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!
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 😂).
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.
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.