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Wing Commander III

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Re: Wing Commander III

#121

Post by brightball »

bentcorner wrote: post #9
sandworm101 wrote: post #3

Owned it. It was campy fun even then but WCII and WC:Privateer were far and away the better games. III was one of many attempts at a game-movie crossover that never really worked imho. Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with SimCity and Civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer

Privateer was a lot of fun. I remember playing it and the sequel. I'd be interested to see more behind-the-scenes of Privateer 2. It also had FMV and (from what I recall) had this sort of campy sci-fi TV movie feel. Great game, although I'm hesitant to look at it without the lens of nostalgia.

I remember Privateer 2, with the guy who played Darius in the old Highlander show.

Re: Wing Commander III

#122

Post by grawprog »

djur wrote: post #115
grawprog wrote: post #5

>Having been recently acquired by Electronic Arts, >The goal was, if someone said, “What’s an interactive movie?” we’d just hand them the CDs from Wing Commander III and say, “Here, check this out.” >This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course...but the lack of any real gameplay evolution within that look and feel perhaps is. So...even back then, EA was in the habit of buying successful game properties a…

Nah, it's clear that Chris Roberts was very interested in going that direction. EA might have enabled that interest, but it's not like some of Origin's independent contemporaries weren't similarly dashing themselves on the rocks of FMV (Sierra, for one). If EA didn't exist, it's very likely that Origin would have either been bought out by some other company or collapsed. They were in dire straits at the time of acqui…

I know, my comment was mostly...i dunno facetious...sarcastic??

I did read the article...it wasn't EA's influence that led to the game's direction it that case...i just thought it was funny that EA got involved in the series at the point where they started going for visuals over gameplay. Seemed fitting for what EA would eventually do.

>If EA didn't exist, it's very likely that Origin would have either been bought out by some other company or collapsed

I know...my wonderings were more...

'What would video games look like today if corporate profit as a primary motive hadn't won out and major game studios still made games with that nostalgic 80's-90's gameplay first ethos i'm likely looking back at with rose tinted glasses...'

Still...sometimes i wish games had gone more the way me and my cousins and friends had always hoped they would back in the days 3d games started emerging rather than the profit driven, microtransaction oriented, interactive movies video games actually became...largely driven by the companies mentioned in my earlier comment.

Re: Wing Commander III

#123

Post by swivelmaster »

rasz wrote: post #108
swivelmaster wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that, you're not looking hard enough. There are countless incredible (and bold) indie games doing really interesting and unusual things. Off the top of my head: - Outer Wilds (an entire solar system is a puzzle stuck in a time loop) - Hades (a roguelike where dying progresses the story) - Slay the Spire (a hybrid deckbuilder/roguelike where different runs can produce drastically different gameplay and bu…

StarSector - ~Star Control RimWorld - "sims"

AFAIK RimWorld is more like Dwarf Fortress

Re: Wing Commander III

#124

Post by cwillu »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #107
GordonS wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privateer! I absolutely loved that game - I must have racked hundreds of hours on it as a kid! I liked WC:Prophecy a lot too, but the trade aspect of Privateer was what really got me hooked. Also, the sheer size of the Privateer universe was mind boggling at the time. That and the graphics almost seemed like witchcraft given PC capabilities of the day.

Indeed. Though revisiting it I find it's brutally difficult without a small deadzone joystick and careful choices early on. Like stay in Troy, Meson blasters, afterburners, run away from most fights, scout don't patrol, etc. Also lack of in flight saves and close asteroid spawning makes it tough even with the best ship and shields.

If you remembered the advice given in the original wing commander that the safest speed to traverse asteroid fields is 250, they were far more survivable :)

Re: Wing Commander III

#125

Post by zikzak »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #107
GordonS wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privateer! I absolutely loved that game - I must have racked hundreds of hours on it as a kid! I liked WC:Prophecy a lot too, but the trade aspect of Privateer was what really got me hooked. Also, the sheer size of the Privateer universe was mind boggling at the time. That and the graphics almost seemed like witchcraft given PC capabilities of the day.

Indeed. Though revisiting it I find it's brutally difficult without a small deadzone joystick and careful choices early on. Like stay in Troy, Meson blasters, afterburners, run away from most fights, scout don't patrol, etc. Also lack of in flight saves and close asteroid spawning makes it tough even with the best ship and shields.

My friend and I would team up. He would fly with the joystick and operate trigger weapons. I would run the missiles and other keyboard systems. We'd also track system to system trading with notes, etc. Much debate on which missions to choose. Those were good times. We'd play for literally days, leaving only for food (we were old enough that we were independent enough to get away with this but young enough to have nothing else to do).

Re: Wing Commander III

#126

Post by Bluestein »

> John Rhys-Davies, who had played Indiana Jones’s sidekick Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films) ...

Blown away as I was by this ("What? Sallah and Gimli ... wow") ...

... it is even nicer/weirder to find him here.-

(He shows up in the most onexpected places ...)

  He was also, allegedly "taller than any of his fellow [LoTR] castmates"
(Then again, that whole franchise plays very well with heights and perspective, effects, etc ...)

See:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7kd163/til_t...

Re: Wing Commander III

#127

Post by Bluestein »

Bluestein wrote: post #126

> John Rhys-Davies, who had played Indiana Jones’s sidekick Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films) ... Blown away as I was by this ("What? Sallah and Gimli ... wow") ... ... it is even nicer/weirder to find him here.- (He shows up in the most onexpected…

> Tom Wilson, who had played the cretinous bully Biff Tannen in the three Back to the Future movies. (He replaced Hamill in the role of Maniac — a role not that far removed from his most famous one, come to think of it.) ...

And ... this.-

Speechless :)

Re: Wing Commander III

#128

Post by philsnow »

alyandon wrote: post #100
danielodievich wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Control II was THE defining game of my childhood. After completing the quest - with difficulty, since my command of English then was not what it is now - my brother and I spent countless hours in Melee mode. I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal to generate random ship combinatio…

I, too, wrote a program that would assemble random teams of ships so you could have ladder style type combat amongst friends! The driving factor is that some ships were virtually impossible to defeat in a skilled player's hand so we had to resort to random selection to be even remotely fair to everyone.

Freaking Utwig, man. I never had a really good answer to an Utwig with a skilled pilot. I would just throw ships at it in melee and expend way more than the "points" the Utwig ship is worth.

Re: Wing Commander III

#129

Post by philsnow »

swivelmaster wrote: post #72
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction Or maybe not. I'm yet to see any modern game that would even remotely approach the magnitude of SC2. So far, the closest competitor was the original Mass Effect game, itself clearly influenced by Star Control games, but even it failed to surpass it.

The problem here is that it is basically impossible for a modern game to achieve the magnitude of those old CRPGs if you just mean that in the sense of how big the universe is and how much story it contains, but with modern AAA standards. The man-hours required to create all that content would be ridiculous. That being said, if you count the totality of the Mass Effect trilogy, including all its DLC, I think you do g…

Star Control 2 shipped with a text file containing a story where Fred Ford and Paul Reiche disappeared for 9 months to hole up in a cabin in Alaska building out the game (including planet surface exploration and hundreds of pages of alien dialogue), in isolation from their publisher, who had to hire a private investigator to find them.

I have no idea if there's any truth to it, but it sounded like my idea of heaven for a long time. When I learned that they were still working together (Toys for Bob) many years later, I harbored a fantasy about going to work for them.

Re: Wing Commander III

#130

Post by Pxtl »

At some point I need to give Tie Fighter another try. The more I played of X-wing the less I liked it, and so when my friends were raving about Tie Fighter I was less than enthused.
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