Yup, you guessed it! Star Control 2 is now abandonware, and a few resourceful programmers (I think they're part of the original design team) have ported it over to modern systems and OS'es. It's now called the Ur-Quan Masters, instead of the more familar Star Control 2 for legal reasons. Personally, I loved Star Control 1. Never got around to playing #2, but a lot of people like it as well. http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ Long Live our Ur-Quan Masters.
Yeah, Star Con 2 was awesome. But the Ur-Quan masters project has been out there for a couple of years now. Actually created ship sheets for the Star Con ship for my favorite wargame, a boardgame called B5 Wars. It was fun taking a Ur-Quan Dreadnought up against a Cylon Base Star and Minbari Sharlin.
I spent endless hours playing this game! Battle mode with friends huddled around the computer was so much fun! I never got around to playing StarCon 3, but I heard it wasn't as good. Although the fact that it used animatronics sounded really cool.
Holy crap! I remember Starflight! Funny how no game ever since has really been quite like them. Being able to land on any planet, mine the minerals, get attacked by the native wildlife there is a great formula for a game, but for some reason, no company has really done something like this since. Star Control was nothing like Starflight though. Think "Asteroids" with a bunch of different ships, each with their own different strengths/weaknesses, battling it out with each other and trying to avoid crashing into the planet in the center.
Ok, after having a look at Star Control 2, I have to say that you're thinking of another game other than Star Control 2. From what I have seen, Star Control 2 might as well have been StarFlight 3.
Well, that's just the melee mode for combat. The game itself is a hugely detailed RPG, with great story arcs, WAY, WAY ahead of it's time. Quests for items, mining resources, trading, and most importantly, interacting with the various alien cultures, each of whom has multiple quests and riddles to interpret. And there's a time limit - empires rise and fall while you are tying to figure out how to fix everything. The RPG aspect is similar to Starflight in that regard. But hypermelee is a seperate arcade game that was fun, fun, fun! It kicked you into melee mode when you had a fight in the game. Not quite realistic as you could only fight 1 ship vs 1 ship, so it was more like champions squaring off than an actual wargame, but it was tons of fun. And the aliens cultures were awesome!
I'd put Star Con 2 as one of the best RPGs I've ever played - it even got multiple playings out of me. It's right up there with Fallout, Baldur's Gate and KOTR for me. Might be a little dated now - it came out in 1992! Damn! LOL. Great SC2 site: http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/
Oh, and here's the online petition for a new Star Con game to be created! http://sc2.sourceforge.net/petition/petition.php
Yeah, it was a huge let down - it was done with a different creative team, it was all Visual Basic, even the music was poor. The story was OK, but the other design elements were lacking, and because the standard was so high, the fan base pretty much hated it. I heard that because there were some residuals based on the creation of Star Con owed to Toys for Bob they were trying to slowly introduce entirely new aliens and get rid of any references to the old game, so they didn't have to play anything to the game creators. Melee was still fun, and the new creations were OK, they just didn't have the same magic as the first two, and the game didn't have a polished feel. Information was presented to you via a visual basic pop up window that looked like it could have come right out of Windows. So pretty big 'meh' all around.
I had Starflight way back when. Many, many hours were spent playing Starflight, The Bard's Tale, and Ultima.
