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Aug. 15th, 2005 07:47 pmUQM has defeated ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
queue, who was unhappily surprised to run into its time limit. It's one that makes perfect sense in-game, but once you're there, you more or less lose all reason to keep playing. It's also yet another element of the game's old-skoolishness. Players of the time would would naturally expect that, at any moment, they might hit a wall and need to backtrack a lot. Modern games just don't do this, though.
I am going to whip up a README file for the game, I think, a sort of diff intended to help smooth the psychology of this game versus modern games. Here's a draft I just pounded out:
= Things you might not figure out by yourself =
This game is from the era of paper manuals, which you were actually expected to read before playing. There are no tutorial missions to teach you the controls. While the game's controls and concepts are actually simple enough to discover soon after you start playing, you may still manage to miss a few important details, such as these:
* All ships have two weapons. The primary weapon is fired by the Control key, and the secondary by the Shift key. Note, however, that your flagship does not begin the game with a secondary weapon, and that not all ships' secondary weapons are weapons per se. Furthermore, some ships use the secondary key as a modifier key, so that while it's held down you can use the other controls to do other things, like rotating turrets.
* Once you ally with the Earth space station, you can flee any combat thereafter by pressing Escape. Note that this "run-away drive" takes 5 seconds to kick in, during which you are vulnerable.
* Crew is basically just ship hit points, both for your starships and your landers.
* Your landing craft has a stun gun, activated with the primary-weapon key. You can use this to zap planet-dwelling lifeforms into a state of suspended animation (bigger critters will need to be zapped more times), making them safe to pick up as cargo.
* The retail version of the game came with a poster representing known space as your character's point of view at the start of the game. It's very useful for locating stars by name (much easier than trying to find them via the in-game starmap), and gives you some additional initial exploration goals. You can find a copy of it here: http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/sc2/images/sc2_color_map.jpg
= Notes for modern gamers =
This is an old-school adventure game, and as such does not adhere to several more modern tenets of digital games. Here is some advice that would seem second nature to a computer gamer 15 years ago, but not so much today:
* You have a time limit. Very bad and utterly irreversible things will start happening after around four game-years (though you can delay this by an additional year through certain in-game activities). You really want to complete the game before this time. If you listen to your allies' advice (and your enemies' loose talk) and don't wander without purpose, you'll be OK.
* Save often. Use many save-slots. The game will cheerfully allow you to save in unwinnable circumstances, even if you don't yet realize the direness of your situation. There are also plenty of situations where a single conversational slip-up can make you the eternal enemy of an entire alien race. (Diplomacy is a delicate business.) UQM gives you 50 save slots, which use a negligible amount of disk space. Use them, and don't be shy about restoring and trying something else when things are going obviously badly for you.
* Take notes with pen and paper. You will often come across information that you'll only hear once ever, so write down anything that seems specific or otherwise important -- the game will not record it for you. Furthermore, the game makes no attempt to perform any sort of bookkeeping tasks for you, such as memory of where you've been or where you've been told to go next. Your adventure will be easier if you record this sort of data yourself.
queue, who was unhappily surprised to run into its time limit. It's one that makes perfect sense in-game, but once you're there, you more or less lose all reason to keep playing. It's also yet another element of the game's old-skoolishness. Players of the time would would naturally expect that, at any moment, they might hit a wall and need to backtrack a lot. Modern games just don't do this, though.I am going to whip up a README file for the game, I think, a sort of diff intended to help smooth the psychology of this game versus modern games. Here's a draft I just pounded out:
= Things you might not figure out by yourself =
This game is from the era of paper manuals, which you were actually expected to read before playing. There are no tutorial missions to teach you the controls. While the game's controls and concepts are actually simple enough to discover soon after you start playing, you may still manage to miss a few important details, such as these:
* All ships have two weapons. The primary weapon is fired by the Control key, and the secondary by the Shift key. Note, however, that your flagship does not begin the game with a secondary weapon, and that not all ships' secondary weapons are weapons per se. Furthermore, some ships use the secondary key as a modifier key, so that while it's held down you can use the other controls to do other things, like rotating turrets.
* Once you ally with the Earth space station, you can flee any combat thereafter by pressing Escape. Note that this "run-away drive" takes 5 seconds to kick in, during which you are vulnerable.
* Crew is basically just ship hit points, both for your starships and your landers.
* Your landing craft has a stun gun, activated with the primary-weapon key. You can use this to zap planet-dwelling lifeforms into a state of suspended animation (bigger critters will need to be zapped more times), making them safe to pick up as cargo.
* The retail version of the game came with a poster representing known space as your character's point of view at the start of the game. It's very useful for locating stars by name (much easier than trying to find them via the in-game starmap), and gives you some additional initial exploration goals. You can find a copy of it here: http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/sc2/images/sc2_color_map.jpg
= Notes for modern gamers =
This is an old-school adventure game, and as such does not adhere to several more modern tenets of digital games. Here is some advice that would seem second nature to a computer gamer 15 years ago, but not so much today:
* You have a time limit. Very bad and utterly irreversible things will start happening after around four game-years (though you can delay this by an additional year through certain in-game activities). You really want to complete the game before this time. If you listen to your allies' advice (and your enemies' loose talk) and don't wander without purpose, you'll be OK.
* Save often. Use many save-slots. The game will cheerfully allow you to save in unwinnable circumstances, even if you don't yet realize the direness of your situation. There are also plenty of situations where a single conversational slip-up can make you the eternal enemy of an entire alien race. (Diplomacy is a delicate business.) UQM gives you 50 save slots, which use a negligible amount of disk space. Use them, and don't be shy about restoring and trying something else when things are going obviously badly for you.
* Take notes with pen and paper. You will often come across information that you'll only hear once ever, so write down anything that seems specific or otherwise important -- the game will not record it for you. Furthermore, the game makes no attempt to perform any sort of bookkeeping tasks for you, such as memory of where you've been or where you've been told to go next. Your adventure will be easier if you record this sort of data yourself.
