Stardock owns Star Control and is planning an "XCOM-like" reboot

I can confirm that binding E to any “flight” controls like thrust, left, right, down will break it along with other controls that work on the same screen in space like Toggle Inventory and Toggle Captains Log.

I suspect that any rebind of E on the planet specific controls with the lander will have the same result. I know it did with the movement keys.

Thanks for fixing. I neeeeeed ESDF :)

Edit: Maybe add a keybind in the menu for the “interact” key? Or whatever it may be called? That way it’s both known what it is and it can be changed like the others plus deal with conflicts when changing it in that menu.

It looks like this will get slipstreamed in today (couple hours from now).

If I’m reading those 2 reviews right they seem like they are folks that like the quests/story part of the game, and don’t like the resource gathering.

Hey, that was me in StarCon2. Except I also didn’t really like the fighting (because I was bad at it). So I let the computer did that part, And eventually used some hex editor game hacking software to jack up my resources, I think.

I think I actually just want to play a kooky scifi comedy adventure game, but the Space Quest games are too hard, so I keep returning to the Star Control series for my jollies, instead :)

There is a module you can buy for the ship that looks like it will allow the ai to fight for you. I’ve added to my ship, but haven’t actually had a chance to try it yet.

Yeah I’ll be buying that right away, haha

That’s my read too.

Most of the wealth in the game is gotten from completing missions, not resource gathering. But I think some gamers will feel like they need to go down to the planets and resource gather because they can.

For the record: I do enjoy exploring the planets too but but I only go one the ones that have high value minerals which means I skip 95% of the planets.

Interesting difference on review scores between smaller sites that seem to like it and the larger ones that seem less enthusiastic.

The IGN review spent quite a bit of time complaining about the planets/gathering resources. I haven’t tried SC:O yet, but their description sounds exactly like I would have expected. It feels like maybe they are not familiar with SC2 and are expecting something very different out of the planetary mini-game than what it is. They mention that the combat on planets is poor which is… well, yeah. It’s not intended to be another layer of the game as deep as the space stuff. At least in SC2, the point of the “combat” was just to fend off baddies long enough to grab your resources and get back into space, not a game unto itself.

As Star Control 2 is one of the most important games of all time to me, I’m looking forward to trying this out and seeing how it feels to me.

Stupid question, during the landing sequence how do you control the ship to keep it in the flight path, left stick? I think the dialog mentioned the cursor keys, but looking at the options I wasn’t sure. It could be I was just landing on a windy planet, but I was not having any luck steering the ship on the way down.

My elder brother did the same with the space fighting, since he was bad at it.

I also didn’t do any resource gathering. The original game had a bug, when you first went to earth and got their facilities going, you could sell your only shuttle craft, and suddenly the number wrapped around and you had an integer number of shuttle craft. And you could sell them as long as you got tired of holding the “Sell” button down. A minute or two of holding the button down was enough to give me enough resources that I never had to hunt for resources in the game.

Well, except for biological resources. I still needed to hunt for those to get info from the Melnorme.

But I’ve mentioned this before, so I should stop repeating myself. You’re probably thinking “Duh Rock8man, how many times are you going to repeat this to me?”.

In new news, from reading those reviews, it sounds like the AI during combat against you can be pretty dumb sometimes, and one reviewer mentioned that when he finally gathered enough resources to buy the module that lets the AI fly the ship for you, the AI for your ship also did really dumb things sometimes, so he ended up never using it again.

This doesn’t affect me, since I never used the Cyborg AI in Starcon2, I like flying ships manually, but I thought it was interesting for your usecase, since you’ll be looking to get that AI module on your ship, it turns out, and you can’t just use the AI from the beginning. And it might do stupid things after you get the AI.

This sounds familiar now that I read it again. Not in the “Duh Rock8man, how many times are you going to repeat this to me?” sense, but rather in the “Oh, that might have been what I did” sense.

D’awww

IIRC, in SC2 or 3, you could separately set the AI level of your ship’s autocombat module from the AI level of the enemy ships. I usually just set mine 2-3 levels higher (so I at least had to pick decent ships for matchups, as a sort of spaceship combat management sim GM type thing, hah) and cruised through that stuff after monkeying around with it initially.

Your life sounds sadly lacking in BUTT missiles, Armando.

More like lacking in even basic hand-eye coordination talents :)

The Spathi sound effects in my old Genesis copy of SC1 always made me laugh as a kid, though :-D

edit: goddamn I love Star Control 1. That fucking subtitle on the opening credits screen was so evocative to me as a kid. Between the awesome manual art and descriptions and the very rudimentary strategy game mode, I made up lots of awesome stories about those Ur-Quan Conflicts as a kid, never even knowing about SC2.

Even though I think Dan focused too much on the planet resource gathering (having recently replayed ME 1 I don’t think the two experiences can be compared) he posted something later that I thought was pretty interesting in that the planet exploration would be improved if it were more like Rocket League.

I admit, I haven’t played Rocket League so I’m curious to those of you who have played RL how you might picture that working into the planet part of SC?

RL has very skill demanding movement… in that you jump and fly (while playing soccer) with your vehicle in crazy ways using your surroundings and power ups knowingly and well timed … I really have a hard time understanding his idea. ~edit~ not far enough in the game to understand it… I realized.

btw. the auto-zoom-‘feature’ while flying - why is that? On the one hand I find it elegant on the other it’s irritating for me. Why not let everybody adjust zoomlevels for themselves?

You can. Either with the mouse wheel OR using the camera keys (1 = auto camera and 4 = zoomed out).

Yep, thanks. But camera’s still auto adjusting. It’s just a minor thing I think I’ll get used to… I should play some more now!

It’s what we’ve done since Starflight, and IT’S WHAT WE’LL CONTINUE TO DO. MINERS UNITE.

Just to clarify, NOT ME!!! lol. I’m still stuck at work, and I’ll be firing up the game once I get home :)