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Wing Commander 3 Reaches Ten Year Milestone
An Anonymous Reader writes "The Wing Commander CIC is reporting on the tenth birthday of the classic PC game, Wing Commander 3. "Much like Wing Commander 2 with the sound card and Wing Commander Prophecy with the 3d accelerator, Wing Commander 3 encouraged a legion of PC gamers to go out and buy a CD-ROM drive for hundreds of dollars. In little over four years we went from a handful of floppy disks to a stack of CDs. Once computers had their CD-ROM installed, systems with only 8 megabytes of RAM sufferred 5+ minute load times before the missions. Still, we happily waited for one of the most incredible gaming experiences ever." Though the game obviously looks dated by today's standards, it's held up remarkably well as a vehicle of adventure and storytelling. It's amazing that it's already been ten years."
I cannot believe it has been ten years already!
;)
I hope some games, like movies and music, are remade, with better graphics and such, hopefully without destroying the game we all came to remember.
though it seems like space flight sims are not a popular as they used to be.
Wing Commander/Mech Warrior have all died off it seems.
so anyone know where i can download that shizzle?
i downloaded a copy of dune 2 recently and was surprised that i was able to play it on a modern computer. no sound tho.
It's nice to remember games that make people upgrade, lest we forget how we can fall behind. Games like Far Cry, World of Warcraft, and Half-Life 2 have DVD options: the more high profile games that make the switch and don't go back, the less we are going to have to swap 6 discs when we install. Come on, everyone! DVD drives in your computers already! They're only like 20 bucks for a cheap one.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
My favourite classic space sim remains Elite, which is 20 years old this year.
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
Oh, the horrible acting...
But, it had John Rhys Davies, that makes it good right?
Oh, and Mark Hamil too!
But, the worst line from an actor in this game:
"Disintegrate me, so I may join my comrades..."
*dies laughing*
I didn't play wing commander 3, but i have many fond memories of WC Prophecy. The missions and space dogfighting were great, and an added bonus, Mark Hamill! Heh well the gameplay was still good.
I don't think it was III. I'm leaning towards II, but whichever one opened with an Origin "symphony" being conducted. Man, that put my Sound Blaster to the test. Actually it was the original Wing Commander, after checking out some of the info WCNews has on the game, it all comes rushing back: the Tiger's Claw... ah, the joys of youth.
MORTAR COMBAT!
If you hadn't gotten Mark Hamill to play Blair, would the final mission still have had the player flying down a canyon to drop a world-destroying bomb on a small target?
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
The game that caused me to buy a CD-ROM drive for the first time was "Return to Zork." Man, I had so much fun with that game... and the awesome graphics and movies... Wow. Memories... :-) I think my second CD-ROM title was "The 7th Guest." Things seemed more fun back then...
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
And I would tend to agree. Myst had a wider customer base and you didn't have to have the sound on so your boss wouldn't know you were playing.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Ah, the classics - this was right at the advent of the cd-rom revolution, of course, a time when games had just started to push the big-budget envelope.
They were actually offering a lot more at the time, too - the box not only had the game cds, but separate install and game manuals, which introduced your character to the TCS Victory, as if it were written in the fictional universe. The original games even had fold-out blueprints of the ships, complete with fictional statistics and flight characteristics. It's a level of out-of-the-box immersion that just isn't done anymore with these new-fangled microboxes, consarn it!
I'm pretty sure it was Windows 95, and the 20-some-odd floppies required to do a clean install, that had people buying CD-ROM drives. The fact that the floppies were guaranteed to fail on disk 6, 7, or 8 after you used them a few times didn't hurt either ;)
I mean, I'm sure there are a few people out there who bought a CD-ROM drive just to play Wing Commander III, this is the same small yet profitable sliver of the market which buys GeForce 6800s to play DOOM III. But for the mass market, it was Windows 95 that led the consumer, grumbling, to the realm of the 2x Mitsumi.
When I think of the CD-Rom gaming age, I think of that HUGE company 'Rocket Science'. They had directors and modelers that helped make movies such as Alien. Wired even did a big story on them. What ever happened to them? I guess when they tried to jump on the FMV bandwagon they missed.
random trivia: The first game to ever come on PC-CDROM was Loom from LucasArts. Also wasn't Wing Commander IV the one that came with a pile of CDs? I thought that 3 just had one or two.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Back in 1994-95 I Was working at Walden Software (EB) and the store directive said they would phase out floppies over the next year and all merchandise would be replaced with CD-ROM. Although I had recently purchased a Tandy Single Speed CD rom drive ($400) I thought they were crazy to set such goals for the common public. It was about this time that Rise of the robots and a few other games hit the market and took a little over 40 1.4 MB disks to install. Sure enough a year latter the store was converted and all new software was in fact selling of CD-Rom.
Does any one remember the old M(multimedia)PC 1&2 ratings they used to set that were supposed to tell the consumer if there computer was good enough to run new software?
It's not such a great event. Wing Commander 3 heralded the death of the series, and the birth of video games like Metal Gear. They may have excellent gameplay, but when you have to sit through hours of dialogue to be able to get to the gameplay, it crosses from gameplay into interactive theater.
<rant>I use to love the Final Fantasy series, but there's more CG video now than gameplay. I mostly play platformers nowadays so I don't have to deal with that crap.</rant> That's one of the things I like about the Gamecube. The disc size encourages vast models with detailed textures, but definitely discourages streaming video...
I can't wait for the first person who loses their savegame state when playing Metail Gear on a PSP. Either you save it just before the dialogue, and you have to sit through it again, or you try to save just after, and the battery cuts out on you before you get there...
I remember playing the original Wing Commander on my Zerox 386/20 with 2MB of RAM and a 70MB hard drive. It used the PC speaker for sound.
And we liked it.
How right they are about Wing Commander 2 and the sound card. I remember working to get a friends brand new SoundBlaster 16 working with Wing Commander 2. I listened to the opening enough that I now have engrained in my brain the phrase "How goes the war against the humans?" which almost always meets with puzzled looks when used. It's especially funny when talking to people who deal with desktop support.
For those who don't remember it I found an mp3 of the opening.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Extended memory is simply memory added after 0xFFFF, but DOS couldn't get at it, being only 8 bit. In order to get at the extended memory, the CPU had to switch to protected mode, and then DOS apps had to use OS/2, or Win 3.0 in "enhanced" mode to run, because they needed a faked-out environment in order to call int 21 (DOS services). The OS would switching in and out of protected mode to make that happen, or emulate int 21 itself. The Win 9x branch thunked, but the NT branch emulated, so that whole marketing campaign about how Windows 95 didn't "have DOS under it" was a boldface lie.
Damn, I'm old.
Yeah, right.
I actually bought "Return to Zork" on floppies. Rather than real full video, you just had these strangely animated pictures.
Want some rye? 'Course you do!
Forget the whales - save the babies.
. . . was not the CD-Rom aspect. Most people had picked one of those up either for Myst or for Encylopedias. Rather, what WC3 brought to gaming was the first (attempt at) a truly cinematic experience in a video game. Sure, Cinemaware had done the same thing years prior, but it was hard to call those "cinema" when the characters only had 500 pixels. WC3 was more movie than game, yet it really did create an interactive cinematic video game. Something else a lot of people don't realize is that its blue screen virtual sets predated those of Phantom Menace by several years.
Sidenote: it's odd that gaming media complained so much about FMV and bad acting, but that generally ended when developers starting using pre-redendered CGI, with acting that was equally as bad. What is about bad real people acting that is worse than bad CGI acting?
I remember the opening movie for WCII. There was this one scene of a large ship that kind of dipped down in a swoop while flying on the screen and it looked all 3d. We were in such awe.
And then there was my crappy machine that couldn't handle syncing the video with the audio. In the opening scene when one of those tiger aliens (can't remember their name for the life of me right now), makes this gesture like he's grasping something in mid-air, and he says something about having something in his hands, my machine would choke and he would make the motion a few seconds before saying the line. Ah, the good ol' days.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
...this was one of the first games I ever bought.
:)
I remember that if you completed it, but lost the last mission, Hamill (Blair?!) got killed by the Kilrathi chap sticking his claw in to his guts and lifting him off the ground - at the bottom of the screen you could see someone's hands around Hamill's ankles to help lift him up!!
The old NES version required you to sit, read and TAKE NOTES on some of the radio sequences in the game. The gameplay was revolutionary but didn't win any awards with the masses. There was no help to call, killing any hostages accidentally or purposely would make it impossible to beat the game and if you missed a hint or radio number, tough. You can't call them back. If anything Metal Gear started the crossing of gameplay into interactive theater.
And it came at least a year and a half before Wing Commander III.
Wing Commander IV, on the other hand, introduced the quasi-era of DVD games. I still have that game, sitting in a sleeve in a drawer somewhere. WC4 was one of two games that "ushered in" the "era" of DVD games, the other being Incoming.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
The 5+ minute load time mentioned is a bit high. I don't recall the low end spec for the game, but on the family 486DX2/66 with 8 megs of RAM I got it down to 90 seconds to load a mission. There was an 7-8 meg mission file that you could copy over on install that would speed it up considerably. If you didn't copy that file over it would be brutal (but I doubt even 5 minutes unless on a 486/33). And actually, compared to Wing Commander 2, this game was pretty weak in terms of gameplay and story, yet it was still solid. I have every wing commander released for the PC (and the Sega CD) and I consider WC3 to be the weakest.
I remember that the switch to CD Rom fixed some of my complaints about the earlier Wing Commanders.
Wing Commander II took nearly an hour to install on my 386, without the speech pack
Speaking of the Speech pack, WC3 had it built in so no need to spend another $15-20 on an addon that only added speech to the subtitled text.
I remember that Wing Commander 1 was the first program I had that required XMS and I had to get QEMM to play it. Shortly after that DOS 5.0 came out with XMS support built in.
While I don't think WC3 was the killer app that made people upgrade to cd rom (for that I would say Windows 95/Office 95 with a stack of floppies a foot tall), it sure made installation a lot faster and easier. I played it through a few times and after winning the initial time, the next time I deliberately failed a couple missions so I could play the losing path missions.
I can remember coming home from the bars and playing this until 3 or 4 AM then getting a few hours of sleep and trudging off to work again. WC 1, 2 and 3 lost me weeks of sleep.
Wow, I'm looking at this thread with all you nerds reminiscing about all crap you had to put up with on PCs to get games to work.
:)
At the time I was playing most of the same games on Amiga and then later Mac. I got the same games but with enhanced sound/graphics/interface and none of the technical support headaches.
I never even owned an x86 PC until 2000. I'd used them at work and school of course, but didn't have the money or inclination to get one until then.
Glad I bypassed all that crap.
Yeah, but Tom Wilson (aka "Biff" from BTTF) was great in his role as Maniac in WC 3-5.
I loved that series. I remember playing WC2/WC3 and hooking my PC up to a 700 watt PA amplifier with JBL concert speakers, shutting all the lights off and hearing the whole house rumble when I was fired upon in a dogfight. That was a cool game.
I've been looking for something comparable to Wing Commander, but it seems the only space-combat title that continues to evolve has to do with the Star Wars universe, which I find a bit on the boring side and too diluted from being endlessly milked.
Riiiight.
I think I remember paying about $350 american for mine.. good ole Mitsumi 1x CD drive, complete with pull out tray and 16bit ISA controller card!
Hmm.. I wonder if I can find a picture of it..
-Mikey
Is it just me, or did anybody else feel cheated by Hobbes (If I remember his name correctly). I really liked the character during Wing Commander II, and in WC III when he turned - I never saw it coming. I was shocked and angry!
:-)
I loved the Wing Commander series. I played WC2 on my "super fast" 386. Trying to get DOS games like that (and WC3) to work helped teach me enough about computers to help me get a job in IT straight out of highschool.
10 years later. I remember my flight mates fondly. Paladin, Maniac, Iceman, Angel, and even Hobbes -- Cheers to you!
Wing Commander IV, on the other hand, introduced the quasi-era of DVD games.
What era of DVD games? I've been buying PC games steadily for about fifteen years now, and the number I own that are on DVD is precisely one.
Why are most games still sold on CD? God only knows, but they are. I work in a game store, and customers are always asking me why all the games we sell come on like three or four CDs when one DVD would be so much more convenient. I look forward to the day when I no longer have to mutter something random about not everyone having a DVD drive yet...
Myst can only be considered the killer app for CDROM's if you ignore all the sales that 7th Guest generated a year before Myst shipped.
There wasn't a quintessential game/software package that made me want a CD-ROM drive. I found a dual-speed drive at CompUSA for $150 and jumped on it. I didn't own a CD-ROM game until a few months later when I bought (ironically enough) the Wing Commander II Speech Pack.
My copy of WC Prophecy is messed up, i haven't the energy to set WCIV up on here, and WCIII is just a bitch without a dedicated DOS Box, i miss simulated piloting :(
Hence my use of the term "quasi-era"... >.>
Ah... good memories abound. Especially of the earlier two games, I would have to say they were my favourite. I could never really sympathize or connect with the characters in the later games - they often just seemed so one-dimensional and I think the FMV aspect ruined it for me. Granted, the later games were still great space sims, but I much preferred the look and feel of the cutscenes in Wing Commander 1 and 2. Privateer (the first one) was quite good as well. When the animated characters were replaced by actual actors, I felt a lot of them lost a lot of their defining features about who they were. It was like watching new people make the old motions. I guess that's sort of true since they replaced most of the characters every game iteration, but... ...I just finished Prophecy recently. The bad end-game clip is memorable - mostly because it is one of the worst I've ever seen. >_
Oh, yeah. If you look at the CIC website, you'll notice that they have the episodes from the animated show online. I've been downloading them singly over the past few months and I must have to say that they're pretty decent.
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
I have Klingon Acedemy on DVD.
It was never made that way, but I dumped the contents of all the CDs onto a single DVD and it installs and plays fine that way.
I wish I could have done that with True Crime and a couple other 4+ CD games.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.