Stardock Tried To Make Star Control, Master of Orion Sequels 125
Gamasutra reports on comments from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell in which he described his efforts to revive two old but popular franchises: Star Control and Master of Orion. Quoting:
"'I actually pitched Atari on a whole idea for a true successor to Star Control,' [he said], noting that the game would follow original series developer Toys for Bob's Star Control II rather than the Legend Entertainment-developed Star Control 3 ('We just pretend that never happened,' the CEO says of that release). ... Novato, California-based Toys for Bob has actually floated the idea of making its own Star Control II sequel, with co-creator Paul Reiche III indicating he has tossed potential design ideas around, but with the company now owned by publisher Activision the proposal seems to be stuck in limbo."
obligatory game link (Score:5, Informative)
For fans of the original SC 2 game, or someone with an open mind for an awesome old game, you can find it here:
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
Totally free and legal too.
You can still play Starcon II (Score:1, Informative)
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
This is a link to a full version of Star Controll II. It works on my Vista laptop and is as good now as it was in the old days.
Re:Sigh.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Are you out of your mind? (Score:3, Informative)
You probably ought to give UFO: Alien Invasion [sourceforge.net] a try. It's definitely not the same game, but it's created by a group of people clearly in love with the source material.
Re:Are you out of your mind? (Score:3, Informative)
Heh - weird. Your parent is termed "Funny" - correctly. Your post is termed "Insightful". Although I do agree with you, you simply didn't get the sarcasm of your parent. ;)
Let's see if I also get an incorrect value attatched - "flame" perhaps?
Who can create a sequel to Star Control II? (Score:2, Informative)
To my knowledge, two companies have expressed an interest in creating a sequel to Star Control II - The Ur-Quan Masters: Toys for Bob [toysforbob.com] (the creators of Star Control and Star Control II; warning: site is entirely Flash) and Stardock [stardock.com] (better known for strategy games like Galactic Civilizations).
Toys for Bob holds the copyright to Star Control II and its characters, which allowed them to open source the game (or, to be exact, a crude attempt to get the enhanced 3DO CD version to run on Windows, which has since been cleaned up and gained additional features such as network play) as The Ur-Quan Masters [sf.net] a few years ago (code under GPL 2 or later, content under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5).
The reason for dropping the name "Star Control" and using the subtitle is simple: the Star Control trademark [uspto.gov] is owned by Atari (a.k.a. Infogrames, who bought Star Control's publisher Accolade).
In other words, TFB has all the rights to make a sequel except the name (in fact, with the open sourcing, anyone could create a sequel, albeit non-commercially). However, since TFB is owned by Activision, they can't work on whatever they like (without being fired). TFB have stated on their news page that they need help convincing Activision to finance a sequel to Star Control II; they have the will, the skill and the rights to do so (albeit not the name, but that's secondary).
MOO3 and Ascendency (Score:3, Informative)
I had no real problems with the MOO3 system of planet management. The biggest problem I had in 3 was that combat sucked. It was so uninvolved as to make me resolve all battles with the one button click.
The problem in MOO3 is that the idea was excellent but the execution wasn't. Too much of the tech made little sense, you could not weigh its impact on your empire easily. Travel down "warp lanes" made overly long games as most of your time was spent trying to get ships to where you needed them and the route could be a convoluted mess with ships arriving woefully out of date by the time they got there.
Most games ended up with an empire that could produce amazing amounts of material and not do anything with it. Diplomacy really took a hit in 3. The Orion Senate or what not was another mess in its own, you could go most of a game and never be part of it.
In the end it was a mess because it was buggy and the developer sucked. At least is was not the game Alan wanted as that would have been even more of a "just click next turn' than what we got
Links inside (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.freeorion.org/ [freeorion.org]
http://www.thousandparsec.net/ [thousandparsec.net]
http://www.startreksupremacy.com/ [startreksupremacy.com]
http://abandonia.com/ [abandonia.com]
http://gog.com/ [gog.com]
Re:Big whoop... (Score:3, Informative)