Game 535: Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace (1989)

 

         

Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace

United States

Masterplay (developer and publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 7 December 2024

                

The oddly-punctuated Star Saga: Two is of course a sequel to a 1988 game that I reviewed in a single entry in 2022. As you'll see from that entry, I've struggled with these titles for definitional reasons—not as to whether they are RPGs (although that itself is a bit doubtful) but more whether they are "computer" games. The computer in Star Saga occupies a purely mechanical role; the story is found in the verbose books that accompany the software disks—nearly 1,000 pages worth of material. That the small development team managed to produce such a sequel in a single year is beyond impressive.

     

As I related in that earlier entry, that development team initially consisted of Rick Dutton, Walt Freitag, and Mike Massimilla, three Harvard University students who periodically engaged in a live-action role-playing game called "Rekon." They happened to meet Andrew "Werdna" Greenberg, co-creator of Wizardry, at a bridge tournament and invited him to participate. Greenberg (who passed away in August at age 67) saw enough promise in the LARP plot to turn it into a viable product. As Mr. Massimilla reported to me in several email exchanges, Dutton and Freitag handled most of the game design and text, Massimilla handled most of the programming, and Greenberg handled the business and production. Massimilla also credits Sheila McDonald, Greenberg's (then-) wife, for editing the text ("she added a lot of the humor") and Gerry Seixas for quality assurance.

    

The game came in a large box with lots of paperwork. Image courtesy of Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature.

     

The Star Saga games are meant to be played by groups. When I played the first one, I misunderstood some of the game instructions that said players shouldn't talk about what they encountered. This apparently only applied to the first few turns. Players otherwise were encouraged to discuss the game and their findings liberally and to help each other out by trading unneeded items when the characters met, a mechanic that the game offers an interface for. To mimic that experience as thoroughly as possible in 2024, I convinced Irene to play along with me. 

        

Star Saga: Two takes place in 2821, six years after the beginning of the first game. Humanity has colonized a local cluster of planets that, together with Earth, are known as the Nine Worlds. The invention of the dual-axis hyperdrive in 2257 made faster-than-light travel possible, and it kicked off an era of great expansion. This era came to a crashing end in 2490, when the Space Plague killed more than half of the human population. The interstellar government responded by creating the Boundary, a border around the Nine Worlds protected by constant scanning and rigid enforcement by the Space Patrol. Humans may pass through the Boundary on the way out, but no one outside of the Boundary is allowed into the Nine Worlds' territory.

       

Each character has a booklet explaining his or her backstory and motivations.

      

One had the players choose from among six characters, all carefully named as to be androgynous, all with their own motivations for going, as the game's subtitle had it, Beyond the Boundary. Because they all read (mostly) the same paragraphs and have the same encounters, however, the bulk of the game is not individualized to the characters. They all accomplish their original mission during the game, but in service of a much larger shared plot.

    

That plot involves the greatest of the pre-plague explorers, Vanessa Chang, whose ship, The Lockerbait, the player finds on the planet Outpost at the Arm of the galaxy. Chang had managed to achieve not just dual but tri-axis drive technology, which she used to explore areas beyond the known galaxy called The Fringe. There, they were captured by a reptilian species called the Clathrans who found humanity inexplicably disgusting. Chang and her crew managed to escape the Clathrans, then created the Boundary as a way to keep the Clathrans from finding the location of the Nine Worlds long enough for humanity to rival them in technology.

       

Choosing the active characters for the game.

     

Each character is given a slightly updated mission for the sequel:

 

• Corin Stoneseeker, a descendant of a comrade of Chang's named Soulsinger. In his travels, Soulsinger found an alien artifact called the Core Stone that has a variety of mystical properties. It was taken from him, and Soulsinger was killed, by a Clathran. His son escaped and founded a clan dedicated to finding the stone. Corin (who I played) accomplishes this quest in the first game and is now setting out to find the origin and purpose of the stone, hoping it can counter The Clathran Menace.

• Laran Darkwatch, a member of the Final Church of Man. Laran grew up reading the Six Holy Text Files but heard rumors of a secret Seventh, lost to the stars in previous generations. Laran defied church dogma to search beyond the Boundary in the ship Jihad. Finding Chang's ship on Outpost, Laran is now convinced that the Seventh Holy Text File must be on the planet Golgotha, somewhere in the galactic Arm. To find it, Laran will have to avoid The Clathran Menace. Okay, I won't keep doing that.

• Jean G. Clerc, an engineer who required alien technology to build the Ultimate Spaceship. Now in possession of such a ship (Run Amok), he or she seeks to improve it to fight the Clathrans, specifically by building or acquiring a Jump Engine.

      

The Nine Worlds celebrate Clerc's return from the first game.

   

• Professor Lee Dambroke, a xenobiologist interested in alien civilizations and abilities. He or she found out a lot about them—acquired them, even—during the first game. Back at Harvard, Dambroke and a colleague theorize about where the energy for these special abilities comes from. The colleague calls it "Dual Space" and suggests that it may be the key to fighting the Clathrans. Dambroke sets out again to research this phenomenon.

• Valentine Stewart, the scion of a wealthy family embroiled in a quasi-legal trading and smuggling empire. He or she decided to seek a little adventure before settling into a life of bureaucracy and paperwork, and accordingly stole one of the family's ships, renaming it Holly Roger. This theft screwed up a trading contract, and Valentine spent much of One assembling unusual trade goods to make up for it. He or she now seeks the source of Flame Jewels, which make tri-axis drives possible.

• M. J. Turner, a hotshot Space Patrol pilot who bent the rules once too often and was given the choice of resigning or accepting a secret mission to leave the Boundary and destroy a notorious space pirate. This turned out to be Silverbeard, the insane former helmsman of Vanessa Chang, who all characters had to kill to get access to Outpost. Back in the Nine Worlds, Turner has just been named the first captain of the Space Navy, a new branch designed specifically to address The Clathran Menace. Turner embarks on a mission to gather intelligence on the hostile Clathrans.

          

M.J. Turner's starting game status.

       

I decided to play Turner for this game, but Irene took up my former character, Corin Stoneseeker. I envisioned Corin as a woman, and Irene agreed. Turner is a man. This is only important because I'll be using the relevant pronouns in my coverage. Turner starts with an empty hold, plasma beams and stress fields on his ship, and "Telekinesis" and "Levitation" abilities. Corin has all the same stuff but also has the Core Stone. The game gave me the option to import Corin from One, and I assume if I did, she'd have several other abilities that I acquired in that game. I'll have to check later.

It took us a while to get things set up in an optimal way. Our first three-hour session eventually used three computers. One, attached to the television in our den, showed us the application (running in DOSBox) and the game map. But Irene and I also had our own laptops in front of us for reading the paragraphs while the other person was entering his or her inputs.

        

After you choose the characters, the game takes you to the first turn screen. Each turn, players can go in any order. Characters specify a number of actions, like moving from one sector to another, landing, trading, and exploring. You get 7 "phases" per turn; if your last action costs more than your remaining phases, you end up borrowing them from the next turn. As in the first game, the manual walks you through the first couple of turns, and the program won't let you deviate from what the manual tells you to do. 

     

 I tried to "go rogue" during the first few turns and got this.

      

As in One, the galaxy is divided into a bunch of triangular sectors, each color-coded, each touching no more than three adjacent sectors, all of which have a different color. To move across the galaxy, you specify a sequence of colors. Some sectors have "space walls" (which in the game's lore exist only in hyperspace) preventing you from moving to those adjacent sectors.

    

A small part of the galaxy. Black dots indicate planets.

      

Both characters start in the same sector of space, and both are instructed to navigate to the planet Outpost and land, which takes up all phases and borrows two from the next turn. Turner went first and, upon landing at Outpost, was told to read paragraphs 26 and 30 from Book A. The first paragraph summarizes the planet's history, including Vanessa Chang and Silverbeard. There are five other ships here—the other characters. The rest of the paragraph runs through the options available on the planet and provides a series of unique codes that you enter into the game interface to choose those options. Paragraph 30 instructs the player how to take notes about what's available on each planet and instructs him what to do for the next turn.

    

Options for Outpost, from the paragraph books.

      

Irene enters her actions and gets two different paragraphs, but oddly the first one has the exact same text, including the codes to use on Outpost. I guess maybe they replicated some of them so two people could read at once? The second paragraph is mostly the same, but where Turner is instructed to explore the planet (6 phases), Stoneseeker is instructed to visit the spaceport (2 phases) and search some nearby storage facilities for things Silverbeard might have left behind (3 phases).

      

The codes turn out to be unnecessary; you can choose the same options that are given in the book from a menu. I know there are times when the codes won't be on the screen and we'll have to type them in, but I'm not sure why they're necessary for the other times.

       

Choosing actions from the game menu.

    

Turn 2: Turner explores the planet and is given two new paragraphs to read. The first is quite long. He finds a hill that has been smoothed into a flat face on one side. He discovers it is a memorial built by Vanessa Chang. It reads: "In memory of humankind and her achievements. We will be avenged. V. Chang, May 30, 2519." This is odd because humankind was not destroyed, and that date is 26 years after Chang's final departure from the planet. Turner's computer suggests that it's a ruse to convince the Clathran's that they succeeded in wiping out our species. The computer notes that after returning to the Nine Worlds and setting in motion the Boundary and the Space Patrol, Chang disappeared in 2519, as did a ship called Fool's Errand. Turner insists that the computer spend a day analyzing the thing, and the computer determines that at exactly midnight (Earth time) on 30 May 2519, the tip of the memorial pointed directly at Earth.

  

The next paragraph instructs the player to search the spaceport and the storage area on Turn 3. That's what Irene is already doing with Corin Stoneseeker, so we turn to her. She finds a memorial to Silverbeard and wonders how he lived so long, whether he was really Chang's navigator, and why he went insane. Inside a hangar is a half-finished ship.

      

Inside the storage facility is an unlimited quantity of crystals, culture, fiber, food, medicine, munitions, radioactives, and tools. The paragraphs say that Corin can load any of those items into her ship, up to cargo capacity. The program takes her to an interface where she can do this. She has 10 cargo bays, so she loads one of each, plus one extra food, medicine, and radioactives. In the first game, all these items were for trading or solving puzzles, not for personal use, and I assume that's true here.

      

Loading up on trade goods.

      

In Turn 3, the two characters mirror each other's interactions in Turn 2, finishing with both of them meeting the other pilots on the planet. For that final action, the authors wrote five paragraphs, one for each character. The only thing that differs among them is the list of "other" ships that the character sees. This is exactly the sort of thing I meant when I said, in my Star Saga: One entry: "I have long been of the opinion that the computer is a better place for [passages of text] since they can be informed by in-game variables without requiring the publisher to have printed multiple paragraphs with only slight variations." Witness the text-heavy Betrayal at Krondor for an example.

     

But this "meeting" paragraph is more collaborative than anything we got in One. There, the characters could have been aware of each other through the players' sharing of information, but they weren't explicitly. This paragraph makes all the characters aware that six people simultaneously found Flame Jewels, constructed tri-axis drives, and followed Vanessa Chang's trail to Outpost. The paragraph elides how all six of them have memories of individually defeating Silverbeard. Anyway, all the characters agree to delete any mention of Earth from their databases, including of course its location. If they want to go home, they'll have to return to Outpost and figure out the direction from Chang's memorial. The last sentences instruct each player to "introduce yourself in character" to the other players and to share experiences and ideas, but it notes "you are not required to tell anybody anything, nor are you required to always tell the truth." I tell Irene that I found the coolest laser rifle at the Chang memorial, but she must not have found it because I got there first. She believed it. She was very upset and vowed to beat me to the other two options on Outpost: visit where Silverbeard used to build his weapons and visit the ancient hangar where Chang's most famous spaceship "is enshrined."

    

At this point, the game lets us plot our own turns. We both decide to finish exploring Outpost before blasting off, since we have no clues about where to go. The game notes that we were already at the weapons workshop, since that's where we got the plasma weapons and stress field. The game says that we take some time to repair our ships, which weren't damaged, but we can come back later if they are.

    

The game offers feedback on Irene's actions this turn.

       

At Chang's ship, Lockerbait, the game gives us the option to spend the next turn reading Chang's message to future explorers, which I got in One but Irene didn't. I choose it anyway to refresh my memory. The message is quite long, but it recaps the following points:

      

• Chang's Engineer, Miller, hypothesized the tri-axis drive, but they needed a special crystal for it.

• They found the crystal, a Flame Jewel, in the possession of an alien race. The aliens gave it to them in exchange for one of the crew volunteering to help test an experimental Jump Engine. Science Officer Sherin Mosswell insisted on doing it and disappeared during the test.

• Using the tri-axis drive, the crew found Outpost and used it for supply missions deeper into the Arm.

• After a few years of exploration, they encountered the Clathrans, who were immediately and inexplicably hostile. The Clathrans boarded Chang's ship and took them prisoner, holding them on the planet Morikor.

• The Clathrans are a large, humanoid species covered in green scales. They pride themselves on knowing about every species in the galaxy, so they were angry that they knew nothing about humans.

• The crew managed to keep the location of the Nine Worlds a secret. They eventually escaped, stole a ship, and fled, leaving helmsman John Silverbeard behind.

• Their ship's axis drive failed, so they were forced to make their way slowly home while in hibernation, enduring some crash landings on the way. When they got home, they learned about the plague, which seemed poised to kill every last human but eventually weakened. 

• When Chang and her crew returned to Outpost, they met a number of other explorers, including organizations to which all the characters in this game belong.

• Chang thinks the Clathrans never learned the location of the Nine Worlds, but they engineered the Space Plague to affect only humans and released it, figuring that someone would eventually bring it to the humans.

• While on Morikor, the crew saw the Clathrans building a huge fleet. Chang things this fleet will be used to survey the galaxy in an attempt to log the locations of all species, including humans.

As we wrap up our options on Outpost, the game gives us unique paragraphs with some hints as to where to go next. Corin's computer digs up a reference to Soulsinger having visited a planet called Zyroth, with a population of peaceful aliens called Zyrans. There's no information as to where it is. Turner gets a radio call from the Institute of Space Exploration, recommending that he go to the other end of the Arm, near the galactic core, to get information about the Clathran's "survey line"--the fleet of ships the Clathrans have deployed to search the galaxy for Earth.

      

Turns 6-11 go like this:

    

M. J. Turner: 

    

• Leaves Outpost, heading "west" across the galaxy. 

     

Moving across multiple sectors in one turn.

     

• Gets a random radio call from someone named Marc Tremont on Para-Para claiming to be an ISE employee. He doesn't seem to want anything specific. Turner chastises him for potentially revealing his location to the Clathrans. Tremont happens to mention that violent crime has recently increased in the Nine Worlds.

• Discovers the planet Holoth in Sector 503. It's a crystalline planet, characterized by "glittering mountains capped by radiant clouds, chasms plunging to mysterious depths, and crags jutting out at you from bizarre angles." A polytheistic species called the Hadrakians—"a centaur-like combination of tiger and gorilla"—calls it home. Chang visited them. All Hadrakians are born male, and in their younger years are the traders, soldiers, and laborers. They earn citizenship through victories in arena battles. They change to females at 30 years old, chill out, and become teachers, administrators, and scientists.

      

Discovering a new planet. I'm not sure that planting a flag is a good idea, though.

     

• Is contacted by a Hadrakian diplomat who tells him a bit about the world and relates that when Chang visited, she won arena battles on virtually every planet in the system. She directs Turner to a port for foreigners, where he has options to visit the commodities market or fight in the arena. Turner makes the mistake of visiting the market first; as a non-citizen, he doesn't have any valid options.

• Chooses the option to fight in the arena. Only hand weapons are allowed, since missile weapons could hurt spectators. The game goes into its combat system, in which it tells you what items or abilities you're using for offense and defense, if any. In this case, I get 100 strength from my "Telekinesis" offensive ability and 100 strength from my "Levitation" defensive ability, and I only need 100 to succeed. Turner gets citizenship, explores more of the planet, and learns about a second, bat-like race that lives there, the Holots. He also learns of "The Battle, Inc.," a "Clathran resistance organization."

     

My first battle in the game. Against a homeless person.

      

Corin Stoneseeker:

 

• Decides to head "south" towards a couple of nearby planets.

• At the end of her first group of jumps, she's listening to a talk radio program from Norstar, one of the Nine Worlds. It mentions that suicides are up 15% this year over last.

• Makes her way to Worzelle, a large planet currently in the middle of a war that has lasted thousands of years. Corin lands in the only safe area and is greeted by a four-armed native with something "between fur and scales" for skin. He explains that most Worzellians spend their lives in combat, training for some ultimate battle that everyone knows is coming but no one knows anything about. There are seven options available on the planet. The first—"enroll for a two-week session of military arts training in the Academy"—takes Irene out of the game for a couple of turns.

• It turns out that Worzellians don't sleep while in training, and Corin has to take drugs to keep up with them. She learns a variety of combat strategies and tactics, and she is drilled to remember three general strategies in a particular order: oisu (sneaking), takai (bluffing), tiisai (fighting), and hurui (using mobility to evade the enemy). This order comes into play in the final test, as Corin is pitted against a much stronger, faster, dexterous Worzellian. The game asks her first, second, third, and fourth moves, and Irene chooses options consistent with the above order. (It's not that hard, but I'm proud of her for figuring it out.) She becomes an honorary Worzellian, gains the "Tactics" skill, and can use the medical facilities for free.

        

Irene works out a fairly easy puzzle.

     

I hated to wrap up this first session with still a few things to do on our respective planets, but we needed to go to bed. I understand that ship combat and a few other mechanics are a bit different from Star Saga: One, so I look forward to experiencing those things.

    

Irene enjoyed the game enough to continue for at least a couple more sessions. Having played for a little while with another person, I'm still lukewarm about the multiplayer experience. We talked a little about theories—both of us concluded immediately that we'll be meeting Vanessa Chang in the flesh at some point, for instance—but despite a little conversation, it still felt mostly like two people playing individual games while sitting next to each other. Maybe it will feel less like that as we go along.

   

Time so far: 3 hours