Although I’ve never been an arcade-game player really, Super Melee was a big hit with me and my friends in high school and college. The fun part was building teams and seeing the match-ups. It was just as much fun when the match-up was totally uneven and you just knew you were going to get obliterated, so you tried to strategize how you could even do a little damage, as it was when the match-up was dead even.
I wonder why you had so much trouble with it, krok. Did you know how to use the secondary powers? That’s not obvious. And some ships are just so unusual, you have to play them in really weird ways.
You might be right that multiplayer might have been the secret sauce to make one better at the game. We used to play the original Star Control a lot in the dorm computer lab before the sequel came out. I got very good at beating everyone in the dorm in multiplayer, and then when they no longer wanted to play with me, I got good at beating the CPU with every ship. Not just the powerful ships, but the lowly, crappy ships.
By the time Star Control 2 came out, I was a master at the basic Alliance and Heirarchy ships, but particularly the alliance ships. I could take one Arilou ship, and beat all the Heirarchy ships in a row, and never lose that one Arilou ship.
The one ship I never got very good at using was the Spathi ship.
And lo and behold, Star Control 2 came out, it had that great intro, and then as I’m heading to the solar system, I find Fwiffo on Pluto. Just by necessity then, I got really good at beating enemy ships with just one Spathi ship, because at the beginning of the story, it’s just Fwiffo. If I lose him, he’s gone for good.
We eventually got a little bored with the fleet building, so I ended up writing a program that generated random fleets up to a given point value and no duplicate ships. It was one of the first times I wrote a program to solve a genuine problem I was having, not just writing a program for the sake of writing one.
The real problem weren’t the lopsided matchups, it was with the ones where neither side could realistically damage the other. (Something like Spathi vs. Chhmr; either the Spathi can do a suicide run for pitiful damage or you wait until one player hits the planet).
The battles really needed some sort of forcing function. It couldn’t just be a fighting game style clock (you can’t choose a winner based on chip damage…), but maybe something like a slowly contracting map.
One of the challenges that I think you guys allude to is the level of difficulty.
For instance, bread crumbs. I don’t like them. I used to. But then I started getting used to just following the breadcrumbs and not really paying attention to the story.
One of my favorite recent games, Bioshock Infinite, I often barely paid attention to what was happening just to get the pointer on where to go next.
On the other hand, there’s like an expectation from today’s gamers that these bread crumbs will be there.
You can’t make them an option. I know myself, I’m way too weak to resist bread crumbs if they are there. So in general, we simply don’t have them (Adventure Studio supports them but we don’t use them for most quests).
One artifact with the openness of Star Control II is that you can easily be underprepared or way overprepared for some of the unavoidable combats (of which there aren’t many, BTW). A lot of it’s about finding some rich worlds and making the smart upgrades to your mothership, which admittedly isn’t obvious until you know the game and which ships you need to be ready for. When I recommend the game to modern players who haven’t played it, I tell them they should look up a list of some of the richer systems and a couple of the rainbow worlds so they can get a head-start on speeding up and arming their ship (especially the former) without a lot of grinding. Otherwise, they’ll just feel bogged down by the early game.
I seem to recall someone saying that you can get away with just 1 combat in SC2. I’m not sure if that’s true but I do remember that much of the time you could get out of combat or just avoid it entirely.
Brad, you truly need to have someone in the game find an ancient artifact which is a playable copy of Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure. (spelling is intended and this is an inside joke. ;) )