Since the earliest arcade games, some of the most popular titles have been ones where you could bring a friend along - and pound the crap out of him. Why, even Pong, the antediluvian ancestor of all computer games, offered a two-player mode. One of the earliest direct space combat games was Space War, a vector-based game in which you and a friend flew around the screen in little starships blasting the snot out of each other.
Space War inspired many imitators, but perhaps the best known was Star Control, from Accolade. It too put you and a friend into the pilots' seats, but threw in a few twists: ships belonged to several different races, and each had its own movement, attack, and special characteristics. (The Arilou, for example, were inertialess, stopping on a dime, had an auto-aiming, short-ranged laser, and could teleport.) Aside from this "melee" mode, in which you basically battled to the death, there was also a strategic mode, which, frankly, wasn't very good.
Later came Star Control II, which expanded on the concept, making it sort of an action/role-playing/strategic/whatever game. In this game, armed with an ancient Precursor ship, you traveled from star to star, mining precious minerals (which you could trade to have your ships repaired), attempting to unite the various races subjugated by the Ur-Quan Hierarchy and inciting them to revolt. It was a HUGE game, demanding many hours of play in order to finish it (I haven't, yet), and it was the first title I can recall to really combine genres in an effective way.
Of course, a sequel was inevitable. However, if it's as good as its predecessors, you won't hear me complaining. And since it's being designed by Legend Entertainment, I have high hopes of it being good.
Star Control 3 is set in the time just after you have smashed the Ur-Quans' power. The survivors of the war have formed the League of Sentient Races; at the start of the game, you are dispatched to the distant Kessarri Quadrant to investigate a disturbance. You must build and manage colonies, which can then construct new ships and new technologies to improve your ships' combat performance. Unlike the Star Flight-like mining of Star Con II, which tended to quickly get tedious ("There better be enough radioactives on this planet to let me buy enough fuel to reach Frunobulax, or I'm screwed!"), colonies exist to support space combat. This gives the game a feel which, according to designer Michael Lindner, is "less like a SimCity and more like a Dune 2 or Warcraft." Each race has its own specialty, so once you've established contact with other species, not only can you use their ships, you can also incorporate their technology into your own.
Meanwhile, the story forces you to keep an eye on diplomatic relations among the beings in the League. Not everyone is cut out for membership, and you'll have to cull those races ill-suited to helping the League achieve its goals. In the same vein, you may have to win the favor of an adversary in order to gain the necessary power to achieve victory.
As in Star Con II, all of the character interaction takes place on a screen which, conveniently enough, shows you who you're talking to. Unlike the prequel, however, Star Control 3 employs 3D animatronic puppets instead of 2D animations. In a new twist, Legend has employed a technology wherein the puppets are controlled by a computer, giving them a precise series of registration points. This allows the video to be digitized into small sequences, which can be strung together in appropriate order by the game engine. This, hopefully, will avoid the tedium of the redundancy of the repetition of the movement which plagued previous games which employed this technique (can you say HELL? I knew you could).
Naturally, the game wouldn't be called Star Control if it didn't do what Star Control does best: multiplayer ship-to-ship combat. Yes, it will support two players on a single keyboard, but it also allows you to play using a modem, direct serial link, or network (so perhaps the Illwrath will finally be dangerous). The graphics will be SVGA, and will support smoother view scaling than PC versions of its prequels, rather like the 3DO version of Star Con II.
The major enhancement to melee combat, however, is the use of a pseudo-3D viewpoint. You can still play from the same old overhead 2D view, but you also have the option of flying from a slightly elevated view behind your ship. There's also a "padlock" view, which works like the "virtual cockpit" feature of many flight sims: you move in one direction, but your viewpoint is detached from your motion, and automatically tracks the enemy ship. Despite this, all of the action still takes place on a flat plane (there's no climbing or descending, as there is in, say, Magic Carpet).
With all of these enhancements, Star Control 3 looks like it is destined to fill the shoes of its prequels - and that's no easy feat. It's currently slated for a January, 1996 release.
