"Picking up roughly where the second game left off, you must lead an alliance in the fight against the Eternal Ones, a mysterious race who consume the energy of all sentient life every eon. To protect themselves from such a fate, the Precursors genetically modified themselves into six-legged cowlike creatures, but were trapped in this form when the robots they built to return them to their original form malfunctioned. Humans, in their quest to locate the legendary Precursors, have discovered this tasty beast and, unbeknown to them, are consuming their goal."
That sounds interesting, doesn't it? That's how the 1001 list sets up Star Control 3, a mish-mash of genres that form a space sim, I suppose, in the vein of Mass Effect, via Frontier: Elite II, only played through interfaces and menus.
It's going to need to be seen to be explained.
Frustrations
Star Control 3 opens with a brief recap of events from the last instalment, and a clear goal for your game this time around - fix hyperspace. Like, all of it.
You do this via clicking through menus and interacting with planets and colonies and aliens who mostly actually want to help you. Every race in the galaxy is stranded without access to hyperspace, and you're the only one who can save them all.
I learnt this from a very helpful Earthling who spilt the backstory and made sure I knew who I was and what I was doing before I got interrupted by a mechanical thing and a battle ensued!
Naturally, I had no idea how this controlled, having not read the manual beforehand (really need to start doing that one of these days) and died along with all the hopes and dreams of the galaxy, no doubt.
Time for a second attempt.
Space combat plays like a bad version of Asteroids. As soon as one ship dares to move, the camera snaps to another view to try and show the whole battlefield, but because gravity is at play and the battlefield wraps around itself, the camera will cut and ships will appear on other sides of the screen, and by the time you've noticed your target will have moved and the camera will have cut and you'll be back to square one.
Just sit tight, spin and fire. I blew something up after a while, in any case.
I then dared to look at this screen, and said, "Nnnnnope, I'm out."
Fun Times
What I did see of Star Control 3 was the animated chats with people, who are puppets with looping chunks of animation. It's nothing special (some of them look God awful) but coupled with the voice work and the odd line of dialogue - especially in your response options, though they're sadly not voiced - it definitely made me want to watch at least some of this game.
Seven or so videos into a Let's Play, and while I've missed half the plot I'm sure, I'm loving these puppets. Alien races are varied and full of character, and watching someone who knows what they're doing without having to press F1 for massive paragraph long tool-tips at every stage of the game allows me to see what I'm missing.
Star Control 3 has you travel the galaxy essentially preparing for a final showdown - I assume - by slowly growing your fleet and colonising the galaxy once more, establishing colonies that provide you with key resources to get you to the next star system - and back - in order to meet new aliens, gather more crew, expand your fleet and spread even further out.
Star systems all have planets, some of those planets have moons and some races will fare better than others if they were to set up a colony here or there, and so you can dot around the races to establish bases to farm resources to continue on your merry quest.
It's in-depth and requires knowledge and patience, but rewards you with a lot of plot that while full of strange names is at least pretty engaging.
Final Word
But even with this interest in the game, I'm not sure I'll hop back into playing it anytime soon. It's heavy on the interfaces and not so charming to look at outside of the conversations with the citizens of the galaxy.
It's resource management, it's farming, it's iffy space combat, though there is a dedicated battle mode outside of the story mode for you to hone your skills or fight your friends. It's well written but we're still not talking about any deep stories or subplots and challenging choices to make.
Apparently, die-hard Star Control fans weren't sold on the sequel to the sequel being made by different developers entirely - especially when the original developers had no interest in doing so themselves - but Star Control 3 met the majority of expectations and is supposedly a solid and fully featured entry in the series.
Maybe I'll explore its galaxy properly some day. At the very least, I'll say that you should check it out in some form because I bet Star Control 3 flew under an awful lot of radars.
Fun Facts
Toys for Bob didn't want to develop a third Star Control game. They instead went on to the likes of PlayStations' Pandemonium!, which featured on a demo disc with Grand Theft Auto, if memory serves. I mention this because the disc stopped working, which was disappointing because instead of playing GTA over and over, I thought I'd see what Pandemonium! even was, and never got to the end of the demo because of disc errors. Gutted.
Star Control 3, developed by Legend Entertainment, first released in 1996.
Version played: DOS, 1996, via emulation.
Version watched: DOS, 1996 (FlyingMacguffin)