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Wing Commander III

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Re: Wing Commander III

#151

Post by swivelmaster »

philsnow wrote: post #129
swivelmaster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

By pure coincidence, after playing Star Control 2 when I was about 8, my family moved to Novato, CA - home to Toys for Bob - when I was a bit older. I ended up getting a temp contract job there on the Madagascar game when I was 19. Paul and Fred were great to work with and as far as I know TfB is still a great place to work.

I doubt that Paul and Fred would have actually disappeared to write the game, but the story is 100% Paul's sense of humor.

Re: Wing Commander III

#152

Post by Talanes »

zelon88 wrote: post #45
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…

They have lost some of the magic I think. I remember as a child doing something similar with games. Back then I wasn't as skilled with games, and as a kid in the 90s it wasn't common to ask your mom or dad to "beat this level for you" because they were often worse than you. So I'd just play the same levels over and over again. It would take me years to eventually beat Wing Commander 2 and 3. But it wasn't repetitive…

The lack of save systems on most console games back then led to the same result. I spent hours exploring the early levels of Sonic and Sonic 3D, because I was only so good and could only get so far in one play session.

This somehow led me and my friends to discover a very unintended way to reach the level select in Sonic 3D: place the cartridge in as loose as you can, and then shove it down fully on the Traveler's Tale logo. Crashes 9 times out of 10, but always worked eventually.

Re: Wing Commander III

#153

Post by b0afc375b5 »

m12k wrote: post #58
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…

You should give Hades a try. It's built from the ground up to be replayed - in fact that's woven into the story in a very compelling way.

I've only recently had the financial capacity to purchase games. However, I find that I've lost my appetite in playing them. I wonder with so many games at my fingertips I'm unable to find the motivation to play them like I used to. I'm baffled that I'd rather read about bash scripting.

Thanks for mentioning Hades, based on the steam reviews and gameplay trailer, it looks promising.

Re: Wing Commander III

#154

Post by npsomaratna »

poisonborz wrote: post #42

I really miss actual movie cutscenes. Good graphics and cheaper mocap, and the general notion that we see the same characters led game studios believe they were a better option. I still think actual actors are hundred percent better at delivering a story. We don't need to uphold this belief that in-game scenes were "real", in the way that an actual movie cutscene would hurt the "magic" - it would actually make it muc…

Agreed. Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies did a fantastic job in WC III. Makes total sense to go with "real" cutscenes if you can get actors of that caliber on board.

Re: Wing Commander III

#155

Post by nix23 »

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

Just for your information there is Privateer Gemini Gold (a perfect remake) free to download:

http://privateer.sourceforge.net/

Based on the VegaStrike Engine (a really cool game by itself):

https://www.vega-strike.org/

Re: Wing Commander III

#157

Post by nope96 »

suicas wrote: post #65
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…

I was thinking along similar lines the other day. One of the things I realised was that imagination played a much bigger part in my enjoyment of games than it does now (as it did with playing with toy cars, lego etc. back at that age). I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who o…

> I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who occupied various buildings and their work days.

I remember Choplifter for the Sega Master System. Half the fun was the story in my head regarding the hostages, the behind the scenes operation of rescue attempt, etc. And the tragedy of it all going wrong when you'd crash with people on board...

Re: Wing Commander III

#158

Post by dividuum »

daniel_rh wrote: post #77
daniel_rh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was WC1 and I disassembled the code and added in a time-dependent limiter in dosbox. I also added multiplayer--it's not quite documented and ready for consumption, but if you're interested in how it works, the code is right now up as a patch to dosbox in the wcmulti branch https://github.com/danielrh/dosbox3d/tree/wcmulti most of the changes are in the src/cpu/core_Normal.cpp and src/cpu/wc_net.cpp

the way you run it is... run a retail copy of WC.EXE with the branch of dosbox3d then do wcnet startserver on one machine and wcnet connect then both machines just run wing commander as normal. and the first one can start the first mission and the other connects in and gets to play as spirit. You can play through the whole campaign this way

Now I almost regret never having really played WC back then. Suddenly having the ability to play a round or two in co-op sounds pretty amazing and it's the first time I've seen DOSBox used to augment a running program by peek- and poking around in its address space. I feel like this almost deserves its own post.

Re: Wing Commander III

#159

Post by mekster »

Pxtl wrote: post #130

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.

Games were good back then because only serious people were creating against a small market.

Nowadays, you create shit games and throw money on advertising, you get millions back...

Re: Wing Commander III

#160

Post by aidenn0 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #144
aidenn0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JEMM was used by Origin in pretty much all the games of that era, including Strike Commander, Privateer and WC Armada. However, as it goes with anything game related, there wasn't a single version of JEMM (just like there wasn't a single version of e.g. Sierra's SCI runtime), so they all had different features and quirks. I believe they mostly shared the same VCPI interface though, as MyJEMM[1] was reported to work w…

Wing Commander Armada was such good times. Buddy and I got half the keyboard and it was intense. Loved that game. Sad to only see one mention of it here, but at least I know it wasn’t a fever dream I had.

I got a game-port Y adapter so we could play with 2 joysticks. It was a blast.
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