Jeff Graw
StarChart Interactive
elander_ said:It didn't copied the starflight series because the creator of that series is also the guy who wrote the dialogs for star control 2.
Paul Reiche III didn't create Starflight. In the credits to both games of the series he's only listed under the "special thanks to:" section. I'm not completely sure, but I think EA sent him in to clean up the code a bit both times. So yeah, SC2 did copy the Starflight games.
Hory said:How is Starflight better? I have tried getting into it several times, butStar Control 2 proved better in almost every aspect.
Since this is the Codex and all, I'll start with the more in depth RPG elements. For example, in Starflight you have a communications officer who determines how precise alien translation is. The skill of the science officer determines how much information you can glean from scans, etc. Each crew member has skills that can be trained (which skills they are best at and how quickly they train depends on race) and hitpoints based on the race of the character.
The next biggie is planetary exploration. In the Starflight games worlds are *huge*, and you could spend hours on just one planet if you wanted to (and there are hundreds of planets). In Starflight 2 there are also alien settlements where you can trade and bargain for resources. This is an area where Starflight absolutely crushes SC2, since SC2's stupid mining mini-game is repetitive, annoying, tedious, and ruins the feeling that you're actually flying around exploring the galaxy. When it comes to space exploration, huge ass fully explorable planets are a must.
This is going to controversial, but I see Starflight as having much better combat than SC2. Sure, SC2's combat is fun in a stupid arcade game kind of way, and it does have a nice kind of rock-paper-scissors balance between ships, but lets get real for a second. Using crew as hitpoints is on a Bethesda level of stupid. Starflight's combat model has shields, armor, different subsystems that can be damaged, and crew can take damage during combat (but are not used as hitpoints!). The big kicker here, is the fact that SC2 only has 1-on-1 combat while in Starflight you can be up against whole fleets of ships at a time. I don't know about you guys, but it's clear which combat model I prefer.
Humor. Oh boy. This is really subjective so I will just touch on this a little bit, but I found Star Control 2's humor to be a bit too too forward while the humor in Starflight games was generally more subtle and subdued. Kind of like Family Guy Vs. Futurama. I prefer the later, but lots of people will disagree.
I'm not going to spoil anything, but in terms of story Starflight > Star Control 2 > Starflight 2.
In terms of atmosphere it's no contest. SC2 has a kind of happy-go-lucky cartoon feeling which goes hand in hand with the arcade elements. Even though many of the solar systems are empty and lifeless you never get a sense of the vastness of space because of the stupid mining mini-game. Starflight, although the atmosphere varies a bit between 1 and 2, is a complete 180 of this. The first Starflight in particular is an incredibly dark, foreboding, empty and vast universe. Care to guess what I prefer in a space exploration game?
Finally, Starflight 2 has a black hole in the far corner of the universe that, if your ship is strong enough to survive the journey, you can let it swallow you up and arrive at a past version of the universe where two ancient and powerful races are just finishing a war of galactic domination. Star Control 2 has nothing that begins to approach that level of awesomeness.
So what does Star Control 2 do better? Well, as I said it has a better story than Starflight 2, though at the same time it's worse than the very original story of Starflight 1. Besides that, graphics and sound is superior in Star Control 2 by a long shot, so the graphics whores-in-denial Codexians will like it better for sure. The expanding/moving spheres of influence are also quite cool. Besides that, Star Control 2 is just plain worse and dumbed down in pretty much every conceivable way.