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Star Control computer games

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The Star Control series is a trilogy of computer games with a cult following. Based around a space combat game modeled after Spacewar, each of the three games adds to this a strategic or adventure game.

Table of contents

1 Star Control

2 Star Control 2

3 Star Control 3

4 Remakes

5 Star Control: Timewarp

6 The Ur-Quan Masters

6.1 Links

Star Control

The first of the series, Star Control: Famous Battles of the Ur-Quan Conflict, featured the basic Spacewar-style melee combat engine as well as a strategic game with a three-dimensional cluster of stars as the terrain. There was no real story component to the game, aside from a cursory background story explaining the existance of two alliances of alien races at war.

Star Control was released for MS-DOS and the Sega Genesis console in 1990.

Star Control 2

Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters is generally regarded as the best of the trilogy. It added a large number of species and ship types to the already diverse cast, and replaced SC1's strategy-based full game with an exploration-oriented space adventure game. Interaction with the various alien species was a chief point of the adventure game: each species had its own conversational quirks, music, and display font, bringing out its particular character.

Star Control 2 was originally released for MS-DOS, the Macintosh, and the 3DO in 1992. In 2002, the creators released the source code and media files as open source under the GPL. A rough port of the game to Linux and BeOS followed swiftly.

Star Control 3

Many players found Star Control 3 a disappointment after SC2. SC3 had fewer ship types, a confusing 3D interface, and graphics and music many regarded as boring. The adventure game was also criticized as having a poorer plot and less diversity of play than the earlier game. A large part of the problem was Star Control's original creators were not involved in the project.

Star Control 3 was released for MS-DOS and the Macintosh in 1996.

Remakes

Star Control: Timewarp

Created by fans of Star Control, Timewarp is a reimplementation from scratch of the game's melee engine enhanced with more modern rendering technology and a large number of new ships. The project was intended to form the basis for an adventure game to continue Star Control 2's storyline independantly of Star Control 3, but this aspect of the game has not yet been developed.

The Ur-Quan Masters An updated version of Star Control 2. It is based on the orginal code from the 3D0 version, which the game's creators released to the public domain.