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PowerMac 7100/66 |
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Reviewed by David Lienbach
Introduction:
Travel through hyperspace has now
become impossible due to interdimensional fatigue. Now you
have built a ship from Precursor technology which uses warp
bubble technology to travel great distances. To try and
reverse the collapse of hyperspace, you and a number of
teams travel to the Kessari Quadrant. Unfortunately, the
nature of the precursor ship scattered the teams throughout
the Kessari Quadrant. Your mission is to rediscover the
teams and restore hyperspace.
Gameplay:
In MacSoft's Star Control 3, you
can play a normal game or you can jump right to battle's
with enemy ships. In Hyper Melee mode you can configure
yours and your enemy's fleet including the number of ships,
and the types of ships. You can also choose whether you wish
to use mouse or keyboard control, the skill of the computer
and you can even play Hyper Melee mode over the modem. Once
you have setup the game, you choose a ships, one at a time,
to battle in one-on-one battles until only you or the
enemy's fleet remains. In battle, you can easily control you
ship from the arrow pad, Ctrl, and Option key for player one
and C, V, B, X, and Z for player 2(in a human vs. human
game). You can change the view and speed the improve the
amount of enjoyment received from this mode of play.
In Adventure Game mode, you must locate the teams and new
alien races plus you must colonize new worlds to gain
resources for ships. Lastly, you must discover Precursor
alien artifacts which may help in reversing interdimensional
fatigue. Once you get into the game, you will learn that you
of another race which has only been referred to as the
Eternal Ones who feed on other races and they may be the
cause of all your problems. While fulfilling your mission,
you will encounter races who will not take kindly to your
presence and may force you into battle. Once you enter
battle, the computer will choose one of your ships and one
of the enemy's(if there are more than one). They will then
enter battle. One complaint I do have is that you cannot
control your own ships.
Graphics & Sound:
The graphics in this game are
very well done. What more can I say? The in-game movies are
partially blocky however most of them, including the alien
races who look nothing like human actors, look as if they
were just recorded onto the computer using an electronic
video camera.
The sound is almost as professionally done as the graphics
but they are not as realistic as would be preferred. Some of
the gun shots sound as if they were created in 5 minutes.
Even so, I found that the gameplay distracted me enough that
I didn't notice it that much.
Interface:
This game has a fairly intuitive
interface. I was able to learn to use most of the functions
of this game without having to read the manual. Most of the
buttons use graphics that allow you to easily navigate
through the game and actually succeed. The method of
transferring crew from ship to ship to colony and back is
easily implemented by clicking on the source/destination and
selecting how many people you want left on you head ship.
Selecting how much resources to allocate to each industry in
a colony is accomplished by moving a slider control. The
only complaint I have relating to the interface is that
while in communication with some aliens, your choices
available are severely limited at times. One limitation that
I wish they had removed was that you cannot exit a
communication at any time.
Difficulty & Bugs:
I almost wrote that this game had
a perfect difficulty level when I realized that this was not
true. This game almost had a perfect difficulty level but I
found it too easy which is why I thought it was perfect
because I was able to win in this game. As you play the game
gets harder because you must battle ships which have an
increasing difficulty and you must solve some difficult
problems.
As for bugs in this game, I encountered none except for what
could be considered a bug but also could be blamed on the
hardware. While playing the introductory movies at the
beginning of the game, the sound was really choppy. Other
than that, the game seemed fine.
Conclusion:
This game is a very enjoyable
diversion from the normal types of games. When I started
playing this game I thought that it would be boring but I
ended up playing for 4 hours straight. Anyone who enjoys
strategy games will definitely enjoy this game and I am
almost positive that anyone will enjoy playing this game.
The amount of thought that this game requires is enough that
you won't get bored because of it being to easy while at the
same time is not so much that you decide to give up because
of boredom in that way. Overall, if you have a CD-ROM drive
of 4x or faster then you should definitely consider this
game.
