little bigger — the sequels of that year had a habit of departing radically from their predecessors in form and spirit. For example, we’ve recently seen how Virgin Games released a Dune II from Westwood Studios that had absolutely nothing to do with the same year’s Dune I, from Cryo Interactive. But just as pronounced is the case of Accolade’s Star Control II, a sequel which came from the same creative team as Star Control I, yet which was so much more involved and ambitious as to relegate most of what its predecessor had to offer to the status of a mere minigame within its larger whole. In doing so, it made gaming history. While Star Control I is remembered today as little more than a footnote to its more illustrious successor, Star Control II remains as passionately loved as any game from its decade, a game which still turns up regularly on lists of the very best games ever made.

Like those of many other people, Paul Reiche III’s life was irrevocably altered by his first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s. “I was in high school,” he remembers, “and went into chemistry class, and there was this dude with glasses who had these strange fantasy illustrations in front of him in these booklets. It was sort of a Napoleon Dynamite moment. Am I repulsed or attracted to this? I went with attracted to it.”

In those days, when the entire published corpus of Dungeons & Dragons consisted of three slim, sketchy booklets, being a player all but demanded that one become a creator — a sort of co-designer, if you will — as well. Reiche and his friends around Berkeley, California, went yet one step further, becoming one of a considerable number of such folks who decided to self-publish their creative efforts. Their most popular product, typed out by Reiche’s mother on a Selectric typewriter and copied at Kinko’s, was a book of new spells called The Necromican.

That venture eventually crashed and burned when it ran afoul of that bane of all semi-amateur businesses, the Internal Revenue Service. It did, however, help to secure for Reiche what seemed the ultimate dream job to a young nerd like him: working for TSR itself, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He contributed to various products there, but soon grew disillusioned by the way that his own miserable pay contrasted with the rampant waste and mismanagement around him, which even a starry-eyed teenage RPG fanatic like him couldn’t fail to notice. The end came when he spoke up in a meeting to question the purchase of a Porsche as an executive’s company car. That got him “unemployed pretty dang fast,” he says.

So, he wound up back home, attending the University of California, Berkeley, as a geology major. But by now, it was the 1980s, and home computers — and computer games — were making their presence felt among the same sorts of people who tended to play Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, Reiche had been friends for some time already with one of the most prominent designers in the new field: Jon Freeman of Automated Simulations, designer of Temple of Apshai, the most sophisticated of the very early proto-CRPGs. Reiche got his first digital-game credit by designing The Keys of Acheron, an “expansion pack” for Temple of Apshai‘s sequel Hellfire Warrior, for Freeman and Automated. Not long after, Freeman had a falling-out with his partner and left Automated to form Free Fall Associates with his wife, programmer Anne Westfall. He soon asked Reiche to join them. It wasn’t a hard decision to make: compared to the tabletop industry, Reiche remembers, “there was about ten times the money in computer games and one-tenth the number of people.”

Freeman, Westfall, and Reiche made a big splash very quickly, when they were signed as one of the first group of “electronic artists” to join a new publisher known as Electronic Arts. Free Fall could count not one but two titles among EA’s debut portfolio in 1983: Archon, a chess-like game where the pieces fought it out with one another, arcade-style, under the players’ control; and Murder on the Zinderneuf, an innovative if not entirely satisfying procedurally-generated murder-mystery game. While the latter proved to be a slight commercial disappointment, the former more than made up for it by becoming a big hit, prompting the trio to make a somewhat less successful sequel in 1984.

After that, Reiche parted ways with Free Fall to become a sort of cleanup hitter of a designer for EA, working on whatever projects they felt needed some additional design input. With Evan and Nicky Robinson, he put together Mail Order Monsters, an evolution of an old Automated Simulations game of monster-movie mayhem, and World Tour Golf, an allegedly straight golf simulation to which the ever-whimsical Reiche couldn’t resist adding a real live dinosaur as the mother of all hazards on one of the courses. Betwixt and between these big projects, he also lent a helping hand to other games: helping to shape the editor in Adventure Construction Set, making some additional levels for Ultimate Wizard.

Another of these short-term consulting gigs took him to a little outfit called Binary Systems, whose Starflight, an insanely expansive game of interstellar adventure, had been in production for a couple of years already and showed no sign of being finished anytime soon. This meeting would, almost as much as his first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons, shape the future course of Reiche’s career, but its full import wouldn’t become clear until years later. For now, he spent two weeks immersed in the problems and promise of arguably the most ambitious computer game yet proposed, a unique game in EA’s portfolio in that it was being developed exclusively for the usually business-oriented MS-DOS platform rather than a more typical — and in many ways more limited — gaming computer. He bonded particularly with Starflight‘s scenario designer, an endlessly clever writer and artist named Greg Johnson, who was happily filling his galaxy with memorable and often hilarious aliens to meet, greet, and sometimes beat in battle.

Reiche’s assigned task was to help the Starflight team develop a workable conversation model for interacting with all these aliens. Still, he was thoroughly intrigued with all aspects of the project, so much so that he had to be fairly dragged away kicking and screaming by EA’s management when his allotted tenure with Binary Systems had expired. Even then, he kept tabs on the game right up until its release in 1986, and was as pleased as anyone when it became an industry landmark, a proof of what could be accomplished when designers and programmers had a bigger, more powerful computer at their disposal — and a proof that owners of said computers would actually buy games for them if they were compelling enough. In these respects, Starflight served as nothing less than a harbinger of computer gaming’s future. At the same, though, it was so far out in front of said future that it would stand virtually alone for some years to come. Even its sequel, released in 1989, somehow failed to recapture the grandeur of its predecessor, despite running in the same engine and having been created by largely the same team (including Greg Johnson, and with Paul Reiche once again helping out as a special advisor).

Well before Starflight II‘s release, Reiche left EA. He was tired of working on other people’s ideas, ready to take full control of his own creative output for the first time since his independent tabletop work as a teenager a decade before. With a friend named Fred Ford, who was the excellent programmer Reiche most definitely wasn’t, he formed a tiny studio — more of a partnership, really — called Toys for Bob. The unusual name came courtesy of Reiche’s wife, a poet who knew the value of words. She said, correctly, that it couldn’t help but raise the sort of interesting questions that would make people want to look closer — like, for instance, the question of just who Bob was. When it was posed to him, Reiche liked to say that everyone who worked on a Toys for Bob game should have his own Bob in mind, serving as an ideal audience of one to be surprised and delighted.

Reiche and Ford planned to keep their company deliberately tiny, signing only short-term contracts with outsiders to do the work that they couldn’t manage on their own. “We’re just people getting a job done,” Reiche said. “There are no politics between [us]. Once you start having art departments and music departments and this department and that department, the organization gets a life of its own.” They would manage to maintain this approach for a long time to come, in defiance of all the winds of change blowing through the industry; as late as 1994, Toys for Bob would permanently employ only three people.

Yet Reiche and Ford balanced this small-is-beautiful philosophy with a determination to avoid the insularity that could all too easily result. They made it a policy to show Toys for Bob’s designs-in-progress to many others throughout their evolution, and to allow the contracters they hired to work on them the chance to make their own substantive creative inputs. For the first few years, Toys for Bob actually shared their offices with another little collective who called themselves Johnson-Voorsanger Productions. They included in their ranks Greg Johnson of Starflight fame and one Robert Leyland, whom Reiche had first met when he did the programming for Murder on the Zinderneuf — Anne Westfall had had her hands full with Archon — back in the Free Fall days. Toys for Bob and Johnson-Voorsanger, these two supposedly separate entities, cross-pollinated one another to such an extent that they might almost be better viewed as one. When the latter’s first game, the cult-classic Sega Genesis action-adventure ToeJam & Earl, was released in 1991, Reiche and Ford made the credits for “Invaluable Aid.” And the influence which Leyland and particularly Johnson would have on Toys for Bob’s games would be if anything even more pronounced.

Toys for Bob’s first game, which they developed for the publisher Accolade, was called Star Control. With it, Reiche looked all the way back to the very dawn of digital gaming — to the original Spacewar!, the canonical first full-fledged videogame ever, developed on a DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology circa 1962. In Star Control as in Spacewar!, two players — ideally, two humans, but potentially one human and one computer player, or even two computer players if the “Cyborg Mode” is turned on — fight it out in an environment that simulates proper Newtonian physics, meaning objects in motion stay in motion until a counter-thrust is applied. Players also have to contend with the gravity wells of the planets around them — these in place of the single star which affects the players’ ships in Spacewar! — as they try to blow one another up. But Star Control adds to this formula a wide variety of ships with markedly differing weaponry, defensive systems, sizes, and maneuvering characteristics. In best rock-paper-scissors fashion, certain units have massive advantages over others and vice versa, meaning that a big part of the challenge is that of maneuvering the right units into battle against the enemy’s. As in real wars, most of the battles are won or lost before the shooting ever begins, being decided by the asymmetries of the forces the players manage to bring to bear against one another. Reiche:

It was important to us that each alien ship was highly differentiated. What it means is, unlike, say, Street Fighter, where your characters are supposedly balanced with one another, our ships weren’t balanced at all, one on one. One could be very weak, and one could be very strong, but the idea was, your fleet of ships, your selection of ships in total, was as strong as someone else’s, and then it came down to which match-up did you find. One game reviewer called it, “Rock, Scissors, Vapor,” which I thought was a great expression.

Of course, even the worst match-ups leave a sliver of hope that a brilliant, valorous performance on the field of battle can yet save the day.

You can play Star Control in “Melee” mode as a straight-up free-for-all. Each player gets seven unique ships from the fourteen in the game, from which she gets to choose one for each battle. First player to destroy all of her opponent’s ships wins. But real strategy — that is to say, strategy beyond the logic of rock-paper-scissors match-ups — comes into play only with the full game, which takes the form of a collection of scenarios where each player must deploy her fleet over a galactic map. In the more complex scenarios, controlling more star systems means more resources at one’s disposal, which can be used to build more and better ships at a player’s home starbase; this part of the game draws heavily from the beloved old Atari 8-bit classic Star Raiders. A scenario editor is also included for players who get bored with the nine scenarios that come with the game.

Star Control strains nobly to accommodate many different play styles and preferences. Just as it’s possible to turn on Cyborg Mode in the strategy game and let the computer do the fighting, it’s also possible to turn on “Psytron Mode” and let the computer do the strategy while you concentrate on blowing stuff up.

Star Control in action. The red ship is the infamous Syreen Penetrator.

Yet the aspect of Star Control that most players seem to remember best has nothing to do with any of these efforts to be all things to all players. At some point in the development process, Reiche and Ford realized they needed a context for all this interstellar violence. They came up with an “Alliance of Free Stars” — which included Earthlings among its numbers — fighting a war against the evil “Ur-Quan Heirarchy.” Each group of allies/thralls conveniently consists of seven species, each with their own unique model of spaceship. Not being inclined to take any of this too seriously, Toys for Bob let their whimsy run wild in creating all these aliens, enlisting Greg Johnson — the creator of the similarly winsome and hilarious aliens who inhabit the galaxy of Starflight — to add his input as well. The rogue’s gallery of misfits, reprobates, and genetic oddities that resulted can’t help but make you smile, even if they are more fleshed-out in the manual rather than on the screen.

Reiche on the origins of the Illwrath, a race of arachnid fundamentalists who “receive spiritual endorsement in the accomplishment of vicious surprise attacks”:

The name “Illwrath” comes from an envelope I saw at the post office, which was being sent to a Ms. McIlwrath in Glasgow, Scotland. I didn’t see the “Mc” at first, and I swear, my first thought was that they must be sending that envelope to an alien. I am sure that somewhere there is a nice little Scottish lady laughing and saying, “Oh, those crazy Americans! Here’s one now calling me an evil, giant, religiously-intolerant space spider — ha, ha, ha, how cute!” Hmm… on second thought, if I am ever found beaten with bagpipes or poisoned with haggis, please contact the authorities.

Around the office, Fred Ford liked to say that the Illwrath had become so darn evil by first becoming too darn righteous, wrapping right around the righteousness scale and yielding results akin to all those old computer games which suddenly started showing negative statistics if you built up your numbers too far. (Personally, I favor this idea greatly, and, indeed, even believe it might serve as an explanation for certain forces in contemporary American politics.)

Reiche on the Mmrnmhrm, an “almost interesting robot race” who “fear vowels almost as much as they do a Dreadnought closing in at full bore”:

When I first named the Mmrnmhrm, they actually had a pronounceable name, with vowels and everything. Then, in a sketch for the captain’s window illustration, I forgot to give them a mouth. Later, someone saw the sketch and asked me how they talked, so I clamped my lips shut and said something like, “Mrrk nsss,” thereby instituting a taboo on vowels in anything related to the race. Though the Mmrnmhrm ended up looking more like Daleks than Humans, the name stuck.

Reiche on the Syreen, a group of “humanoid females” who embody — knowingly, one likes to believe — every cliché about troglodyte gamers and the fairer sex, right down to their bulbous breasts that look like they’re filled with sand (their origin story also involves the San Francisco earthquake of 1989):

It was an afternoon late last October in San Francisco when Fred Ford, Greg Johnson, and I sat around a monitor trying to name the latest ship design for our new game. The space vessel on the computer screen looked like a copper-plated cross between Tin Tin’s Destination Moon rocketship and a ribbed condom. Needless to say, we felt compelled to christen this ship carefully, with due consideration for our customers’ sensibilities as well as our artistic integrity. “How about the Syreen Penetrator?” Fred suggested without hesitation. Instantly, the ground did truly rise up and smite us! WHAM-rumble-rumble-WHAM! We were thrown around our office like the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise when under fire by the Klingons. I dimly remember standing in a doorframe, watching the room flex like a cheap cardboard box and shouting, “Maybe that’s not such a great name!” and “Gee, do you think San Francisco’s still standing?” Of course, once the earth stopped moving, we blithely ignored the dire portent, and the Syreen’s ship name, “The Penetrator,” was graven in code.

Since then, we haven’t had a single problem. I mean, everyone has a disk crash two nights before a program is final, right? And hey, accidents happen. Brake pads just don’t last forever! My limp is really not that bad, and Greg is almost speaking normally these days.

Star Control was released in 1990 to cautiously positive reviews and reasonable sales. For all its good humor, it proved a rather polarizing experience. The crazily fast-paced action game at its heart was something that about one-third of players seemed to take to and love, while the rest found it totally baffling, being left blinking and wondering what had just happened as the pieces of their exploded ship drifted off the screen about five seconds after a fight had begun. For these people, Star Control was a hard sell: the strategic game just wasn’t deep enough to stand on its own for long, and, while the aliens described in the manual were certainly entertaining, this was a computer game, not a Douglas Adams book.

Still, the game did sufficiently well that Accolade was willing to fund a sequel. And it was at this juncture that, as I noted at the beginning of this article, Reiche and Ford and their associates went kind of nuts. They threw out the less-than-entrancing strategy part of the first game, kept the action part and all those wonderful aliens, and stuck it all into a grand adventure in interstellar space that owed an awful lot to Starflight — more, one might even say, than it owed to Star Control I.

As in Starflight, you roam the galaxy in Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters to avert an apocalyptic threat, collecting precious resources and even more precious clues from the planets you land on, negotiating with the many aliens you meet and sometimes, when negotiations break down, blowing them away. The only substantial aspect of the older game that’s missing from its spiritual successor is the need to manage a bridge crew who come complete with CRPG-style statistics. Otherwise, Star Control II does everything Starflight does and more. The minigame of resource collection on planets’ surfaces, dodging earthquakes and lightning strikes and hostile lifeforms, is back, but now it’s faster paced, with a whole range of upgrades you can add to your landing craft in order to visit more dangerous planets. Ditto space combat, which is now of the arcade style from Star Control I — if, that is, you don’t have Cyborg Mode turned on, which is truly a godsend, the only thing that makes the game playable for many of us. You still need to upgrade your ship as you go along to fight bigger and badder enemies and range faster and farther across space, but now you also can collect a whole fleet of support ships to accompany you on your travels (thus preserving the rock-paper-scissors aspect of Star Control I). I’m not sure that any of these elements could quite carry a game alone, but together they’re dynamite. Much as I hate to employ a tired reviewer’s cliché like “more than the sum of its parts,” this game makes it all but unavoidable.

And yet the single most memorable part of the experience for many or most of us remains all those wonderful aliens, who have been imported from Star Control I and, even better, moved from the pages of the manual into the game proper. Arguably the most indelible of them all, the one group of aliens that absolutely no one ever seems to forget, are the Spathi, a race of “panicked mollusks” who have elevated self-preservation into a religious creed. Like most of their peers, they were present in the first Star Control but really come into their own here, being oddly lovable despite starting the game on the side of the evil Ur-Quan. The Spathi owe more than a little something to the Spemin, Starflight‘s requisite species of cowardly aliens, but are based at least as much, Reiche admits a little sheepishly, on his own aversion to physical danger. Their idea of the perfect life was taken almost verbatim from a conversation about same that Reiche and Ford once had over Chinese food at the office. Here, then, is Reiche and the Spathi’s version of the American Dream:

I knew that someday I would be vastly rich, wealthy enough to afford a large, well-fortified mansion. Surrounding my mansion would be vast tracts of land, through which I could slide at any time I wished! Of course, one can never be too sure that there aren’t monsters hiding just behind the next bush, so I would plant trees to climb at regular, easy-to-reach intervals. And being a Spathi of the world, I would know that some monsters climb trees, though often not well, so I would have my servants place in each tree a basket of perfect stones. Not too heavy, not too light — just the right size for throwing at monsters.

“Running and away and throwing rocks,” explains Reiche, “extrapolated in all ways, has been one of my life strategies.”

The Yehat, who breed like rabbits. Put the one remaining female in the galaxy together with the one remaining male, wait a couple of years… and poof, you have an army of fuzzy little warmongers on your side. They fight with the same enthusiasm they have for… no, we won’t go there.

My personal favorite aliens, however, are the bird-like Pkunk, a peaceful, benevolent, deeply philosophical race whose ships are nevertheless fueled by the insults they spew at their enemies during battle. They are, of course, merely endeavoring to make sure that their morality doesn’t wrap back around to zero and turn them evil like the Illwrath. “Never be too good,” says Reiche. “Insults, pinching people when they aren’t looking… that’ll keep you safe.”

In light of the aliens Greg Johnson had already created for Starflight, not to mention the similarities between Starflight‘s Spemin and Star Control‘s Spathi, there’s been an occasional tendency to perhaps over-credit his contribution — valuable though it certainly was — to Toy’s for Bob’s own space epic. Yet one listen to Reiche and Ford in interviews should immediately disabuse anyone of the notion that the brilliantly original and funny aliens in Star Control II are there entirely thanks to Johnson. After listening to Reiche in particular for a few minutes, it really is blindingly obvious that this is the sense of humor behind the Spathi and so many others. Indeed, anyone who has played the game can get a sense of this just from reading some of his quotes in this very article.

There’s a rich vein of story and humor running through even the most practical aspects of Star Control II, as in this report from a planet’s surface. The two complement one another rather than clashing, perhaps because Toys for Bob is clever enough to understand that less is sometimes more. Who are the Lieberman triplets? Who knows? But the line makes you laugh, and that’s the important thing. When a different development team took the reins to make a Star Control III, Reiche’s first piece of advice to them was, “For God’s sake, don’t try to explain everything.” Many a lore-obsessed modern game could afford to take the same advice to heart.

Long after every other aspect of the game has faded from memory, its great good humor, embodied in all those crazy aliens, will remain. It may be about averting a deadly serious intergalactic apocalypse, but, for all that, Star Control II is as warm and fuzzy a space opera as you’ll ever see.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t go in for plot. In fact, the sequel’s plot is as elaborate as its predecessor’s was thin; the backstory alone takes up some twenty pages in the manual. The war which was depicted in Star Control I, it turns out, didn’t go so well for the good guys; the sequel begins with you entering our solar system in command of the last combat-worthy craft among a shattered and defeated Alliance of Free Stars. The Ur-Quan soon get wind of your ship’s existence and the last spark of defiance against their rule that it represents, and send a battlefleet toward Earth to snuff it out. And so the race is on to rebuild the Alliance and assemble a fleet of your own before the Ur-Quan arrive. How you do so is entirely up to you. Suffice to say that Earth’s old allies are out there. It’s up to you to find the aliens and convince them to join you in whatever sequence seems best, while finding the resources you need to fuel and upgrade your spaceship and juggling a whole lot of other problems at the same time. This game is as nonlinear as they come.

Star Control II takes itself seriously in the places where it’s important to do so, but never too seriously. Anyone bored with the self-consciously “dark” fictions that so often dominate in our current era of media will find much to appreciate here.

When asked to define what makes a good game, Paul Reiche once said that it “has to have a fun core, which is a one-sentence description of why it’s fun.” Ironically, Star Control II is an abject failure by this standard, pulling in so many directions as to defy any such holistic description. It’s a strategy game of ship and resource management; it’s an action game of ship-versus-ship combat; it’s an adventure game of puzzle-solving and clue-tracking. Few cross-genre games have ever been quite so cross-genre as this one. It really shouldn’t work, but, for the most part anyway, it does. If you’re a person whose ideal game lets you do many completely different things at every session, this might just be your dream game. It really is an experience of enormous richness and variety, truly a game like no other. Small wonder that it’s attracted a cult of players who will happily declare it to be nothing less than the best game ever made.

For my part, I have a few too many reservations to go quite that far. Before I get to them, though, I’d like to let Reiche speak one more time. Close to the time of Star Control II‘s release, he outlined his four guiding principles of game design. Star Control II conforms much better to these metrics than it does to that of the “one-sentence description.”

First, [games should be] fun, with no excuses about how the game simulates the agony and dreariness of the real world (as though this was somehow good for you). Second, they [should] be challenging over a long period of time, preferably with a few ability “plateaus” that let me feel in control for a period of time, then blow me out of the water. Third, they [should] be attractive. I am a sucker for a nice illustration or a funky riff. Finally, I want my games to be conceptually interesting and thought-provoking, so one can discuss the game with an adult and not feel silly.

It’s in the intersection between Reiche’s first and second principles that I have my quibbles with Star Control II. It’s a rather complicated, difficult game by design, which is fair enough as long as it’s complex and difficult in a fun way. Some of its difficulty, however, really doesn’t strike me as being all that much fun at all. Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while know that I place enormous weight on fairness and solubility when it comes to the games I review, and don’t tend to cut much slack to those that can only be enjoyed and/or solved with a walkthrough or FAQ to hand. On this front, Star Control II is a bit problematic, due largely to one questionable design choice.

Star Control II, you see, has a deadline. You have about five years before Earth is wiped out by the Ur-Quan (more precisely, by the eviller of the two factions of the Ur-Quan, but we won’t get into that here). Fans will tell you, by no means entirely without justification, that this is an essential part of the game. One of the great attractions of Star Control II is its dynamic universe which just keeps evolving, with or without your intervention: alien spaceships travel around the galaxy just like yours is doing, alien races conquer others and are themselves conquered, etc.

All of this is undoubtedly impressive from a game of any vintage, let alone one as old and technologically limited as this one. And the feeling of inhabiting such a dynamic universe is undoubtedly bracing for anyone used to the more static norm, where things only happen when you push them to happen. Yet it also has its drawbacks, the most unfortunate of which is the crushing sense of futility that comes after putting dozens of hours into the game only to lose it irrevocably. The try-and-try-again approach can work in small, focused games that don’t take long to play and replay, such as the early mysteries of Infocom. In a sprawling epic like this, however… well, does anyone really want to put those dozens of hours in all over again, clicking through page after page of the same text?

Star Control II‘s interface felt like something of a throwback even in its own time. By 1992, computer games had almost universally moved to the mouse-driven point-and-click model. Yet this game relies entirely on multiple-choice menus, activated by the cursor keys and/or a joystick. Toys for Bob was clearly designing with possible console ports in mind. (Star Control was ported to the Sega Genesis, but, as it happened, Star Control II would never get the same honor, perhaps because its sales didn’t quite justify the expense and/or because its complexity was judged unsuited to the console market.) Still, for all that it’s a little odd, the interface is well thought-through, and you get used to it quickly.

There’s an undeniable tension between this rich galaxy, full of unusual sights and entertaining aliens to discover, and the need to stay relentlessly on-mission if you hope to win in the end. I submit that the failure to address this tension is, at bottom, a failure of game design. There’s much that could have been done. One solution might have been to tie the evolving galaxy to the player’s progress through the plot rather than the wall clock, a technique pioneered in Infocom’s Ballyhoo back in 1986 and used in countless narrative-oriented games since. It can convey the impression of rising danger and a skin-of-the-teeth victory every time without ever having to send the player back to square one. In the end, the player doesn’t care whether the exhilarating experience she’s just had is the result of a meticulous simulation coincidentally falling into place just so, or of a carefully manipulated sleight of hand. She just remembers the subjective experience.

But if such a step is judged too radical — too counter to the design ethos of the game — other remedies could have been employed. To name the most obvious, the time limit could have been made more generous; Starflight as well has a theoretical time limit, but few ever come close to reaching it. Or the question of time could have been left to the player — seldom a bad strategy in game design — by letting her choose from a generous, moderate, and challenging time limit before starting the game. (This approach was used to good effect by the CRPG The Magic Candle among plenty of other titles over the years.)

Instead of remedying the situation, however, Reiche and his associates seemed actively determined to make it worse with some of their other choices. To have any hope of finishing the game in time, you need to gain access to a new method of getting around the galaxy, known as “quad-space,” as quickly as possible. Yet the method of learning about quad-space is one of the more obscure puzzles in the game, mentioned only in passing by a couple of the aliens you meet, all too easy to overlook entirely. Without access to quad-space, Star Control II soon starts to feel like a fundamentally broken, unbalanced game. You trundle around the galaxy in your truck of a spaceship, taking months to reach your destinations and months more to return to Earth, burning up all of the minerals you can mine just to feed your engines. And then your time runs out and you lose, never having figured out what you did wrong. This is not, needless to say, a very friendly way to design a game. Had a few clues early on shouted, “You need to get into quad-space and you may be able to do so here!” just a little more loudly, I may not have felt the need to write any of the last several paragraphs.

I won’t belabor the point any more, lest the mob of Star Control II zealots I can sense lurking in the background, sharpening their pitchforks, should pounce. I’ll say only that this game is, for all its multifaceted brilliance, also a product of its time — a time when games were often hard in time-extending but not terribly satisfying ways, when serious discussions about what constituted fair and unfair treatment of the player were only just beginning to be had in some quarters of the industry.

Searching a planet’s surface for minerals, lifeforms, and clues. Anyone who has played Starflight will feel right at home with this part of the game in particular.

Certainly, whatever our opinion of the time limit and the game’s overall fairness, we have to recognize what a labor of love Star Control II was for Paul Reiche, Fred Ford, and everyone who helped bring it to fruition, from Greg Johnson and Robert Leyland to all of the other writers and artists and testers who lent it their talents. Unsurprisingly given its ambition, the project went way beyond the year or so Accolade had budgeted for it. When their publisher put their foot down and said no more money would be forthcoming, Reiche and Ford reached deep into their own pockets to carry it through the final six months.

As the project was being wrapped up, Reiche realized he still had no music, and only about $1500 left for acquiring some. His solution was classic Toys for Bob: he ran an online contest for catchy tunes, with prizes of $25, $50, and $100 — in addition to the opportunity to hear one’s music in (hopefully) a hit game, of course. The so-called “tracker” scene in Europe stepped up with music created on Commodore Amigas, a platform for which the game itself would never be released. “These guys in Europe [had] just built all these ricky-tink programs to play samples out,” says Reiche. “They just kept feeding samples, really amazing soundtracks, out into the net just for kicks. I can’t imagine any of these people were any older than twenty. It makes me feel like I’m part of a bigger place.”

Upon its release on November 30, 1992 — coincidentally, the very same day as Dune II, its companion in mislabeled sequels — Star Control II was greeted with excellent reviews, whose enthusiasm was blunted only by the game’s sheer unclassifiability. Questbusters called it “as funny a parody of science-fiction role-playing as it is a well-designed and fun-to-play RPG,” and named it “Best RPG of the Year” despite it not really being a CRPG at all by most people’s definitions. Computer Gaming World placed it on “this reviewer’s top-ten list of all time” as “one of the most enjoyable games to review all year,” and awarded it “Adventure Game of the Year” alongside Legend Entertainment’s far more traditional adventure Eric the Unready.

Sales too were solid, if not so enormous as Star Control II‘s staying power in gamers’ collective memory might suggest. Like Dune II, it was probably hurt by being billed as a sequel to a game likely to appeal most to an entirely different type of player, as it was by the seeming indifference of Accolade. In the eyes of Toys for Bob, the developer/publisher relationship was summed up by the sticker the latter started putting on the box after Star Control II had collected its awards: “Best Sports Game of 1992.” Accolade was putting almost all of their energy into sports games during this period, didn’t have stickers handy for anything else, and just couldn’t be bothered to print up some new ones.

Still, the game did well enough that Toys for Bob, after having been acquired by a new CD-ROM specialist of a publisher called Crystal Dynamics, ported it to the 3DO console in 1994. This version added some eight hours of spoken dialog, but cut a considerable amount of content that the voice-acting budget wouldn’t cover. Later, a third Star Control would get made — albeit not by Toys for Bob but by Legend Entertainment, through a series of intellectual-property convolutions we won’t go into in this article.

Toys for Bob themselves have continued to exist right up to the present day, a long run indeed in games-industry terms, albeit without ever managing to return to the Star Control universe. They’re no longer a two-man operation, but do still have Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford in control.

To this day, Star Control II remains as unique an experience as it was in 1992. You’ve never played a game quite like this one, no matter how many other games you’ve played in your time. Don’t even try to categorize it. Just play it, and see what’s possible when a talented design team throws out all the rules. But before you do, let me share just one piece of advice: when an alien mentions something about a strange stellar formation near the Chandrasekhar constellation, pay attention! Trust me, it will save you from a world of pain…

(Sources: Compute!’s Gazette of November 1984; Compute! of January 1992 and January 1993; Computer Gaming World of November 1990, December 1990, March 1993, and August 1993; InterActivity of November/December 1994; Questbusters of January 1993; Electronic Gaming Monthly of May 1991; Sega Visions of June 1992; Retro Gamer 14 and 15. Online sources include Ars Technica‘s video interview with Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford; Matt Barton’s interviews with the same pair in Matt Chat 95, 96, and 97; Grognardia‘s interview with Reiche; The Escapist‘s interview with Reiche; GameSpot‘s interview with Reiche.

There’s a rather depressing pitched legal dispute swirling around the Star Control intellectual property at the moment, which has apparently led to Star Control I and II being pulled from digital-download stores. Your best option to experience Star Control II is thus probably The Ur-Quan Masters, a loving open-source re-creation based on Toys for Bob’s 3DO source code. Or go hunt down the original on some shadowy corner of the interwebs. I won’t say anything if you don’t.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/star-control-ii/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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A great many celebrities lead charmed lives. They can enjoy the finer things such as fast cars, expensive jewelry, and sprawling mansions. A lot of them have personal assistants and hangers-on that are at their beck and call. Of course, one of the perks that some of the biggest stars have is the ability to hook up with almost anyone at any time. Warren Beatty, Charlie Sheen, and Jack Nicholson are just a few of the many male stars that have been with more beautiful women than the average guy can ever dream of. It doesn’t matter if you are a young heart-throb or a past-your-prime senior citizen. If you are a star then you can fulfill your lustful fantasies. There is an obvious double standard that exists though. If you are a male star that is running around town with a new girl every night then you are considered a stud. If you are a woman that does the same thing then you are referred to in more colorful and less flattering terms. These derogatory monikers have been applied to such female celebrities as Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, and even Taylor Swift. Female celebrities canoodling with multiple men is nothing new. Vintage starlets like Jean Harlow and Grace Kelly were notorious for their legendary sexual appetites and ever-changing partners long before today’s promiscuous female personalities were at it. Here are the 19 female celebs who’ve hooked up with the most gents around Hollywood.

#1 Angelina Jolie Angelina Jolie is far from the most salacious character on this list but she’s still been around the block a time or two and with her new-found single status we can be sure that she will go around a couple more times before all is said and done. She was first married to Jonny Lee Miller from 1996-1999. During that time she was also apparently spending the night together with Mick Jagger, Timothy Hutton, and Jenny Shimizu. She then wed Billy Bob Thornton from 2000-2003 while at the same time being linked to Antonio Banderas and Nicolas Cage. She enjoyed the single life for a few years by hooking up with Val Kilmer, Jared Leto, and a guy you’ll see mentioned several times on this list, Colin Farrell. We then had Brangelina but that’s over now. Who’s up next?

#2 Pamela Anderson No list of Hollywood harlots would be complete without having Pamela Anderson on it but, believe it or not, her exploits are far tamer than most others on this list. She was discovered by accident when a cameraman at a football game in Vancouver zoomed in her as she sat in the crowd. She was seen on the Jumbotron and was immediately hired as a spokesmodel. This led to modelling which led to Playboy which led to bit parts in television shows and eventually to her breakout starring role in the Baywatch television series. She dated Mario Van Peebles, John Peters, Eric Nies, Scott Baio, David Charvet, and Vince Neil before marrying Tommy Lee of Motley Crue in 1995. After that marriage broke up she hooked up with Bret Michaels, Kelly Slater, Steven Dorff, some guy named Jamie Padgett, and Criss Angel. She also managed to squeeze in a short romance with Kid Rock. After marrying and divorcing Rick Salomon in 2015, Pamela is looking for her next conquest.

#3 Eva Longoria 42-year-old Eva Longoria landed a few bit parts on television beginning in 1999 before she got her big break with her role of Gabrielle Solis on Desperate Housewives. She has since appeared in dozens of movies and television shows as well as racking up a few producer credits. She’s also gone through quite a few different guys. Her first marriage to Tyler Christopher lasted from 2002 until 2004. She married Tony Parker in 2007 but that union fell apart in 2011 after the dark-haired beauty found several incriminating text messages on his phone. She is presently married to Jose Antonio Baston. She has also been in relationships with J.C. Chasez, Hayden Christensen, Eduardo Cruz, and Ernesto Arguello. She is rumored to have had a fling with Mark “Butt Fumble” Sanchez too.

#4 Jennifer Lopez J.Lo got some much-needed exposure as a Fly Girl in the television comedy In Living Color. She decided to pursue an acting career and she got a good break when she was given the lead in the movie Selena. She then began a recording career and she has never looked back. She is one of the most recognized faces in Hollywood. With all of the work that she does, it is hard to believe that she has found time to get involved with so many guys. She has been married to Ojani Noa, Cris Judd, and Marc Anthony but all of her marriages ended in divorce. She is presently dating Alex Rodriguez. She was once engaged to Ben Affleck but things didn’t pan out. Jenny from the block has tangled with Drake, Beau Casper Smart, Sean Combs, Wesley Snipes, and Chris Paciello as well as Maksim Chmerkovskiy, Bradley Cooper, and Rodrigo Santoro.

#5 Lindsay Lohan For someone who is just 30 years old, Lindsay Lohan has compiled an excessively long list of lovers. The ex-Disney starlet has been involved in relationships with both men and women including Aaron Carter, Jamie Dornan, Robbie Williams, and Heath Ledger. She has a soft spot for the older dudes as shown by her tumbles in the hay with Benicio Del Toro, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and Mr. Die Hard Bruce Willis. When she was in her early 20s she apparently had flings with James Franco, Jared Leto, Joaquin Phoenix, Jude Law, James Blunt, Gerard Butler, and Seth Rogen. Of course, Justin Timberlake, Criss Angel, and Colin Farrell got in on the action too as did Ryan Phillippe, Jason Segel, Orlando Bloom, and 50 Cent. There are literally dozens of Hollywood stars linked to LiLo. It’s not the size of the list that is so amazing as much as the fact that she hasn’t had any children yet.

#6 Jada Pinkett Smith This 45-year-old actress/singer/dancer saw her star rise in the early 90s with small television roles. She garnered a lot of attention when she was featured in The Nutty Professor in 1996. She began a singing career in 2002. She has been married to actor Will Smith for 2 decades but before she settled down with the Fresh Prince, Jada had romances with Tupac Shakur, Wesley Snipes, and ex-NBA player Grant Hill. She has described her marriage as “open”, which means that they both get to sleep around. There are also rumors circulating that Will is, in fact, bisexual and the marriage is in trouble. To add fuel to the fire, there were printed stories that Jada was caught in the sack with Marc Anthony. It is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the many rumors that surround this couple but the one sure fact is that it is a bizarre relationship.

#7 Megan Fox 31-year-old Megan Fox is one the world’s biggest sex symbols. The actress and model landed bit parts in television before landing a role in the movie Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen in 2004. Her big break happened in 2007 when she landed the part of Mikaela Banes in Transformers. She got hot and heavy with her co-star Shia LaBeouf. She also had relationships with Ben Leahy and David Gallagher in the early 2000s. In 2010, Fox married Brian Austin Green of Beverly Hills 90210 and Desperate Housewives fame. They have been together ever since. Despite being in several relationships, Megan Fox maintains that she has had sex with just 2 guys and has never entertained the thought of a one-night-stand. Yeah, right. She has also hinted that she is bisexual.

#8 Jessica Biel Jessica Biel got her start in the television show 7th Heaven in which she cultivated a wholesome image in her role of Mary Camden. She has gone on to star in a string of movies such as Ulee’s Gold, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Rules of Attraction, and Total Recall. She is currently filming her 33rd movie, Shock and Awe. Biel has been married to Justin Timberlake since 2012 and they have one child. Prior to settling down with JT, Jessica had her share of hot dates with the likes of Adam LaVorgna, Chris Evans, and Derek Jeter. We aren’t sure if the ex-Yankee left her a gift basket. It is also widely believed that she had a torrid romance with Gerard Butler as the two were seen cozying up in 2011.

#9 Demi Moore After her appearances in Blame it on Rio, St. Elmo’s Fire, and About Last Night…, Demi Moore became a household name. While she has been in a few flops, Demi has landed some great roles over her 30+ years in the business. She has landed her share of men too. The brunette married Freddy Moore back in 1980 but the two split after just 4 years. Moore and Emilio Estevez were engaged but they broke up in 1987 which led to her much-publicized marriage to Bruce Willis. That lasted 11 years before dissolving. She made headlines in 2005 when she married Ashton Kutcher but the fairy-tale romance ended in 2013. Demi has been intimate with many other guys like Dweezil Zappa, Brad Pitt, Owen Wilson, Tobey Maguire, and Alex Rodriguez among others. Of course, Colin Farrell got in there too.

#10 Mariah Carey This voluptuous diva has been in the spotlight for nearly 30 years and she has been the subject of many men’s fantasies. She may be in her late forties but she has maintained a bubbly and youthful appearance. Who cares if she has a good plastic surgeon? Mariah has put smiles on quite a few guys and we don’t mean with her singing or acting. She has been married to Tommy Mottola and Nick Cannon but she has a long list of others that she has been intimately linked to Christian Monzon, Mark Sudak, Erik Benet, and Mr. Gift Basket Derek Jeter. It is thought that she has hooked up with Eminem, Trey Songz and Stevie J. It has been reported that she is currently dating Bryan Tanaka. She sure gets around!!

#11 Alyssa Milano Milano hit it big in the 80s sitcom Who’s The Boss in which she played Tony Danza’s daughter, Samantha. She parlayed that role into a very successful career on the big screen as well as television. She’s also been around the block a couple of times when it comes to hooking up. She dated Kirk Cameron, Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, David Arquette, Jonathan Silverman, Eric Nies, Scott Wolf, Jason Behr, Jimmy Federico, Justin Timberlake, Brian Krause, and lots of others including Mark Wahlberg. She must have tired of actors because she began a string of relationships with Major League Baseball pitchers Carl Pavano, Barry Zito, and Brad Penny. She was briefly married to singer Cinjun Tate but that union lasted just one year. She is currently married to David Bugliari. Hilariously enough, she wore white on her wedding day.

#12 Cameron Diaz Vincent D’Onofrio, Carlos De La Torre, Matt Dillon, Robbie Williams, Justin Timberlake, Jude Law, Kelly Slater, and Keanu Reeves are just some of the Hollywood stars that Cameron Diaz has had a romantic involvement with. She has also been linked to Alex Rodriquez, Sean “Puffy” Combs, and Tyrese Gibson. There’s something about Cameron! The Charlie’s Angels star is rumored to have had flings with Seth McFarlane, Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, Gerard Butler, Bradley Cooper, Ed Norton, Djimon Hounsou, Vince Neil, and Mr. Magic himself, Criss Angel. The blonde was engaged to Jared Leto back in 2002-2003 but things just didn’t seem to work out and the couple went their separate ways. She finally settled down in 2015 when she married Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden in Beverley Hills. We’ll see how long that lasts before she starts adding more notches to her bedpost. She’s only 44 so she has plenty of time.

#13 Halle Berry Halle Berry has been a fixture on the big screen since 1991 when she was given a small part in Jungle Fever. She has been in dozens of movies since including the X-Men franchise, Monster’s Ball, and Catwoman in which she looked especially hot. She’s been involved in several relationships. She married baseball player David Justice in the early 90s. That romance made headlines after accusations of domestic abuse. The two split in 1997. The smoking hot Halle married Eric Benet in 2011 but that matchup ended with divorce. She entered into a 5-year relationship with Gabriel Aubry before getting married for a third time to Oliver Martinez. In between her marriage, Berry has been romantically involved with Kevin Costner, Wesley Snipes, Christopher Williams and several others. Rumor has it she got down with Eddy Murphy too.

#14 Dolly Parton When people think of Dolly Parton, the first thing that comes to mind is her titanic vocal cords that have been belting out hits for decades. The curvaceous country singer has been married since 1966. Her husband, Carl Dean, has kept himself out of the public eye and is rarely seen with Dolly. He tends to stay home while Parton is on the road. This opens a lot of opportunities for infidelity. Although Parton has maintained a clean image, she has admitted to straying. She just hasn’t named names but it is widely believed that she has had affairs with band leader Gregg Perry, Sylvester Stallone, and Burt Reynolds. She has denied allegations of a lesbian affair with her assistant Judy Ogle. She is also rumored to have been involved with Billy Ray Cyrus and is Miley’s Godmother.

#15 Pink Alecia Moore, otherwise known as Pink, hit the scene in 2000 with her debut album Can’t Take Me Home. As it turns out, you actually can take her home and several guys have. The animal rights activist and LGBT supporter may have settled down after marrying Carey Hart in 2006 but she got around before hooking up with him. Actually, she may still get around as the two are allegedly in one of those “open” marriages. She is rumored to have gotten it on with Motley Crue drummer and all-around bad boy Tommy Lee as well as Anthony Criss. Todd Morse got the party started with her and Pink has even been romantically linked to women. Apparently, it just took an ice cream cone for Joey Fatone to briefly win her over.

#16 Jayne Mansfield Here is another blonde bombshell that packed a whole lotta love into a very short period of time. Jane Mansfield was one of the biggest sex symbols of the 50s and 60s and she loved to flaunt her best assets. She was 21 years old when she appeared on screen in her first film in 1955 and her last role came in 1967 just prior to her tragic death. She did a lot more than movies during her 12-year run. She had lots of sex with lots of guys. Her first marriage to Paul Mansfield lasted from 1950 to 1958 but she also found time during this period to canoodle with Clint Eastwood, Steve Cochran, George Jessel, and a host of others. After another infidelity-filled marriage to Mickey Hargitay, she married Matt Cimber in 1964 but she soon ran off with her attorney. Colin Farrell would have really loved her.

#17 Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe is probably one of Hollywood’s most famous sex symbols. She was just a teenager when she began modelling in 1944. This led to film work and she was soon a star. By the early 50s, she was all over the big screen in roles that cultivated her image as a blonde bimbo. Her off-screen life was legendary as she was romantically linked to dozens of powerful figures like Howard Hughes, mobster Sam Giancana, and John and Bobby Kennedy. She bedded an impressive roster of Hollywood actors like Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Uncle Miltie, Dean Martin, and Yul Brenner. Robert Mitchum, Eddie Fisher, James Dean, and John Huston. She got it on her a few women too including Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia. She had dozens of intimate relationships before she died at the age of 36. Some like it hot. Marilyn sure did!

#18 Joan Crawford Joan Crawford is one of the silver screen’s biggest names ever. Her film career started in 1925 during the silent era and by 1930 she was one of the industry’s most recognizable names. She was in over 80 films over a 45-year span. She was also in over 80 relationships. She was married several times but she had all sorts of lovers on the side. Walter Winchel, Spencer Tracy, Rudy Vallee, Cesar Romero, Jackie Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and Robert Mitchum are just scratching the surface. She even bedded Howard Hughes. You can also put down Claudette Colbert, Dorothy Arzner, Barbara Stanwyck, and allegedly Marilyn Monroe as well. That’s right!! She liked women too. Other notable Hollywood heavyweights like Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper found their way into her arms. She even straightened out Rock Hudson in 1953.

#19 Tallulah Bankhead Tallulah isn’t the most famous name on the list of 15 female celebs who’ve hooked up with the most gents around Hollywood but she might be one of the most notorious sex fiends. She appeared in many Broadway shows, movies, and on television. She is also well-known to have had an insatiable sexual appetite that led to numerous encounters with some of the most famous men and women in Hollywood. She was involved with no less than 68 partners including Errol Flynn, Louis Armstrong, Yul Brenner, Groucho Marx, Burgess Meredeth, and Humphrey Bogart as well as Jimmy Durante, Chico Marx, John Barrymore, and Douglas Fairbanks. She is even rumored to have had a fling with Winston Churchill. She was married between 1937 and 1941 but, let’s face it, Tallulah wasn’t really a one-man kind of gal.

Source: TheRichest

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