I remember the graphics being so much better. Here I am playing SC2 on my brand new AMD fx-57 / nvidia 7800 GTX god box. Someone laugh. Ur-Quan masters runs great on windows. On mac I get only video garbage although this site might have the fix, I didn’t play with it too much. That’s what the weekend is for.

All I know is that this open-source project has really brought me back. I’m glad this page says ’1992′ explicitly, I could only place it between 1991-1994. I played UQM right before I went to bed and couldn’t fall asleep. Dumb move. I just laid and thought about how much the world has changed, my life has changed since SC2/MSDOS. I mean … no Internet, no gamefaqs.com, no IRC, no blogs, not even SVGA (a term that is gone now). When I beat SC2, I beat it by myself. I think I asked for help on how to beat the very, very end (not going to give anything away) … I had no clue. I think I asked a friend or read it on a BBS. Can’t remember. When I beat it this time around, I’m going to have HTML, tabbed browsing, live chat, dual head, wireless and a whole bunch of other technologies all at my fingertips to make a gamer win.

What an age we live in indeed.

The intro graphics of SC2 were amazing in the day. The fading/transitions were incredibly high-quality. Seeing them again made me realize that gaming standards are very high these days but not in terms of gameplay. The PSP can do ad-hoc networks with my friends but no decent games (yet … like a real RPG).

The space sim is dead. X3:Reunion is the only thing I have to look forward to in that genre. People want fighters, FPS games, RTS because it’s all 3d. It’s all 3d now!

Wing Commander was pixel 2d graphics. The artists knew what they were building. A video cartoon. Now 3d modeling raises the bar. I have to skin stuff. I have to scale my model back for the PC hardware. I have to worry about the player camera. I spend my time managing the 3d world and it looks less like a 2d cartoon or movie-set. In my opinion, very few games have captured the look/feel/interface/response that Wing Commander and Star Control 2 had. And I think it’s because everything has gotten more complicated and unmanageable.

My comments are very general. There are good 3d games out there with some clever design, style and decent gameplay (HL2, Rise of Nations, Jedi Academy, WoW, Psychonauts). But it’s not the same. Not until someone explicitly tries to stay 2d. Like Viewtiful Joe, not that I played it.

Anyway … UQM = metal. \m/

http://www.submedia.net/uqm/

The sourceforge page points you to a binary install that does not have any of the required auxilliary frameworks.

The dmg in the above location is more complete.