Vorosh Plays Star Control 1

Vorosh provides English commentary for various Korean StarCraft tournament videos on his YouTube page. He also plays other games and provides his own commentary on those as well. This time, he chose to play Star Control 1. He is playing against the computer in Melee mode with the difficulty set at Awesome.

Nobody should be this good.
- Awesome difficulty caption

Out of the three difficulty settings, Standard is the only one where the computer does not use secondary functions; Ur-Quan Dreadnoughts will not launch fighters, Shofixti Scouts will not explode, Mycon Podships will not heal, etc.  This is also the same for Star Control II.

One thing that interested me is the turning radius he mentioned.  The ships cannot turn in 360 degrees.  There is a seperate bitmap image for each angle the ship is facing.  This can make it difficult to aim at the opponent and sometimes requires the player to turn and fire at a certain angle while building up inertia.

The combat in Star Control 1 is significantly slower than Star Control II.  This is due to the hardware and software available around 1990.  Star Control II was released in 1992 and shows how much computers have changed in such a short period of time.

A feature I liked that was in Star Control 1 that wasn’t carried over to the second game was the Cyborg and Psytron players.  Cyborg allows the player to make a move or select a ship while the computer takes control of the actual combat.  Psytron takes over the movement strategy and gives player control over ship combat.  I liked playing as Cyborg in the full game mode of SC1 because when I first played the game, I never fully understood what exactly I was supposed to do when I had to move my ships and it really helped me concentrate on the combat.  At this time, I have never heard of Archon.  Sometimes, I would play as the Psytron in melee mode, choose ships and watch the computer fight against itself for fun.

Thanks Vorosh for recording some gameplay.

Vorosh’s YouTube page
Star Control 1 on Abandonia

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