Conference hydra::amiga_v1

4399.0. "Accolade's "Star Control"" by RAVEN1::HEFFELFINGER (Tut, tut. It looks like rain.) Sat Jan 05 1991 00:05

Title:  Star Control
Author(s): Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford
Publisher: Accolade
Summary: Spacewar with a refreshing twist.
Overall Score: 9/10

Okay you oldtimers out there.  Yeah, you guys with the canes and the
graying temples.  Remember Spacewar?  Wanna play it again?  Buy this game.

Star Control is a 3 level game which caters to both the joystick jockey and
the strategist.  It's not the most realistic wargame ever created but for
those of us who don't mind trading a little realism for some playability,
SC is the ticket.

The first level is merely head-to-head Spacewar shoot-em-up.  The graphics
are pretty, the action is smooth, and the sounds are appropriate.  The
story wrapped around the game is that "The Alliance of Free Stars" (Yay!)
and the "Ur-Quan Hierarchy" (Booooo!) have started a hot war.  Each side is
made up of seven races, each of whom contribute a unique type of warship.
So the first level of the game consists of pitting one ship against another
in an arena atmosphere.  Call it training, if you will.

Level 2 is called "Melee."  7 Hierarchy ships are pitted against 7 Alliance
ships, and it's a battle to the death.  When one ship is destroyed, the
loser chooses another ship to go against the winning ship.  Melee continues
until all seven of one side's ships have been destroyed.  It's a great way
to practice what you've learned in level 1.

Level 3 is the most interesting of the 3.  SC comes with 9 battle scenarios
of increasing difficulty.  Each takes place in a small universe (or sector
if you prefer) that contains at most 50 planets.  The idea is to set up
mines on mining planets, to plant colonies on habitable planets, to fortify
planets to slow your opponent's progress, and to in general earn as many
"Starbucks" (shades of "Battlestar Galactica") as you can.  The more
starbucks, the more ships you can build at your starbase  So you move from
world to world in this clever, rotating, 3-D, "universe" mining and
colonizing.  (Mines make money, and colonies allow you to replenish the
crews on your warships.  The number of crewmembers is the number of "hit
points" as it were, for each ship.  When the crew hits 0, the ship
explodes.)  The alliance and hierarchy take turns doing their things, and
when they encounter one another, the spacewar sequence kicks in.

As I said, it's not the richest battle simulation I've seen, and it's not
an indepth adventure like "Starflight," but it's had me riveted since
Christmas night.  It seems to be pretty well balanced, but even though the
Hierarchy might be a tad stronger, the game allows the Alliance player to
get his/her space legs before it starts to get too difficult.  The game is
laced with subtle (and not-so-subtle) humor that makes it all the more
endearing.  The artwork is splendid!  I should also add that it comes with
a scenario editor so you can create your own campaigns.  It also comes with
a program to configure the keyboard controls to suit you.  I use the
joystick as much as possible so I haven't tested that program.  SC does not
use the mouse.

It comes on 2 floppies and contains no on-disk protection, it works very
well from a hard drive and I've been running it from RAM: lately too,
without a single problem.

There are 2 gotchas:

1) It does a lot of code overlaying so there are some heavy (read "slow")
disk accesses.  I run off of an admittedly slow hard drive, and when I'm
really getting into the game I can get very impatient. Moving it to RAM:
helps a little (You'll need a good 3M if you want to do that) but even so,
I fidget.  If you have only floppies, be prepared for some waits.

2) Accolade is on an ugly code wheel kick now.  On the one hand, things run
well from the HD that way, but on the other, my desk is littered with
wheels.  (The new Jack Nicklaus uses one, too.)  The wheel in this one is
cute the first few times but gets old after awhile.

In summary, if you like a little thinking with your joystick jerking, try
this game.

-Gary