(no subject)

[prog]

Spent the whole freaking day playing The Ur-Quan Masters, the open-source modern-computer port of Star Control II, a classic and much-celebrated space adventure game from 1992. (Not a clone -- an actual port, based on the original code for the game's 3DO version. Pretty cool.)

It keeps you strung along through the usual mix of RPG elements: explore, gather treasures and fight baddies, become more powerful. Repeat until endgame. Extra crack-points since you have full control over your power growth, not by raising numeric stats but by customizing your starship, pimping it out more and more as you become richer. Even with humble VGA graphcs, it can't help but tickle anyone's geek-pleasure centers. One more mining sortie and I can afford that second fusion blaster!

I'm probably spent on it for now. I hope.

Comments

[queue.livejournal.com]

*shakes fist* You kids and your video games! Guess what I'm doing up at 3:45 in the morning?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Say hi to Fwiffo for me.

[queue.livejournal.com]

Fwiffo hasn't done much since my first (very entertaining) enocunter with him. I kind of expected that, when I encountered other Spwith (or whatever they're called) in space, Fwiffo would do something. But maybe he'll only "activate" for certain special Spwith encounters?

[prog.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure... I've had the same experience you've had. (Except I haven't had any Spwith encounters since then.)

My gamer-sense is that he's a gift at the beginning to give you a tough-to-kill (30 crew) and therefore newbie-friendly escort at the start of the game, assuming you're clueful enough to find him and sensible enough to befriend him. I found him useful against those dang Sylandro Probes while my flagship was still wimpy.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Actually, I mostly know Fwiffo through the following conversation I had with daerr over IM as I was playing.

D: I haven't played in 12 years so I don't know how much I remember.
Me: Hey, I just found the dude on [mumble mumble spoiler]
D: Fwiffo!!!

Every person I've spoken to who played the game when it was new on PC seems to have similar levels of recall for the whole experience. It is a much-loved game.

[oasys.livejournal.com]

I think my college roommate skipped a whole semester playing that game. I was a sucker for the "melee" part of the game, a very well-balanced head-to-head. I had to look at their FAQ to see if network melee was added. Fortunately (for my free time), not:

What about network play?

Network play is one of the most requested features. We would like to include it, but as it will take a lot of work to make the existing code work on a high-latency network (such as the internet), we have decided to put our time in more important aspects of the project for now.