New Wing Commander - For Gameboy Advance?

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."

Comments

movie

[AndyAMPohl]

Hopefully it'll be a little more successful than the "port" to film.

Andy

Re:Voice work by Matthew Lillard ??

[TC (WC)]

Why would they want to? Prinze played young Blair, Blair in Prophecy was Mark Hamill. Either way, I'll just add that Blair isn't the main character in Prophecy, Lance Casey, the son of Iceman from WC1, is the player character.

Trying to hide wormhole graphics?

[Baron_911]

Anbody notice on the main page's Screenshots, the thumbnail for the ship going into (coming out of?) the wormhole is BIGGER than the actual picture?

Re:Trying to hide wormhole graphics?

[TC (WC)]

Raylight has the big one on their site. It's not an ingame shot unless they used it as a loading screen or something.

Re:Voice work by Matthew Lillard ??

[Anonvmous Coward]

"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.

Wormhole explanation

[AtariAmarok]

"Anbody notice on the main page's Screenshots, the thumbnail for the ship going into (coming out of?) the wormhole is BIGGER than the actual picture?"

That is because of the singularity nature of wormholes. The closer to the wormhole, the smaller the image, as it is compressed to a single pixel in order to pass through.

I have to wonder about this...

[amuro98]

I played WCP on my PC some years ago. Pretty cheesey, if you ask me. WCI, II and IV were a *lot* better, IMHO.

Anyways, WCP had by far the most complicated control scheme of the WC games. How are you going to squish that into something with only 6 buttons and a d-pad?

Maybe they could put sensors in the cartridge so it could intrepret tilting the game as steering, as well as when you move forward/backward as speeding up/slowing down. That way you'd just go to a large open field, and start running around in circles while you blast aliens...

Re:I have to wonder about this...

[TC (WC)]

Eh, the important controls are really the same as in Wing Commander 1, which ported with a fairly good control scheme to the SNES. Most of the extra controls in Prophecy are kind of nice, but not anywhere near necessary to do well. I can, for example, quite happily play with a two button joystick and no keyboard.

Re:I have to wonder about this...

[amuro98]

I dunno about that. I seem to recall that some of the alien fighters took quite a beating before going down, so being able to match their speed was an essential command used by me. A lot.

Free Wing Commander

[FFFish]

If I recall correctly there was a free web-released Wing Commander. To my memory, one downloaded the game and first mission; following weeks, further missions were released.

This would have been a few years back; perhaps two or three.

Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about and where I can get it again? This wasn't pirate-ware, it was a for-real, sanctioned release.

Re:Free Wing Commander

[TC (WC)]

Yeah, that was Wing Commander: Secret Ops. It was, at the time, distributed for free, however it was made clear that it was only for a limited time. There's no legitimate way to download the episodes beyond the first (which acts as a demo), but it's included in the Wing Commander: Prophecy Gold package.

Incredible, but they ported the wrong game

[Mean_Nishka]

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!

Re:Incredible, but they ported the wrong game

[TC (WC)]

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.