Slouching

Finished possibly the last final of my life a few days ago, and am currently slouching towards graduation. I could ruminate on academic life, lost friends or other such nostalgic nonsense, but I won't. Don't feel like it. Maybe some other time. Instead, I'm going to geek out over a great old game I recently played through again. I refer here to Star Control II, or the open-source version, the Ur-Quan Masters.

It starts out fairly standard. You're a starship captain from a space colony, returning to find Earth under enslavement, along with every other race in nearby space. The game is essentially about forging alliances, manipulating politics and occasionally shooting the crap out of the slave masters. Most of the game is well constructed, with a fantastic melee segment. The ships each have wildly differing abilities and weaknesses, making for fascinating gameplay. For example, the slave masters, a race known as the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za, have a ship with a powerful medium-range blasting attack, plus the ability to send out little commandos who will attach themselves to the enemy ship and start shooting it to bits. In contrast, probably the single most effective ship against them is a speedy little craft with a pathetic forward shot and the ability to fire a very weak missile backwards. The latter craft is relatively quick, so you just swoop in and out, releasing a few missiles as you flee for your life. After a few rounds of this, a halfway skilled pilot will have worn the Ur-Quan ship down to nothing. Charmingly enough, the pilots of the latter ship are a race of complete cowards who crumble at the slightest threat. In fact, that's how you persuade them to join you. Eventually, they choose to permanently enclose themselves in a shield that prevents any traffic with the rest of space.

Which brings me to the most interesting part of the game, for me at least. The history and psychology of each race are well thought out, and it's difficult not to feel sympathy for your enemies, while occasionally being shocked at how immoral your character can be. Let's begin with the Ur-Quan. Some twenty thousand years ago, the Ur-Quan were a race of solitary hunters who had just begun to explore their solar system. Another race of aliens, the Taalo, came across them, and after some initial conflict, the Ur-Quan were able to control their natural hostility and became part of an alliance of alien races. In fact, the Ur-Quan were great explorers, charting and investigating thousands of unknown worlds. On one planet, they came across the Dynarri, a race of super-intelligent toad-like creatures who could mentally control others. The Dynarri promptly took control of the Ur-Quan, then the rest of the known alien races. The Taalo were immune to the mental compulsions, as opposed to the Ur-Quan, who were particularly susceptible. So the Dynarri compelled the Ur-Quan to exterminate the Taalo, who succumbed without a fight.

For the next two thousand years, the Ur-Quan were slaves to the Dynarri. The Ur-Quan were bioengineered into two races, the green scientists and administrators, and the black warriors and workers. Eventually, one green Ur-Quan discovered by accident that extreme pain would force the Dynarri to disconnect from his mind. So he waited until he was near a communications transmitter, then injected himself with an acidic poison. In the moments before his death, the excruciating pain freed his mind from the Dynarri, and he broadcast his discovery to the known galaxy. Ur-Quan began to inflict extreme pain upon themselves, and in the few precious moments of freedom, lashed out and killed as many Dynarri as they could find.

Eventually, the rebels developed a device, called the Excruciator, that would keep them in constant pain, just short of killing them outright. With every member of the race using this device, a war was fought over many years. When the rebels won, they decided that death would be too kind to the Dynarri, so they bioengineered them into non-sentient translators.

The problem then for the Ur-Quan was how to avoid ever being enslaved again. There was a disagreement here, and two factions formed. The green Ur-Quan, naming themselves for Kzer-Za, the Ur-Quan who had first discovered how to break free from the Dynarri, wanted to enslave every other race in the universe. By controlling all other sentient life, threats would be eliminated. The black Ur-Quan, led by an officer named Kohr-Ar, felt that complete extermination of all sentient life was a preferable solution. The disagreement grew, and a civil war was fought. The Kzer-Za won, but conceded that it was possible that they were wrong. So they told the Kohr-Ar to head in on direction of the galaxy, carrying out their doctrine of extermination, and the Kzer-Za would head in the other direction, enslaving all sentient races they met. When the two met again, another doctrinal conflict would be fought to decide who was right.

The game takes place when this second doctrinal conflict is ongoing. So aside from sympathising with the history of the Ur-Quan, you realise that the slave masters were fighting their brethren for the survival of all life in the galaxy. So the problem is whether you should continue to strive against them when they are advocating slavery over genocide.

In fact, slavery isn't really a terrible thing. The Ur-Quan Kzer-Za apparently do take care of the slave races. A choice is offered to be confined to the homeworld permanently, or to become warrior-slaves. The former option isn't actually such a terrible thing, since most people never make it into space anyway. So enslavement means nothing to most of these slaves. In fact, one alien race had lost their homeworld, and had spent decades looking for a suitable new one to no avail. It was the Ur-Quan who found one for them when they chose to be confined. The latter option seemed to allow relative autonomy. Slaves were not even used in the doctrinal war. In one case, the Ur-Quan prevented a race of battle thralls, as they are called, from devastating themselves via nuclear warfare. Further, all warfare between slaves is prohibited, resulting in a general peace.

Well, that's the central bit of history for the game. Go play it. It's free now. The developers released the source code into the public, so now there's an open-source version available on the internet.