The Game: In a first-person space shooter set in the Star Control universe, the player is charged with maintaining order in the spaceways, a job made a little more difficult by rival warlords trying to stake their claims on the interstellar shipping lanes. Your patrol ship is armed to the teeth, which is good – because so are their ships. (Accolade, 1998 – never released)
Memories: Left in an unfinished state and never officially released, Starcon represents the most recent, and most baffling, attempt to drag the Star Control universe into the console realm. It’d already been done spectacularly well on the 3DO with Star Control II, which actually managed to trump the original PC version in some respects. But while the Playstation should’ve been capable of an equally spectacular port of Starcon II, Accolade instead licensed the name, and some placenames and species, for a game that has almost nothing to do with the rest of the series.
Even that might’ve been okay, except that as first-person space shooters go, Starcon wasn’t bringing anything new to the table. (Indeed, one of the last peeps out of Accolade about Starcon‘s status was that development was going into an indefinite limbo – a euphemism for quietly cancelling the project – because it wasn’t unique enough to make a dent in the then-competitive Playstation market.) Starcon had nothing on Colony Wars or other games of its ilk. It was barely a decent space shooter, and barely had anything to do with Star Control‘s sprawling narrative. Not a great combination.
To add insult to injury, the next PC iteration of the franchise, Star Control 3, didn’t set the world on fire either, not offering any compelling improvements over Starcon II‘s exploration/exploitation/expansion game play. Sadly, the Star Control universe faded quietly away at this point; its epitaph has turned out to be the fan-made Ur-Quan Masters, a remake of Starcon II using the 3DO graphics and sound sets, capable of running on newer versions of Windows. One would think that the Star Control universe practically screams “MMORPG,” but 
perhaps it’s best left alone – before it winds up with another misstep like Starcon for the Playstation.
(This game was reviewed, and the video and screenshots 
gathered, from an actual Accolade beta copy that was in my possession from 2005-2007; I sold the game at the Classic Gaming Expo 2007 auction, and I am unaware if the party who bought it has any plans to release or dump the game.)
