Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!).

I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the space theme) all the recent iterations of Star Wars and Star Trek. People love to complain that the new SW trilogy (or the prequel trilogy) or Star Trek Discovery is a load of rubbish but the reality is that we're just older. Things aren't going to spark in the way they did when we first watched. And that's fine.

I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.

While I've been a fan of Discovery for the most part, and it occasionally shows glimpses of promise, it's largely not "Star Trek." The story telling is simply just not rooted same soul that Trek has been built upon. I'm okay with change, but not so much with creating flashy spectacles at the expense of meaningful story telling.

I know it's been discussed to death, but just wanted to say I was late to the Mandalorian and I completely agree with you— it felt very true to the Star Wars universe, while at the same time expanding it considerably and not relying on cheap recycling of past characters and plot arcs.

And all of this on the kind of technology platform which could easily have enabled the absolute worst of the Lucas instincts to thrive as far as overcomplicated plots and gee-whiz special effects. Somehow it managed to take us to a dozen different planets and yet stay firmly rooted in a story about parenthood— and that, between a faceless warrior and a voiceless puppet. Wild!

> I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.

That's a good way to put it. Entirely agree.

Seeing characters from the original be the bad-ass your younger self imagined they were but couldn't be is what The Mandalorian achieved. They crafted a story that allowed that to happen.

check out The Orville, it is more of a classic star trek than the new official star treks

Star Control II was THE defining game of my childhood. After completing the quest - with difficulty, since my command of English then was not what it is now - my brother and I spent countless hours in Melee mode.

I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal to generate random ship combinations.

Few years ago I replaced SCII story mode and found it to be a total delight, especially now that I recognize the fine humor in English.

And now I have two sons about the same age that I was, and they got hooked on Melee as well and would play each other and myself, bringing warm happiness to my heart. One of them drew some ships for me on paper and they're on my corkboard in here, making me smile every time I look to the left.

I wish there was a SC3!

We used to play highest ranking vs lowest ranking ships a fair bit. If the Arilou didn't teleport into the planet more often than not, it would've been a lot more dangerous.

I, too, wrote a program that would assemble random teams of ships so you could have ladder style type combat amongst friends!

The driving factor is that some ships were virtually impossible to defeat in a skilled player's hand so we had to resort to random selection to be even remotely fair to everyone.

Freaking Utwig, man. I never had a really good answer to an Utwig with a skilled pilot. I would just throw ships at it in melee and expend way more than the "points" the Utwig ship is worth.

> I wish there was a SC3!

:)

> But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction

Or maybe not. I'm yet to see any modern game that would even remotely approach the magnitude of SC2. So far, the closest competitor was the original Mass Effect game, itself clearly influenced by Star Control games, but even it failed to surpass it.

The problem here is that it is basically impossible for a modern game to achieve the magnitude of those old CRPGs if you just mean that in the sense of how big the universe is and how much story it contains, but with modern AAA standards. The man-hours required to create all that content would be ridiculous.

That being said, if you count the totality of the Mass Effect trilogy, including all its DLC, I think you do get the magnitude of one Star Control 2, and it's generally fantastic.

Star Control 2 shipped with a text file containing a story where Fred Ford and Paul Reiche disappeared for 9 months to hole up in a cabin in Alaska building out the game (including planet surface exploration and hundreds of pages of alien dialogue), in isolation from their publisher, who had to hire a private investigator to find them.

I have no idea if there's any truth to it, but it sounded like my idea of heaven for a long time. When I learned that they were still working together (Toys for Bob) many years later, I harbored a fantasy about going to work for them.

By pure coincidence, after playing Star Control 2 when I was about 8, my family moved to Novato, CA - home to Toys for Bob - when I was a bit older. I ended up getting a temp contract job there on the Madagascar game when I was 19. Paul and Fred were great to work with and as far as I know TfB is still a great place to work.

I doubt that Paul and Fred would have actually disappeared to write the game, but the story is 100% Paul's sense of humor.

It makes me happy to hear that, thank you for your reply.

You don't need to create everything with modern AAA standards. Games like FTL show that you can achieve a lot with much less effort. You just need to be bolder. And i think being bolder is the hard part: games these days are more timid in their aprroach to than they were in early 90s, like always trying to stick to a working formula. Mashups of different genres like SC2 are somehow nonexistent.

If you think that, you're not looking hard enough. There are countless incredible (and bold) indie games doing really interesting and unusual things.

Off the top of my head:

- Outer Wilds (an entire solar system is a puzzle stuck in a time loop)

- Hades (a roguelike where dying progresses the story)

- Slay the Spire (a hybrid deckbuilder/roguelike where different runs can produce drastically different gameplay and builds)

- Dead Cells (a hybrid Metroidvania/Roguelike with Diablo-style random weapon/item spawns that force the player to use different strategies with every playthrough)

- Into the Breach (from the guys who made FTL)

- Undertale (a fourth-wall-breaking RPG in which you can talk your way out of any battle, with multiple endings)

- Signs of the Sojourner (a narrative deckbuilding game where your cards represent different types of conversation)

- Her Story (a game all about watching pieces of footage from a deposition about a death... or is it a murder?... and trying to figure out what happened)

- Baba Is You (a puzzle game in which the rules are also objects in the game that can be moved and changed)

- Hypnospace Outlaw (a simulation of an alternate-reality 90's internet)

- The Stanley Parable (a game about following directions, or not following them and irritating the narrator)

- The Beginner's Guide (a narrated tour through the games of another developer, possibly without their approval)

Of this list, I've seen ads of most on Steam and checked the reviews. That's not what I'm talking about. Most of your list is still one genre, maybe with some new mechanics (not so new in Hades, for example, I've seen shades of this in 1992's Ragnarok).

What I was talking about are games like Star Control 2 and Dune 1, where they boldly mixed completely different genres and, in SC2 case, added a very deep lore and managed to feed it to you at the right pace, not overwhelming you with information, and giving it in entertaining way.

For example, I would love some nice space RPG with FTL-like space combat. But they just don't mix genres that way these days.

StarSector - ~Star Control

RimWorld - "sims"

AFAIK RimWorld is more like Dwarf Fortress

Last I checked I had spent around 700hrs in skyrim...

The story/campaign for SCII was great, but it also came with a local multiplayer arcade mode! It was an awesome time.

> The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging things about aging.

To me, this is where the “start a new company doing something good and interesting” kicks in, it seems. The best part of ageing seem to me that they grey hairs that I acquired during the last startup make it easier to the next one.