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Wing Commander III

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Re: Wing Commander III

#131

Post by paulryanrogers »

cwillu wrote: post #124
paulryanrogers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

That is the magic number. My frustration was that enemies so often appeared in them, and could not be escaped. One bad asteroid collision and the weakest enemies were only a few lucky shots away from destroying my ship.

Re: Wing Commander III

#132

Post by Bluestein »

xyzelement wrote: post #69
allenu wrote: post #25

Wing Commander II is quite memorable to me because as a child I could never get it to work properly and it introduced me to the world of autoexec.bat and HIMEM.SYS. No matter what I did, I could never get both the in-game speech and the mouse working at the same time, it was either one or the other.

Yes! I often think about how my childhood fiddling with this kind of stuff gave me the confidence and background to become a "computer person" and how little of that exists today for kids - apps just work so there's no educational struggle to get them going.

> I often think about how my childhood fiddling with this kind of stuff gave me the confidence and background to become a "computer person"

So much of this.

Actually taught one an approach to problem solving in that domain, in a a way that few other things can ...

Often wonder if there's an equivalent activity nowadays that would amount to this for newer generations.

Re: Wing Commander III

#133

Post by cma »

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…

> >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

Don't forget his role in 'Sliders.'

Re: Wing Commander III

#134

Post by fullstop »

I have all of the CD-ROMs for this in my basement. I never played it because my PC at the time couldn't handle it and it took a good 10-15 minutes to get into space.

Re: Wing Commander III

#135

Post by prawn »

danielodievich wrote: post #96
afavour wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!). I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the spac…

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…

We used to play highest ranking vs lowest ranking ships a fair bit. If the Arilou didn't teleport into the planet more often than not, it would've been a lot more dangerous.

Re: Wing Commander III

#136

Post by prawn »

cgriswald wrote: post #6

I've lost something. When I was a kid, buying a new game was nearly impossible; If I was lucky, I'd get one for a birthday present or a Christmas gift. Occasionally a cool friend would lend me a copy of something. For a very short time, I lived about a mile away from a video game rental store and I'd sometimes be able to convince an adult I was responsible enough to return the game and spend my own money renting a ga…

Not sure if it's your style of game, but Red Dead Redemption can be a great use of idle time, just roaming around at golden hour admiring the natural environment. It's a separate idea to knocking off achievements or rushing on to the next game. More like sitting on the porch with a drink, for people without a porch or much of a view.

Re: Wing Commander III

#137

Post by Bluestein »

cma wrote: post #133
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…

> >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 Don't forget his role in 'Sliders.'

Oh, of course ...

  Great flick, by the way.-
  (At least I liked it ...)

Re: Wing Commander III

#138

Post by lovegoblin »

datameta wrote: post #23
tibbydudeza wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Chris Roberts is back with Star Citizen , 500 million dollars for an eternal beta of nostalgia.

I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series... It totally captivated me as a kid, but I sure as heck didn't know who was responsible for its creation. It just sort of existed as a different realm without much thought of the behind-the-scenes

> I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series

His name was on the cover of the box haha.

But yeah him being the showrunner was one of the primary reasons the original Star Citizen scam^W kickstarter went so well. The space sim genre/community was so dead back then that at that point we would've thrown money at anything.

Re: Wing Commander III

#139

Post by bobbyi_settv »

Bluestein wrote: post #127
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 :)

Tom Wilson later gained some internet fame for this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y

Re: Wing Commander III

#140

Post by exporectomy »

Just a personal story - I had an regret filled experience with this game that was my own fault. Just bought my first computer and first real computer game WC III. Exceeded all the recommended specs on the box but it ran at a very low framerate all jerky and unplayable. So slow you couldn't avoid getting killed without turning the cheats on. Hated it. Even worse, I had no idea who Mark Hamill was! It was totally wasted on me. I ended up selling it to a friend but later discovered why it was slow. The stupid turbo button on the computer acted backwards! Either push it in or turn the LED on to make it run in slow mode. For several months I'd been carefully and mistakenly keeping turbo turned off thinking that made it go faster and had never used such a fast computer so I thought that was just normal.
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