It would help. I remember punching in lines of code from magazines to get my gaming fix.
HEY FOGIES, STOP THREAD CRAPPING, YOU OLD TIMERS!
…if it helps, I typed out the BASIC code from Compute and 3-2-1 Contact magazines…
Damn 20 years ago? That made me pause, shesh… I still have vivid memories of it, watching it install off its like 13 floppy disks, taking about 45 minutes on our 386. I think I played through the whole game using they keyboard instead of our joystick for some weird reason.
Even the manual was fantastic, themed in the scope of the world, and in a household where there were 2 gamers, 1 machine, and that other gamer was your dad, having awesome manuals to read was what go me through long gaps of waiting to play :)
One of the things I liked about starcraft 2 was the between mission screens were such a throwback to wing commander, freespace, tie fighter, etc etc. I haven’t seen that in a long while and I really do love that style of menu.
I think if you want a dose of space combat, freespace 2 is still reaaaaaaaly good, there are a whole set of graphic overhaul mods out there that make it look pretty good by today’s standards, which means that game is still quite playable imho.
Anyway, wing commander, sweet ass game for its time, absolutely zero replayability now though :)
Anyway, wing commander, sweet ass game for its time, absolutely zero replayability now though :)
Reported
I too played it on a lowly Packard Bell 286/16 and it handled WC1 alright but struggled with WC2. I recall looking through the documentation and game options screen trying to make the ships look as sharp and refined as the ones depicted on the box art especially as they were captioned as in game screenshots. sigh
I’m not that old, but, in Europe at least, before 1990 PCs were mostly seen as grey machines of boredom, with crappy CGA graphics… The other micros, 8 or 16 bits were where it’s at, with easy to use OSes, colours, decent price point… Wing Commander was one of the first game that looked so awesome that it could justify paying for a modern PC…
I still have my copy of Wing Commander: Privateer. best game evar.
Respectfully disagree. I went through three Gravises (including one oddball made of transparent plastic), and I wasn’t exactly Charles Atlas at that young age.
The CH Flightstick, on the other hand, was another story entirely. Accurate enough for Indycar Racing, and nearly as robust as a Quikshot II.
Back to the main topic: Sadly, I never played the complete WC series as WC4 was released during an extended period when my PC just couldn’t cut it. By the time I made the big jump to a Pentium II-233, I’d lost interest in the series. Then came Prophecy and those amazing 3dfx graphics.
“Who are you that flies so good?! ARE YOU INSANE?!?!”
Fantastic game, but holy crap the voice acting was just laughable.
True.
At least AMD (as owners of ATI), Creative and Nvidia should get the rights for Wing Commander, Rebel Assault and a 3dfx launch title like Hexen II or Decent make them run on modern computers and then release them to for free because without any of these games they wouldn’t exist today at least not in their current form.
Only those games made people upgrade their beige machines with things like a “sound card”, “cd rom drive” and finally a 3d graphics card.
Don’t forget Privateer Gemini Gold is freeware.
i love the old midi soundtracks though. and yeah it wasn’t great voice acting, but it was fun. my friend and i used to quote that to each other, “Who are you that flies so good?! ARE YOU INSANE?!?!”
I got my first computer the summer before I started college almost entirely to play Wing Commander 3, which was awesome – previously I’d only messed with WC1 & 2 a little at a friend’s house. Strangely, I never did play WC4 though, and I’m not sure why.
I have to admit i always liked Freespace more though, and not just because Volition is here in town and I could recognize a lot of the bit part voice actors. :) The missions and the stories seemed better in Freespace, and you don’t get too many holy crap moments like the first time you see the Lucifer or the last couple missions of Freespace 2. FRED was the first mission editor I ever really played with too, and I had a lot of fun trying to work on missions with that puppy.
Actually, that was the advantage of the NIM (Neno’s Interactive Music) system that Nenad Vugrenic developed back in the day. I don’t recall if Origin ever patented it… did they even have software patents back then?
Yes, that was a great stick. The only stick to come close to it was the original Microsoft Sidewinder, when Microsoft added Z-axis rotation, throttle control, and a directional hat on top to a stick that was precise enough and that had the right kind of mechanical design for flight sim use.
And now I miss joysticks damn it. This thread is making me so emo.
I also played on a 286. The hardest game was the qemm game of trying to free up enough lower memory to play the thing and then being stuck with only extended memory on 286 vs expanded memory on 386 which was required for the voice pack I think.
I slept out at a CompUSA because it was a grand opening and the first 10 people got 386/16’s. I got there at 11:30pm the night before and my friend and I were numbers 9 and 10.
Then I bought Wing Commander. And no, it wasn’t my first game. I had already finished grad school and I was poor.
Actually, WC3 was the really, really big one. That was the first game I remember anticipating before it came out. And it had Luke frikkin’ Skywalker.
I remember joining the Prodigy Wing Commander forum. We, like, talked about WC, in all its forms. We were cool. Fuck those Ultima dweebs.
Ahhhh Wing Commander. I remember the ad for that game getting me so pumped! Then the actual game clearly living up to even my lofty expectations. Sigh, what a classic. So sad the series is dead. :(
Man I loved me some WC in the old days. I’ve still got my boxed copies of I, II and III. I should probably unload them for some loot on Ebay before EA lets go and GoG puts them up for sale.
There really wasn’t anything like the Wing Commander experience prior to that first game, or even all the way through III. There were some imitators, but nothing came close for me until years later when Freelancer recaptured the magic. I’d love another incarnation of either game (WC or FL).
WC wasn’t my first space sim though, that honor belongs to Elite on the Atari. Anyone remember those games? You needed a heck of a lot of imagination due to the vector style graphics, but it was cool as hell nonetheless. I remember an outfit called Omnitrend put out an Elite killer called Universe at some point. That was the biggest, bulkiest game with the most difficult learning curve ever.
Oh, also, The Last Starfighter (from the movie of the same name) for Atari home computers. Good times, good times.