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Kinda like the Melnorme's MetaChron?

go post it here :

http://www.star-control.com/community/

the forum at pages of now and forever. 'the' sc 2 place.

The main fan site for Star Control has, for as long as I can remember, been The Pages of Now and Forever. It's got all sorts of Star Control related stuff (information, extracted music, fan art, and various other stuff). It's a good place to find information and news about Star Control (all three of them), and meet other fans. (Sadly, the SC community is not what it was five years ago, but it still exists. Slightly Offtopic: anyone here remember Guillaume's Star Contol message board?).

The title screen is fan-created, and there's a music remix project (some of the original musicians are doing the remixes... the Ilwrath music is already up at the Pages of Now and Forever). I'm pretty sure they'd accept quite a bit of fan-created stuff, as long as it's good enough. The developers are *Happy Campers*, after all :)

I'd highly recommend Star Control 2, by Toys for Bob, as a classic game. In fact, I consider it my favorite game of all time. It has some RPG elements, a great real-time space combat system which can even be played human vs. human, instead of a lame Final Fantasy battle system, and totally non-linear storyline progression. The majority of the game is conversation with aliens.

After leaving your colony and returning to Earth in a mysterious alien ship, you find that in the 20 years you have been cut off from what's going on outside the colony planet, the Alliance lost the war, and the human race is now imprisoned by a slave shield surrounding Earth.

There is a starbase in orbit of Earth. After your first task of making contact with them, it is up to you to find out how you can defeat the Ur-Quan. Not knowing anything about the spheres of influence yet, you just look at your starmap, and plot a course in any direction, hoping the alien races you meet are friendly...

Most tasks aren't necessary to complete the game, but instead get you something that will help you out a lot, like a useful device or an alliance with a race, allowing you to build their ships and use them in combat, or even just information.

Originally created as a PC DOS game, it was later ported to the 3DO console where they added 12+ hours of speech, CG opening and ending sequences, and a few other enhancements.

The 3DO version with all the enhancements, voice included, is now being ported back to Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc, and will be released as freeware. So the freeware version isn't available yet, but you'll want to keep checking the fan site for updates.

While FPS is the preferred network game style of choice, it may be unpopular with parents (who like to blame their child's violence on someone other than themselves), so I would avoid them. I think Mechwarrior 4 is a great choice, but as a Precentor in the Mech Lord League, I'm probably biased in that regard. MW4 is a good mix of 'shooter' with strategy, with a small tad of design too. Civilization 3 is amazingly addictive, but I have no idea how it plays multiplayer.

Alpha Centauri maybe? It's not the NEWEST of games, but that doesn't preclude quality. Actually, one of the Star Control clones (may I suggest Timewarp?) would be really good, since matches can be fought in minutes, and is both addictive and extremely enjoyable to play multiplayer.

I just put my money where my mouth is again, and purchased a copy of Star Control 2 from Accolade. Check out the awesome fan site http://www.star-control.com. I'll also take the opportunity to point out that I personally love games where you can download the manuals in PDF (not scans of the manuals) and think it should be standard practice.

The game used to be based off of Allegro, and was easily compiled in any OS (whether it be windows, any number of UNIXes, and heck, even BeOS). Since then the project has taken a massive turn in another direction, in an attempt to switch from Allegro to SDL. However, the Allegro sources should still be widely available.

go check it out, if you have an hour or two to spare... be warned though... it can get very, very addictive.

The game used to be based off of Allegro, and was easily compiled in any OS (whether it be windows, any number of UNIXes, and heck, even BeOS). Since then the project has taken a massive turn in another direction, in an attempt to switch from Allegro to SDL. However, the Allegro sources should still be widely available.

go check it out, if you have an hour or two to spare... be warned though... it can get very, very addictive.

Since I started learning Japanese, I recently heard about a major genre that currently exists only in Japan, the social/dating sim. The "killer app" of this genre was Tokimeki Memorial in 1995 (a success on the scale of Doom), and since then there have been thousands of clones. Unfortunately, these games revolve around conversations with game characters, so they are unplayable for people who don't understand Japanese. And because of the aforementioned risks, no one has ever dared release one in the West. As a result, the genre is completely unheard of here.

As a jaded gamer, I find playing a completely new genre for the first time in 5 years very refreshing. Dating sim gameplay is fundamentally different from anything I've seen before. I'm hopeful that the genre will eventually break into the Western market. If you are looking for a paradigm shift, this is perhaps where it will come from.

i wish they could revive the star control franchise, but start from #2 and ignore #3. I loved that game. i recently restored an old 486 and installed dos on it just to play it. nearly 10 years later people are still playing the game.now if only i can find a copy of xcom, and the first MOO...

ML

But... but... NetHack already works. Who needs anything else?

Seriously, though, Linux does have a number of games:

• Tux Racer (previously mentioned /.)
• Various FPSes (Doom, Quake, ...)
• Pengus (a Lemmings clone)
• FreeCiv (a Civiliazation clone)
• All the stuff port by Loki games
• Star Control: TimeWarp, an unofficial, open-source game in the Star Control universe (caveat: Getting it to compile under Linux took a bit of effort when I tried, but it was doable)

That being said, I do agree that Direct3D support in Wine is A Good Thing (except for the possibility that it decreases the likelyhood of true Linux ports). But don't sell Linux short.

(Random "It probably won't work, but..." thought: Running a WinCE Dreamcast game under WINE running on Linux on a Dreamcast. That'd be cool. Useless and probably impossible, but cool none-the-less.)

Bugma
-= I only mind the voices in my head when they don't speak English

As for the music, I did a follow-up and found that Dan Nicholson of Kosmic wrote all of that!

Umm, SC2's music was made through a contest for mod music, the creators of the game explain it at the SC creators' chat log at Pages of Now and Forever. They had 4 or 5 different music guys in the end. Nicholson was one of several. Another one of those guys is part of Robots Are Supreme. Wierd shit. Potatojuice is actually a remix of the Melnorme theme. I recommend "homage to RC Sonic" and "Powerdown/fly home".

Here's the link to The Pages of Now and Forever which is named after the doctrine of the Ur Quan (Kohr-ah, for sure, if not Kzer-za as well).. Anywho, have fun. That's a great site.

While I like Linux as much as the next guy, a commercial Linux-only game doesn't make good business sense and an open source one will most likely get ported by someone else if it's that fantastically popular (and, of course, it's a moot point if the game is unpopular -- you don't see people lining up aroudn the corner to play /usr/games/mille).

And there are a number of open-source games, some of which have been mentioned on Slashdot.

One interesting project that hasn't is Star Control: Timewarp. Unfortunately, the current development is DOS-centric and there are some brain-dead coding practices, but I did manage to get it up and running on my Linux box with some fiddling.

Star Control II has to be one of the classics of all time, with a big universe, intricate story, and interesting aliens. It was playable on a 286 and it had a great .MOD based soundtrack that didn't need an expensive SoundBlaster card -- you could hook up a home-made resistor ladder DAC to your parallel port and get decent music and effects that way.

But I'm sure lots of other great classics are being championed by other people. Here's the interesting part about SC... there is a fan project underway called Star Control: TimeWarp that seeks to create a game based on the SC2 universe -- and it includes the source code.