Retronauts - 471: Retronauts Episode 471: Star Control

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

By the fetid breath of Dogar and Kazon! Nadia Oxford, Shivam Bhatt, and Scott Sharkey have traveled to this insignificant quadrant of the galaxy to evangelize about two games that changed space adventure games forever: Star Control I & II. Cover art by John Pading. Edits by Greg Leahy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.com. This week on Retronauts, surprise and terror. The juice is boiling. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Retronauts. I am your host for this week, Nadia Oxford, of the Axel of the Bug God RPG podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. Today, we are going into deep space and hyperspace and maybe even quasi space as we talk about one of the greatest adventure games of all time, Star Control. Well, mostly Star Control 2 and Erkwan Masters, but we'll throw in a, uh, A hello to Star Control on our way. I'm honored to actually be joined on this episode by two of my great and very old friends. Sorry for saying old, but it's true. Shivam Bhatt and Scott Sharkey, both avid fans of Star Control, like probably more than me, and that's pretty scary. Go ahead and say hi, you first, Shavam.

Hello, it's good to be back on this show. I've been actually asking Parrish to do a StarCon 2 episode since Retronauts started. Wow. You know, 17 years of patience, and I finally got there. You did. Your patience really paid off. I said, you know what? I should just do a Star Control 2 episode.

I said to Parrish, you okay with that? And he said, sure, sure. That's good thing. I don't know why he didn't just let me do it, but I guess I'm just a perennial guest and not the permanent. You're a guest and a great friend. You're a good mollusk. I don't know what you call a spath-eye, but there you go. Sharky, it's been like 50,000 space ages.

How are you? It's been a long time, yeah. It's funny. I actually wanted to do this back when I was hosting this, like 15 years ago. Wow. So I'm very happy that I managed to make your dreams come true in a roundabout way. That gives me great honor. You laugh, Nadia, but when you did send me the text saying, hey, you want to be on a StarCon episode?

I was literally like, yes, right now, let's go. I got my microphone out. Let's get this done. Yeah, this is one of the first things I wrote about, like in computer games. gaming world, like early 2000s. Really? Wow. Yeah, because I had that column on just like, you know, free and indie games. And this was one of the first ones I did.

Yeah, I was actually going to ask you, you gentlemen, how you got into like Star Control in general. Sharky, since you started to go ahead and talk some more about your history with the game. I had a friend of it, the Genesis game way back. Yeah. We mostly just played the super melee. Like the campaign stuff, I barely dip my toes in. And it's not bad.

but it is, you know, it's an early, like, turn-based strategy game with, like, basically fancy space war in between. Yes, StarCod One definitely felt like space wars with graphics, right? Like, 1950s era space war with a little bit of upside. It had a lot of character, but most of the story is in the manual. Like, it's not a lot to it. For sure. The good era when manuals actually carried the weight of the game.

Even Star Control 2 kind of does that. I remember getting the game, and I still have the manual, and it's just like I was kind of just sitting on my floor of my apartment. little Hobbit Hole apartment, just reading it and being like, wow, this is so cool. There's a lot of world building in it. There really is. Yes, there is. Like, I remember reading the manual of Sarkhan 2, and it's like, and the aliens came and shot

lasers into these places in like South America where nobody knew civilization was. And I'm like, oh, my God, I want to know that story. Oh, yeah. They've got vaporized Atlantis and it's like a footnote. Yeah. I love that. There is a mention of that, isn't there, in the instruction booklet, the Urquan Concord Earth, and they start shooting up places the humans have no idea why they're shooting up.

they're like, we're attacking all of the places that are advanced civilizations, and we're like, there's nothing out there. Why did you laser the Atlantic? Turns out there's nothing there now. My history with StarCon, I did not play the first one until way later. I definitely got into StarCon too. My best friend who lived next door to me, his dad was one of the 1970s nerds who had like, you know, ham radios and electronic stuff and seven hard drives in his computer when everybody didn't know what a hard drive was. and they would get all the cool new computer games all the time because his dad was like a proto nerd

and one of the ones they got was StarCon too and so I used to go to his house all the time and we would be sitting there and just you know in awe of how expansive and amazing this game is like we're going to talk about it for the next X amount of time but so I won't go in too far but let's just put it this way

we were so addicted to this game that the copyright protection of this game when you log on it would give you a star in coordinates and then say name the consolation and you're supposed to pull out the big fancy star map they had and you know type in the name we lost that star map because we were kids however we had played star con so much that we literally could just keep refreshing until it got to soul and then we knew where soul was and we were able to put in the coordinates for that and get into the game that and like horo luggy and we were sitting there and like because we're 12 horror luggy come on it's like

yeah i did not forget that yeah but like we're like we're We were literally, like, looking at this map, and we would be looking at the coordinates and kind of like, okay, on the mouse pad, where is this? Oh, yeah, there we go. And then we went and wrote out the entire coordinates of every single star on a notepad that I think I still have somewhere, just to prove a point. It's one of those world maps that sticks with you. Like, I know people talk about like I could still play Zelda with my eye shut or whatever, but like I remember the Star Control 2 map. Like, I could still like Delta Gorno is at like, you know, 200 or whatever. exactly like you remember where the portal for the arrow loo is you remember where like these

important planets and when you look at just like when I fired it up again in prep for this episode and I just went to the star map and I'm like holy crap there are a lot of stars and every last star has been deliberately placed every one of them has like anywhere from one to like 12 to 15 planets every one of those planets have been handcrafted an individual place and I'm like this is the most like nowadays this would be like all procedurally generated or something. But this was bespoke as hell. And I'm just like, damn, these guys spent hours plunking down random aliens on every last dot of this planet.

That's nuts to me now. It owes a lot to Star Flight. Yeah. Like, if you even look at that game, even if you haven't played it, it looks like Star Control, because Star Control just drew a lot from it. And there's a lot of cross-pollination between the people who made those games, too. Yeah. Like, was it Paul Richie?

All right. Rike. Right. I can never remember. That's his name. I think that was probably actually like the first thing I was familiar with him doing was like mail order monsters. I guess back when he was supposed to be working on that, he was like helping with Star Flight. That's amazing.

Years later, it came together as this. Yeah, like, from what I understand, though, this is also kind of their, like, their electronic version of their old Star Frontiers RPG game that they were playing. The old TSR, basically, it's like a science fiction role-playing game, kind of like D&D, but in space. And they borrowed a lot of their home campaign to make this kind of, this, this, world for this game. Wow, Dragon Lines in Space. You know, it, well, it's like Spell Jammer, right?

Yeah. Actually, think about it, how much like Spellammer is? Is there even this flaw just on you go through to get to the crystal spheres between the different areas? Damn. Damn.

I'm making this connection right now, but this game is hellless. It's very, very, it wears it on its sleeve that it was attached to a tabletop game. It is very D&D in space. Oh, absolutely. Wasn't Ritchie, I'm sorry, Ricky, our friend, wasn't he?

That's what his Wikipedia says. Wasn't Richie a part of TSR or he wrote for D&D or something like that? He did. No, wait, what was that Fred Ford? I don't remember. He was a friend of Errol Otis who was basically the guy who did all the core artwork for it. Oh, wait. I'm looking here because I'm now curious.

I went to his Wikipedia page. And it turns out he did write a whole bunch of old D&D world stuff. So yeah, Gamma World, which obviously has a lot of influence here. But then also Slave Pitts of the Undercity, which was a little. one of the big mega modules. Damn, this guy did a lot of RPG credits. And like Sharky City, kind of wears it all in the sleeve. I was actually watching an interview with Ars Technica with Richie and Ford.

And they were saying how they were considering procedural generation for the planets, but they realized how that's not very special. Like the way they put it is just procedural generation is very impressive at first. But then you kind of realize you don't have, as essentially, of the story behind each star, like it's very purposely placed, which they ended up doing for Star Control 2, saying, well, this one is close to the sun. It's like a Ruby World. This one is like very hot. So they put, God, there's so many stars. When I think about what's coming up at Bethesda, Starfield, and how they're like, oh, yeah, there's a hundred systems. And I just

immediately thought about Star Control 2 and saying, holy crap, like, that's a lot of land to cover. Yeah, it's just so insane to think about the fact that, I mean, at its core, this game is the space exploration game, but I think with the time limit that the game has, there's no way to actually explore every single star on a single playthrough. No, take it from me. There's not. There's like no way. You never have enough fuel.

If anybody ever hasn't played this game, it is interested in playing it, I recommend not playing it with a walkthrough and going into it with a mindset that like you are going to fail. Oh, yeah. Your first through playthrough is like eventually, you know, the cora or whatever, their sphere is going to grow and start sweeping around them. map and then you're just going to cry a whole lot. And you're doomed. But you use that time to keep a notebook and write down where everything is so you know where to go the next time

around. I was just about to say, this game demands a notebook and it demands you write down every coordinate anybody says. Because otherwise you're just going to be like, if someone mentioned a star system, you write that shit down because it is going to come into play later on. Oh yeah. Anytime somebody is going to actually give you numbers, that means that's where you got to go. But Nadia, you know what? You haven't told us how you got into Sorry, control. Oh, it started with a mental breakdown. That's all good things, too.

It was all good things, too. Basically, in 2003, I was at a job as a janitorial job. Like, I was, I got really sick. I got tuberculosis. So I quit and kind of had a breakdown where I just couldn't really, you know, do anything for about a year. And around that time, of course, had zero money. And, of course, I was frequenting, like, you know, thrift shops, seeing whatever cool stuff I could find. And back then people still put video games in thrift shops.

And I saw Star Control 2, like a box set for the PC. And I said, you know what? For some reason, I had just recently heard of that. Sharky, it might have been something you wrote. I swear to God. Probably. I was always going off about this. And I said, okay, I'll grab that.

And I grabbed it. And I'm like, oh, wow, this is actually really freaking awesome. And around the same time, I heard about Urquan Masters, the remake that came out in 2000. And was it two when it came out, I think? It was around then, yeah. And I said, you know what? This is great on my good old 486. but I'm going to download the Urquan Masters because, number one, it's free.

Number two, it's the 3DO version of the game, which, although I had never played it, I remember seeing it in Game Fan. When Game Fan had a game that it loved and never shut up about it, so it had a whole thing about Star Control 2 for the 3DO. And I said, that looks like a really interesting game. I'm going to throw that away for a future reference because God knows I'm never going to have a 3DO. And then when I heard, oh, they released this game that you were kind of interested in back when you were a kid. I said, okay, cool, I'm all down with this. And I went ahead and I downloaded it.

I'm like, oh, shit, this is a really freaking great game to have for free. And I just, like, really fell into it. I fell into the lore because actually, thanks to having Star Control 2, the box set, I had the lore book and everything. So I was reading through that and putting everything together with Rekkonmasters. And then the game taught me a very hard lesson about how computer RPGs tend to be different from JRP. Which is, I was, as you were saying, Chavam, like, you know, I was kind of goofing around in the stars. You don't really have time to do that, but I had no idea.

And suddenly I noticed the core, a sphere of influence, sphere of influence is growing and growing. Oh, yeah. And everything in its shadow is decimated. Just civilization is my part of the moment. The first time you see that sphere grow and then you see like the UMGA just disappear or the Utwig just dis, and you're like, what the hell just happened? Oh, no. Oh, shit. They go with the kunk.

I didn't like them, but they didn't deserve that. And then you're like, oh, bad things have just happened. Yeah, yeah. And I'm thinking, like, compared to console RPGs, I think, well, okay, Final Fantasy 7 tells you, the Meteor is coming, but it's not going to drop ever. So I thought it was like that. But no, the core, I will, uh, they have to drop. They'll literally kill everything in the universe.

Yeah. This game is basically like, yo, buddy, I am bringing the end times. Here they are. But it's really important to note just for a second that like Star Control 2, when it came out, it was like, you know, floppy disks in 1992, whatever, very basic traditional RPG. But this was one of the first real fan-based open-source projects to come out, to become real popular, to get the blessings of the actual creators of the game. Like, they basically took the original code. They open-sourceded.

They found the voice tracks and everything. They made it. They've updated even up till now, up until 2022. They've been continually updating this game to just work on new systems and to polish it more and more. And basically, they called it Erkwan Masters because Acclaim would not, or Accolade would not let them have the Star Control. name, which has, you know, become a problem later with the other thing. But the fact that it existed for free, the full game available for basically any concept, I mean, any system you want to play it on. And it's like 100% not like some, you know, hack version or nothing. This is the

official full-on game. It's still impressive to me. And the fact that they did in 2002 is just wild. And it's even a version that you weren't likely to have played. I mean, who owned it 3DO. Like, I mean, I rented one once. It had some car game where the car looked like a shoebox. I don't remember anything else about it. But to have voice acting and everything, adds so much to the game, so much character in just the art anyway, but to put these ridiculous voices on top of it. And the music poured it over so well, because they, you know, they used odd trackers for it. And, you know, what was the story behind that? Didn't they hold like a contest? They held a contest for mod composers.

So this is like demo seeing people like on the Amiga doing this. Yeah. And with the samples baked into the mod files like that, it just sounds really good on 3D. And then it ports really well back to PC. Yeah. I still love that. Fantastic. It's one of my favorite soundtracks.

Like I drive with that stupid hyperspace music sometimes. It's both chill and also just invigorating. It makes you want to go out there and like triumph over the alien races out there. I mean, but the quasi space music. is so good. The hyperface music is so good. Like, the only thing I don't like is the actual just battle music because you hear it

so much. Oh, yeah. But that's a Final Fantasy tactics problem, right? It's interesting, though. You can play through the game barely fighting, other than like a few obligatory fights near the end. You can get through most of it without firing a shot. There are a few places where you're cornered into it, but you can almost do a pacifist run.

You can play through it so many different ways. I mean, you can skip entire encounters and stuff, too. Like, you can play through the entire game and never talk to the Vux. Like, other than General X, you don't have to mess with them at all. Good old General X. Actually, that's wild to think about how this game allowed you to sequence break a lot. I'm probably nobody tried to speed run it, but probably just because it is very long.

But, I mean, people have sped run frigging like other scrolls and Final Fantasy. You can play through this in like an hour and a half if you're skipping the conversations. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure somebody must have. It kind of defeats the purpose, though, you know. It's mostly just is the, is the, is the, is the, character and the talking to all these people, that makes it fun.

Like, just watching somebody zip around, pick up the key items, and then go right to the end wouldn't be terribly entertaining. That's true. That's true. I don't know. I'm sure somebody will find some kind of glitch where you can just, like, teleport across and snatch everything up. After quasi space, there's like hyper quasi space, and that's how they go through the game. Big space. Okay, so Star Control One, he comes out, Toys for Bob makes it in, like, 1990, put out on the Amiga and DOS.

And like Sharky was saying, basically, there was a story there. It was kind of thin. It was like about like alien races from the good guys. fighting the alien races of the bad guys. But the more important part is that they came with this game called Super Melee Mode, where every spaceship in the game was on this 2D screen. There's like a sun or a planet

or something in the middle, and you're basically one half of you is using the arrow keys and like the shift and control button. The other half is using Wazi and like Spacebar and the other shift or something. And you're going back and forth and trying to just shoot each of your ships has like two weapons, like a main one and an alt one. You had a certain amount of life. And it literally played exactly like

space wars did. As in the sun exuded gravity in the middle, you could swing around it, you could fly around. It's hell of fun. It's one of like classic arcade experiences and it still holds up. I was always so terrible at the fighting. I tried to avoid it as much as possible, but I have heard the stories about people kind of playing the original with one keyboard and there were some problems with like key binding back in the day. And so they actually, Twister Bob released a like a fix for that, like a software fix so that you could, like two people could play at the same time without screwing up their keyboard. And the interview I was watching, there was a nice story about how one guy told

them that his house had been wiped out in a hurricane and he was miserable, but he stayed with his friend and like playing Star Control, like just the combat just kept him kind of sane during a bad time. And they really like that story. And I could understand why. Yeah. I mean, Star Control 1 doesn't have a lot to tell for it except that it exists. it feels a lot like

a lot of the early first games that you see on NES where like Mega Man 2 is the one you care about or like you know Castlevania 2 is the one you care about Zelda 2 is the one you care about and nobody cares about the first games in those series yes you heard me you heard me

don't at me but StarCon 1 existed and it gave us all the races but the more important thing is that it gave us Stark on 2 yeah that's kind of the thing isn't it it's a fine prologue But it's not nearly as engaging.

It is definitely just good guys and bad guys. And the moral ambiguity, if you would even call it that in Star Control 2 of like there are, now there are two bad guys and you're rooting for one of them. It's the genociders versus the slavers and you're rooting for the slavers. Oh, I want to talk about that in depth, but we will get to that in 10 seconds. Because if I start now, it's going to, it's going to go. It's going to be the Urquan podcast. It's just all we're going to talk about. Yeah.

So 1992 on DOS comes out StarCon 2. It's called Star Control 2. We know that. But when you went into DOS, the install folder was StarCon 2, C-colon slash. So that's the way we call it, because we're old. StarCon 2 basically, it came out. And the manual has this incredible storyline to fill in everybody who didn't play StarCon 1, which was like a lot of people. But you start off as this captain of this broken down precursor ship, which is basically this skeleton of a gigantic, like, Star Destroyer-level ship thing.

and you're off on this little planet that was forgotten by everybody where like humans went and colonized and they're just hanging out and you can later on go back to that planet and visit in the game and the Urquan have locked it down, it sucks. But you go there and you come back to Earth

and you are limping into Earth with this busted spaceship and the first thing you see is this little orb come at you from like coming at you from the fact that first off the first thing you see is planet Earth is covered in a red shield and you know what the hell is that and there's a space station rotating around it

As you go towards a space station, a little probe comes out and it comes to you. And suddenly you get a message and you hear this like just horns blaring and it's the most martial terrifying noise you've ever heard in your life of dun da-da-d-da-da-da-da-d-d-and you're like, oh my God, what the hell? And there's gigantic like death centipede hanging down over this pit. And you're like, what the hell is going on? And he's got a little like, you know, blob friend over there who starts talking to you. And he's like, we are the Urquan. And it's all this, like, horrifying, like... It's all blinking out of sync.

Oh, yeah. His eyes are blinking. The body is twitching. And it's just like, you are flying an unauthorized vessel. We are going to kill you. So please hang out until we do. And you're like, what the... What?

What do I tell him to wait? Don't be like, wait here or the punishment will be worse. How could it be worse? Yeah, Mike, there's a giant scale. For now, we're just going to kill you. If you keep this up, we're going to kill everybody. Yeah, that's true. They do escalate.

Yeah. You go to the space station. And the captain there is like, get us some minerals and help us get some power and figure out what else going on. So you do. It teaches you a basic mechanic of the game. You go to a planet. You send your lander down. Hope it doesn't die.

Pick up fancy like purples and reds and yellows and, you know, rocks sell them back to the dude. He gets his energy. You get to buy fuel people and ships. And, you know, you can go and explore the town. And while you're doing that and talking to this guy, suddenly out of nowhere, this spaceship comes hurtling out of space at you, which is limping. It's got half life. there's this crazy, terrifying Spider-Man who's got a horrifying font even that looks like Spider-Web just kind of crawling across.

I noticed when I was going back over this, that the first letter of every word of their sentence is capitalized. Yeah. And the thing is, the font choices in this game are so perfect for each race. They're really evocative, especially before they had voice acting before they had anything. Like, you could look at it and be like, oh, this is, I don't want to mess with these people. the ill wrath of all things like yeah well they're their ones are going to use the metalhead font yeah right obviously they're so edge lord they're so egg lord and they've got like the cling on ships and they got cloaking devices and first off when you get into battle with this guy and he just

goes invisible and you're like what what what where the hell did he go and then comes out of nowhere next to you shooting fire and you're like okay this is messed up and I hate this please don't kill me because you got the dinky human ship which is like a clunky ass like garbage ship that It shoots out nuclear bombs and little lasers, and it's trash. It is just the space warship. Yes, that's all the air is to it. I think you can get Fwifo before that point. You can definitely get FIFO.

Best character in the game. Absolutely. It's like the only ship I keep for the entire game. It's great. You have to. I mean, it's the law. It's a ship. When you come into Seoul for the first time, you're in the, our planetary system, Pluto is out there, and it's close to you, and you can go pop over.

When you go to Pluto, you find two things. one is there's a one lone purple like resource there which is great it gives you money for starting and two there's a random weird looking ship that's a whole bunch of balls kind of just stuck around center toys yeah it looks like a tinker toy or like a chemistry set where you're modeling some atom that nobody's ever heard of like you know the ones where you have to have foam ball and stick like the gum drops into it like in high school and you get there and there's this weird weird mollus squid man who's just like, please don't kill me. I'm the only one.

Or he starts with, I will destroy you. And I am super brave. And I'm definitely not the only one on this ship here. Yeah, and he does something like, he says something to the effect of, okay, well, I know you're just going to charge for me. So why bother? Here's the coordinates of my home. Here's everything you want to know.

But first thing he says to you. It's so, Fiffo, I love him so. First off, Fiffo. What a name. What a name. What a name is like Swiffer. The way of introduction, he just sells out his entire species. Yeah, perfect.

And he tells me about his life and how he had like, you know, something like 8,000 brothers and sisters and he was thrilled because his mom called him my name once. Yeah, it's like the staff out of the hours and hours of conversation if you want to listen to it. Oh, God. And they talk for, they wrote so much. And when you think about this now, think about how much audio is in this game since every bit of dialogue gets read out in three of it.

Like two thirds of that TV must have just been like voice tracks. Easy. Yeah, for sure. So FOFO is in this spathai eluder. I think they called it? And it's awesome because it's got this thing called the butt missile where it's like its main weapon is this little pea shooter that shoots out like a little ways and nobody cares about.

But the alt weapon is this purple missile that comes out your butt basically because you're meant to be running away and just shooting these guys and it's got a little fart noise. It does. It makes a little fart noise when it makes the, uh, when it shoots. And it's perfect. It's the only ship I can think of that. is not built for, like, suicide head-on missions. Oh, yeah, no, this thing is all about just...

It's a great matchup against almost everything. Yeah. You can just run away the entire match. It takes forever. You kite people. Yeah. You kite them and you just fart at them. It's amazing.

Yeah. I mean, and they don't even show up in the game, but the Andrewsynth have, like, the opposite of that, where you just basically, like, blaze through people. Oh, yeah, dude. I love the Anders-Sinth. I've never tried their ship. I just know about them and how they are no more because they ask me a question. Keep asking.

No. Too much asking. one of my favorite races ever and the fact that they basically are just like completely obliterated in this is like it's so sad but their ships are cool they turn into like giant flaming comets that just kind of blaze through you but yeah so stark on two it was amazing it was incredibly long and i think that in order to stop you from basically spending the next forever going through every star the designers set this game up to be a colossal war between two races and if you take too long which is like longer than five years of in-game time, one of the races wins, and then they start

just going through and obliterated. Should we talk about the Urquan right now? Yeah. I think we're all going to talk about the Earth one. We have to. We might as well. They're the centipede in the room, right? So yeah. The premise of this story is that Earth has been in captured, Earth and all of the good races from Starcon 1 were captured and enslaved by this race of centipede dudes called the Urquan. Obviously the Urquan masters in the title of the game. There are these green centipede to hang down. They're too cool to talk to you. So they use

these little brain slugs called Denari that they use to actually communicate with you. And these guys are like hyper-fascists. When they have their big giant green ships, they shoot out their crew at you, which then go and zap you you little by little and then suck them back in. And their whole gimmick is we want

to go through the universe and enslave all the races and lock you into your own planet, either turn you into a combat race that works for us or turn you into a slave race and just put you on your planet and leave you alone. And they have been doing this thing called the path of now and forever, which is they're part of this big, giant collective race of Urquan. And the other half of the Erkwan race, the horrifying, horrifying Kora, who are the black centipede guys who've got like these ships that shoot out metal blades and have flame like circles around them and hang over a pit of bones. They basically decided that, no, we're going to go through the race and go through the universe and kill every sentient being we thought.

Eternal doctrine, yeah. Yes. So these two races, the Urquan Kora, or the black ones, the Erkwan Kazerzah, the green ones, basically meet up. And they're like, you know what? If we hang out, we're going to destroy each other. So I'm going to go this way and you're going to go that way. And the next time we meet up, we're going to have a big battle. And whoever wins gets to obliterate the universe or something.

Well, it turns out your system is a lucky one where they decided to meet up your little quadrant of the corner of the corner of the universe. So you're there. And the Erkwan are obviously the big bad guys from the first game. They're the big, bad guys now, and you're like, who's going on? What's this evil stuff? But the story, when you, like, talk to the Kora and, like, the other races, and you find out the way to actually talk to these people, and you're like, why are you like this? No, Halt.

What you were doing is wrong. Why do you doing this thing? Yeah. And they're like, well, let me tell you. Here's my entire backstory. Yeah. And it's like one of the most messed up things ever, right? Like, these guys used to be a brown race of peace-loving centipede who were kind of violent when they're mating, but otherwise, whatever.

And this race of Denari, the little brain slugs that they turned into their talkers, controlled them and turned them into slaves, bred them to split them into combat half and scientists half, and then use these necklaces to control them called the excruciators. Oh, no, they used to escape their control. Oh, yeah. Because they can't control them when they're in pain, so they subject themselves to pain. They had amazing mind-controlled, and they were getting zapped and they were getting messed up. And then Kazerzah, one of the scientists, creates this thing called an excruciator,

which basically causes them to be in so much pain that the Denari have to break the telepathic link because they're just like, oh, this hurts. And so these guys basically have to like torture themselves in order to free their race and then like just go ham on everything. And I'm like, huh, a race where you literally have to just fry yourself in order to free yourself,

probably is not going to leave for a good bunch of people to hang out with. No, they're pretty pissed off. I do like their revenge though is considering that they're very territorial. and they hate talking to other species. They have this instinctive revulsion of being around them. So, like, the most insulting thing they can think of for their worst enemy is to turn them into translators. Like, as punishment, you have to talk to aliens on my behalf.

Yeah, and, like, you don't get to have freedom. You are literally just a babel fish that sits in the corner. And I'm like, that's pretty rad. Video Deathloop is the show where we watch a short video clip on loop is the show where we watch a short video clip on Loop until we just can't take it anymore. the way, we'll try our best to make each other laugh and to hold out longer than the other guy. Come in on any episode. Video Deathloop, new episodes every Friday. As a fan of podcasts, you've probably thought about starting one of your own.

Introducing the new HyperX DuoCast. The DuoCast has all the essential features an aspiring podcaster would want from USB Mike, with HyperX favorites like Tap to Mute and a vibrant mute indicator. It's compact and elegantly styled. Perfect for situations where you want a mic that looks great but isn't too extra. Check out the new HyperX DuoCast, available at Target.com, or shop direct at HyperX.com. Video Deathloop is a show where we watch a short clip on loop until one or both of us can't take it anymore. Each week, one of us picks out a video, the other does not know about to their dismay.

Video game cutscenes, TV show openings, music videos, and occasional horse videos are just some of the clips we've ran, and we're five seasons in. Check us out every Friday. But yeah, so, StarContin, I'm sorry. Sorry, Nadia, I took over. No, no, I mean, that's why I had this podcast. I know you two would be the ones of like, really, you've been wanting to do this for age as so have I. So I totally understand.

Like, just like, holy shit, this is a dime in place. Oh, my God, dude. I've been playing this game again recently. And when you go, so I guess we should lay out what the game is, right? So basically, you're out there. You've got your ship. You can buy other ships from the races that ally with you. So the Spathye, the humans, the kunk, the yot, whatever.

And each of them acts in a different way. You go around to different planets. you meet the various races. When you meet them on the star map, a big bubble pops up to show you the sphere of influence that they have, which is really cool storytelling because sometimes they'll be like, like you meet these race of hippie birds

called the Pekonkour, super fun, super famous. They've got the little butterfly ship that spins around. They can resurrect themselves. They're my personal favorite race. You know, and they go, ha, it's great. But I was playing this the other night. Like, I had, I've won that coin flip like six times in a row. It feels so good. It feels

so good when you do. Because you just have to jam on attack buttons and hope that you get it, or at least that's what we told her. It makes for the most absurd final fight in the game, though, because you really have to rely on them. And the entire time, you're just shouting insults because that's how they recharge their guns. So you're just flying around going, jerk, wimp, loser, dweed. I forgot about that.

So the Pekunk have a little butterfly ship, and it's got these cool little three like shooters that come out, whatever. But when you fire, you've got energy. And your energy gets re-energized either by waiting or, in the case of like the pecanc, you have to use your alt to refill your energy. And their

alt is literally just yelling schoolyard insults of people. And you're fighting against these death centipedes. This is the final battle too. So you're like up against like the black horrible centipede and these like toucan sam motherfuckers like yeah.

Dweeb. Jerk. But yeah. So then there's a race of these like, you know, bird guys who are pyridactyl called the Yehot. We're basically like the crazy martial samurai. Yeah, the Scottish dudes. And they sit there and the Yihad and Pekunk were apparently a long ago one race.

And they split up and over the course of the story, you cause them to fuse together. And you see slowly the Pekunk sphere of influence moving closer and closer and then just disappearing into the YHat. Oh, yeah. Before that, like when you start their civil war, like the Yaha splits into two spheres of influence when they start fighting each other. I mean, watching those move around. And you can actually like stall the game a little bit. Like you can prolong your deadline. You can trick the third ash into fighting the equine.

That'll slow it down a little bit. Or the supox and the whatever, the depressive guys. The Odwig. They'll go over there and it'll give you a few more months while they just, you know, die futilely. It's just, it's so got so much personality this game does. It's like oozes ridiculous. I mean, every single race is unique. Every single ship is unique.

Like one of my favorite is the hypercapitalist drudge. The druge, oh, gosh, they're a little on the nose, yeah. Yeah, like, first off, their dude is, like, hanging from chains over this, like, factory, and you can go there because you have to buy some items from them, and you can sell your crew members to them to get credits to buy things from or to buy fuel or whatever. And then your people are, like, did you just sell our people into slavery? It's like, no. Oh, yeah, the price for crew goes way up if you do that. There was like, oh, my God, this asshole is going to sell us to these guys. And they fuel their ships by throwing their crew in the furnace.

It's like Amazon. Exactly. And you see like the little icon of the hand pick up a thing and just throw it into the fire pit. And you're like, oh, no. Oh, no. I'm mistaken. You hear screaming. Oh, yeah.

It's horrifying. And then like the samurai Shafixie who got there like, you know, one dude left. And he is, his ship has a bomb on it that will explode. So you have to go into combat with the guy and then escape a whole bunch because otherwise he will kill him. himself and you will lose. And it's like, oh, no, what do I do? There's somebody like, the screen goes white and you're dead and it goes back to the title. Like, when you find the Uwig bomb, like, you can just use it.

Yeah. And it's like, oh. I found this. Set it off. Oh, that's what happens. Okay. Or you bring it back to the station and the guy is just like, yeah, just go somewhere else with that.

Please never do that again. At the end of the stand, trash can man is hauling back the nuke to flag and flag. Like, get that out of here, please. Yeah, like, of course, the little marsupial. guys are like just borderline racist though like of course they have like a hairy carry device oh yeah yeah but you have to like find the the pervert

vux guy to like get emails and then he like replenishes the race in like a month well they are like you know little marsupials they do spawn like bunnies but that's how I get cheaper that's how I get cheaper crew yeah the crew cross goes down to one after

that yeah good everybody just now you've got a bunch of rats in your deal that one's a rat It was up to your waist in tribbles, basically. Like murderous Japanese tribles. Yeah, I love that the vucks were these ugly one-eyed, like traditional aliens. The pervert among them is the one who wants to talk to humans. And he's like, oh, I love humans.

They're so cool. And I'm like, oh, you're real creepy, bro. Yeah, you got tentacles, dude. That's one of those ones, too. Like, you can go down the conversation tree with the vux. And eventually they'll admit that, like, you know, it wasn't because of this insult during first contact. We just think you're really fucking gross. Like, we can't understand the way your next move.

and the bones in your mouth. It's like two eyes. It's so disgusting. And then, of course, my personal favorite, the Arolu, who are traditional, like, you know, bald-headed little green men with the UFO spaceships who are, like, living in quasi-space. And their ships have no inertia, which is completely wild when you try to play with them in, like, combat, like, oh, they can just stop. Every other ship gets dragged by gravity or by, you know, when they move, they move according

to thrust and propulsion, which is half of the fun of the combat system. like so tricky to get your thing to go where you want. For sure. But I love the heirlook in both teleport and literally turn on a dime. I like how everybody's reaction to the RELO is just sort of vague unease. They've been nothing but helpful.

They were useful in the previous war. They've done everything they could for you, but everybody's like, those creepy little bastards. They modified our genetics 10,000 years ago. I mean, they're probing our butts, probably. I mean, they kind of admit that they've been like, you know, oh yeah, sometimes we let you remember when we examined you.

And they have so much. under like they they treat you very condescendingly like a child but not in a really mean way every time they're like oh you're so clever you baby like you're like you're a cat that learned how to use the toilet like that's just how they talk but what really intrigues me about the ary lu is they kind of tie into the lovecraft element of star control too which is absolutely excellent to me it's like the best video game version of lovecraft uh it's such a hinted-at story that they don't really you know they don't blow it off you're allowed to infer this like Like, you know, they already do talk a little about it.

Like, they were probably trying to protect you from the oars, but they don't outright say it. Yeah, I love that, like, the way that they've got space set up is like quasi-spaces above the orders are from below. And you're like, oh, that's bad. And also the implication of that they're all just like one being. Yes. Like, oh, you're many bubbles. We're not many bubbles. We are fingers.

Like, okay, whatever that means. Terrifying and stupid at the same time. We want they look like parrotfish. Yeah, so let's talk about the ors for a second, which I used to always laugh at because, like, when I was going on the internet, and I met a bunch of Koreans and they would use the old, like, bow emoji, which was O-R-I-I-I-I-I-I always thought they're saying O-Rs. Every time I see the oars, I'm just like, ah, the juice is boiling. And I'm like, no, they're bowing at me. I don't get it. But, yeah, so the oars, the oars are these little parrotry. fish thing that live on this planet and they're like welcome to the party and you're like what because are you happy campers yeah like are you happy campers they're they are from a place that

your translation cannot handle so when it can't it fills in random words and the way it is with these dudes is like their voices are normal and then it goes way weird which is why like at the top of the show i made sure that nadia said the greatest quote of all which is when the ors get piss at you and they're like, the juice is boiling. And you're like, oh no, no, don't boil the juice. I don't want to know what that is, but don't boil the juice. And the only

thing that pisses them off that was asking them about the Andro's scent. You're never going to, you're never going to get that story because the implication is that they are. Like they replaced them. Oh, yeah. No, what basically the idea. So in StarCon, one, the humans have created a race of like fully like sentient, cyber,

like, you know, cyber beings, whatever, like clones, things. and they call them the Androsynth, which is one of my favorite, like, just space alien names ever. Yeah, I love it. So the Androsynth are this cool race, and they're like, you know, screw humans. We're going to go off and live on our own. We're going to make our own planet. It'll be great.

Blackjack and hookers, yeah. Yeah, and they go and do that and you lose contact with them. Earth loses contact with them. Civilization loses contact with them. And like, what happened to the Andersons? Let's go find out. And we go there and there's these random fish there. And we're like, hello, we're here now.

And you're like, can we talk to the Andresith? No. No. And don't ask about it. Stop asking. Too much asking and we are dancing. As the way the Aureliu put it is the most chilling, there are no more Anderson, only oars. Yeah.

And it's just so sad. And it's because like their story is so like they made it. They got free. No, they got sucked into the nether. No. And that actually terrified me. Oh, God. Because when I'm reading about the Andersons and how.

rightfully pissed off they are about humans and then you're born okay you're going to have to go into anderson's space i'm like oh here we go and i find these there are ruins on the homeworld the andersonth and i can't remember if that's where you one of the guys who sees the ruins or something the ruins has flashbacks or he has hallucinations about a sequence that was based on a very specific lovecraft story where a guy could start could see things no quote unquote beyond the veil and he could see like these enormous jellyfish monsters that, you know, weak that the rest of his companions couldn't see. So it was kind of based on that where this guy is seeing these things and is actually what the Andrescent warned the humans about. If you can see them, they can see you and we don't want that.

So that's why they really don't want you to F around in that quadrant of space. Yeah, anybody is even a little bit psychic, like has terrible visions and that sort of thing. Any implication is that like the already we were modifying us to not be psychic, so we didn't have to deal with this. yeah it's classic silver age sci-fi stuff you know i used to love how like telepathic powers were just a given in like golden silver age sci-fi like even old episodes of star trek or whatever people have like their esper rating is on their personal file oh man you know what that's exactly good point jerky this is exactly that this is like every good 1950s sci-fi pulp trope wrapped into one well even the even the art for the aliens is very inspired by like pulp sci-fi

100% if you took the ari-loo splash green and put it on the cover of a 50s book and say, they walk among us. Yeah, I'd believe it. Or you could take like the the Sireen or whatever. I was like, like Frank Frisetta, you know. Yeah, exactly. Like the sireen,

a whole race of space Amazon's that are all women that just happen to be able to mate with humans, including you, Captain. They're blue or green or whatever. Yeah, they're blue space girls. Uh-huh. Captain Kirk. Okay. They keep their lungs in their boobs because every time they breathe in their tits inflate.

It's such a weird animation. What an adaptation. My goodness. Nature is incredible. Look, I'm not going to say that Ford and Richie were exactly mature people here, especially when you think the Cyrene spaceship. All the leisure sullarius replies you can make to them, too. Like, every one of them is like a sleazy pickup line.

I know. Oh, I mean, you have a, like you have a freaking sex scene, which is absolutely voiced hilariously comically. Oh, God. I won't even spoil that. Also, their ships are called the penetrator. The penetrators. The penetrators.

Like, it's, it's not subtle. It's definitely the, like, 14-year-old kind of sense of humor. Look, when I was 14 in playing this game, it was rad. It was rad. You are the target audience. Yeah, I was. Yes, the Cyrene penetrator, which has a particle beam stiletto at the front. And hypnotization field projection ribs, presumably for pleasure.

Oh, your pleasure. Oh, I love that mechanic, too, though. It's like to steal and sell other people's crew using. the sireen and like just have them jump out of their ships because they're so eager to meet the green ladies. Oh yeah, dude, that's the thing. Their alt power is like, it's like a siren. They summoned you to come out, but they're.

Do they have their space suits when they do that or do they just dine in the bag in the space? I mean, you can pick them up and they become your crew. Oh, okay. That's cool. You can actually like farm enemies crew that way. It's, it's a dumb thing to do, but you can. So my trick was I would go there and I would use a sireen penetrator to soften them up by sucking away their crew and then escape with it

and then bring in an actual ship to win with. But like, for instance, the official Ultronomicon Wikipedia for the penetrator says along with the Mycon pod ship in Pekung Fury, the penetrator is one of the few ships able to come out of battle stronger than it

went in. I'm like, that's a thing right there. The ship's phallic resembled. It's coupled with the fact that it's piloted by a matriarchal race. May lend to its euphemistic name. No kidding, Wikipedia. No kidding. You don't say. Oh, my God. Yeah, the Cyrene.

And, of course, the Cyrene have to deal with the Mycon, who are these, like, mushroom people that have these cool little red spaceships. And you go there and try to get one of their eggs to, I had story, sorry, but. There's a backstory. It's a whole story. But they also have a thing. Like, if you go deep into the conversation trees, you can start to, like, parse out what their deal is, you know, because they'll, like, speak these random bits of dialogue. They're implied to be, like, their ancestors at different points in the past. And you can kind of piece it together that they're, you know, they're not really a naturally occurring species.

They're a terraforming tool that somebody forgot about. Isn't that such a cool idea? Yeah. No, exactly. Classic sci-fi tropes. I love these things. Just all the, I just love that everyone's linked together in some way. Yes.

Yeah, there are really anything that exists in isolation, no, other than like the Zokphot pick. Frungi, frungi. Which one of you is the FOT? That's a great long. No, you're the Fought. Meanwhile, like, probably the Fought is just sitting. in the background not talking. Dude,

the Zokphot pick suck, but they're so funny. Oh, they're trash. The dialogues in this game were well, well written. And the pores of Branky, who were once the fourth one

of the Zokphot pick, but they had to destroy them. Okay, so the Spathie, I got to say, though, so like the Spathie are sitting there and when you go and try to get them to join you, the Spathie King and Queen are like,

no, we're terrified, we don't want to go anywhere, and we can't leave, because our planet, is covered in these giant, scary monsters. And they're like, okay, fine, we'll kill them. You go down to that planet and they're just stuffed. There's like koalas.

They're just like dumb little primates. They don't even attack you. Yeah, they're just teddy bears. They sit there and blink at you. These people are just pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. And they joined you for like a week, just long enough to study your slave shield so they can put one over their own planet because that's all they ever wanted.

Yeah, they're like, bye. And they wanted to be a follow species. They wanted to be on the slave shield. but what was the umgah real assholes ruin that for them so the umgah are basically colossal tricksters and also like big brain right like so they sit there and they're genetically modified mutators

so another sci-fi trope and they help you out by like we found this random translator from a like a fallen urquan ship and they're like oh so we fixed it and we made it back to the way it was and suddenly this dinari wakes up and it's like a full on telepath that's just like mind controlling you over the entire civilization like overnight. Everything is terrible and you're like, oh, that was, that was bad.

That was a bad idea. But they're also grateful for like a week. And then they're like, you know what would be funnier if you were our great anime? And they're just fighting for no reason. They're just trolls. They're like Space 4chan. Let's talk about the Sylandro for a second. The Slylandro are basically the most annoying random encounter in this game. And they become more and more frequent as the game goes on unless you do. Like, these guys just come out there, and there's these crazy, like, lightning rod kind of spaceships, these crystalline beings.

They shoot you and zap you with these big electric things. And they get their energy back by absorbing from, like, passing by asteroids. And when you kill them, you get 500 credits, which is basically the only value they have is just chilling them. Yeah. But when you talk to them, they're always like, we come in peace. We're here to study or whatever. Even their background music is just a loop of them saying, we come in peace.

Yeah. And it sounds all screwed up because they're, they're. programming screwed up. Yeah, exactly. They're a runaway von Neumann probe. Somebody screwed their priorities. Again, classic trope. Classic trope, because you go there and like, wait, their home world's a gas giant and there's these bunch of just floating sparkle things?

What the heck is this? It's like, oh, you found our probes? They're out there to get resources and bring them back to us. Aren't they neat? And you're like, no, they're destroying the universe. And like, what do you mean? They're peaceful and they just kind of take asteroid and like, no, no. They're like disintegrating universe.

So, you know, like, oh, let's just look at the programming here. Oh, we said aggression to 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, that seems like a problem. Somebody switched this thing to evil. There's your problem. I actually wonder how many people kind of gave up early on the game because those probes, if you don't know what you're doing. They're too hard for the early game. They're very hard.

And that's a deliberate choice. I like that. That's even part of the backstory. It's like, you know, the captain of the ship that you have with you, the only Earth ship you've got, like was killed in an encounter with one of those. But they don't tell you this what it was. You know, it's just that we encountered this thing and it did this, but we don't know what it is or what his origin is.

But it's, yeah, it's baked into the backstory, too. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, he was killed by like, Debroni, space debris. I can't really have his name, but I think it was implied that your character had a crush on her or something. I don't know.

Of course you did. But, dude, that opening novel in the friggin manual sets up a whole lot of story that the game kind of just lets it exist. But Sarkon 2, every race in there is just this absolute, vibrant. Every one of them's got a deep backstory.

Like, there's these traders you meet, the one I do called the Melorme. oh yeah we're just these big guys show up out of nowhere and they're like we want these plants and animals that you've been picking up and in return we'll give you better tech and we'll also tell you stories about things and when you learn about like the history of like the sentient milieu and the very reason you're like teach you the words to get the erquanda info info dump it's yeah and this is one of those few games where I am here for every written word like I want to know every info you're going to dump at me they're so good

And even then, it, like, it leaves you like stuff to piece together yourself. Like, they never outright state that they're the male numb from the Sunni at Melu that got away. Right. They almost certainly are. I mean, that's the implication. It's just, but it's there for you to, you know, pluck that out if you want to list. I love this game goes out of its way to make you feel intelligent for putting things together. Right.

That's a good point. That's a good way to put it. You find the rainbow world. You're going to a different world. You're putting these puzzles together. You figure out that in this one quadrant of space on the 17th day of every month, a portal open, they'll let you go to green space. You're like, what the hell is going on? It's so good.

Even the rainbow worlds, they make, if you put them together, they make an arrow. An arrow that points toward the center of the galaxy, yeah, and they kind of points towards where their precursors probably went. Yeah, that's the implication. And they've poorly followed up on that in the third game that doesn't exist. Oh, did they now? Yeah.

You know, I played a lot of Starcon 3, but we'll talk about that in a minute. So, who are your favorite races? We've talked about a bunch of them, but there's so many races. this game? I mean obviously you're going to have to like take the Urquan out of the running because that's

the most well developed and the most interesting I was actually going to like I was probably going to say Urquan especially the Korah because actually the voice acting the game even though it can be very cheesy at times like the Korah are so bang on chilling that they are just so it's great the way

they talk to you you know how sometimes you go up against a villain you're like I can probably manipulate this guy if I want to he seems like a bit of a jerk or whatever these guys know you just get the implication that there is no negotiation. There is nothing but death. And just the one word answers they give you. And there's one answer in particular if you try to say, hey, calm down, dude, let's be friends. He's like something like many civilizations have sent their wise men to find out a way to calm us down. All of them have failed. No, this is just their job.

Yeah, exactly. It's like arguing with a bug. You just, you can't. Yeah. And they're just, their ships are horrifying. Their combat mechanics are horrifying. And they, just go and mess you like when you wait too long and you like start to hear about them from like other races showing up and they're like yeah man that planet we went to was just coated in these metal giant metal blades that just jacked everything up and you're like oh no what is going on they serve as such as a perfect foil for the urquan though it's like the only thing that could make them look good in comparison right like what makes the fascists look good oh the murderers okay i don't know would you describe them as the urquan anyway not not the cora is

as sympathetic villains, I mean, as victims of abuse, I mean, to put it lightly. Yeah, exactly, right? Like, this, this, they make a very good case for themselves. The Urquan considers all just need a therapist real bad on a racial level. A big God-sized therapist, but no, you've got to point there, Shockey, because I always wondered that myself, when I discovered the twist, if you want to call it that, and the reason why they're putting everyone under a slave shield, I said, holy shit, that's, that's really something right there. and even I don't want to say they're good because they certainly are not like they will kill you if you cross them but they did things like when the sireen said well you can't enslave us we don't have a home planet anymore because it got juffo whop or whatever the term was they're like okay well here's a new planet oh is exactly what it's a paradise and it's a paradise thanks thanks you solve a lot of problems and they do make the case of themselves when they say they're like you know we've come across so many dead worlds where they either nukes themselves in oblivion or even

ecology collapsed. It's like if we had been there sooner, they'd probably still be alive. Yeah. No, for sure. They're like, look, we are doing this for your benefit. Yeah, you don't get freedom and you can't go anywhere. However, you get to survive. That's great. Right? And like, the thing, it's funny, when you talk to them about the cora, they almost become like, you seriously, no, you don't want any part of that. Trust me, what we're offering, even though it's bad and we understand it's not great, is still better than complete nutter oblivion. Trust me, the cora will just vaporize you and it's it's almost like like they they get a sense of pleading in their voice almost like please please don't go there

please don't mess with them you can't um my personal favorite race is the chmer which in the first game in the first game there were two races one was the hypermechanical merm which looked like they looked like they walked out of like uh you know war of the world's type of thing they're just these giant columns of like alien things and then Well, their ship is a literal transformer. Yeah, right? It is. And then, like, the chingesu, who are basically these sentient, like, crystal beings.

And when the Urquan come and enslave everybody, they say, hey, can you just put us on the planet with a murnum? And so these two races get together, and you bring them a giant sun device that lets them fuse and create this crazy, like, cybernetic crystal being called chmur. And it's this amazing, they're basically like the leader race. Like, if you're Doug, they're the guy. who's the school president in Doug, which is a 1992 reference. Because I'm just thinking about that one episode where like Doug accidentally gets the keys to the squash room and has to be in charge. And he's like, no, I'm not supposed to be.

The Chmur are the ones who are supposed to be in charge of your federation. You're just the chump who's there. So when they come out of this thing, they create this ship, which looks like the coolest. If you were 12, you design a spaceship ship you could ever design. Oh, yeah, you totally drew this in your trapper keeper in eighth grade. Right. like it's this awesome looking just like it's the spaceship you make out of lego right it's exactly that it is exactly that and it's got these three things that are hovering around it it's such a sick

shit it's got like point defense lasers and yeah it's it it's one of the best ones to take into the end isn't like part of the story is that the tremor needed like they were trying to merge to fight back against the urquan but they would need they would have needed like thousands of years to complete the process it would have taken 35 years as powered by their son but they were like Look, we need to go faster than that. So we have the precursor sun device. Right. Boom.

And they even say, like, we, this isn't the result we wanted. Like, because we rushed it. Like, we don't, we haven't reached the potential we could have had, but, you know, we're here now. Yeah, they're like, look, buddy. But since we're here, let me help you. Exactly. Well, here I am. Let's do this thing.

I actually, as someone who was a huge nerd also for Master of Orion, I always thought like that. There was a connection for sure with the, uh, the Murnamur and the Mechon. and the uh silacons and the um and the other race like i always i always thought that there's like a connection there yeah i mean it definitely feels like it is there are callbacks to a lot of a lot of old sci-fi tropes like a lot of things here it's one of those things where i'm always tempted to say like how much had mass effect ripped off from this thing and it's like well they're ripping off the same sources i mean obviously this was yeah they're they're all coming from the same puddle oh for sure um i mean bioware has admitted that star star control's a huge huge influence

Oh, it shows. I mean, right down to the crappy little dune buggy. Like, far and away the worst part of that game. No, for sure. But, like, the, when I, actually, when I first heard about Mass Effect and I heard about the, the Krogan, I said, oh, shit, that's the Thratish. Oh, that's the Ratch. Yeah, totally. Like, just nuking themselves back into oblivion, like, every few centuries. Yeah. But I love the Thratish, though. You see them, and there are these big dudes with these Stogies. These are these warthog dudes And their ship's got this awesome like fire

Coming out at the backside And they're just like this crazy psycho Those 90s try hard cool guy Oh yeah And there are multiple ways of dealing with them too I love it You're not like railroaded into any one thing Like you can just keep kicking their ass

Until they start deciding like Oh you must know what you're doing We're gonna model our civilization after you guys Since you beat the shit out of us Or you can trick the edge lord spider guys Into killing them Right That's right yeah

So you have this thing called like the Umga Caster, which lets you talk to different races periodically. And like the Ilroth, when you go to their space and you figure out the radio station that they used to get messages from their gods to talk to their gods. So you pretend to be their gods. And you're like, you are now called the Dillrats. And you're like, well, I guess you says that God. We're now the Dill rats. And you can use it to send messages and saying, you should go to this planet and fight against these guys there. And you send it to Thratas space. And the Thratas are like, yeah, these dudes came. I mean, we get to kill them, and it's awesome.

And I love it because you can either send the thrash to fight the corah and slow things down or to just handle the ill-roth. Well, you can do both. You can send the throttash to fight the urquan, and then you can send the dill rats to kill them. God, it's so much fun. I love the idea of the Urquan time, and those, like, really serious battle between them, and then, like, these space rhinos and space spiders come out, and they're like, what the hell? And then, like, some plant guys.

It's like, flower here. I like when you talk to them, too. You can even say, like, our top scientists and sci-fi writers have said that intelligent plants are impossible. And there's like, oh, the artists do too. That's why we're pretty sure we're divine. That's a good comeback, actually. Ah, yes, the supucks. They're so weird.

Like, I'd never use their ships. They were just there. Oh, they saw. Yeah, they're on the far side of the planet. It's fine. The Uttwig, though, I love their ships. They had a shield. They were slow as hell, but they had, like, a real.

good range weapon. It's just that they were so sad and emo and wore a like veil all the time. Their music is just like, hello, Captain. I'm just feeling really down right now. It's like me during quarantine. Oh man, they were ahead of their time then. Yeah, they're like, look, Susie Sue is on the radio. Can we talk? Oh man. Okay. But yeah. So every race in this show in this game is amazing. amazing. And you basically go through the universe, fly around, find

ways to make your hyperspace travel faster, find ways to make your quasi space travel faster. One of my favorite ones is, like, I pop out of quasi space, and I ended up in the middle of like Kora space. Oh, good. You're in the middle of Kora and, um, because there's an Erkwan space, and you're like, oh, this is bad. I need to leave

yesterday. And it's wild though, because you can see the Urquan, the two Urquan races having battles with each other and you go to a planet. And there's six of them, and they're just like, oh, you know, why don't you guys solve this amongst yourselves? And I will never come back. I do love how the battle between the Urquans really does feel like something way above you, something that like your little ape mind shouldn't even be comprehending because it's basically a battle of something ascending gods. Oh, it's like a classic like Babylon Five, like war in heaven kind of things. Like these are the elders and we are just the

kids like living in the backyard. Yeah, it's definitely mama and daddy are fighting. Let's leave let's hope that mama wins ironically yeah right like it's terrifying so this game is strategically incredible there's so much depth to it there's so much depth of the combat to the exploration all of the story is worth your time to read the races are rad and then the final battle where you get there and you turned your ship into a gigantic sentient bomb that you have to go and throw into like the ship that the urquan have or whatever and yeah the samadro your giant battleship is basically like a tugboat as far as the precursors are concerned. It's just

a maintenance vehicle. It's not even like a Star Destroyer or anything. It's like a Honda Civic. Yeah, and you see the actual Samatra, which is a real precursor ship, and you're like, oh, this is going to be bad if they get that online. And you basically have to death start them. You get, like, when you get to the end game,

you have your like, you know, your Chimur and Shum Jesu and whatever. And then out of nowhere, the reunify Yihat come, led by a Pekunque queen. And they're like, we'll give you all of our ships. And I just go in with a full fleet of yot and pecan trips because hell yeah let's go and the last battle is super fun and super long and when you win you feel like you earn something like the game is real real just satisfying i'd have put it down for day i ended up getting stuck on that last fight because

it had been so long yeah the peccas are so squirrelly like they turn so damn quick that you're just constantly flying into a wall and then getting obliterated oh god and then when you finally have to like you know fly your flyer flying bomb into the ship like the little projectiles that knock you around like I kept getting ping ponged out of that slide like it was just like screw this I'll do this tomorrow it's either really easy or really frustrating you know star control sorry not star control toys for bob I don't know if you've played Skylanders at all but not really I'm aware of it there's a character name Persephone she's a she's a fairy and she talks like the oars she says like you meet her she says like, hello, extremely. And I was like, I get that reference with all these little kids are like,

who cares? Oh, yeah, no kid is ever going to get that. It is so wild to me that the guys created one of the greatest sci-fi games of all time went on to make Skylanders. It's so bizarre. You got to stay in business. Whatever you got to do. I get it. But before that, they were doing like Disney license stuff. I don't know, they do like goofy skateboarding. That probably wasn't it. But it was something like that. It's just utterly wasted on that kind of thing. And I'm like, yeah, they did actually. They worked on Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure. Oh, shit.

So that's for real. Wow. I almost remembered it. And Madagascar. You know, and I'm like, Activision takes one of the greatest teams of the 90s and has them making shovelware. And the 80s even. Like, they were making some of my favorite games for Commodore. Like, the guy was involved in Archon.

He was, uh, mail order monsters is still one of my favorites. Even it's a little bit half baked. It's like a precursor to so many other like monster. collecting and battling games. Yeah. I mean, these guys, oh my God, Arcon is such a good game. It's still perfect. But like StarCon too, though, man, like if this is the only game that you make, you've made the perfect game, right? Like, it prefigured so much stuff that came like 15 years later. They basically accidentally made like an open world RPG. That's exactly it. It's an open world RPG. You can, you have no direction. You're like the only direction you're giving in the beginning is

you can go this way. That's where the Spathai are. Otherwise, Explore. The first gatchat, you see, you'll run into a Melorme. They'll tell you something. And you just go poke around and you will eventually run into aliens and start messing around. And it's wild. Like, when I was starting up the game again, I had forgotten how little direction the game gives you. Yeah, it gives me nothing. That's amazing. You would never get away with that today. Like, you would never be able to just throw someone into space and say, good luck go. And that's just like, what? But then, you know, flash forward months later after you've explored the game. And it's like, you have an itinerary. It's like, I know where the rainbow worlds are. I'm going to hit that shit first. I'm going to put a hellbore cannons in the front of my ship. Hell, yeah, you are. I wasted a lot of time just farming through it. Because every planet I saw, I wanted to explore and farm and, you know, look at the alien life. Find your golden worlds and Ruby worlds. A lot of are pretty.

And I love the music for like a lot of the orbit music as well. So it's weird to think about like this game is so old now. Like people hadn't discovered exoplanets back then. Yeah, I was looking at that today. Oh my God. Yeah, you're right. Pluto was still a planet. but we never

seen another planet around another star that's just so wild it makes you feel old huh it really does when he put it that way 1992 was 30 years ago no it wasn't that's a lie

it's got to be a lie 30 years ago and yet it doesn't feel data in the least oh my god no the game doesn't and kudos to the Erkwan Masters team for keeping this thing alive and like the fact that I can play this on my friggin I mean I could play it on

literally any platform I want, which is just insane. There's so much fan stuff, too. People are still doing remixes of all the music. There are people who made like full-on campaigns that you can plug into Erkine Masters, like their own little sequels and stuff. That's so good. Like just playable fan fiction, basically. Have you played the HG version?

I haven't. Yes. I downloaded it. Yeah. And it's like, it's good. But I'm looking at Professor Jesus, the captain of the space station. Hey, is or whatever his name is. And I'm like, hey, he's wearing a name tag.

I never noticed that before. My name is his. I'm about to die. I just noticed it like his space station rave music. I love that. I'm such an immature idiot. You should just be twirling glow sticks. Yeah, I know.

Look, the game is very 90s. Let's be real. It's 90s version of the 50s is whether it is. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty apt. But man, it does it so well. And I think honestly, like I had a friend of mine who has never played it before. I was like, man, you got to play it before.

he did and he really enjoyed it and I mean yeah there are some parts that are a little janky some of the puzzles are a little annoying and I don't blame anybody for using a fact but also half the fun is exploring and like dealing with it and figuring it out and I seriously the game absolutely holds up to it. No, for sure. No, it's a great game, great influence. Oh, my God. I can just visualize all of it.

And even now, though, like, periodically I'll throw the gif up of the Urquan, like, just the Urquan dude. And it's like, oh, my God, that's horrifying. Please don't do that. Because, like, I can hear that martial music of just them coming at you. And you're like, that is, even on the. Images you can hear, yeah. Yeah, right? I have an old gif I made, like, back in the 90s of the Urquan, like, in front of an American flag.

I don't remember that gift. They're twitching tentacles and stuff. I used to use that for our fake campaign websites. It's still relevant. I would still vote for an Erkwan right now. I mean, yeah, vote for Erkwan. They'll just enslave you. Well, at least I'll give you a new planet.

Ours is pretty much on the brink. It's the health care. Yeah, unfortunately, yes. That is the... Oh, man. What a weird game. Yeah, man. So Starkon, too, it's influenced basically every sci-fi game you've ever played.

It still remains one of the best RPGs. And like everybody you've ever heard of people who play like Fallout or BioWare, all these guys have all played Stark on. It shows up in everything because they did it right. They did combat right. They did story. I don't think there are many games that have got the kind of nuance and story that this text prompted. Even though it's like literally just reading pages of notepad,

it still makes you emotionally invest in the game in a way that a lot of things today feel a little too handled. This one gives you a lot of hooks and it lets you make these connections. And you can feel the D&D DNA in this from like the way that the storyteller feels like a DM who is giving you plot hooks

and then letting you make your own int roles to figure out what these things actually mean. And I love that. I love that so much. I think it's interesting that maybe not a lot of people played this game, but a lot of game developers played this game. Like, the universally is just always cited as an influence.

Right. It's like your favorite game maker's favorite game, right? Yeah. If you're interested in making games, play this game. You'll learn a lot just from how it's put together. And honestly, how ambitious it was. Like, I absolutely believe when, you know, they've said that, you know, they worked unpaid for like the last few months on this just because they, it was too big.

It really is a game that you feel like the creators believe in 100% and still. still believe in. It really carries that heart. You can always tell. And it also explains why they didn't come on for the sequel. There was, there was no way they were going to do that again so soon, I think. Man, no, for sure. I was so excited when Star Control 3 came out. Like, because I was young, I didn't know any better about like, you know, politics or anything. I was just like, my favorite game of all time. As a sequel, I'm going to get it. And StarCon 3 was weird. Like, first off, what I remember is that New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the R-E-M album came out. And I basically played the hell out of it because the Sarkon 3 soundtrack sucked.

So I just used the Red Book audio, put in the REM CD and just looped my favorite songs from that album over and over while I played Sarkon 3. They did some cool little tricks to add in races that link backwards to Sarkon 2. But the biggest sin they did was, well, they took the sprite work from the first game, which was stunning, and replaced it with real cruddy early 90s CG. Oh, no, no, man. most of it were they were puppets they built puppets for

these characters and like you would think on the surface this would be something I would really like I'm way into freaking weird puppet shit but no they look terrible they look like bad claymation horrors that's what I thought I thought they're claymation yeah they're puppets and animatronics and they just don't work

especially given how much character the other ones had and like differing styles even though there's pixel art you know you can see like a differing artistic style with each of the different species you know and they just kind of harken back to a certain kind of like pulp art. Like, you know, the siren or pure Frank Frisetta. Yes, exactly.

The worst one was the heirloo. In Starcon 2, they look like traditional green aliens. In StarCon 3, they're these fleshy. You know, have you ever seen those, like, pictures of what would Homer Simpson look like if he was real? Yes. And he gave a new, fleshy ugliness. That's what they turned the

heirloon into. And I was like, how could you take like a very classic race and just make them look suddenly terrifying? I also gave that really, like, as I recall, the backstory for the Ariolulu and three was just really a letdown. Like, it wasn't interesting at all. Like, apparently they were using us to harvest our DNA or

I don't know, something very non-ari-Lu. They missed all the charm. Yeah. And they went straight to horror. Exactly. And it's like, okay, that's fine. But like, the whole point is that these people were protecting us and they're caring for us. Yeah, they're harvesting DNA or whatever, but it's not like, but there's a difference

in the way that they're presented. They're not just monstrous. They have an agenda. It's maybe a little creepy, but And it exists in juxtaposition to like just the frivolity and the whimsy of the rest of it. Like it seems that much more horrifying when it's placed against like just how goofy everything else is. Yeah. Exactly that. I mean, StarCathril III, it had some really fun things.

It had like, they added a new system where you go through and you can like get resources and then use those to build up new ships and build new bases and let you kind of colonize through space, which is really fun. It's kind of a callback to the first one, like where you would like build ships and occupy space. Star Systems, and there was a little bit of a strategy game to it. It adds a light Forexiness, but it's not, it misses the soul of what made Sarkon 2 good. Like, the story is kind of just there, but it feels really patched on. It feels like a fanfic. That's what it is. StarCon 3 feels like somebody really liked Sarkon 2 and tried to make a fanfic and did not have the ability to handle it.

If you're into theaters, the love never dies of video games. I mean, you know that legend was capable of making good games. They just didn't know what to do with this. yeah and it just it sucks it sucks and then and then accolades sat on the trademark for so long and you keep saying starcon it keeps reminding me like they had plans of making another sequel but like they were going to make it like like a 3d space shooter like like a mission driven kind of thing and i've only ever seen like a couple screenshots in magazines because apparently didn't make it very far but yeah they're just going to call that starcon it just never happened i'm honestly kind

of glad it didn't that's very 90s somehow stark oh early 2000s yeah this like they were doing like here's star trek except you fly little space fighters. Like, okay, what part of Star Trek is that? Seriously. I would actually say, like, this is the best Star Trek game.

Like, that's not a Star Trek game. Yeah, you know, that's true. That's true. It definitely, and then Star Dock. And then Star Dock happened. Oh, Star Dock. Now, I don't know a whole lot about the lawsuit, just that

it was messy. Star Doc, they bought the Star Dole name, right? Yeah. Basically, what happened to StarDock? bought the name to Star Control and wanted to make their own thing and started making this weird thing, weird game with it. And then

Ford and Reich were like, yo, we still own all the races and like story bits and everything about this game. You can't just do that. You can make a Star Control but you can't use any of the trademark. You don't have the entire copy. Yeah. And it went kind of ugly and got weird. And then they patched it up and now when you go to like

the Star Doc Star Control page, they've got links to all three of the originals. But their version of their game that made is like they call Star Control Origins. So it was basically meant to be like instead of being like a sequel like they originally intended, they made it into like a super

prequel and I don't know nobody's ever played it. Nobody ever talked about it once it came out. It's a Star Doc game so like you know. I didn't even know it existed. Yeah. It's one of the thing where you're like I think I remember I got a request to review it from them when I was in games writing and

I was like, nah, I don't think I'll do that but thank you very much. Yeah, like, I don't think anybody has ever looked at, played at, or thought about this game. Like, I don't even think it has a Wikipedia page. That's how much people. Oh, no, it does. It does. It came out in 2018, for God'sakes. But it's a game that nobody cares about. Play the real StarCon. It's still there. Urquan Masters. You can get it. It's on every platform you want.

I'm actually surprised that Star Control, the original, was on the Genesis. And I wonder how it ended up there. The same way, I wonder how to Star Control to get on 3.0. 3.0 of all things. I guess it was just, too early for PlayStation or Saturn or anything, and it wasn't going to go on Super Nintendo. So, let's not go on, do it, do it, do it. Can you imagine, A, that would have been awesome. B, there's no way a Super Nintendo would have been able to deal with this. Not in a thousand years.

No, but no way. If they had come up with like a truncated version, that might be pretty good for what it is, kind of like how you did get a lot of computer games and Super Nintendo and Genesis. But I wonder why the original never came to the Super Nintendo, but it did go to the Genesis. Yeah, it's an odd one. Genesis were probably cheaper to license too. Oh shit, right. Yeah, you got a point there. Also, Mega Drive was way bigger in Europe too.

Oh, that's a good point. That's right. But also, like, with so, I mean, I saw the 3DO version once and I'm like, the 3DO is a weird system. It is. But it was cool, so it was like, it has some cool deviations, I think, that very much of his time, it's kind of trapped in a bubble, like kind of like the Trimographic 16. Or CDI or it was that era where nobody. quite knew what to do with CD-ROM, so you're getting shit like MTV's Club dead. That's a flashback right there. Burn cycle.

Just, yeah. Burn cycle. Good old burn cycle. Never played it, but it looked interesting. Well, this is Retronaut, right? So StarCon 3, it exists. It's fine. You can get on good old games if you really, really want to.

I don't have plans to play it. StarCon 2, worth playing even today. That's all I got to say. Oh, yeah. I play through it almost every year. It's easy to come back to, and it's just great. We all have that game. We all come back to.

And that's not mine. I think Secret of Mine is probably mine, but I can understand why Star Control would certainly be a really good game to come back to. For me, it was a big comfort when I was having a really hard time. So I'm glad it exists. Yeah. All right. So I guess we've kind of come to the end of this one because what do you got, Nadio?

What are your last thoughts for Star Control 2? Well, briefly, I want to mention that hopefully we'll get a follow-up because there is talk from Ritchie and Ford about, I think they just recently made their own company after Activision put Toys for Bob in the Gall of Duty Minds, which really pisses me off because... Call of Duty, Duty, Duty. They're on Call of Duty duty duty until the end of time. And Choice for Bob, they've always been an extremely talented and good developer. You know, even though Skyrim, Skyrim, Jesus, Skylanders might not be everyone's cup of tea. There's a lot of care and it's a solid platformer. It's an okay game.

And they did a great remake of the Crash Games and they did they do Spiro? I can't remember. But they did Tony Hawk, I think. And then Activation says, oh, well, hope you like being in the minds of Call of Duty for because I guess Tony Hawk didn't sell a billion, Jillian copies or whatever ridiculous number they had in their mind. But thankfully, Ford and Ritchie are kind of on their own thing doing a company called Pistol Shrimp, I think.

Yeah, that was it. Yeah. You know, those guys deserve way better. They deserve to be up there with like Sid Meyer level conversation. Because the games that they've come up with are just so monumental. I mean, there's so many games that are like, this is one of the best games of all the time. But most devs don't have like a six. single thing like that under their belt, much less like several things that's like defined aspects of genres. And then to be like so misused for consistently misused for so long. It's like you have like this magical artifact and you're using it to open cans or some shit. Right. Like what are you doing? Why? These guys deserve to be like leading multiple games. Not just making shovelware. No, they're a treasure because they are like older devs who have been around since the very beginning. You don't get people like that in this industry.

We're still doing this, you know? Still doing it, yeah. All right, man. So what about you, Sharkey? What do you got? Final thoughts for Star Control 2? My final thoughts is like, if you played it, play it again. If you haven't played it, play it now.

You'll see echoes of it in so many things that you probably didn't recognize before. Yeah. That's the fun. My only suggestion is just be patient. Your ship sucks in the beginning. Just go buy some thrusters as soon as you can. It'll make your life a lot better. trust me on this one.

Come out of it like you like you would like a Frumsoft game. Like it's going to drop you in there. It's not going to insult you with a tutorial. It's going to assume you're going to figure it out. You can put the story together yourself. We're not going to explain everything. Well, an elder you did have to jump down a hole to get the tutorial.

That was pretty great. Star Control is the Dark Souls of Star Trek. What a perfectly horrible note to end on. All right. Well, I will hand it back to you, Nadia. Sorry. Oh, no, like, that's basically what I wanted this episode to be. I wanted us to just sit around and gush about Star Patrol.

Let's face it, anyone who's going to listen to this episode, that's all they're going to want. They're going to want to hear about the good times and what makes the game unique and all that fun crap. I think we really had a good time speaking about that. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But that is actually all for this episode of Retronauts. And thank you guys so, so much for joining me.

Let's take this space to promote things that are going on. How about you, Sharkey? Anything cool going on in your life? Oh, nothing I can talk about. Oh, awesome. Just stuff that falls outside the normal ethics gradient. So you're doing sharky stuff, basically? Basically.

I'm still evil sharky on Twitter. Awesome. Good time. And Shiva, I know you have stuff. Yeah, so I host a podcast about Magic the Gathering called Casual Magic. It comes out every Tuesday on every podcast and on YouTube every Thursday. And you can find me on Twitter at Electrotel or if you care about my magic. stuff at Gear Boy Gears, and you can hear me on like half a dozen Retronauts episodes

about like Street Fighter or Silicon, or Civilization, whatever parish is like, oh, this is a Sheven game, okay, we're going to call him in here. Well, yeah, you'll probably hear me on more retronauts because I come on this show. You do, and we hear you on BlogGuard as well. You DM'd our... That was so much fun. Yeah, no, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, we will, actually.

You're going to hear about that, so... What about you, Nadia? Where can the people find you? Basically, I'm at Nadi Oxford, and I also do the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast. It's a RPG podcast about RPGs, old, new, eastern, western. I do a lot of writing behind the scenes. I'm in, like, a lot of game mobilization now. So I'm here and there.

I am definitely part of the Retronauts crew. So you will hear from me roughly every month. So keep on listening, and we'll talk more Star Control stuff. And, well, not more Star Control. But, hey, who knows in the future? Who knows what they'll bring? But if you'd like Retronauts itself, if you think this episode is cool, we have a lot more content like it. Just visit the Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Retronauts for access to media.

That's even more explosive than a show Fixed Glory device. I actually wrote that. Sorry. Support us at the $3 level to receive early access to weekly episodes. Supporting us at the $5 level gets you episodes a week early and as well as two exclusive episodes a month. Support us at the magic number of 64 for the opportunity to see. set a retronaut's topic of your choice once every six months. As of recording, there are two spots left, so go ahead and snap them up. As for me, like I said, I'm Nadia Oxford of the Acts of

Blood God podcast, and we give us at patreon.com forward slash blood godpod and or follow me on Twitter at Nadia Oxford. Until then, thank you for listening and all glory to culture 12. You know,