Wing Commander - A Retrospective Analysis

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I remember being absolutely mind blown in 1990 by this. It was way ahead of what else was generally around at the time. Got a pc in 1991 as a result after intense parental lobbying (386, 4mb ram, 40mb hard drive, cutting edge for the time 😂).

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/Mowgli2k 📅︎︎ Jun 08 2023 🗫︎ replies

Holy crap Wing Commander hits me in the warm and fuzzies. This was one of those early games that was truly exciting. Wing Commander 2 - vengeence of the kilrathi though omg did that own me back then.

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/Decado7 📅︎︎ Jun 08 2023 🗫︎ replies

I was more into xwing and tie fighter so I never played 1 & 2 but I did have wing commander 3.

It was that reason I chose to back star citizen.

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/ACDrinnan 📅︎︎ Jun 08 2023 🗫︎ replies
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Wing Commander is a space sim made in the year  1990. You know, a game where you have full 3d   control over a spaceship, and you fly it around  blowing up other ships for fun and/or profit. I   feel like I have to explain that part because uh…  space sims aren’t in a very good place right now,   and haven’t been for a very long time.  It wasn’t always that way though.   Space sims were once a thriving genre with  multiple high profile releases every year.   So a few months ago, I found myself wondering…  what happened? Was it survival of the fittest?   Is there something inherent to the genre  that keeps it from appealing to a wide   enough audience to be financially viable?  Was it a matter of some unfortunate design   trends that all happened to converge at the  worst possible time, scaring everybody off?   Or does the fantasy of being a fighter pilot in  space simply not resonate the way it once did?   I’ve taken it upon myself to get to the bottom  of it. And if we really want to figure this out,   what better place to start than the beginning?  You see, Wing Commander isn’t just a space sim,   it’s the space sim, the first one. Now, you  could quibble over this if you want. There   were earlier games that technically cover the same  ground, but just look at them. Wing Commander is,   to my eyes, the first game that is even  vaguely recognizable as what you would   actually want from something called a space sim. While I’m sure those games were great in their   day, no new player in 2023 is going to look at  them and see anything other than a relic. Hell,   I’d bet a significant portion of the people  watching would say the same thing about Wing   Commander. It’s arbitrary. Everybody’s gotta  draw the line somewhere, and for me, it’s here.   The thing is, I’m not coming to this from a  place of nostalgia. Despite having grown up   alongside space sims, I never actually played  any of them at the time, for various… reasons.   So when I observe these games in 2023, it’s with  a pair of fresh eyes, albeit with an understanding   that most of these games are old, so while they  still need to deliver on a fundamental level,   you gotta give them a little bit of  slack for lacking modern conveniences.   So the story as I’ve heard it goes,  Programmer/Designer Chris Roberts was   a guy who definitely isn’t famous  for anything in the present day.   Anyway, In 1990, Chris Roberts and  his pals at Origin Systems were   kinda having similar thoughts to the  ones I was having just a minute ago:   the dream of having a 3d space game was real, but  even the highest end computer hardware available   to consumers at the time just couldn’t make that  happen at an acceptable fidelity or framerate.   So they figured out a workaround: pre render all  the ships from a bunch of different angles, then   render them as sprites in game – kinda like Doom,  which was due to be released 3 years later by the   way. That way they could have ships that looked  way nicer than anything a home computer could   handle at the time running at… well… I guess this  was considered an acceptable framerate back then…   In a tiny window taking up less than  half of the screen to help achieve that   framerate. It was a trying time, OK? And with that basic concept in mind,   they set about making what they called  “The 3-D Space Combat Simulator”.   It turned out OK. [Footage of sales numbers] Alright, so, let’s talk about the game itself.   Wing Commander is set in a universe where  the spacefaring Terran Confederation is at   war with the Kilrathi Empire, a warlike  race of sentient cat people. I think the   best way to describe the tone and  feel is Star Wars meets Top Gun.   It’s what you might call light sci  fi, but without the space magic,   also you’re in the military and they won’t let you  forget it. You live in a barracks and spend all   your free time at a bar, you get promotions if you  follow your orders well, or you’ll get stuck with   the loser squadrons in a bad ship if you don’t.  You get medals of honor if you do especially well,   and if you die you get a full-on military  funeral complete with a 21-gun salute.   The first thing you see when you  start a new game is… an arcade game?   The timer runs out immediately and you get a  game over, revealing that this is actually just   a clever way to get you to enter your character’s  name for the high score. The original version   had no default name, and people on the early  internet took to calling him ‘Bluehair” for   obvious reasons, but the sequels decided on  the canon name Christopher ‘Maverick’ Blair,   and later releases of the game include that  name as a default, so that’s who he is to me.   And then wait a minute, did we just  stumble into a 90s adventure game?   Nowadays I’d say it could use a few more colors,  but the cartoony artstyle and detailed pixel art   is honestly pretty charming. This bar is where  you end up after each mission and is where you   spend your downtime, chatting up your fellow  pilots until it’s time to get back to work.   The guy on the left is Shotglass, a recently  retired pilot turned bartender, the first   character you’re likely to talk to, and the only  one who’s always in the bar, since he’s not on   active duty anymore. Thanks to his occupation he  hears all sorts of news and since he’s had a long   career he has all sorts of things to say about  the world and your fellow pilots: basically,   he’s there to dump exposition on the player. He  keeps it fairly brief and digestible at least.   At the table are two of your wingmen to be:  Paladin is your old “2-days from retirement”   trope. Just like Shotglass, he’s old and  experienced, and has lots of advice for you as a   result. He does distinguish himself a bit from the  other pilots by having a few deeper thoughts about   the war overall. And by being Scottish as hell.  [Auch, laddy, they caught me with my kilt down]   Angel is a nerd. Specifically the preppy  perfectionist kind. She’s a real stickler   for rules and regulations, and always going  on about relative odds or shots to kill or   some other important number. I guess it’s good  to have somebody worrying about that stuff.   When you’re ready, and you’ve done your  saving and loading business in the barracks,   it’s off to the mission briefing. I was initially  a bit wary of having to sit through a briefing   before every mission, but the way they’re handled  in this game isn’t bad. Your commanding officer,   Colonel Halcyon, keeps them short and sweet.  Each one is typically only a minute or so long,   and about half of that is dedicated to setting  up the context for the mission and mixing in   character moments, making it feel more like  a cutscene than a lecture. In this case,   he wants us to patrol the Enyo  system for enemy fighter ships.   And then it’s off to space – check out that  really smooth animation, must be rotoscoped!   The first thing I noticed after getting into the  cockpit was that the flight controls feel great.   Fighter ships are really agile in this game;  they turn fast, have very snappy acceleration   and deceleration, and get a handy afterburner  for quick bursts of speed at any time.   Despite how fast you turn, I actually have  very little trouble controlling the ship with   an analog stick, because the response  to the stick is so smooth and precise,   at least in the version that I played,  which I’ll talk about much later.   There’s no acceleration or other filtering to  screw with your aim, no inertia to counter,   no “helpful” auto orientation features to  stop you from turning where you want to,   just a crisp, 1 to 1 response to your input. If  you really think about it, having the ships handle   this well doesn’t really fit something called a  space simulator, but hey, I’m not complaining.   You’ve also got some momentum to your movement.  It’s not quite Newtonian physics because you only   have some momentum – it’s just enough  to let you pull off some sick drifting   maneuvers [running in the 90s] without making it  hard to come to a dead stop when you want to.   Space sims have a bit of a reputation for  overindulgent, overcomplicated control schemes.   You know how it is: you load up one of these  games itching to blast some fools, but not so   fast! First you gotta read the manual to figure  out which button moves your s-foils into attack   position (it’s F by the way), then memorize all  26 of the keys required to control your targeting   computer. Uh oh, he said it in the movie, so  that means there needs to be at least one button   dedicated to it in the video game. Ah, there it  is, S. Aw, now I have to polarize my shields? I   just wanted to shoot some tie fighters! [R2, try  to increase the power!] Oh god, it never ends!   Well, I’m happy to report that Wing Commander 1  at least, is not like that at all. The controls   fit quite comfortably on a gamepad. If you’re  interested in using the control scheme I made   for it, I’m planning to make a companion video  explaining how to play this game in 2023,   which would include setting up the controls  with Steam or reWASD, so hopefully there’ll   be a link to that in the description by  the time you see this but if not, I can at   least drop a link to my reWASD profile for the  game in case you’re able to make use of that.   Just a quick note, since I did bring it up,  another feature unique to the version I’m   playing is the ability to turn off the cockpit  graphics and get a fullscreen view. I know   some people enjoy the immersive qualities of a  huge cockpit, but I prefer being able to see.   So if you’re wondering what happened to the  cockpit, there you go. You might have also   seen the occasional clip of this game with voice  acting here or elsewhere and yeah, there are a   couple versions that have it, but they don’t play  very well, so unfortunately we’ll be getting the   silent treatment until it’s time to cover those. Now that we’ve familiarized ourselves with the   basic flight controls, let’s find something  to shoot. Missions take place in these massive   contiguous spaces that the game calls ‘systems’,  and task you with visiting a set of numbered ‘nav   points’ in order, completing an objective  at each one, or moving on to the next one   if it turns out there’s nothing there. If this  sounds like it might be complicated don’t worry,   navigation couldn’t be easier. There’s a button  you can press at any time to put a marker on your   HUD telling you where to go next. If you wanted to  you could fly to it in real time, or go wherever   you want I suppose, but what you really want  to do is hit the autopilot button, which will   take you to wherever you’re supposed to go next  in a couple seconds, or tell you why it can’t.   It’s actually shocking how intuitive and well  paced this game is considering that it’s over 30   years old. I feel like I need to point out, this  kind of design isn’t normal for a game in 1990.   When people talk about how games were ‘simpler  back in the day’, generally the way that was   achieved was by literally making the games simple.  As in they were easy to understand because there   wasn’t that much to understand about them. There  were more ambitious, complicated games of course,   but they were correspondingly harder to understand  and play. What we’re seeing here is more akin to   the way games are designed today, which is  to have systems that are extremely complex,   but give the player tools that make  interacting with those systems simple.   Oh, right, we were gonna shoot something. And  conveniently at the first nav point we run into   some enemy ships. And here we find the heart  of the game. Everything revolves around this   idea of flying around and shooting at these  sprite-based ships. If this doesn’t work,   then nothing else matters. And you can probably  guess by the fact of this video existing that   yeah, it works. On a fundamental level, this thing  reads as a spaceship to me, I can tell where I am   in relation to it, and shooting at it is fun. Combat in Wing Commander is mostly   straightforward, but with a couple wrinkles that  you might not be used to. Your primary means of   offense are projectile weapons referred to as  guns. Guns draw from a constantly recharging   pool of weapon energy, so you can only fire  them so much before having to wait to recharge,   but never have to worry about running out of  ammo for good. In addition, each ship comes   with a very limited assortment of missiles.  Defense is a bit more complicated. You’ve got   three layers of protection: first, a constantly  recharging energy shield, then armor plating,   and once those are gone, an internal HP value  that once depleted results in your ship being   destroyed. Damage to shields and armor is  locational, so if you lose your rear shields   and take some damage to your rear armor,  everything on the front side will still be   intact. Both player and enemy ships follow the  same rules, or something very close at least.   The ship you start the game in is called the  Hornet. It’s supposed to be a scout fighter,   so it’s lightly armed and armored but fast as  hell. The speed can be a bit of a mixed blessing,   because when combined with the momentum heavy  physics it’s very easy to tap the afterburner   intending to close the distance between you and an  enemy fighter and end up fatally rear ending them.  The hornet’s primary weapon is a dual  laser cannon, which shoots blaster-like   bolts of energy. As you might expect from  a starter weapon, it’s the easiest to use,   with the highest projectile speed and pretty  good energy efficiency allowing you to blast   away without worrying too much about running out  at a bad time. It works well enough against the   weak ships you’ll mostly be fighting in the early  game, but its low damage output can’t keep up   with the shields and armor of anything tougher. For those tougher things you do have missiles,   but I should really say tougher thing, because the  Hornet only carries 2 non guided ‘dart’ missiles   and one heat seeking ‘javelin’, which is  enough to take out one fighter… maybe.   The darts are a little awkward to use because, of  course you don’t want to waste them, but sure fire   opportunities don’t come along often, so a lot of  the time I end up never using them. Still, there   are times when they come in handy. Heatseekers are  interesting because the game really does simulate   the “heat seeking” part. They lock on to the heat  from an enemy’s engine wash, and if that enemy   manages to shake the missile, it’ll lock on to the  next engine it sees, friend or foe. The likelihood   of this actually biting you in the ass is very  low, but it’s a neat detail nonetheless. What’s   more gameplay relevant is the fact that it’ll  only lock on if it can actually see an engine,   so it’s not enough just to get a target in your  sights: you need to stay behind it for long enough   to acquire a lock. What’s annoying is that if the  enemy turns their engine out of your line of sight   for even a single frame, it breaks the lock on and  you need to start the whole process over again. It   really could have benefitted from a grace period  of a second or so that let you fire the missile   or get the engine in sight again to maintain the  lock. Like the lock-on equivalent of coyote time.   Although the Hornet is objectively the worst  ship in the game in terms of its stats,   I don’t hate it. This is mainly down to the fact  that it’s the starter ship and the developers   know it. They don’t expect you to take on the  world in this thing, so it ends up being enough   for most of the challenges it does face. Like these Dralthi at the first nav point:   it may be the iconic box-art fighter, but the  Dralthi is the chump enemy type of this game.   It’s lightly armed with the same laser cannons  as the Hornet, has poor defense, and is not   particularly maneuverable, it goes down with  very little trouble, provided you can hit it.   Which is more of a problem than you might think.  The key to understanding how combat works in Wing   Commander is that hitting an enemy fighter is very  difficult. You’re trying to make these slow moving   projectiles collide with these enemies that can  move very fast in any direction they want whenever   they want, and to top it off, you can only shoot  so many of them before your energy meter runs out   and you have to wait for it to recharge. You can  shoot the Hornet’s lasers a pretty decent amount   before they run out, but each shot is very weak,  and the later guns that actually do an appreciable   amount of damage drain it obnoxiously fast.  The recharge speed is pretty fast by default,   but whenever your shields are regenerating,  so pretty often, your weapon energy slows   to a crawl. All of this means that you  really need to make every shot count.   On the other hand, these factors also apply to the  enemies trying to shoot at you. If you’re getting   shot at, just juke in any random direction you  like and hit the afterburner button if you feel   like you need an extra boost, and you’ll be  safe. As such, some fights can end up going   on for a while as stalemates, with neither side  being able to land enough hits to seal the deal,   especially early on when you haven’t developed  the skill required to hit things efficiently.   Perhaps in part because it’s so hard to land  those shots, it’s pretty satisfying when you do,   especially when you manage to catch  them with a bunch of shots in a row,   taking them from full health to dead in an  instant. This is aided by an impressively   detailed array of hit effects. Nowadays it’s  pretty widely understood that it’s important   for any game about shooting things to make sure  that whatever you’re shooting reacts to being shot   in a satisfying way. Back in the 90s this was not  widely understood, especially among PC developers.   And yet, in Wing Commander 1 we have a little  explosion effect when you hit something,   a distinct sound effect for when your shots are  absorbed by an enemy’s shields, and another sound   when you hit their hull, along with pieces of  shrapnel flying off, and some persistent sparks   and fire trails to indicate that the ship has  taken significant damage. I would’ve liked to   have seen a visible shield flare effect, but given  how far ahead of the curve we already are here,   I can’t complain. There’s an uncommon  attention to detail here that I appreciate.   After we’ve dealt with those enemy fighters,  it’s off to the next nav point. On the way there,   we get kicked out of autopilot because there’s  a ”hazard near”. Looks like we’re going to have   to fly through an asteroid field to get there.  This is an aspect of the game that has aged less   gracefully than some of the others. Asteroids  will come flying at you, and you need to dodge   them until you’re clear of the field. They can  really mess you up if they hit you and they hurt   even more the faster you were going when you hit  them, so it’s generally a good idea to slow down   to about 250 kps, which also helps you see them  coming so you can swerve out of the way in time.   If you do that, it’s pretty safe, so it’s really  a test of patience more than anything else. Still,   even the outside chance that you could be  finishing a long and hard mission only to get   blown away by a rock that came out of nowhere is  just abhorrent to think about. For the most part,   once you’ve got the hang of them, asteroid  fields aren’t awful, they’re just… downtime.   Where they become obnoxious is when they’re placed  so you have to sit through them before getting to   a really hard objective that you’re going to have  to retry many times. You just know they did that   on purpose, too, the [Cocky little freaks!] After we’ve cleared the asteroid field,   we can go back into autopilot and  see another enemy fighter type.   The Salthi has the same weak guns as the Dralthi,  but even weaker shields and armor. It can actually   be quite a bit harder to take down though, because  it’s a lot more mobile and evasive. It does have   a pretty funny weakness though. Due to a design  flaw, it lacks the ability to turn right. That’s   not a bug or anything, that’s a canonical behavior  observed by characters in the game. Even despite   this, Salthis can still be annoyingly good  at dodging my shots when they want to be.   Once you’ve completed your objective at every nav  point, it’s time to come home to your carrier, the   Tiger’s Claw. If you’re a new player, this part is  the most likely to trip you up. First you need to   use the communication system. Opening your comms  gives you a menu that lets you use the number keys   to select who to talk to and what to say. In this  game at least, you never have to count higher than   4, so they fit nicely on the d-pad. Talking is  something you end up doing surprisingly often in   this game. You can give orders to your wingmen,  taunt enemy ships to get them to aggro you,   and at the end of every mission you need to  ask the Tiger’s Claw for permission to land.   That’s the easy part. Next, you have to fly  into the hangar bay in the front of the ship,   which is… trickier than you might think. You need to make sure you’re actually going   into the landing bay or you’ll bonk into the  hull instead. Just take it slow and break off   to try to find a better angle if it doesn’t seem  to be working. Eventually you get a feel for it.   One nice looking landing sequence and a  quick debriefing later and you’re back   in the bar, ready to do it all over again. Ah, some new faces. Spirit is Japanese and   this is the early 90s, so of course she’s all  about honor, duty and shame. Well, she talks   about those things anyway. She never gets around  to actually following through on any of them,   so in practice she’s just a little uptight, but  only a little. Hunter is a brash young up and   comer with something to prove. Kinda like  Maverick, no not that one, the other one.   Much like the other Maverick,   he’s a bit of a prankster but we don’t  get to see any of that ourselves either.   For our next mission, Colonel Sama wants us to  escort a Drayman transport out of the system.   Escort. Oh… Do I need to explain escort missions? You see,   it’s a mission that tasks you with ensuring the  safety of some kind of AI controlled character.   You could probably figure that part out. The  reason why you might not be familiar with them, or   more specifically their reputation, is that in the  past, they were so universally despised by players   that developers eventually got the message,  and pretty much purged them from video games.   The reason they were so hated comes down to the  fact that they can be failed for reasons outside   of the player’s control. The combination of the  enemy and the escort target’s AI can lead to   all sorts of frustrating scenarios. Oops, Natalya  ran in front of me while I was shooting somebody,   time to start the whole mission over! Did I mention that space sims are chock   full of these? Escort is like the bread  and butter mission type for these games.   Ok, so this isn’t looking good, but… I  am somewhat sympathetic to their use.   Something you might notice when you play  a lot of video games is that very few of   them ever have any meaningful variation in  mission objectives. It’s actually surprisingly   hard to come up with something other than “go  to a place and kill everything there”. This is   because many objectives that you might think are  different end up boiling down to “go to a place,   remove the obstacles preventing you from doing  a thing (kill all the guys), then do the thing.”   Now, they’ll tell you otherwise. Cutscenes  and voices in your earpiece will come up   with all sorts of different reasons for why you’re  going to a place and killing all the guys there,   but make no mistake. That is what you’re  actually doing in almost every case. The   cutscene or animation that plays afterwards is set  dressing, there to distract you from that fact.   As bad as that sounds, it’s actually fine. As  long as the game does a good job of making it   feel like you’re doing different things, it’s not  so important that you’re not actually doing them.   One of the most important tools for keeping up  this illusion in most games is level design.   The variation in experience resulting  from the traversal of different terrain   can be enough to distract you all by itself. So what does this way too long tangent have to   do with Wing Commander? Well, space sims don’t get  the benefit of this kind of level design. Because,   well, you’re in space! Empty space! There is no,  or very little terrain to shape the experience,   so traditionally less used components such  as mission design have to pick up the slack.   Simply put, space sims need to mix up their  rules-based mission design and objectives to   a far greater degree than other genres, or  they risk becoming hopelessly repetitive.   Which brings us back to the dreaded escort  mission, which for better and for worse is   unmistakably different from the status  quo. So how do they work out here? Well,   it’s kind of a crapshoot to be honest. To their credit, they did manage to remove   some randomness from the equation - All escort  targets start from a fixed position and move in   a straight line to their destination, so the  only variables are you and the enemy fighters   trying to destroy it. Unfortunately that’s  still a significant amount of randomness.   If all of them decide to ignore you and go  straight for the target at the same time,   there’s not much you can do. Well, you can taunt  them to try to draw their aggro, but that itself   is subject to RNG, and the chance of success does  not seem particularly high in my experience.   Even when they are paying attention to you, due  to the way that combat works, time to kill can   vary massively based on not only your skill but  on what your opponent decides to do. Sometimes   they’ll make a mistake that lets you kill them in  an instant, other times they’ll activate goblin   mode and matrix dodge all your shots. And every  second you’re busy with them is an opportunity   for their friends to light up the target. Enemies that want to engage a transport or   capital ship will park themselves next to  it and start unloading their guns on it.   It’s pretty easy to tell when someone is going  for it if you’re looking, and if you’re not,   the sounds it makes will clue you in pretty  quick. From there it’s up to you to shoot   them until they either die or break off to  save themselves. On the one hand, this is a   good opportunity to get some easy damage on the  attacker, on the other, every ship that does   this is guaranteed to get at least a few shots  off, and it really doesn’t take much firepower   at all to down most capships, so when you have  several enemy fighters doing hit and run attacks,   the margin of error can be extremely thin. The worst example of this is the game’s most   infamous mission, which has you escorting a  captured Kilrathi carrier into human custody.   Even with my desperate intervention,  the enemy pretty consistently ends up   destroying the thing less than 10 seconds after  I arrive, which is just ridiculous. Most of the   other escort missions aren’t nearly that  bad, but the low HP of the things you’re   protecting always makes it feel like you’re only  one unlucky break away from getting screwed over.   Seeing as this first one is meant to  be your introduction to the concept,   it’s unsurprisingly not bad at all. Keep a  couple waves of weak enemies away from the   Drayman until it gets to the designated “jump  point” so it can warp away, and you’re done.   Back on the Tiger’s Claw, before we can hit the  bar, the colonel wants to see us in his office.   We’re moving on to a different system and he’s  reassigning us to a better fighter ship. The   fact that we’re changing ships is a sign that  we’ve been doing well. Wing Commander is broken   up into a number of what it calls “series-es” Each series has you flying between 2 and 4   missions in a particular ship, usually in and  around the system the series is named after.   Finish a series and depending on how the war has  been going, the next series will be different.   If you completed enough objectives,  not necessarily all, but enough,   you’ll be assigned a better ship and put on  the good path, and if not, you’ll be demoted   to a worse ship and sent on a worse path. Repeat  until you get to either a good or bad ending.   This non-linear approach and softer punishment for  failure is commendable, but there are a few quirks   to the system. The requirements for “success”  in a series aren’t spelled out at all and seem   to differ from series to series. There were some  where I was able to succeed despite having failed   to complete objectives in multiple missions,  while others sent me straight to the bad place   after having failed just one measly objective. Another oddity is that the missions on the worse   paths tend to be harder than the ones on the  better paths. This is mainly due to the fact   that the ships they stick you with in these  losing series really suck, and expecting you   to do anything beyond what the easy missions in  the first few series have in them is unreasonable.   Whatever the reason, making a game get  harder in response to a player performing   poorly is generally considered a no-no. I’ve  heard people say that it makes sense for the   losing path to be harder because you’re  in a worse, more desperate situation,   but I would argue that having the outcome of  an entire war hinge on the moment-to-moment   performance of a single fighter pilot is absurd.  And maybe I’m just not cut out for leadership, but   if someone under my command was underperforming, I  would respond by assigning them to less important,   less demanding missions until they got better. On the other hand, if all you want to do is   play the game and get the good ending, it’s  actually quite easy. As you can see, you get   many chances to get back on the good path, and in  fact the only time you’re ever truly locked in to   one path is at the end when the paths converge  into the two final good and bad ending series.   As long as you can win a couple missions,  you can get yourself back on track.   According to GameFAQs, you can literally  just immediately eject on every mission   they send you on, and for some reason they’ll  keep giving you more ships to throw away. Keep   doing this and as long as you pause your  spree to do 4 specific missions, you can   get the good ending! Talk about a lenient system! Origin would go on to regret making all of those   different paths, because most players  would reload when they failed an objective,   and therefore never see most of the losing  series, making them kind of a waste.   Now, when I said we were getting a better  ship, ehhhh, when talking about the Scimitar,   “better” is a relative term. Even the developers  seem to agree with me that this thing suuuuuucks!   I’m not sure they fully understand why though.  The official line is that it’s slow and clumsy,   but… it’s not really? It is true that it turns  slower and has a lower speed than the other   fighters, but not by enough to really matter.  To have your wingmen tell it, the enemy will be   flying circles around you, but in reality,  it has no trouble keeping up with them.   So what’s the problem, then? It’s  this piece of trash right here.   The mass driver is technically the highest dps  gun in the game, or would be if you could fire   it for more than 2 seconds without running out  of energy. The real cherry on top is that the   Scimitar’s shields take almost twice as long to  regenerate as those of the other ships. Not only   does this make them bad at shielding you, but,  if you remember, also affects the energy going   to your guns. You end up being so starved for  energy in this thing, just barely able to sputter   out a couple shots every few seconds once a battle  gets going, which just feels atrocious. The mass   driver’s projectiles are also the slowest moving  in the game, which is deceptively important. Given   how hard it is to hit anything in general, having  your projectiles move 30% slower makes it that   much more of a problem. For missiles, the Scimitar  gets the Hornet’s loadout plus 2 more heatseekers,   for a total of 2 darts and 3 javelins, which is  enough to definitely take out one fighter. Great.  Then there’s the matter of the armor plating that  is supposed to make up for the Scimitar’s lack of   speed. Let’s just say it’s a good thing that the  mobility issue isn’t all it's cracked up to be,   because armor doesn’t count for jack in this game.  Knight here has no idea what he’s talking about.   Having double the armor of the Hornet means  it’ll protect you from one or two additional   shots at most. Shields are what actually matters,  and the Scimitar does not have enough of those to   make me feel safe. In a raw technical sense,  the Scimitar is a better ship than the Hornet,   but that’s not the whole story. After  the first series the game takes the   kid gloves off and starts introducing  some actually dangerous enemy types,   and the Scimitar is not the ship you  want to be in when fighting these guys.   And some more new faces. Iceman was the Tiger’s  Claw’s star ace before we came along. In addition   to being highly skilled, his demeanor is  always calm and professional. He hates   the Kilrathi even more than your average pilot,  and seems to enjoy his work a little too much,   at least the other pilots seem to think so. Knight is… Well, his thing is supposed to   be that he’s unremarkable, an ordinary  pilot, kind of a straight man character.   The problem is that most of his fellow pilots  aren’t really out there enough for that to   be a distinguishing characteristic on its  own, so he’s just a regular guy, I guess.   This time around the colonel wants us to patrol  the McAuliff system. Well, we know how to do that.   The one new thing here other than a chance  to get used to the Scimitar is a minefield.   I actually find these to be a lot less  of a problem than the asteroid fields,   because unlike the asteroids the mines don’t  move. They have a bigger hitbox to compensate,   but they also don’t do as much damage. I don’t  think I’ve ever died to a mine in this game.   Back in the bar, we have the last two  characters. Maniac is like the anti-Angel,   he just hates the rules, doesn’t like  anyone telling him what to do, and he’s   also quote-unquote “unstable”, which just means  that he’s a little crazy, in a non specific way.   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,  Bossman is an old and experienced pilot   with lots of wisdom to share. According  to the manual, he used to be a reckless   go-getter like Hunter before the loss of  some of his comrades scared him straight,   but we never see any hint of this side of him  in the actual game, so there’s not that much to   separate him from Paladin and Shotglass. Now that I’ve introduced all of them,   this seems like a good time to talk about one  of the game’s most touted features: wingmen.  I’ve glossed over it until now, but  every time you go out on a mission,   you’re joined by a single wingman who is under  your command. Each series pairs you with a   specific wingman - in Enyo I was flying with  Spirit, and here in McAuliff I’m with Paladin.  They put a lot of effort into expressing each  wingman’s character via their AI behavior.   Older pilots like Paladin might be inaccurate and  slow on the draw, while particularly skilled ones   like Iceman will fire quickly and accurately, and  Maniac will blast everything with reckless abandon   and no regard for whether you might be in the way. This also applies to how they respond to your   commands. Angel will always follow  orders, while Maniac never will,   and a showoff like Hunter might refuse an  order to retreat unless his ship is literally   on fire. Meanwhile, a more level headed guy like  Knight might just decide to do it on his own.   To be honest, I didn’t really feel the  need to micromanage them with specific   orders. The heat of battle is no time  to be fumbling with a menu based radio,   and I figure as long as they’re keeping at least  one enemy fighter off my back, they’re doing their   job. And if they manage to get a kill or two?  Even better, provided you’re not trying to hog   all the kills so you can get medals and optimize  your KDR to stay on top of the leaderboard.   The command I did find myself using was the one  that tells them to actually go out and attack the   enemy rather than uselessly flying behind you,  which they absolutely will keep doing until you   tell them not to. Come on buddy, just do it!  I know you want to, on account of the fact   that you won’t shut up about it. I don’t know why  they felt the need to make the wingmen so lacking   in initiative. I guess they wanted to make you  feel like a big man bossing these guys around,   and that wouldn’t really happen if you didn’t  at least have to give an order sometimes.   Strangely, once you do set them loose, the game  seems to remember this and you don’t need to tell   them again, even on subsequent missions or loading  your save, until the next time you exit the game   and load it up again. Now, I’m pretty sure this  is a bug, but I won’t tell anybody about it you   won’t. Let’s let this be our little secret, OK? Wingmen are generally pretty good at taking care   of themselves, if not great  at actually getting kills.   Even still, death can come very fast in this  game, so everything can be going fine one moment,   then one wrong turn and boom, no more Paladin. And  I mean really no more, because if a wingman dies,   that’s it, they’re dead for good. They even get  a funeral just like you do. You’ll be flying   solo in any future missions that would’ve involved  them and they won’t show up in the bar anymore.   I don’t like this feature. The fact that a  wingman can die basically guarantees that they   can’t participate in the story in any meaningful  way, because any plot points that might involve   them wouldn’t be able to happen if they were dead.  The fact that all but 2 of the main characters are   like this does not bode well for the story. Nobody  is allowed to do anything important, because that   thing wouldn’t get done if they were dead. I also  just… like these people despite how it may seem,   and don’t want them to be removed from the  game. Nothing interesting happens if you go on   without them, you just don’t get to see whatever  they would’ve contributed from that point on.   Whenever a wingman died I  would quit and reload my save.   Would anyone have really questioned it if they  just auto ejected when their ship was destroyed?   Anyway, let’s take Paladin out to destroy an enemy  capital ship. Better hope nothing happens to him!   Bossman’s advice here is actually pretty  solid, you’re going to want to clear out   all the enemy fighters before focusing on  a capship, because it really helps to have   the breathing room to sit there and shoot  them without having to worry about getting   blown away from behind. And it looks like the  fighters protecting this one are a new type.   It’s almost disappointing that the Krant  has the same piddly laser cannons as the   previous two fighter types, you’d think  they would’ve moved past that by now.   What it does have is way more armor and shields;  this thing is beefy! It can take quite a few hits   before going down, but its lack of armament  prevents it from posing too much of a threat.   Now that the escort has been disposed  of, it’s time to take on the capital   ship itself and *sigh*, where do I begin? Remember when I said that the 2d sprite   based ships fundamentally worked? That  was a bit of a lie of omission. What I   should’ve said was that the sprites are great  at depicting fighters – ships that are roughly   comparable to yours in size. For bigger  ships however, it’s a complete disaster.   The first problem is that the illusion  doesn’t work. They just look tiny. I’m   supposed to believe that this is a huge  carrier that can house multiple wings of   fighters? It looks like it can barely fit the bar! The more serious issue arises when you get close.   The limited number of rotations and coarse  scaling can make it difficult or impossible   to tell where they are in relation to you, or  which direction they’re facing. Was my praise   of the hit effects misguided, or is the sprite  just lying to me about where the ship actually is?   There's a huge capital ship in front of me right  now, can’t you see it? If I shoot right now,   will I hit this ship I’m trying to protect,  or the attacker who’s about to blow it up?   Every interaction with these larger ships  is awkward and janky, so maybe that’s why   they made the hostile ones kind of a joke.  Capital ships have one of two kinds of attacks:   a single shot, slow firing laser turret that can  fire in any, or at least most directions, or a   flak gun which is basically an aoe attack that  slowly damages anything in a radius around it,   but both of these are so weak that they can  barely keep up with your shield regeneration.   Characters in the game talk about saving your  missiles for the cap ships because your guns   aren’t powerful enough, but that’s actually  not true at all. You can literally just sit   behind them (provided you can figure out  where that even is) and unload into them   with your guns until they’re space dust  without any real danger to yourself. This   also means that they’re all essentially  the same fight, with the only meaningful   difference between the various classes being  the number of hits it takes to destroy them.   You know what? I’m putting my foot down right  here. The very idea of a small fighter taking down   a supposedly massive capital ship is inherently  ridiculous, and having you do it in these games   is a mistake. You’re just never going to get  me to believe that shooting your piddly little   lasers at this massive thing is ever going to do  any significant damage to it. It’s like unloading   your SMG into the side of a tank. The entire  exercise just looks stupid and is never fun to do.   I’m not saying that capital ships shouldn’t  be depicted at all or that you shouldn’t be   able to interact with them by taking on the  smaller individual components like turrets,   just leave actually destroying the whole thing to  something other than a dinky little fighter ship.   I’d love to have a game prove me wrong with a fun   and well thought out take on fighting  capital ships, but I’ve yet to see one:   every game I’ve seen try it so far has gotten  some aspect of it horrendously wrong and ended   up frustrating or boring. I think the designers  of these games are afraid that the player will   get bored if they aren’t the ones to  personally do absolutely everything,   but I for one would much rather do something  to support an AI controlled ship that actually   looks like it should be able to take these  things on if that’s what it came to. Anything   other than parking next to it and scratching  the paint until it inexplicably explodes.   Some capital ships, like the one on this  mission, are here to fight, but on other   missions you might come across one that is on  its way to a jump point, so the onus is on you   to take out all the fighters as fast as you can,  then destroy the capship before it can escape.   Despite how awkward actually fighting them is, I  don’t actually find destroying capital ships as an   objective type to be all that bad. It’s basically  either some time pressure or an aoe hazard to   deal with while taking on the escorting fighters.  The amount of time you have before they get away   always seems reasonable, like it genuinely  is your fault if you can’t do it in time,   and if all else fails, you can always throw  caution to the wind and go for a hail mary   attack if you think you’ve been taking too long. And that’s the last unique gameplay scenario Wing   Commander has for us. Technically there’s also a  recon objective where you just have to target a   specific capital ship and then you can leave, but  since capital ships are a joke, you might as well   just blow it up while you’re there. The game  continues to introduce new elements like enemy   types and mixes things up with variations  on the objectives, but fundamentally every   mission involves seeking and destroying enemy  fighter wings, escorting friendly capital ships,   or destroying enemy ones. It doesn’t seem like  a lot when you put it all together like that,   because it isn’t. But hey, you gotta remember,  this was the first one. And honestly, across a   single playthrough of the campaign, I think it’s  enough, just barely. By mixing and pacing those   few elements out in various ways, they were  able to avoid the feeling of repetition just   long enough to make it to the end. I don’t think  they could’ve gone on any longer than that though:   I didn’t, and still don’t feel any pressing need  to go back and check out the series I missed.   For the final mission at McAuliff, we need to  separately escort two Drayman tankers each to   a different jump point. But watch out,  there’s an enemy ace gunning for them!   This seems as good a time as  any to talk about the enemy AI.   The AI for fighters in this game is genuinely  impressive, even if you don’t consider that   it’s over 30 years old. This is absolutely  not the kind of game where the enemies will   just passively allow you to blow them up by the  dozen. Every fighter is dangerous, and taking   them down requires effort and focus. I talked  about how hard it was to hit the enemy before,   and a big part of it is that the AI flies a  mean dogfight. Enemy fighters do a good job   of staying out of your crosshairs and getting  behind you when they want to, but still have   intentionally designed weaknesses to exploit. Don’t get the wrong idea here, they’re still no   match for you one on one, or at least they’re  no match for me, but they’re very dangerous in   groups, and they make you work for that victory,  which is what you want from this kind of game.   They’ll even run away if you critically damage  their ship or they accomplish their objective.   Your job is to complete whatever your objective  is, not to chase down every stray fighter,   so you can just let them go without  consequence, but if you really want   to rack up kills for the leaderboard and  don’t mind wasting a ton of afterburner fuel,   you can take them out before they get away. Anyway, you can tell that the occasional   mistakes are intentional because aces don’t  make them, and will give you no quarter.   There’s one for every class of enemy fighter,  and they typically serve as a boss fight of sorts   at the end of a series. They’re noticeably  harder to hit and more aggressive than the   regular version of their ships. They also  cheat a little, with way more shields and   armor than their ship class would normally  have, like literally more than some capital   ships. But hey, boss fights are boss fights. In a way, aces are the only real opportunity   for characterizing the enemy, as they’re the  only named enemy characters in the game. Your   wingmen will talk them up, telling you all about  how ruthless and skilled they are, and the aces   themselves regale you with unique taunts as you  fight them. I’m not sure why this elite veteran   with over 100 confirmed kills is still flying  a piece of crap like the Salthi, but everyone   has their preferences. I think it’s a shame they  don’t come back in future missions if they escape   their first encounter with you. It would’ve  been cool to have a nemesis to contend with.   After we get back, we’re treated to one of two  cutscenes. Kilrathi marines invade a scientific   colony on the planet McAuliff VI, and if you did  poorly, the unarmed scientists are all killed,   or if you did well, the scientists  somehow manage to overpower and capture   their attackers. Good for them, I guess. I did well, so with those scientists saved,   we’re off to the Gimle system, and I can finally  ditch the Scimitar for the Raptor, the first ship   that isn’t horribly deficient in some way. You  can put the previous two ships and last two on   either side of a dividing line. On the one side  you’ve got severely underpowered ships that make   the game a chore to play if you have to take on  anything other than the weakest enemies in them,   and on the other side you’ve got the good ships  that are actually capable of getting things done.   The most notable change is that it has two sets  of guns. In addition to the mass driver, you also   get a pair of neutron guns, which are sort of  halfway between the mass driver and the laser.   The important thing is that you can activate “full  guns” and shoot both at the same time. You’ll run   out of energy even faster than you did with the  mass driver alone, but the amount of damage you   can dish out all at once makes it worth it. Now  instead of having to constantly follow behind   an enemy nipping at their heels, you can wait  for the right moment and absolutely shred them   with a full burst. It’s super satisfying to pull  off, and it makes taking down enemy fighters so   much easier than it is in the Scimitar or Hornet. For missiles, in addition to two of the usual heat   seeking javelins, we also get a couple image  recognition spiculums. These work like your   typical video game missile: aim at the target  until you get tone, then fire and forget. Very   nice, their simplicity and reliability make them  my first stop for any missile related needs.   If that’s not enough you also get 1 pilum  FF, for friend or foe. This one you can fire   without the need for a lock-on and it’ll  go off to ruin someone’s day on its own.   This does mean that you can’t choose who the  missile will target though, and one missile hit   will only really do enough damage to take out an  enemy’s shields, so if it decides to go after some   bozo you weren’t even fighting yet and you don’t  get to him before his shields recharge, it could   end up being a waste. And finally, you get… a  mine. Well, they can’t all be winners. It’s worth   noting that this is the heftiest missile loadout  you’ll get access to in the game, and even then,   it’s really not that many. It’s just enough to  even the odds in one high pressure situation.   I don’t think it would have hurt to let you carry  a few more, or to have some kind of restocking   mechanic because you have so little of them  that they barely factor into the game as is.   The other big differentiator is the shields.  The Scimitar technically had stronger shields   than the Hornet, but it’s not until the  Raptor that it finally feels like enough.   Shields regenerate constantly  and very quickly in this game,   so they make a big difference in soaking up the  damage you’ll take, but only the Raptor and the   final ship have enough that you can reliably take  a hit or two without immediately losing them and   suffering permanent damage. I really dislike  how fragile you are in the first two ships.   Typically a well designed game will treat  small mistakes as something that only leads   to failure in aggregate over time while leaving  instant punishment to only the biggest screw ups.   When you’re flying those less protected ships,  sometimes even the tiniest mistake can take you   from pristine to dead in an instant. When that  happens at the end of a long and hard mission   that you’ve flown perfectly up to that point, it  can be infuriating, and doesn’t leave you with   any kind of lesson other than… be more perfect  next time, I guess? The one or two extra mistakes   that actually having an appreciable amount of  shields affords you are a real game changer,   and they make flying the two good ships  so much more fun than the two bad ones.   It even opens up new strategies. There’s  locational damage, and your front shields   operate independently from the ones protecting  your back. When there are a lot of enemies it   can be tough to find an opening, but you  could intentionally tank a couple hits   on your back shields in order to make one, then  turn around to keep it safe while it recharges.   Only the two good ships have enough shields  for this to even be worth considering though.   Our first opportunity to take the Raptor  out for a spin is a mission to defend an   “Exeter class destroyer”. Man, it feels  so good to fly this thing, it’s like I’ve   taken my training weights off or something. Once we get to the Exeter, we find another   new enemy type: The Jalthi looks kinda similar  to the Krant when viewed from some angles, but   you don’t want to make that mistake. This thing is  basically a flying tank. It’s very slow and easily   outmaneuvered, but if you do get in front of it,  it has 6 guns that it fires at the same time,   which is a nice way to introduce you to  the wonders of constructive interference.   Jesus christ, my ears! I’ve lowered the volume  somewhat to protect yours, but trust me,   you’re going to want a volume knob handy if you  play this game yourself. [footage of waveform]   Aside from that, 4 laser cannons and 2 neutron  guns are enough to seriously damage the good   ships, or just straight up one shot a scimitar or  hornet. It also has the most shields and armor of   any basic fighter type in the game, but it’s so  easy to hit that it doesn’t last as long as you’d   think. They’re no match for the Raptor, just  make sure you stay away from their front side.   The next mission is a bog standard patrol  for enemy fighters, but with a twist:   You and Angel get to test drive a pair  of prototypes for the final player ship,   the Rapier. It’s mostly the same as the Raptor  in the ways that count. Just like the Raptor you   have two sets of guns, but this time you get laser  cannons instead of mass drivers. I prefer it this   way because you get a few more shots off before  running out of energy, and they’re more likely to   hit, but it’s mostly the same. You get a weaker  missile loadout than the raptor, with 2 darts,   2 pilums and 1 spiculum, but as I said before,  you can never truly rely on them anyway.   The Rapier has less armor plating than the Raptor  or even the Scimitar, but who cares when you get   better shields than even the Raptor? The  characters make a big deal out of this,   but it’s really a non issue. Trust me,  you are much safer in this thing than   you are in a Scimitar. Oh, and it’s really fast. Turns out It’s not just us trying out a new toy,   the final nav point has a pair of the  final enemy fighter type to match ours.   The Gratha is no joke. These fighter jet looking  things have it all: strength, speed, and armor in   one complete package. Its pair of mass drivers  and laser cannons aren’t as devastating as the   Jalthi’s ‘six guns, but they still pack a major  punch, and unlike the Jalthi, it makes its   comparatively lighter but still very beefy shields  and armor last way longer by dipping, ducking and   diving away from your shots. The later missions  are chock full of these, so get used to them!   And with the top of the line fighter for each side  debuting at the same time, we’ve now seen every   meaningfully unique gameplay element. Technically  there are some enemy capital ship types we’ve yet   to see, but the experience of fighting them is  identical to what we’ve seen before. I didn’t   consciously notice it until I went over the  game with a fine toothed comb for this video,   but they’ve managed to introduce at least one new  thing in each successive mission up to this point,   which probably not coincidentally is about  halfway through the game. From this point on,   it’s all down to remixing those elements in  various ways while turning up the heat with   increasingly difficult compositions of enemy  fighter waves. Following the game mission by   mission has been a useful framing device  up to now, but this is probably a good   time to zoom out a little, maybe just bring  up some topics without a prompt. Like, uh…   One problem I’ve noticed that space sims often  have is that it can be extremely hard to tell   where things are when it matters. You’ll be  wrapped up in some huge, chaotic melee when all   of a sudden your commander starts shouting in your  ear how you need to protect the USS Defenseless.   But there’s just one problem: where is it? Getting  your bearings in space is a uniquely hard problem,   because you’ve got 6 degrees of freedom you need  to cover when looking around in a massive, fully   3d environment with little to no visible landmarks  to orient you. You can’t even tell up from down   since it’s all relative in space, and all the  other ships are constantly moving around, across   distances vast enough that they become impossible  to see, not because of draw distance but because   they are literally far enough away from you that  they would be imperceptible to the human eye.   It's a problem that I think is solvable, but  it absolutely requires effective tools to help   you find what you’re looking for, and I’m sad  to say that most space sims do not give you   what you need here. And so you spin around  hopelessly trying to locate the Defenseless,   as the screams of its dying crew members  reverberate around your cockpit. It’s a   massive pain point for these games, which is  why I don’t think any discussion of one of   them is complete without talking about what,  if anything, it did to deal with this issue.   So how well does the first one fare in this  regard? ….Better than you might think.   As you might expect, the tools the game gives  you for selecting and locating targets are   pretty basic, but so is everything else.  The thing is, you’re not getting into epic   fleet battles involving hundreds of ships here.  Every engagement only involves a small number of   participants, which keeps things simple. And that  simplicity ends up being greatly to its benefit.   Your main tool for finding things is this  radar display. I sometimes find the radars   in these kinds of games, which have the  unenviable task of trying to consolidate   the positions of 3d objects on a 2d screen,  to be incomprehensible or borderline useless,   but this one was immediately intuitive for  me. The way they accomplish this genuinely   impressive feat is by discarding most of the  information and focusing on what matters most.   You could probably venture a guess that this  red dot is an enemy ship, so how do you get   it in your sights? Simply turn until the dot is  in the center, and you’re looking at it, easy!   What it sacrifices to be this simple is any  information on how far away any of those dots are,   or where they are in relation to each other. But  since there are never enough of them to be truly   overwhelming, you can figure that stuff out by  just pointing towards your target and looking   at what’s around it. Both enemy and friendly  capital ships get their own distinct color,   and I don’t think you ever encounter more than 2  capital ships of any kind at a time, so I never   had any real problems figuring out where they  were when I needed to. Sometimes less is more.   One area where the games’ age really shows is  in what I’m going to call ‘combat awareness’.   Pretty much every fight in this game involves  you and your wingman going up against at least   3 enemy fighters at once, usually more. The  radar is great at showing you where to shoot,   but what about defending yourself? Without a  usable third person view or any hud indicators   your only way of knowing when someone is  shooting at you is to listen for it. This   works to some extent, but there are… limitations.  This game was released in 1990, remember. You can   hear the enemy shooting at you, but there’s no  positional audio at all, not even stereo, nor   is there any distance attenuation, so the shots  from your wingman dogfighting somebody so far   away that you can’t even see them sound exactly  the same as the ones coming out of your own ship.   Additionally, only so many sound effects can  play at the same time, so any time a lot of   shots are going off at once you just kinda  have to assume that some of them are coming   from behind you in case they really are. You do  get a little indicator light to tell you when an   enemy missile is locked on to you, but with no  warning sound to draw attention to it, it’s very   easy to miss during hectic moments. There’s  definitely some room for improvement here.   The game has a couple simulation-y elements that  initially gave me pause but turned out to be not   so bad once I got to know them. The first is  the fuel meter. Who wants to worry about their   mileage in space? In practice though, although  it does verrrry slowly go down from basic flight,   the only thing that really moves the needle is  using your afterburners, and as long as you’re   not just boosting everywhere for no reason and  personally chasing down every single enemy fighter   that tries to run away, you’re unlikely to  run out of fuel before the end of even the   longest missions. You aren’t stranded if  you do run out either. According to the   manual your top speed is supposed to be severely  reduced, but in my experience that’s not true.   The only thing that running out of fuel does is  prevent you from using the afterburner. Which   is not a great situation to be in, but I  would hardly count myself out over it.   The other big one is the damage system, which  I have mixed feelings on. The way it works is,   any attack that makes it through your shields  and armor will damage the various components   of your ship in addition to its overall HP. What  breaks is partially based on where you were hit,   and partially determined by random chance.  There’re all sorts of different things that   can be affected: damage to your engines reduces  your max speed, your fuel tank could take a hit   and spill out some of its contents, you could lose  your shield generator with obvious consequences,   or get a screen full of static when you try  to use your comms, and so on. It’s kind of   fun just to see all the different things that  can break, there really are a lot of them.   Where the problem comes in is that not all of  them are equal. Losing access to your missile   tracking system is one thing, trying to go without  your guns or your shield generator is something   else entirely. Depending on something that is  at least partially based on RNG, taking damage   could be a minor inconvenience, an interesting  challenge that might be fun to work around, or   crippling to the point where you might as well end  the mission right there. There is a repair system,   but you don’t get any information about how it  works other than the occasional message that so   and so has been fixed. The only things I know for  sure are that it won’t fix anything that has been   completely destroyed, and that it takes a very  long time to fix the things that It actually can   work on. Oh, and the repair system itself is  one of the things that can break, of course.   Damage is also supposed to apply to your enemies,  although it’s pretty hard to tell, to be honest.   Are they running away because they literally can’t  shoot me anymore? I guess that would make sense.  When it works, which is admittedly a lot of the  time, the system can add a little bit of spice to   the experience, keeping you on your toes and  forcing you to improvise in the face of what   otherwise might be a rote situation. Even being  completely crippled can occasionally lead to fun   player stories. Like the time I lost every single  gun and missile on my ship, leaving me completely   defenseless, only able to hope that my wingman  could finish the rest of the mission on his own,   but Bossman, the absolute legend, actually  came through and brought both of us home with   all objectives completed! Stories like that are  undoubtedly the reason why they made the system,   and it really does add to the experience, but  I think it could do with a bit of tweaking:   something as simple as making it impossible  to permanently destroy your guns and shield   generator, or at least making it less  likely to happen would go a long way.   OK, so I’ve gone over all the various  mechanics and systems by now, but how   does it all fit together? I think a good  question to ask when trying to determine   that about a game is “How do you win at it?”  What are the considerations you need to make   when the going gets tough. What actually matters? Well, Something to keep in mind is that it’s not   hard at all to fight off 1, or even 2 enemy  fighters (as long as you have a wingman).   It’s when you get outnumbered that the difficulty  comes in. Because it’s so damn hard to hit things   that don’t want to be hit, actually doing so means  steadily aligning yourself with the target, or in   other words, flying in a straight line. If there’s  anyone behind you, that’s their opportunity to   take you out. And because half of the ships are  so fragile, you don’t really have the choice of   tanking a little damage in exchange for a kill  – you need to break off in this situation if you   want to survive. This means that every additional  enemy you add is an exponential increase to the   difficulty of the encounter. If 2 is no big deal,  3 is a real fight, 4 is dangerous, 5 is crazy,   and if you ever run into 6 or more enemy fighters  at the same time? Uhhhhhhhhh…. [Good Luck].   When you’re fighting a lot of enemies at once,  they’re going to be shooting at you almost all   the time, and you’ll be forced to focus on  avoiding their shots rather than attacking   them. But every once and a while, there’ll  be a gap, a small period of time in which   nobody is shooting at you. Maybe they’re all  recharging their guns or something, I don’t know.   These gaps are your opportunity to get a  few shots of your own in, hopefully enough   to destroy one of them, which will massively  shift the odds in your favor. With each enemy   fighter you down, the length and frequency of  these opportunities of attack will increase.   That’s why it’s absolutely essential to  recognize these chances to act when they come,   and take maximum advantage of them. The primary  skill tested by Wing Commander is shooting:   quickly aligning the crosshairs, predicting  the enemy’s movements, leading your shots,   conserving your energy for the right moment... Defensive play on the other hand is pretty   barebones. Even against overwhelming odds, it’s  not very difficult to avoid damage if you just   keep tapping the afterburner in random directions,  but you can’t stall forever, and when it comes   time to seal the deal, it’s just so goddamn hard  to hit anything that there’s little to no room   for defending yourself while you do it. Make no  mistake, there’s a high skill ceiling for landing   those shots, but it’s tough to shake the feeling  that it’s the only thing that really matters.   The better you are at shooting, the better you  can take advantage of those short opportunities   to buy yourself some breathing room. The  quicker you can take down enemy fighters,   the less time they have to destroy your escorts,  and the more time you have to take out theirs.   At the end of the day it all comes down to making  those little orbs intersect the enemy hurtbox, and   I can’t help but feel like there should be more  to it. Even so, landing those shots is satisfying   enough to carry the experience on its own. It’s simple, but simple doesn’t mean stupid.   The simple, one to one relationship between your  inputs and the flight controls make them a perfect   fit for a game about aiming. The only things that  matter are your skill, and that of your target.   So when it all comes together, when  you’re in a ship that starts with R,   and you’ve got multiple bogies on  your tail and your shields are down,   your target breaks left, but you’re  ready for them with a full salvo… It   can be sublime. Now, I’d been summarizing   the story up to the halfway point, so  you probably want to know how it ends. After Gimle, some saboteurs blow up a Kilrathi  military installation somewhere in the Brimstone   system. Or they don’t. Wait, the Brimstone system?  Where’s that? Has anyone even mentioned it up to   this point? No, I don’t think so. Ooooooh, it’s  where you go on one of the paths I didn’t take. Next, we go to the Dakota system, where an  agricultural colony is suffering an outbreak   of Watson’s disease and needs uh… am I allowed  to say the V-word without angering the algorithm?   You know, it’s that thing that you take to  protect yourself from infectious diseases,   anyway, it needs to be delivered from offworld,  so we gotta protect the transports from Kilrathi   raiders. Depending on how well we do that and  some other more generic military objectives,   the defense system of Planet Hurricane in the Port  Hedland system will fend off an attack or not.   Port Hedland… huh, that’s another  system from a different path. Because we’ve been doing such a good job  so far, we’re now on the offensive in the   Kurasawa system attacking enemy supply lines.  If you complete every mission perfectly in   Kurasawa you actually go straight to the  endgame, but this series is the one with   the impossible mission where you’re supposed  to defend a captured enemy carrier, so uh… We get a second chance in the Rostov system,  where we need to prevent the Kilrathi from   enslaving a primitive alien race and  ransacking their planet for resources.   And hey, the cutscene is actually  related to what we’ve been doing   this time. It kinda seems like the cutscenes  were made with one particular path in mind. Anyway, since we pulled that off, it’s time  to finish the job and destroy the Kilrathi’s   starbase in the Venice system, kicking them out  of the Vega sector once and for all. Or they kick   us out via the Hell’s Kitchen system. Destroying  the starbase is basically identical to fighting an   enemy capital ship, in case you were wondering.  Once you’re in either of the ending series,   you’re actually locked in to either the good or  bad ending regardless of what you do from there.   You can eject in every mission  in Venice and you’ll still win   the game. I guess Hunter took  care of it. Good on ya, mate. Sooooo yeah. There seems to be this idea going  around that people didn’t play Wing Commander   for the gameplay; they were there for the  story. To be honest though, if we were to   only look at Wing Commander 1, it would be  kind of hard to see why. Like, what story? There is a plot, which is to say there are  events that happen, and there are characters,   but never the twain shall meet. Neither the player  character nor anyone he knows is in any of the   story cutscenes where we see people actually  doing things. Worse, none of it matters to us.   Even if you happen to have been on the right path  to be involved with the events depicted in any way   whatsoever, this is still a bunch of people we  don’t know doing something that has no personal   relevance to us, and none of it is ever referenced  again after it happens. Come to think of it,   I don’t even have a good sense of where “The  Vega Sector” is in relation to Earth or Kilrah,   or how big of a deal it is for the Confederation  or empire to have claimed it. I get the idea that   this was intentionally left vague so we could  focus on the action, but then, why should I care   what happens to it? In the end it’s all a bunch of  dry military objectives to be failed or completed.   It provides a believable context for why you’re  getting into dogfights in space, but barely   anything beyond that. They’re lucky the action  genuinely is good, or I wouldn’t have bothered. And then there are the characters. It’s  obvious that Origin considered them   an important part of the game from  all the effort they put into them:   coming up with a diverse array of backgrounds  and personalities, drawing those detailed   animated portraits, custom tuning their  AI, implementing permadeath for them... And you know what? It did pay off to an  extent. They’re a generally likable bunch,   and they do stand out, both from each other for  the most part, and from what most other games   had to offer in 1990. They’re nothing special  for 2023 though. Having a distinct character   outline is nice and all, but that’s supposed  to be the beginning. Characters are meant to   evolve and reveal themselves over time, and that  can’t happen if you never see them do anything.   Occasionally one of your wingmen will  tell you about something they did,   but hopefully I don’t need to remind  you of the golden rule of showbiz here.  Still, we are talking about a long running  series here, so in a way, this whole game is   just a beginning. There’s something compelling  about following a group of characters over a   long series, developing a history with them  and watching them change and grow. Even if   they do occasionally seem to just morph into  an entirely different person between games.   Watch this space, is what I’m saying. While it does use the traditional method of  having a looping background theme per area   when you’re off duty, once you get into  space, Wing Commander’s virtual orchestra   mostly plays more like a programmatic film  score, dynamically adjusting itself based on   context to fit whatever action is happening on  screen at the moment. You might be thinking “oh,   a dynamic soundtrack, like when there’s an  ambient track and then it switches to the   active version when you get into combat” And,  yeah, but it’s so much more granular for that. They’ve got a unique track for when you’re  being tailed, for when you’re tailing someone,   when you’ve got a missile locked on to you,  when your wingman is in trouble, when your   wingman dies, when a battle is particularly  intense, and before we had ___, there was ___.  Outside of battle we have different main themes  depending on what kind of mission we’re doing   with transitions that vary based on how well the  mission has been going. I got used to listening   for the successful variations of the ‘returning’  theme when arriving back at the Claw to reassure   myself that I had done well. Although weirdly, the  ‘failure’ version will always play when returning   from escort missions. I’m not sure if it was  intentional or not, but it always kept me on edge,   which speaks to the effect of the music  when it is playing something appropriate. Wing Commander’s soundtrack isn’t one that I’m  going to be listening to outside of the game,   but while playing, it fits the action  like a glove. It’s not always perfect,   [destroying an enemy, enemy down fanfare] like  whoa, calm down there! I only killed 1 guy,   there are still 3 others! Are you really going  to make that big of a deal out of every single   one of them? Apparently you are, and that  seems like a bit much. It also seems to   get confused in some situations where multiple  tracks could apply, so it just keeps awkwardly   switching between them before they can get  going instead of letting one take priority   over the others like it should. Outside of those minor issues,   it really does feel precisely appropriate to  what you’re actually doing 90% of the time,   like a film score. Which seems to have been  exactly their intention, so… Mission accomplished. We’re not done yet though! [Not yet, Snake! It's  not over yet!] If you’re looking for more after   the main campaign, Origin has you covered with  two additional story campaign expansion packs,   called Secret Missions, and  Secret Missions 2: Crusade. What I should tell you upfront is that you  probably shouldn’t play these unless you   really enjoyed the main game and think you’re a  real pro. If you’re worried about missing out on   the story for some reason, just watch Secret  Missions 1&2: The Visual novel on Youtube. But don’t make the same mistake I did  and believe the internet when it tells   you that Wing Commander 2 “continues from where  Secret Missions 2 leaves off”. The hell it does!   There are a few events that happen in The Secret  Missions that get an offhand reference in 2, but   it’s nothing you’d even notice was missing if  you didn’t know about it. You might think they   would’ve taken this opportunity to expand on how  the hell we got from here [WC1 ending] to here   [WC2 intro], but you’d be wrong. Like  most expansion packs of this type,   they are self-contained stories made with  the understanding that only a minority of the   people who bought the base game were going to play  them. I would say that the quality and ambition of   those stories is a genuine improvement over the  base game, but we’re talking baby steps here. There’s a tool for transferring your saves  between the base game and secret missions,   but the only things that carry forward are your  medals and leaderboard stats so it’s nothing   essential. You can carry a save all the way from  base Wing Commander 1 to the second game and its   expansion content though, which is kind of fun to  think about. I bet you could rack up an absolutely   ridiculous killcount by the end of all that. Secret Missions 1 starts with the Kilrathi using   a mysterious super weapon to totally wipe out  a human colony out of nowhere. So it’s your job   to identify and chase it behind enemy lines  to destroy it before it can be used again. This is a good start: rather than the generic  objective of taking control of the Vega sector,   we’ve got a specific inciting incident that gives  the characters a solid motivation for going after   the objective, and a specific circumstance  to complicate things and add drama (oooh,   we’re behind enemy lines… can we survive on  our own? Will we ever make it back to safety?),   as well as a specific overall objective  for the campaign to build toward:   figure out what attacked the colony, chase  it down and take it out. Specificity is key. And what’s this, is something actually  happening to one of the characters?   Your fellow pilots have been talking and they’ve  decided that Maniac is dangerously insane,   and should be grounded. Which…  yeah I mean just look at him.   Wait, so are we supposed to take the  colonel’s lack of acknowledgement   to mean that he’s not going to ground  Maniac? Oh. Sorry, false alarm everybody.   It is an improvement, but the story still lacks  any twist or turns to hold your interest. It   ultimately boils down to: you find out the weapon  is on a new kind of capital ship, you chase it   down, blow it up and escape. Just another series  of military objectives to accomplish or not. Gameplay wise, Secret Missions makes zero  mechanical changes. You’re flying all the   same ships with the same weapons against the  same enemies. But harder. So how do you make   Wing Commander harder without changing the  mechanics at all? You cram multiple waves   of 4 or more fighters into every. single. nav  point. Oh, and you give the player a crappy ship. When I was playing these games for the first time  earlier this year, Secret Missions defeated me.   Every mission was an exhausting meat grinder,  and after failing for the 15th time in a row   on one of them, I just got fed up and watched  the rest of the dialogue scenes on Youtube.   Now that I’ve returned older, wiser, and with a  lot more Wing Commander experience under my belt,   I figured I’d be able to take them on this  time, and you know what? As long as you’re   at least as good at Wing Commander as I am now,  it’s not that bad. The majority of the missions,   which have you flying in either the Raptor or the  Rapier put a smile on my face. Sure the odds are   overwhelming, but that just makes it all the  more satisfying when you pull it off, right?   What wasn’t fun at all was the series around  the middle that expects you to beat those same   odds in a Scimitar, the little ship that  couldn’t. Getting past those missions took   a lot of patience, but once I did, it was back to  smooth sailing in a Rapier all the way to the end. And don’t go thinking you can skip some of  those bad missions like you could in the   main game. They pared down the branching paths  to a linear sequence for the expansion packs.   If you don’t complete enough objectives,  you go straight to the bad ending series. Uh oh, they just blew up the Tiger’s Claw.  I wonder what happens if I eject now?   Wait, what!? But you’re… we’re on the…   You know what? Let’s just not question it and move  on. Maybe you can skip a mission or two after all. Psst. Hey. Want to know one weird trick? (Kilrathi  hate it!). In situations where there are multiple   waves of enemy fighters, the next wave won’t  arrive until the last enemy in the current one is   destroyed. So what happens if the last enemy were  to instead run away? The next wave doesn’t spawn.   And if you can’t convince the last guy to  run, you could just do your business with   only 1 ship on your tail instead of the  6 that would show up if you destroyed it.   You might call this an exploit,  and you’d be right! But if you   were to make use of it in The Secret  Missions, well, I wouldn’t blame you. If Secret Missions 1 was a step up in difficulty  from the base game, Secret Missions 2 is,   naturally, the next step from there. They  actually did add some new stuff this time though.   Dralthi have been given better shields and had  their laser cannons replaced with mass drivers   to make them less of a joke, the enemy have an  even bigger capital ship now called the Snakeir   carrier. It’s still the same fight as every other  capital ship, but it looks snazzier and takes a   bit longer to kill [Wow!]. And most importantly,  there’s a new enemy superfighter called the Hriss.   It’s like a Gratha on steroids, with  great maneuverability, powerful guns,   and shields and armor for dayyyysss.  And finally, many of the fighters of   all types that you’ll come across get an AI  upgrade in the form of elite Drakkhai pilots.   It basically makes aces into  a semi-common enemy type.   Then combine all that with the usual wave  after wave of overwhelming numbers of fighters   you’ve come to expect from the Secret Mission  series. I’m not gonna lie, it’s pretty rough. On the Confederation end of things, the Scimitar  is finally gone! [The evil has been defeated],   but don’t celebrate just yet. In its place we  get a captured Dralthi that you use for “stealth”   missions. If you’re wondering how stealth works  in the Wing Commander 1 engine, it doesn’t!   Enemies will just attack you like normal. At first  I thought my version of the game was bugged, but   I was told that no, apparently that’s just how it  is! The disguise doesn’t work, but for some reason   they keep trying to use it. The first couple of  times they at least give you recon objectives. You   wouldn’t want to do any actual fighting in this  thing, because it turns out a Dralthi is basically   identical to a Scimitar in all the ways that  matter. *sigh* There’s just no escape, is there? Uh… What was I talking about again? Oh. One word of advice I can give  is that when the colonel tells   you not to fight something, listen to him!   Or if you see something dangerous that you weren’t  specifically told to deal with? Simply… don’t!   Like these assholes who want to fight you in the  middle of an asteroid field? Really, guys? Really?   [No thanks bro!] Just remember to tell your  wingman to get in formation with you or send them   home if you do this, or they’ll get themselves  killed trying to fight everything you left behind. You also get 2 new wingmen  visiting from Wing Commander 2.   Jazz is… a jazz pianist, go figure. And he seems  to think pretty highly of himself. Whatever.   Doomsday on the other hand... He’s got maori  tattoos, which is interesting. What’s not so   interesting is his personality. He  describes himself as a pessimist.   I want you to imagine a pessimist character. Now  exaggerate the pessimism. More. Flanderize it.   Every single sentence out of this guy’s mouth is  either doomsaying or a complaint of some kind. I   mean yeah if you think about it every wingman just  repeats a couple of stock phrases over and over   again, but it turns out that when that amounts  to constant whining, it’s way more annoying! It probably doesn’t help that he’s with you for  the worst two missions in the game. First you need   to protect 2 freighters from an overwhelming enemy  force. Pretty normal so far, but try this on for   size: what if you had to do it in a Hornet? You  know, the underequipped starter ship that takes   forever to kill anything other than the weakest  enemies in the game, and can be torn to pieces   by a single attack from the stronger ones?  That hornet? Try as I might, I could not save   that second freighter with my pea shooter. So I  thought hey, this game gives you some leeway with   the objectives, right? As long as I ace the other  mission in the series, maybe it’ll still be OK. And that other mission is… to escort  another freighter… in the Dralthi.   So much for stealth. As bad as the Dralthi  is, it’s still technically more capable than   the Hornet, so after many tries, I did manage  to bring the freighter home safe and sound…   and I’m on the losing path anyway. No leeway  after all. And that’s where my second attempt   at Secret Missions 2 ended. The thought of taking  out the entire Kilrathi armada in record time with   a Hornet, then having to do that second mission  with the Dralthi again was too much. I give up.   I think I owe Doomsday an apology.  Turns out he was right all along. It's kind of a shame, because unlike Secret  Missions 1, 2 really does bring some new   things to the table, and it’s cool to see,  but it’s just so damn hard that when they   try to get clever and make you face it all in  a garbage ship, it’s too frustrating to bear.   They also tried a lot harder  with the story in this one. This time you’re on a diplomatic mission  to meet with a friendly new alien race of   bird people called the Firekka. They’re not  as technologically advanced as the Terrans   or Kilrathi, but they could probably find  some way to contribute to the war effort,   and they’d eventually end up enslaved or killed  by the Kilrathi if we don’t get involved,   so the plan is to form an alliance with them. The  Firekka are willing, but the Kilrathi will try to   stop you. In fact, they’re willing to commit way  more resources than is reasonable to stopping you…   an absolutely ridiculous amount. Turns out  they don’t care about the Firekka at all,   they just want the planet for  a totally unrelated reason. And that reason is -whoa, stop the presses!  They killed Bossman! I can’t believe it,   Bossman’s dead, you guys! Finally, a character  in this game went and did something dramatic,   or… had something dramatic happen to them, I  suppose. Do we get to actually see this happen   or be involved with it in any way? Of course not!  What game did you think we were playing here? Baby   steps, remember. Angel’s pretty broken up about  it though, seeing as she was flying with him when   it happened [Shame clip]. They really did try  to work some actual plot points into this one,   but the problem is that they have to fit the  Wing Commander 1 template, which means they’re   all conveyed to you via the medium of one of  your wingmen telling you about it in the bar. One plot point that we actually do get to take  part in is the defection of a Kilrathi captain.   Captain ‘Ralgha’ wants to join the Confederation,  and he’s taking his ship with him, so you fly   a mission to cover him as he escapes from the  rest of his fleet and makes for the Claw. Nice!   Once he’s safely onboard, Ralgha tells us why  the Kilrathi want the Firekkan’s planet so bad.   Every few years their ‘warrior priestesses’ pick a  planet to hold some kind of religious ceremony on,   and it just happened to be the one this time  around. This ceremony is very important to   the Kilrathi. It’s like a chain letter,  if they don’t complete it and send it   to 5 new recipients by the end of the week,  they’ll be cursed with 7 years of bad luck.   This is very bad news for the Firekkans, because  unbelievers won’t be tolerated, so everyone on the   planet will be forced to convert or die. Then, something even crazier happens:   Prince Thrakhash sends an ultimatum to  all Confederation ships in the area:   you have one day to leave. Now we  have a named antagonist! Just imagine,   finally we can put a face to the enemy, get  to know something about their motivations   and thought processes, feel some satisfaction  when we defeat them. No, I mean really imagine,   because you don’t get to actually see him, you  hear someone else describe what he said. *sigh* Instead of heeding the warning, Halcyon wants  to pretend to do it while actually hiding out   in a nearby system, then sneak some marines onto  the planet to sabotage the ceremony and kill the   priestesses. They manage to pull it off (wait,  why does everybody have phasers now, weren’t   they using bullets before?), so Thrakhash sends  another ultimatum specifically to the Tiger’s   Claw this time: Get out now and I’ll let you live,  but your marines are toast. Halcyon isn’t having   any of that, of course, so the plan is to get in,  get our boys out of there, then try to do enough   damage to the Kilrathi fleet on the way out to  force them to leave the planet before they can   enact genocide on it. And if you’re extremely good  at Wing Commander, you might even pull it off! The Firekkans are never seen or heard from  again, by the way. They even tease one of the   Firekkans as a potential wingman, but nope,  forget about ‘em. Actually it would’ve made   the most sense to have him fly with you in this  game. You know, someone who actually has a stake   in the conflict. But no, instead we get Jazz  and Doomsday, neither of whom has anything in   particular to say about Firekka. Oh well. I think it’s very telling that when I   sat down to write about the story, an  actual honest to god plot summary came   out instead of a one sentence dismissal.  They really did improve the writing here,   it’s just unfortunate that it’s so constrained  by its form, and it’s paired with gameplay so   frustrating that only the most skilled and patient  players will ever be able to play it to the end. OK, so let’s say you want to play Wing  Commander. Which version should you   play? The game was very successful  for its time, so it was ported to   several very different platforms in  order to capitalize on that success,   resulting in some interesting differences  between the various versions. Let’s take a look. Starting with Wing Commander for DOS. This was the  original 1990 version of the game, making it the   standard to compare all other versions to. If you  were to buy and play the game now without doing   any research, this is also the version that you  are likely to end up playing, because it’s what   you get from GOG and Origin out of the box. It’s  not the version I would recommend playing though.   The first issue is that it’s a pain in the ass to  get the music to sound right. You need to set up a   Roland MT-32 emulator with the correct rom files  and then to convince Dosbox to actually use it,   and it’s enough of a boondoggle that I didn’t  think it was worth banging my head against it   enough to get it working for this short overview.  Anyway, here’s what it’s supposed to sound like,   and the rest of this section is  what it’ll actually sound like   if you don’t spend an inordinate amount of  time getting it working. It’s not that bad,   but I like to play games at their  best if I can help it, you know? The real problems start when you climb into the  cockpit. Remember back when I said the flight   controls felt surprisingly good? Well, not in this  version! The input resolution is extremely low,   so when you start tilting the stick there’s this  huge deadzone before the game will register any   movement at all, and when it finally does, the  starting speed is already pretty high, then you   need to move it significantly further out before  it’ll go the next step up in speed and so on. It   ends up feeling really choppy and imprecise, like  you’re moving in steps – ka-chunk-kachunk-kachunk.   At least you’ll probably have plenty of time  to dial in your aim, because like many DOS   games from the early 90s, Wing Commander  ties its simulation speed to its framerate,   and doesn’t have a frame limiter. This means the  game runs faster as the framerate goes higher,   and there is no canonical game speed. The  out of the box experience from GOG will   have you constantly raising and lowering the CPU  cycles to try to find a speed that feels right,   but the problem is that the framerate is heavily  affected by the number of ships onscreen, so the   setting that works well for a packed dogfight will  run unplayably fast when there’s only one enemy. If you sub in the newer Dosbox-X,  you can use a setting to slow down   your virtual vram which will allow it to  run at a relatively consistent framerate   that is probably close to what the  intended speed was supposed to be.   But that’s when you realize that the  intended framerate must have been very low.   I don’t have the means to accurately measure it,  but I did hear from somebody who would probably   know that it was expected to run somewhere  around 5 FPS, and… yeah, it looks and feels   that way. I don’t think of myself as a framerate  snob, but that’s a bit too low, even for me. One interesting thing to think about is how  this works with those clown car missions in   the expansion packs. There’s no way even  top-of-the-line computers at the time   would’ve been able to render all those  fighters at the same time at full speed.   It must’ve been a slideshow for most people, so  maybe it wasn’t so hard to deal with all that   crap when you had the benefit of extreme slomo.  I don’t think that would be very fun though.  The sound effects are extremely primitive,  but I have heard some people say they prefer   these to the ones in future versions,  so your mileage may vary I suppose. There were versions for other computer standards,  like the Amiga and the Japanese only FM-Towns,   but they’re mostly the same other than their  soundtracks, and not interesting to me,   so I’m just going to lump them in  with this version and move on to… The 1992 Super Nintendo port by  Mindscape. When I first saw this,   I couldn’t believe it. How on earth did they  manage to get the game running this well on   a Super Nintendo of all things? And before the  Super-FX chip even existed? What’s the catch?   Well, it turns out there is a catch, and boy is  it one! The game makes use of the Super Nintendo’s   famous mode 7 feature to scale and rotate  the enemy ship you’re fighting. Very clever,   but here comes the catch: I said enemy ship, not  enemy shipssss. Mode 7 only works on one object at   a time. The rest of the SNES processing power is  tied up rendering your wingman using an extremely   cut down version of the original method. This  means that whenever you encounter a group of enemy   fighters, they come at you one at a time, and you  can’t interact with ‘inactive’ ones in any way.  If that’s somehow not enough to stop you, there’s  also the flight controls. If you thought the   controls in the DOS version were choppy, try doing  it with a d-pad! Now, they did adjust the turning   speed and hurtboxes to make this possible. You can  play the game like this, but the better question   is whether you would ever want to, and for me the  answer is definitely not. It just does not feel   good to fly this way, and that’s kinda the primary  motivation to play this game in the first place. There’s also the small matter of trying to  cram all the controls into a SNES controller.   A modern gamepad may be able to handle  it, but 8 buttons and no analog sticks   just isn’t… enough. They do make an honest  effort – select is used as a modifier button,   and they try to group like functions  together, so for example B fires your guns,   so select and B cycles between the different guns  on your ship. But then you have things like having   to press select and R to cycle through multiple  screens to get to the communications menu,   then select + X to cycle through the  options, then let go of select and   press X to pick the option. It technically  works, but it ain’t pretty. There’s no way   you’re figuring any of this out without reading  the manual, I doubt it’ll ever feel natural. Because the SNES is fixed hardware,  you don’t have to manage the framerate,   at least. It’s not a particularly  good one and it does fluctuate,   but at least you know it’s what  you’re supposed to be getting.  Other than all that, it actually does  seem to be the entire game, or at least,   nothing I’ve read indicates otherwise, and I’m  not itching to volunteer to be the one to check.   There’s the usual classic Nintendo censorship, but  it’s nothing major. They removed all references to   alcohol, confiscated Hunter’s cigar, and the Blue  Devils squadron is now the Blue Angels, oh well. This must have been pretty impressive to  SNES owners at the time if nothing else,   because it did well enough that they  even ported The Secret Missions over,   but nowadays there’s no reason why  anyone would ever play this for more   than 5 minutes as a novelty unless they had  played it as a kid and were nostalgic for it. A couple years later in 1994,  we got the Sega CD port,   which was a joint venture between Game  Arts, Bits Laboratory, CRI and Two-Five.   Taking advantage of the Sega CD’s scaling  and rotation chip to render the ships… Wait,   the Sega CD had a scaling and rotation chip? Why?  How many games other than this one even used it? Let’s follow our “Mission Flishi  path” and see how it goes. At first glance, it appears to run worse than  the SNES version, but there’s a reason for   that. That’s right, none of that ‘one at a time’  crap in this version, it’s the full experience.   In terms of content and mechanics, this is the  actual game, and it even includes both Secret   Missions campaigns. Or, well, Jazz and Doomsday  are in the manual, anyway. What, are you gonna try   to prove me wrong? Yeah, that’s what I thought.  Unfortunately, you’re still flying with a d-pad,   which is an automatic disqualification for  me. Also, while there thankfully is support   for the 6 button controller, let’s pour one  out for anybody who tried to play this game   with the standard Genesis controller, which  features a grand total of 4 usable buttons. This version does have one unique feature  to set it apart though: full voice acting!   And you know what? It’s not half bad! The  biggest problem I have with it is that   there are these occasionally awkward pauses  between sentences as the game queues up the   next line from the CD, but the actual  performances from the actors are good. Wait a second… is that? Wow. This  is definitely the earliest Cam   Clarke sighting I’ve ever had. I  wonder if he remembers doing this. The characters are the one feature of the  story that still stands up somewhat, so giving   them a voice actually does add significantly to  the experience. So much so that if you do play   the game, though I wouldn’t recommend playing this  version, I do think it’s worth popping over to a   Youtube video of the bar conversations and mission  briefings for whatever part you’re on instead of   watching them ingame. Unfortunately these videos  don’t currently include any path other than the   winning one, or the Secret Missions, so  you’ll have to go without those for now. For the future it’s worth noting that somebody  is working on a way to get the voice acting from   this version running in the PC version,  but as of this video it’s not ready yet. It’s kind of interesting that they included  the intro with the simulator in this version,   since you can’t choose your name on account of  the voice acting. This sequence must’ve been   baffling for anybody who played this without  having seen any of the other versions. Origin   hadn’t decided on a canon name for the main  character yet, so your callsign is Hotshot in   this one. Probably a better choice than Maverick  for a game that also has an Iceman, if you ask me. Also in 1994, we got a remake called Super  Wing Commander for 3DO and Mac. I’m not   really sure why they never bothered  to make a PC version of this, but OK.   Now, despite being more technologically advanced  than the original game, I actually think this   remake holds up worse in several ways. The new  graphics for enemy ships make them look really   indistinct and hard to tell apart, and the CG  backgrounds for interior scenes just look bad.   The aesthetic overall just looks less colorful  and charming than the cartoony art style of the   original, like they were chasing photorealism  at a time when they had no hope of gracefully   achieving it. The interstitial animation scenes  in particular can sometimes just be really weird.   Like… What the hell is this thing? Who  would do this? Just put it on yourself! One aspect of the new graphics that I think  does work well is the characters, although   they can deviate quite a bit from the original  designs in favor of looking like whichever   Hollywood actor they were trying to rip off. Like the Sega CD version this is fully voice   acted, but with a completely different cast, and I  gotta say, it sucks. Everyone sounds like they’re   either bored out of their mind or paying more  attention to maintaining their accents than how   they’re supposed to feel about the lines they’re  delivering. The SegaCD version really puts this   to shame. They did at least finally settle on  Maverick, and stuck with it from this point on.  Content wise Super Wing Commander not only  recreates the whole game and both Secret Missions,   but also includes a new campaign taking place  between Secret Missions 1 and 2, that the   community has dubbed “Secret Missions 1.5”, which  has you going after the shipyards that created the   super weapon from Secret Missions 1, and attempts  to add some foreshadowing for Wing Commander 2. The thing that really puts the nail in Super  Wing Commander’s coffin for me isn’t really   its fault. It’s that its strange choice of  platform makes it awkward to play nowadays. Emulating an old Mac takes some  legwork, but it is possible.   The Mac version seems to tie game speed  to framerate, just like the DOS version,   making it hard to find a good balance.  What’s worse is that I couldn’t figure   out a way to have my gamepad inputs recognized  by the Mac emulators I tried, leaving me with   either basically non-functional mouse controls,  or mapping the arrow keys to my analog stick.   Trying to control this game digitally is actually  worse than the SNES or SegaCD versions because the   turn speed hasn’t been adjusted to account for it,  making it really hard to draw a bead on enemies. The 3DO version does work if you can wrangle  this Russian emulator, and it can even emulate   the 3DO’s flight stick peripheral. If you’re  dead set on playing Super Wing Commander,   this is probably the way to do  it, but it’s still not perfect.   There’s something that feels…  wrong with the flight controls.   It’s like there’s some kind of acceleration or  something. I can’t really describe it in any   more detail than that, but it just doesn’t feel  as smooth or precise as I would like. The control   layout and necessary multi button combinations  to accommodate the small number of buttons   available also remains very awkward and confusing  compared to what you can do with the PC versions. That’s right, PC versions, because there’s  one final version to talk about. 1996’s Wing   Commander The Kilrathi Saga is a collection  of Wing Commander 1, 2 and 3 ported from DOS   to Windows. This is an update of the original  version of the game, so just forget Super Wing   Commander even existed. Don’t worry, the T-pose  machine can’t hurt you, it was just a bad dream. First, the good: This is the best controlling  version of the game by far. The update to   directinput came with a boost in input  resolution, removing the choppy feeling   the DOS version had and making it much more  precise, with the end result feeling great. Speaking of chop, the game now  runs at a silky smooth 24 fps,   just like the movies! That may not seem like  much nowadays, but it’s far and away the   best you’ve ever been able to get with this  game, so don’t knock it too much. This also   crucially means you don’t have to worry about  the game running at the wrong speed anymore. You also don’t need to worry about getting the  music working right anymore, because it’s now   a recorded arrangement rather than midi, and  it’s in my opinion the best version of the   game’s music to date. If you’re wondering  what it sounds like… well, you shouldn’t,   because you’ve been listening to it for most  of this video. This is also the soundtrack I   chose to feature in the “Music” section if  the background music was too quiet for you. The Kilrathi Saga also replaces the very primitive  sound effects of the dos version with new ones   that I believe are taken from Wing Commander 3. I  think they’re generally better than the old ones,   but if I had one complaint it would be that  they’re really loud relative to the music,   especially the laser sound. I find myself  wishing there was a way to control the   volume of the sound effects independently of  the music like you can in most modern games. In addition to all that, it adds an option to  remove the cockpit while keeping the HUD, so you   can finally play in fullscreen instead of having  to view everything through a tiny little window.  Now the bad: the conversion was a little  sloppy, so some bugs were introduced. In   the original version when certain systems were  damaged, parts of your cockpit would blow up,   and your displays would get all staticy. That’s  all gone in this version. The graphics for planets   and other stellar objects in the background are  also missing, leaving space looking even more   empty than it’s supposed to be and making  it that much harder to get your bearings. The biggest problem is that, as you  might expect of a Windows game from 1996,   it doesn’t run very well on Windows 10.  It’s ironic that this version of the game,   which was created for the express  purpose of future proofing it,   is actually much harder to run nowadays than the  original version thanks to the advent of DOSBox. It’s a damn shame that what could’ve been  the best version of the game is tarnished   by bugs and left inaccessible today… is what I  would say, if it weren’t for Wing Commander DX,   a mod for the Kilrathi Saga version  that fixes all of that stuff. As you’ve probably figured out by now, this is the  version of the game that I played to capture the   footage for this video, and the one I recommend  for anybody who wants to play this game in 2023. But you might find yourself asking: Is Wing  Commander worth playing in 2023? As is often   the case, it depends on who you are. Did you  somehow wander in here from those top 10 lists   that seem to be the only other videos about old  space sims on Youtube looking for the “best one”?   Then the answer is probably not. As  the first of its kind it’s very basic,   lacking much of the scale, bombast and  variety of later games in the genre,   there are severe limitations to the technology it  uses that can compromise the experience, and the   game has the occasional frustrating difficulty  spike, although the fact that you don’t have   to complete every objective and mission to win  helps. If what you want is “the best space sim,   no caveats” then Wing Commander is not what  you’re looking for. Go play… I don’t know,   Freespace 2. I hear that one’s supposed to be  pretty good. Now, if you’ve played a bunch of   these kinds of games and are looking for another  one, or if you’re like me and find the prospect of   seeing how a genre started interesting, is there  fun to be had from Wing Commander? Absolutely. I had always heard that Wing Commander was a  story focused game, while people who care more   about gameplay should stick to X-Wing and Tie  Fighter, but I found this first one at least to   fly in the face of that advice. The story was  fairly dull and not really worth experiencing   if that’s all you’re there for. The missions on  the other hand were full of thrilling dogfights   that kept me coming back for more. It’s also  worth reiterating just how approachable this   game actually is. You know what, if you are new  to these games and *this* seems like it might be a   barrier for you, maybe you should start with Wing  Commander. You could do a hell of a lot worse. As for how it fits into the genre as a  whole, I think it’s a damn good start.   More than the graphics, what stands out to me  about it is how uncharacteristically playable   it is. The quality of life features like the  autopilot and navigation systems feel like   they fell out of time. You can summon a waypoint  marker on your HUD to tell you where to go next   at any time. A waypoint marker… on your HUD…  In, and I cannot stress this enough, 1990. I touched on the idea that maybe these games   overcomplicated themselves and became  too niche to justify their budgets,   and that’s still under investigation, but  one thing I can say is that it wasn’t like   that in the beginning. There’s nothing inherent  to space sims that prevents them from being the   kind of thing that the average person can pick  up and have a good time with. Ok. So there may   have been a couple things, but there’s nothing  inherent to their design that makes them that way. If I can accomplish one thing with this video, I  hope it’s to get more people to check this game   out. It’s actually very important, historically,  not just for space sims, but for pc gaming,   and just… gaming as a whole. And yet, nobody from  my generation or beyond knows anything about it.   Ask people my age and you might get a  “those are the games with Mark Hamill,   right?” if you’re lucky. Anybody younger though?  They know what Doom is, they’ve played a Mario,   but Wing Commander? Nope, nada,  nothing. And I think that’s a shame. Obviously it’s not going to be for  everyone. But if you’re interested,   and if you’ve watched this far, you probably  have a pretty good idea of whether you are or   not…. If you like these kinds of games,  or even if, like me a few months ago,   you just think you might like these kinds  of games, then please, give it a try. Phew. I think this might be the longest anyone has  gone on about Wing Commander in at least 20 years,   counting consecutively at least. Thanks for  making it all the way here, assuming you aren’t   a dirty cheater who skipped to the end. I’ve  got a question for you though. Did you enjoy   this video? Did it entertain or inform you?  Would you be interested in seeing more like it,   perhaps a similar treatment for other space  sims? Well then, I think you know what to do.   Perhaps even more importantly than boosting the  metrics, though, I want you to let me know in   the comments. I’m a little new to this whole  Youtubing thing. I think it’s customary to   start by getting in a little over your head,  but oh man is that an understatement for the   amount of time and effort it takes to make  a video like this. Not that I’m complaining,   but let’s just say the response to this video is  going to be instrumental in determining whether   or not I try doing something like this ever  again. So uh, if you would like to see more,   do yourself a favor and tell me all about it. Thanks for watching!
Info
Channel: Space Cadet Rewind
Views: 109,797
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Space Sim, Flight Action, Origin, Chris Roberts, Retro, Star Citizen, DOS, Flight sim
Id: _z7EBLrFp6U
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 115min 36sec (6936 seconds)
Published: Tue Feb 28 2023
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