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Wing Commander III

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Re: Wing Commander III

#61

Post by Firehawke »

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

I feel that Special Operations 2, with the Morningstar and the plot around Jazz, was probably the high point for WC2.

The ending was certainly cathartic after everything that had happened from the beginning until that point.

Oddly, I feel like Prophecy may have had the best fleshed-out flight system, but I wasn't a huge fan of the story. WC4 had the second best ending, though! Only behind SO2 in terms of relieving you of the frustration.

Privateer is definitely an interesting game, and it's really weird that they never really tried to follow that model again. Privateer 2 is best not brought up, and by the time any theoretical P3 could have been in development Origin was already dead.

Re: Wing Commander III

#62

Post by Firehawke »

aidenn0 wrote: post #53

The author points here (and I think in older posts) to the change of setting for the reason that Strike Commander failed. That's definitely part of it, but the game was essentially unplayable without QEMM386 (a commercial expanded-memory manager of the time). With the MS EMM386, you would regularly get crashes to the dos prompt (I think the typical error included a .OVL file in the output). Prior to the knowledge of…

It's amusing in a dark and cynical way that this was the second time they'd managed to screw up in regards to EMS/XMS.

JEMM, integrated into Ultima 7, made that particular title hellish to get working. You needed to find a mouse driver that was small enough to fit in conventional memory because JEMM wouldn't work with EMM386.SYS or QEMM386.SYS loaded and would not let you play if either were loaded or you didn't have enough conventional memory.

Their best efforts to make the game friendly to people who didn't have the technical knowledge to deal with EMS/XMS actually made it significantly harder for non-technical users AND technical users alike!

Re: Wing Commander III

#63

Post by m463 »

ekianjo wrote: post #24

I think the article kind of fails to capture how amazing the game was when it came out. Amazing, as in jaw-dropping. There was nothing like that at the time with the same kind of production values: it was certainly an expensive game to make, and it showed in every aspect of it. It was also the first game to use SVGA which was a revolution in itself in VGA land. I still have fond memories of WC3, and I don't think it…

It all kind of runs together, but I distinctly remember walking into NCA (I think?) in sunnyvale california in the mid 90's. They had shelves full of huge crt monitors, all of them with wing commander, with full motion video and sound piped through computer speakers.

Of course, that got you thinking about upgrading your system and making sure your system could pull it off.

Re: Wing Commander III

#64

Post by hinkley »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #35

This was also the perfect way to learn your dad knew who Ginger Lynn is but also to for him to learn how his then ~15 year old also knew.

One evening we are watching some reality show where they show up at your house and fix things, and this one episode they introduce the owner. Owner, nothing, that’s Ginger Lynn. They never did name her. The whole episode she was just “the owner”. I had nobody to share this realization with, as you can imagine.

So she is still out there somewhere, living her best life from the sounds of it.

Re: Wing Commander III

#65

Post by suicas »

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 occupied various buildings and their work days.

There was also a mountain range in one of the backgrounds on one level, and I recall spending time planning to explore it later, even pausing the game to draw a map of an imagined village there.

Of course now the vocabulary of games (and my understanding of them) has changed a lot, and it's far more obvious what the limits of a game and its interactive areas are - to me they're now throwaway pieces of entertainment, no longer worlds to inhabit and explore.

Re: Wing Commander III

#67

Post by Shivetya »

leoc wrote: post #51
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 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. Surely Elite and Elite II deserve more of the credit there?

Elite and Elite II, played them both, however I give the nod to the Wing Commander series and specifically Privateer for one simple reason. They did not making flying difficult let alone everyone's badge of honor in Elite in making your first successful docking with the rotating stations.

Still my favorite space game ever had to be Starflight though Starflight II came close. Not the same play style but early games on computers during that time were such a marvel for how much they did with so little

Re: Wing Commander III

#68

Post by ohyeshedid »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #54

It must be Origin retrogames quarter on HN! We had an article about what made Ultima IX (or was it VIII?) a complete disaster and it was exactly from this same web domain. I read the entirety of the WCIII article then ,since the ultima article linked to it. I think the article is well sourced, and for sure i learned a thing or two, but more importantly, it made me think on how valuable sources of information (domains…

Fwiw, if you click the domain listed to the right of the title; (filfre.net),[1] it will take you to a list of all submissions to HN under that domain.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=filfre.net

Re: Wing Commander III

#69

Post by xyzelement »

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.

Re: Wing Commander III

#70

Post by mycall »

aksss wrote: post #48
benlivengood wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As adults we've found higher payoff/cost activities and generally, at least for me, other people are more interesting than games. I never saw that coming. EDIT: not to say that I don't still enjoy games, but games have to either be really fascinating (factorio, surviving mars, city skylines) on a technical level, be social (multiplayer minecraft with my kids), or emotionally engaging (some RPGs, but usually only one…

I think that's really on point for me. I try to recreate the magic I used to feel playing Ultima, Wing Commander, Gunship, Commanche, Falcon 3, etc. with modern games and find I just don't... care. In terms of personal activities, I could be building something cool in the garage, or out on a real-life adventure, or playing with some electronics experiment, or doing research on a topic of special interest to me. Games…

Augmented Reality could bridge the gap. Take a look at Pokemon Go or Geocaching as examples.
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