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Wing Commander: Darkest Dawn — Fan-Made Goodness Reborn
MojoKid writes "Last week marked the launch of Wing Commander Saga: Darkest Dawn, a fan-built companion to Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger that's been in the making for the past ten years. It's a real labor of love. Now that the game is available, the question is, how good is it? "The game dropped on Thursday, I started playing Friday, and as of this writing (Sunday afternoon), my weekend chore list is gathering dust on the fridge. I've been too busy cursing my decision to chuck my Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 to notice. 'If I'd kept it just one more year I wouldn't have this problem,' I mutter, fingers splayed over the keyboard in a vain attempt to convince my Hellcat to bank like something other than a Centaurian Mud Pig. Wing Commander Saga is a fan-made game that's good enough to be worth paying for. Not only is it better than a lot of schlock companies expect you to pay for, it pays homage to its source material while improving on Wing Commander's classic gameplay and graphics."
Wow, I think that's a bigger accomplishment than the game itself.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
What does an eight-hundred pound Tiger-man pay for licensing?
Not ripping your chest open and feeding in the insides seems fair enough.
I'll have to try this out, but I sure loved the old Wing Commander games. I haven't replayed them to see how they hold up, but they did a pretty good job of balancing difficulty so that you could almost always succeed, but you always *felt like* you just barely succeeded.
It's been a long time since I've played a flight/space combat game that hooked me enough to play more than a couple missions. I hope this game finds some success.
People seem to have discarded joysticks as contollers right and left, but there are whole genres, like flight simulations, where joysticks are practically a necessity. Why is everyone so keen on moving to inferior controllers? You have people trying to play FPSs with thumbsticks, when mice are far superior, and so on. Seriously, what's up with that? Is there some memo I didn't get saying we all have to give up the best kind of controllers for a particular game, and use worse ones?
I'm amazed at how the space combat genre seems to have died a bit of a death in recent years (yeah, I know about the X universe, etc). Surely it's about time someone either rebooted Wing Commander or Tie Fighter, or else made a new game in a similar mould? With modern technology, it could be awesome.
And Denise Richards can reprise her role in the first. With any luck I can also see Patrick Muldoon get his last neuron sucked out of his skull. They missed it back then.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Which doesn't mean good in this case, it means self reenforcing. It is a case of the few ones that do come out suck badly, so nobody buys them, so publishers don't think there's any money in them, so nobody good can get funding, so only crap games can come out.
It's a vicious cycle, and some kinds of games can get it to it.
from the FAQ
prescient captcha: godsend
Now I really do have to sort Linux drivers for my pre-USB HOTAS.
You have to assume there ever was a soul to a website.
If so, I have a bridge I can sell you. For cheap. It, too, has a soul.
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
Wing Commander: Standoff has been available for some time now, and it's pretty great - unlike Saga, it uses WC: Prophecy's engine (and consequently needs Prophecy: Secret Ops to run - just need to download that too). Check it out - http://standoff.solsector.net/
for the thing, then the developers could afford their own server and wouldn't have to put it on bizarre file websites.
i mean, they could have a special edition just for tech hoarders. you know who you are. you have a set of 3.5 floppies that you have been 'meaning to transfer to CD' for about 15 years now. and an old sparc station with no network card, and a sparc network card that's the wrong kind that you were going to see if you could hack a driver for, then there's the silicon graphics indigo that is missing a power button... about 135 old cables of various sorts for equipment that hasn't been manufactured since 1987, etc etc etc.
Vendetta Online - been around for years, and they are a 'real' flight simulator / space combat game. it has a steady user base, but a tiny one. you can maybe argue that its because of the nature of the development team/company.
but i am not sure. there might be something inherently 'non-popular' about flight-sim games, that means you cant have one thats a big MMO.
Other examples:
Warbirds, the WWII online combat sim. Amazing flight sim, but tiny user base.
Tanki Onlin - a tank game. very popular, but again, not huge blockbuster. and there is no 'mmo' to it. its all twitch battles in 'battle rooms'.
compare this to popular MMOs... which are largely driven by luck-based and stats-based combat, grafted onto pseudo stories and nice visuals. you don't have to contemplate or learn complex 3 dimensional maneuvers, nor do you have to execute them repeatedly with split second timing, in order to 'win' in these games.
instead, you have to memorize spells and attack patterns, but you don't have to do anything, sort of, 'performance oriented'.
flight sim combat is like playing the piano or something. . .big learning curve. but MMO combat is more like playing 'guitar hero' on super easy level. you barely even have to have any rythm or sense of tone to play it.
I'd say this is pretty core Slashdot material.
Fan created game that's a sequel to a series of games missed by many Slashdotters, built on an open-source engine, released for free?
Hardly advertising.
Thanks for the article. My mom used to play WC: Privateer back in the day. She told me about it a while ago and I hunted it down. I've spent a good couple of hours in Privateer doing missions, jumping to other systems and not making much progress. Games used to require so much more skill and effort from the player. I still haven't really gotten out of the Troy system. It's sad how you can buy a game and finish it within two days now. I still find that old dos (among others) game extremely immersive and I look forward to trying this fan tribute out after work. In the meantime, I'll continue seeding the torrent.
Change your joystick deadzone settings - if you aren't using a real joystick, the deadzone is linked to your mouse.
Hit F2 and set your joystick deadzone, this also controls your mouse virtual 'joystick' deadzone.
WC had mouse control in from at least 4, and very good it was too.
But wait - shall I go upstairs and dust off the Sidewinder Force-Feedback, my only joystick? No, I won't - it's MIDI based, and so won't work under Win7.
So, shall I play it using the keyboard? Errr....no, think I'll play something else.
I suspect this pattern will be repeated by many.
Unlike some of the commenters above, I was able to get the torrent to download. I just had to sit through a 15 second fabric softener ad. Right now the file is using the max bandwidth I've allocated for that purpose (1 Mbps) and it should be done in less than an hour. Stuff like this was made for the BT protocol. Note to the xxAA and their toadies in the various governments around the world who insist (and, in their hearts truly believe) that bittorrent exists only for pirating Ke$hia albums.