Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Wing Commander - For Gameboy Advance?

Posted by simoniker on from the gba-kilrathi-scum dept.

TC (WC) writes "In the past week, the first Wing Commander game in 5 years was released... for the Gameboy Advance. A port of Wing Commander: Prophecy to the GBA was released in North America on May 28th. This news update on the Wing Commander CIC has first impressions of the game and some screenshots. It uses Raylight's Blue Roses 3D engine, and is one of the most beautiful looking and technically impressive GBA game that's been made."

3 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Voice work by Matthew Lillard ?? by Anonvmous+Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Why would they want to? Prinze played young Blair, Blair in Prophecy was Mark Hamill."

    Factoid: Mark Hamill was the voice of "merlin" the computer on one of the ships. In the credits, Merlin was listed as '?'. Heh.

  2. Incredible, but they ported the wrong game by Mean_Nishka · · Score: 2, Interesting
    WCP is amazing.. Smooth framerates, decent graphics, and a marvel of programming (and to think it only occupies 4 megabytes!!)

    I think, however, that this game would appeal to a wider audience if they ported Wing Commander 1.. Wing Commander always depended on strong story elements to negate some of the repetitive gameplay.. Porting over a game that relied heavily upon FMV for its storyline was a mistake. WC1 & 2 had an animated text based storyline that is perfect for the GBA.

    It's a shame that such a marvelous technical achievement may be overlooked because they ported the wrong darn game!

    --
    www.lonseidman.com

    1. Re:Incredible, but they ported the wrong game by TC+(WC) · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Eh, the actual original Wing Commander game didn't really have much in the way of a plot, it was pretty generic with a couple of interesting characters that you talked to a few times. There was the ongoing war storyline, but there really wasn't anything involving the characters. The neat plots didn't really start to show up until the Secret Missions addons.

      Beyond this, though, word 'on the street' is that EA doesn't feel particularly comfortable licensing out the original games, since they aren't always clear on what rights are owned by who, and what people they might need to pay off. Before the sale to EA, Origin's records weren't exactly well kept. However, Raylight's definitely capable of a Wing Commander 1 or 2 style game, as Star Giants, the game they were developing before they came upon the WCP license and then scrapped and took some of the basics from for Prophecy, was a blatant Wing Commander clone. I mean, there's a frickin' Dralthi in one of the early screenshots they released.

      Maybe if Prophecy sells well, they'll go back and port something else. The probable ones are Secret Ops, as they already have the basics down with Prophecy, or possibly the original game, if they can somehow get EA to let them, since there's already an SNES port that would be easier to convert.