Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Wing Commander, what happened to you? It's been so long now since we last heard from you ...
Take a quick jump in time, back to 1990. The original Wing Commander was released by Origin, and it seemed awesome. 3d space combat, with bitmap graphics instead of ugly polygons and with enormous system demands (if I'm not all mistaken, a 25 or so MHz 386 was pretty much required to play, and memory and expensive sound cards were highly recommended). Yes, it was a huge PC game, and I was a small Amiga user. Pity really, the game seemed really cool and I wanted to play it ever since I first read about it.
Fortunately, small wonders to happen. Wing Commander being ported to the Amiga was one of those events that just made you laugh at those wickedly expensive PCs and their silly hardware. Especially when you read the interview with the genius who ported the game and found out that he'd been keen on the idea of including speech in the port (the original game didn't have it), but apparently didn't only for time reasons. The power of the Amiga 500 with 0,5 megabytes of RAM is not to be underestimated.
Hrm, enough of that, the point is the game was ported so I could get to play it.
And play it I did. It was awesome. It had a great cinematic feel, cutscenes, space combat and great music throughout. You felt the anxiety while watching commander Hacylon explain the mission objectives in the briefing room, lip movements synched with the text of course. I never got tired of hearing the sirens blare and seeing the pilots run to and board their ships while I gripped the joystick tight, preparing for launch. Even if sequences like those weren't gameplay they were so great for the atmosphere that I always started wondering why more games didn't do them.
And then, you got to go out in space and shoot things! Waypoints, wingman orders, asteroid belts, dogfighting like crazy, afterburners, missiles, all accompanied by orchestral music that shifted depending on events. Star Wars? Who needs Star Wars when you've got this?
Then you got back, debriefed (or, not all that rarely, buried and reloaded) and perhaps a promotion or a medal award ceremony. Then you rushed over to the bar to cathc up on gossip and check the killboard before it was time to go out again. Oh yeah, and the campaign branched depending on how well you did too.
At heart, Wing Commander is and has always been a pretty simple space shooter. But the execution and attention to detail has made it something much larger, a whole universe to get sucked into. Further games more or less only updated the presentation, but that's all you wanted anyway.
For reasons beyond my own control, I've only played through the odd-numbered Wing Commander games. I've made my way through part I, III and V, but only started on part II and don't even own part IV. I got part II along with I and III when I picked up the Kilrathi Saga collection, but unfortunately the first two games didn't play too well. Well, they played nice and smoothly (and adapted so they ran at playable speed on modern computers as well instead of at 2000 frames per second), but I never managed to get the controls set up nicely, despite having a joystick. I don't remember the exact problem that made me give up, but it may have been something with sensitivity. Both games don't accept too many keypresses at once which makes keyboard play impossible, and mouse ... Well, it's just not meant to play that way :-) ...
To sum up the sequels shortly Wing Commander II is much like the first game. Wing Commander III was one of those huge-budget full motion video affairs, and it did the trick rather well. Mark Hamill put his sci-fi skills to good use as Christopher Blair, the character you play and the space combat moved into the 3d realm pretty nicely. The Price of Freedom (that's part IV) I haven't played, but it appears to be much like WC III, only wiht even move movie clips. People have said it's a better film than the actual Wing Commander film, but I haven't seen that either. Finally there's Wing Commander Prophecy, a slight oddball in the family but a great game nevertheless. Chris Roberts, who created the series, had left Origin, the Kilrathi had been defeated, a new alien race appreared in their place and you played a new hotshot straight from academy instead of Blair. A different feeling, but a nice refreshing one, and your old alter ego came in and kicked some alien asses as well.
Curiously, Prophecy has recently been released for Gameboy Advance as well, I've got to find out more about that some day ... Apart from that, the Wing Commander series seem quite dead lately. Rest in peace.