I could never find the original but have played the second one to death. Got to love slaughtering every species you come across with technology four or five tiers above them. Had the coolest damn ship loadouts ever too. Anyone but me still play this game?
I played the first one a bunch. It’s still installed on my drive and I play it every once in a while but not enough to finish the game. It used to infuriate me when the computer would take one of the races and give them a stack of 32,000 ships to come after me with. You knew it was cheating because there was no way that race could have built that many ships given lack of planets they controlled. I spent many a long night during college staying up way to late playing that.
I think I tried the second one briefly but preferred the first for it’s simplicity (I’m not much of a strategy gamer unless it’s relatively simple to get into a game; I don’t like having to worry about 50 different resources and whatnot).
I played some of one, but played two all the time
Plasma Cannons all the way, baby!!
Haven’t played in years. I remember playing for hours and hours back in college. Although it wasn’t as cool as Starcom II, which is what had been keeping us up nights the month before. (Best ending of a video game ever, BTW.)
–Cliffy
MOO2 rules. I tend to either get creamed or cream everybody. No middle ground. MOO3 is in production I hear. Looks mondo complex compared to the original. I am curious how it will all work.
I just finished a game of MOO II a day or two ago. I remain amazed at how well it still plays. I am anticipating MOO III nearly as much as I was Civ III. They are in my opinion the two best series of games ever produced.
I still play the original one from time to time. I think I found it on an Abandonware site, but it took some searching.
Master of Orion was one of the first computer games I ever really got into. It was fantastic, for a kid who had last played text-based shareware stuff, and had never been able to really figure out the SSI gold box AD&D games. The strategy element was always great, and I loved being technological light-years ahead of the other guys. I just would always regret not being able to try out my ground-based tanks and battlesuits against enemy infantry- bloodthirsty me wanted more ground combat. Master of Orion II was just different enough to be interesting, while retaining all that made the original such a damn great game.
One game I do remember that really needed to get more MOO-type attention was Master of Magic. That game rocked, even more than Master of Orion, I thought. It still is the greatest game that I’ve ever played, and I really wish I could somehow get it working again. Alas, it requires some strange memory configuration that I can no longer make work on my computer. There were rumors of a sequel, but nothing ever came through. Some faithful little part of me knows that some valiant soul will take up the torch, and make a truly worthy sequel.
MOO II may very well be my current favorite computer game. I’m putting off getting a new computer until MOO III is released (about March) so that I’ll have the best possible, top-of-the-line computer to play it on. I’m that obsessed.