Would die to see the Wing Commander series (at least 1 and 2) released on XBLA or PSN.
I wanted to sue Origin for false advertising after that VG&CE cover, but all was forgiven when I actually got it running. Though I do remember being a little bit upset about space being midnight blue, rather than black.
I can still hear those AdLib trumpets playing the opening theme: PWAA-pwaa-pwaa-pwaa-pwaa-pwaa…
Wing Commander is the game that got me into PC gaming. Before then, a computer was something I used for Lotus Works :P
Anyone else here get a SoundBlaster for the game and turn it off, because it played faster without it? I had a 486DX/33 when I got Wing Commander, and it was blisteringly fast and exciting. With the SoundBlaster, it noticeably slowed down. I even bought more RAM to help (8MB, it was like $1200 back then!), but there was no effect =/
Ah… bluehair, how I miss you.
First time I played, I went down the losing path without realizing there were paths. It was shocking to see my side lose, and all these depressing missions and vignettes. Worse, I never got to fly the Raptor or Rapier :(
I was a die-hard amiga gamer up until a friend showed me Wing Commander on his pc back at university. I bought a copy of Wing Commander for myself soon after that. A few months later, I had a 386/25 with a sound blaster. It was totally sweet.
I didn’t have a PC at the time and was pretty much a console only gamer at that point. By the time I got one, the only one I played was Prophecy. But I loved it. I really did. I can only imagine how great it must have been to play this whole series from the start, when it was new.
This game is my point of inception. Like some of you, this was my first PC game as well.
I still have vivid memories of a winter day - following my dad into Best Buy (we lived in a pretty small Wisconsin town) to pickup a 386, with dust covers and all.
Then with this game my dad introduced me to a whole 'nother world that at the time didn’t take hold (even though SimCity and Civilization were soon to follow), but into my middle school and high school days would be an augment to reality and an aid in acquiring real-life, thus-far-life-long, friends.
I remember it taking the longest time for me to understand how to land after a mission. The asteroids are still vivid in my memory as well. At the time I don’t think I understood the concept that the game contained a story line and was actually “winnable”. I spent a lot of time on the simulator, and watching the funeral scene.
Thinking twice, no wonder I couldn’t quite understand all of that, I was just starting to learn to read and write. These memories are absolutely golden to me. Thanks for brightening my day with this thread.
I don’t know what makes me feel older – that the game was 20 years ago, or that people are saying it was their first PC game.
Things I always appreciated about Wing Commander 1:
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How it was able to be so atmospheric and character-based with so little actual dialogue or graphics. Two locations on the ship, one of which was basically a glorified menu screen, and then inter-mission monologues with other pilots.
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The ship progression, as you “leveled up” to cooler ships over time. This is something that was lost even in later games in the series, as they’d mix up the mission types and ship types. I like the progression model better.
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They way that they always played music to the end of a phrase. If you pressed spacebar to skip a sequence, it’d wait a secodn until it had played through the end of a phrase, rather than just cutting off midnote like modern games do. And in-flight, as it switched from theme to theme, it did so smoothly. The advantage of MIDI, I suppose. (Also, really, the music in general for this game was brilliant. The opening theme, the death music, the triumphant and sad mission return music, the briefing music, the launch music, the jazzy bar music… all great.)
If I remember correctly, I think I logged a couple of months playing WC1 with a keyboard because I didn’t know any better. Then I got one of these joysticks:
http://www.billandchristina.com/vgamecomp/images/collection5/ar3/DSC01897.JPG
I think i burned though 3 of them through from '90-'95. I miss all the flight games <sniff>
One of the greatest franchises of the 90’s - and run into the ground in short order by EA, seemingly on a whim.
My real question is, why were games like this - space action/sim games - only popular during the 90’s? Wing Commander launched it in '90. Freespace 2 was the end of the line in '99.
Was it that these games were too much of a sim for the action folks, but too much action/not enough sim for the sim folks? How did a huge market for games like this seemingly dry up overnight?
The gameplay was advanced for the 90s - you played in 3 dimensions at a time when most games were platformers. But by FreeSpace 2, the games were simplistic relative to FPS competition. There’s no terrain, no real physics (and when they tried to implement it, as in some Microprose space shooter, it was Newtonian physics that made the game horrible to play). In space, you don’t deal with gravity, don’t get cover, don’t get concealment. The benefits of a spaceship, like recharging shields, were stolen by games like Halo.
I was just thinking the same thing.
Wing Commander was the game I bought my 386 sx 16 to play. Then I added a soundblaster to get the really good sound.
Why can’t we have good games like this again?
I recal people arguing that space was a perfect setting back when computing power was really restricted and every pixel counted because there aren’t many resources to display space (mainly black with some lights (stars) and the odd nebula or planet thrown in).
Once the computers became more powerful more complex graphical settings could be realized and maybe that made space obsolete.
Also FPS really took off around 1999 especially online (Personally I recall Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena coming out the same time and making me stop playing anything else for months).
You guys reminded me there was a time Origin was my highest gaming God. To His acts my geeky desires bowed.
How have the worlds changed!
As old as it may be, I think Snoopy has multiple times the mass appeal! Maybe I’m out of touch because of my scarce interest in sci-fi …
Edit: I didn’t buy a pc for W.C. Ultima 7 claims that honor! I did upgrade for Strike Commander … in retrospect wasn’t worth it.
Chris Roberts got a fat head and had pretensions of being an auteur film director.
Best joystick. Ever. Served me well in Silpheed and WC.
One of the reasons I appreciate reading this forum is that the age range seems to trend higher than elsewhere (maybe it’s the threads that I read).
In keeping with the Science part of the Sci-Fi theme of the game, lets look at this from a geological (or whatever) perspective: Everyone alive at this moment share the same sliver of time in this mass of millions upon billions of years. Looking at it that way we’re pretty much identical in age, just talking grains of sand at this point.
Would you feel younger if I opened a thread to discuss the 30th anniversary of Starfighter on the TRS-80 (my first space combat sim)?
Oh yes, the sweet memories. My dad bought that model after I broke our original stick by banking left much too hard. Thinking back we probably could just have epoxied the handle…
Suncom made awesome joysticks in the early 90s as well.