BOTTOM 192 — Week 2 — Poll 24

[This Old Neon]

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

[Kong Wen]

If this were Streets of Rage 2, I might have considered it. But Star Control II is one of those games that has no right to be this large and involved for something that came out in 1992.

[Claytone]

SCII is a game I really gotta play, but I haven't yet. Seems like it probably deserves my vote over the lovely-but-quaint original Streets of Rage. Gonna have to abstain, though.

[Kong Wen]

SCII is a game I really gotta play, but I haven't yet. Seems like it probably deserves my vote over the lovely-but-quaint original Streets of Rage. Gonna have to abstain, though.

One thing I'll say is that I do find the early '80s-'90s strategy game innovators to be somewhat difficult to go back to, with a few exceptions (SimCity, Civ, RTK).

I guess, the esoteric ones that didn't really spawn repeated entries in lengthy series and thus have a chance to iterate on themselves and refine now-familiar features. They definitely gave us some recognizable influences, but it's like the expectations of the game are so different than what we're used to. In some ways, this is also part of the thrill of going back to them.

[Niahak]

SCII is a game I really gotta play, but I haven't yet. Seems like it probably deserves my vote over the lovely-but-quaint original Streets of Rage. Gonna have to abstain, though.

There's an open-source version available under a different name, The Ur-Quan Masters. The source (and assets) were open-sourced by the original developer, Toys for Bob - and based on the changelog, they've offered some text updates to the open source version too.

It's one of those weird hybrid-genre games from the 90s. It's an exploration action strategy game, with lots of quests, an economy of sorts, action-based combat and mining, an alliance of species you assemble, etc.

Don't let the 0.8.0 version number fool you. UQM is really an improved version of the original, with voice-acting brought in from the 3DO (!) version of the game but retaining the better parts of the DOS version.