Wing Commander - A Retrospective Analysis
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- Опубликовано: 11 июл 2024
- A longform review/analysis of Wing Commander, one of the original space sims.
Links
Patreon - / spacecadetrewind
Ko-fi - ko-fi.com/spacecadetrewind
Wing Commander PC Gamer Coverdisk release (This is the full game, available legally for free): www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/2000_P...
wcdx (Mod that fixes the game up for modern computers): github.com/Bekenn/wcdx
Wing Commander - The Visual Novel (Sega CD Version): • Wing Commander: The Vi...
reWASD control schemes
Trigger: www.rewasd.com/community/conf...
Face: www.rewasd.com/community/conf...
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:02:22 History & Synopsis
0:04:28 First Impressions
0:07:18 Flight Controls & Navigation
0:12:07 Hornet & Combat
0:18:44 Asteroid Fields & Communications
0:22:21 Mission Design
0:28:04 Mission Structure
0:31:03 Scimitar & Minefields
0:34:51 Wingmen
0:39:31 Capital Ships
0:45:34 AI & Aces
0:48:05 Raptor, Rapier & Fragility
0:56:21 Situational Awareness
1:00:42 Simulation Elements
1:04:09 High Level Gameplay
1:07:53 Music
1:11:46 Story
1:17:03 Secret Missions
1:23:09 Secret Missions 2
1:32:52 Ports & Versions - DOS Version
1:36:55 SNES Version
1:40:03 Sega CD Version
1:43:32 Super Wing Commander
1:47:10 The Kilrathi Saga
1:50:30 Conclusion
1:53:28 Final Word
Credits
Squakenet
Space Rogue gameplay - • Space Rogue gameplay (...
Elite gameplay - • Elite gameplay (PC Gam...
Mobygames
Wing Commander DOS boxart
Retro Game Geeks
Wing Commander Amiga boxart - / 1148538904276066305
Most2Seconds
Starfox 64 clip - • Cocky little freaks!
Chris Roberts photo
By Official GDC - Flickr: GDC 2012 RSI Press_Wednesday-4038, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
New Challenger!
Metal Gear Solid clip - • Evolution of "It's Not...
Zach C
Resident Evil 4 clip - • No thanks, BRO!
SonataFanatica
Secret Missions 2 story footage - • Wing Commander: The Vi...
Sega CD story footage - • Wing Commander: The Vi...
GameOverContinue
Indigo Prophecy clip - • Game Over: Indigo Prop...
Premswaroop Kasukurthi
Like/Subscribe Animation - pixabay.com/users/premswaroop...
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Conthrax
Special Thanks to: Haidaraaaaa, Shady3011, Haxmega 
Игры
Chris Roberts saw the game Battlehawks 1942, that used sprite-based WWII aircraft and thought, "Lets do that in space!"
I was there. And he did.
We knew we had something special when playtesters were literally falling out of their chairs dodging enemy fighters. I'd be working on the art and hear a thump from the playtesting room. It was wild.
I think the game was designed on 16 megahertz machines, so that was the intended sweet-spot in frame rate.
The wing fragment that emerges from explosions was animated from a model I built from card-stock and plastic swizzle sticks, and hung from a string.
The scramble animation was rotoscoped from a guy on a treadmill!
I designed and fought for the radar screen they used. That was my one significant contribution besides the art.
The art was done with DeluxePaint II, with Autodesk Animator assisting with palette construction. (You can thank the DPII gradient tool for the atmospheric look of the hanger scenes.)
The amazing Glen Johnson did the faces and characters. I did the cockpits, cutscenes, and space debris and backgrounds. Also fonts and box cover.
Some of the best work I did at Origin!
Thanks for sharing this! I’m 38 and played this game a lot as a kid and I was so mind blown! Very fond memories of an amazing game!
Lol I was born in ‘77. I was the 3rd kid on my block with a x486/25sux and the game ran WAY faster than on a 386dx16, so I didn’t care that I had a cheap version of the 486. Wing Commander 2 ran perfect on it, too. This game completely changed everything. The best thing we had were Sierra games up to that point. I will admit that once Xwing came out I almost forgot about this game since X-wing was absolutely superior. Once I played Xwing it was easy to see that Wing Commander wasn’t 3D at all.
It would be rather entitled of me to expect to hear more about this behind-the-scenes stuff, but the interviewer in me wants to ask more questions the more I get answers :) Like those before me have said, thanks for sharing this.
I agree that this was great work in the graphics department and must commend your contribution; Wing Commander was a visual watershed moment for the PC and the look of the game stays with me decades later.
@@quarkbent9165 No problem, those were definitely the highlights of WC development for me. 🙂
In some of the later games they tried for 3D rendered cockpits and backgrounds, but they just didn't have the color palettes for that, and it ended up really ugly.
I had great fun doing the midgame cutscenes for the special missions, it allowed me to fake a lot of multiplane camera effects. 😉
@@browningcq Oh, I agree! Full 3D is vastly superior! 😃 I played the hell out of Xwing!
I was in Customer Service & QA at Origin starting in 91. One of the most common customer questions about the start of Wing Commander was how to not die in the arcade sim just after starting. I always explained to them it was expected and it was just there to capture your callsign.
Andrew! 👍
I completed WC4 by myself in 1997 on Normal, I was 7 and wrote to you guys. Ya'll sent me a few patches and a t-shirt and a letter from CR, don't know/doubt if the letter was authentic, but it made a lifelong fan.
I haven't played this game in over 30 years and when the second enemy ship came on screen I thought to myself "Hey that's a Salthi". Made me laugh thinking about how embedded this game is in my memories. Great nostalgic video, I'm really hoping you keep this channel going.
for me, it was the profile of the rapier. man that was satisfying to land/take off.
@@jamesrivettcarnac Hell, yeah, the very first time you got to fly a Rapier was awesome. The Scimitar before it was junk compared to the Rapier.
Me too. God, I absolutely loved these games. So amazing, and absolutely etched indelibly in my brain.
Can always identify a Dralthi too lol
This game had a profound impact on me and anyone who played it back in early 90s. It was ground breaking and astonishing this was possible in 1990s!
The Strategy Guide for Wing Commander 2 actually broke down how the AI worked in both games and it's kind of neat. There's an environmental checklist of conditions, and each condition has a percentage chance of provoking a reaction. Which defines a lot of enemy AI, except this went deeper than "Where is the player, where am I, what can I shoot with?" For example it'd check to see how damaged you were then compare it to it's relative damage to determine how aggressive it gets, and if it thinks it has the upper hand, there would be a chance of firing guns until dry or a smaller chance of firing a missile, etc. It was very simple in a way, but most AI designers to this day don't have their AI checking so many relative conditions.
I had all those books and borrowed them to someone 😫
Those were the days when strategy guides were substantial.
Fun fact - the allied fighter plane from Ww1 called the Sopwith Camel could famously out turn anything to the right. It was a side effect of having an extremely powerful engine with high torque. The weakness was turning left, where it was slow and tended to climb instead.
3 rights make a left.
@@terrylandess6072 and that's how they were doing that (it was better).
Camel's engine was a rotary one. This means whole engine was rotating, not only propeler. That's what effected tuning (engine made a lot of Camel's mass).
yeah, on those old wooden planes, I can imagine.
@@elasmojones imagine they used almost as much lubricants as fuel each flight.
I loved Wing Commander back in the day. It was way more accessible than any of the other flight sims I tried, almost like an arcade game. I still really like the character animations and the pixel art. That stuff is timeless to me. The Super Wing Commander remake looks horrific.
Agreed, although while Super Wing Commander is definitely a downgrade, I think I'd be willing to at least give it a chance if I could get it working properly.
@@spacecadetrewind If you're emulating you probably need the 3DO BIOS to run it. I've never tried emulating the 3DO so I don't know how much of a headache it is.
it never ran properly on the Goldstar 3do, u need a Panasonic. Guess that goes for the bios file as well
I came here expecting a rant, and i found a documentary. Great job. History of space sims are in short supply. The greatest games I have ever played are just underdogs in gaming history. Most of "gaming history" videos are about Mario and FPS. This video is refreshing.
As someone who was around at the time and really in to games like this (I was 14 in 1990), what I find most fascinating about these kinds of videos is the perspective of people who came later and are trying to understand how this thing fits into the history of gaming in general.
I think you did a great job there. It really was revolutionary at the time. There are games that came earlier, but they’re mostly different takes on the Star Raiders formula. Wing Commander added so many new features and gameplay items that it felt very futuristic in 1990. The sequel did even more to further that sense of development.
It was a great time to be a gamer and into “space sims.” It was sad watching the genre strangle itself, but it took a while and we got a lot of great games out of the genre before that happened.
I thought this was a wonderful retrospective. Excellent work all around.
As a guy who played Wing Commander during it's heyday I'm glad to see such a comprehensive video.
Looking forward to when you get to Privateer.
25:00 Homeworld proved that space CAN have topography, but you have to think outside the box to do it. And once you open up that possibility you get all kinds of new gameplay styles and that can also directly affect the types of stories you tell in a game. Its a nice feature, but it would be many years before developers figured it out.
The fundamental problem is that you have to have the right people, who are also motivated at tackling this problem, to realize this. Most game designers seem to be big picture dreamers and try to make these big grandiose designs and overshoot in scope, rather than solve the more relatively mundane task of trying to use a small number of elements to solve a problem like giving space topography or coming up with truly interesting mission objectives other than "escort" or "destroy."
For the topography bit, one of the things no one seems to ever want to do is include super structures or moons, and only half the time do they realize that from a fighter's standpoint can capital ships themselves be used to create topography, I've noticed. At best you're usually getting an asteroid field, or maybe a nebula, but you could easily start considering LaGrange point installations or smaller moons into space battle scenarios, as well as use asteroid belts in far more interesting ways by having much larger variations in size of the asteroids themselves. Not to mention that there's a general logical problem of space combat in that, it would never actually happen in "open" space anyway because of the vastness of distances. The only logical places combat in space would ever occur in would be locations that have some kind of obvious significance where people have a reason to gather, and almost all of those are going to be nearby resources and/or structures, and thus, nearby something large of note to give space a sense of orientation.
From an artistic viewpoint I found the skyboxes of Homeworld to be stunningly beautiful. It's a shame I can't play RTS games for shit!
Great video, man! Can't wait for the WC2 one.
Wing Commander was absolutely incredible back then. It might be hard for some to put yourself into that time, but when WC came out it really was like watching a movie. Also, those moments between the missions, where you basically could just "roam" the Ship (bunks, bar, training simulation, etc.) and talk to people was really unique. Made it all feel more cinematic and / or adventurous. At least to me.
Thanks! I'm currently working on a video for X-Wing, but if I keep going after that, the next one will definitely be WC2.
WC2 was definitely better, he missed the game fixes!
@@spacecadetrewind If you've not played 2 yet, I can't wait. I made a post earlier up but basically about 80% of your gameplay complaints about Wing Commander 1 are actually completely resolved in Wing Commander 2 to a shocking degree.
I kind of hope you do Privateer after that before going onto 3 though. That might be the most fanatically loved game in the entire franchise.
I loved the whole series. Though Privateer was my jam
@@spacecadetrewind Thanks for this video! A future video about Wing Commander II would be appreciated also. I remember the excitement of getting Wing Commander II with the extra voice disks and playing it on my family's 486DX-33 way back in the day, and I remember really enjoying the Special Operations expansions as well.
Oh man! The memories of all those hours I played Wing Commander back in the day on my 386...
I love how in the 2nd game, they took the Hornet and Schimitar and mashed them into the same ship, the Ferret. Which is, unironically, an awesomely fun fighter to fly in WC.
Super Ferret is the best Wing Commander ship.
I remember that each of your wingmen also had a "pain tolerance" where they would allow only x number of friendly fire incidents, and finally treat you like enemy #1. Maniac was the worst.
And if you didn't destroy the enemy craft quick enough, he would do it...
Did all-nighters playing the game(s).
Hated the movie though
Really? I remember I could fire and almost destroy the Tiger's Claw and no one would fire at me
Cap ships were more forgiving.
@@ovalteen4404 nope. You can kill all of your wingmen if you want, with no consequences and they'll never fire back. Used to do it all the time on the last mission of a system
@@michaelgillman2505You're lucky then. Maniac would often annoy me by getting in the way and then getting mad when he got shot. Of course if you're targeting them directly, you can probably take them out before they decide to retaliate.
I played “hells kitchen” back in the day, so I guess I was on the bad pilot path. So many neat tricks that were explained, like the ejection trick and the lone remaining fighter trick. It’s everything I wanted to know about WC in 1990. Thank you for this incredible video retrospective. The obvious follow up suggestion: wing commander 2!
I loved playing this game when it came out. It was mindblowingly ahead of what came before it. Great to see younger generations find value in these old classics.
7:15 I have to tell you, that feeling I get from the alert sequence? Gives me shivers every time. I wish it would be properly remade or homaged by someone. Between it and the wonderful simplicity of "Pacific Theater WWII in Space" vibe, WC1 will always be my favorite. Am I the only one who feels this way?
Well, that's what Star Citizen is supposed to be. Chris Roberts raised a large pile of money that he weedled into an enormous pile of money to make a modern Wing Commander. Except on the way to doing that, he got sidetracked building a $tudio and hiring expen$ive AAA actors for voice work that he could pretend were friends of his. And he paid them to perform the mocap as well, rather than a cheaper team of normies. AFAIAC, Star Citizen is just a newer version of Elite: Dangerous that was designed to have space legs from the beginning, with ridiculously detailed models and netcode that somehow performs worse than E:D. The missions are just as sterile and joyless after a short period of time with lousy rewards. My characterization of the gameplay is a few months out of date. Maybe they magically fixed all the flaws and it's the holy grail of space sims now. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
@@onecalledchuck1664 Sadface
I think that sequence was paying homage to something else itself, but I don't remember what...
The capital ship battles in Wing Commander 2 were far superior. They were a welcoming and challenging change. Capital ships in the second game had something called phase shielding (I think). And you couldn't destroy them with guns at all. You either had to fly and escort bombers or fly a bomber yourself to take them out. The bombers were slow clunky ships with tons of armor and shields. But the big advantage they had was they carried torpedoes. These things would do significant damage to cap ships, but some took several. The very challenging aspect was that the torpedoes needed something called "phase lock" (at least that's how I remember it). You basically had to sight a cap ship for several seconds, maybe even 10, for the torpedoes to figure out the shielding phase and be able to penetrate them. So the challenge of having to be a sitting duck while fighters and flak hammer on you, or break the lock and give your shields time to recharge and try the lock again. Some missions there is a time limit to take out the cap ship, so you don't always have the luxury of taking out the fighter cover before making a torpedo run. Also the bombers were horrible at dogfighting. I found this change added some decent mission variety and varied the challenge and strategy. Look forward to see you review that game.
Space Rogue had some great physics for the time. Being able to slingshot gravity wells and flip your ship around without losing momentum in the direction you last thrusted? Magnificent
I loved how operatic the game is and how lived in the world was. It didn't need the bar area at all to be a functional game. But chatting with the bartender and your wingmeen in between missions adds so much to playing/revisiting the game.
Seems like squadron 42 will have the same
I am impressed to see this production quality on a channel with only 86 subscribers. I enjoyed the retrospect.
Thanks! Hopefully it's just humble beginnings, heh.
Almost 10 times that now.
Happy to say that I am one of the first 1,000 subscribers
I was going to say the same thing but you said it so well so thanks for the comment
Well after 6 days it's 5.5 times subscribers. Well deserved. For my taste, it's to long though... one probably could finish the game in this videos runtime ;)
StarLancer is actually pretty good at the whole "taking on Capital Ships" aspect of it tbh, usually they'll have you take out smaller components and then have either an allied capital ship or allied torpedo bombers deal the finishing blow. Other times the Ship to Ship combat will be happening as a backdrop (right in the middle) of you taking out their fighters, it's pretty cool tbh
They tried to make the capital ships more dangerous in the later games. Wing Commander 2 introduced Phase Shields that required you to use torpedoes in order to damage them at all. Wing Commander 3 and 4 just made them huge in comparison to fighter craft. In Prophecy you couldn't even destroy a capital ship. You had to target the Bridge and Engine subsystems and destroy them to render the capital ship helpless.
It was my favorite game at the time. Great video. Brought back good memories. I wish they would make a modern version.
Thanks! And hey, you never know. Given enough time, it seems like just about everything comes back around again.
Same here.
Maybe, someday, Star Citizen will be released. . . maybe.
@@RenlangRen I have a take that Star Citizen _is_ released... what we see now _is the game_, and it's not going to be more than what it is now.. new things will be implemented but it'll always be incomplete, bugs, and fundraising until eventually there's not enough new sales ("donations") to sustain development and it'll be cancelled. I think Chris Roberts is aware of this.. that's why they don't talk about release dates anymore..
@@adfaklsdjf I am afraid your take will prove correct.
Love your dry humor and editing.
Always wanted Space Sims to be covered this good.
Subbed!
What an awesome job, you've got a lot of talent. Thank you for walking me through this classic
Wing Commander was, and still is, my favorite game of all time. I remember being at a friend's dorm, slightly drunk, and seeing him fire up his brand new 386DX in a darkened room, and launching the game. To this day it's the closest I've come to a religious experience. The next day I plunked down all of my savings to buy my own 386 with a VGA monitor and a Gravis joystick, just so I could play this game. The owner of the computer store said I wasn't the first one to come in with exactly the same story.
I played that game so much that I started to dream about it. I would be bobbing and weaving and dodging deadly Gratha shots as soon as I closed my eyes. While today the story seems a little thin, what I remember most is that the fact that I could interact with my wingmates both in the bar AND in space. It made it feel like they were real people. But the gameplay itself was what kept me hooked. I've been waiting for thirty years for someone to explain why, and you did so beautifully. Thank you for that.
To this day, I feel like no other game has quite replicated the experience of being able to just jump into space combat, have a fun and varied and challenging experience, and then quickly move on to the next mission. Even later Wing Commander games lost some of the magic of the original--- for example, we never saw "aces" again after WC2 (or maybe WC3, because you finally fight Thrakhath, which was great). But also, we never saw enemy ships disengage and run away when they were nearly dead, IN ANY GAME SINCE. Literally every space shooter, including later Wing Commander games, just has enemies blindly keep flying around until they get destroyed. I feel like this makes the combat lose a lot of immersion, since you never have to make a decision like "will I go after that damaged ace, and get the glory, or stick around to save the transport?" That, and a bunch of other little details that are long forgotten (but detailed in your amazing video) seemed to just disappear, and then the entire space sim genre disappeared as well. It's a shame, because I feel like Wing Commander should have been just the start, not the peak, of the space sim gameplay experience.
Anyway, thank you again for your video. I've subscribed and I'll definitely watch anything else you make.
I really enjoyed your review/recap of this gem. Realy nostalgic for me as I was enthralled with it and had to complete each and every WC version that came along. Thank you for being so thorough and your words are honest and true to my feelings as well. Thanks man. And thanks for the tip on which version would be best to try today.
Great video. This entire series has a special place in my heart as my father and I played the ever living hell out of the original WC. Also, the original Privateer is still on my top 5 all time favorite games. While I don't agree with some takes you have on the game, I still thoroughly enjoyed this video. As a person who played this when it came out, I can tell you first hand, it blew my effing mind.
25:24 - Escort missions... Funny thing about these, in most games they are pure cancer, however in this game they are often very memorable. There are two missions that are literally burnt into my memory when I think of WC -- any WC game. First being, the escort the Drayman carrying the Watson's Disease vaccine that you need to protect it from a wing of Jalthi. The second being, bring the Ralari-Class destroyer home, and fend off a wing of Gothra. These two mission were the some of the most difficult missions in WC + SM1&2 (And yes, I killed the entire Kilrathi Fleet you're not supposed to engage while in the Hornet in SM2).
While there are a few other missions that stick out, nothing compared to how god damn hard these two were, nor compared to the exhilaration I got when I finally beat them both for the first time. Also, you can 100% complete the Ralari mission and bring it home. The #1 tip for this mission is to not engage autopilot before the nav point with the Ralari, this will allow you to get a jump on the wing of Gothra. So all that said, I think they nailed it with the escort missions in WC1.
47:52 - Any ace you didn't kill in the campaign will return in either final mission in Venice or Hell's Kitchen, they appear with the appropriate wing of fighters in these missions, e.g. Khajja will spawn with the Krant wing. So you could essentially have a "boss-rush" if you really wanted to. A side note, by clearing all five waves of fighters in the Starbase mission is how you get the Pewter Planet medal. It just doesn't carry over to SM1 since you can't actually save after the final mission...
If you made it to the end of this post, congratulations. Again, great video! I would love to see more deep dives on other entries in this series.
Thanks! The aces returning for the final mission is an extremely cool detail that I completely missed because the Kilrathi names don't stick in my mind and I assumed the one guy I ran into was new. Guess I'm going to need a corrections segment in my next video.
@@spacecadetrewind Gotta agree with Tirpitz that the escort missions were hard, but doable. Man, did I struggle to get those Drayman across. But the trick I used for the Ralari was not the autopilot one - was spamming insults like an angry sailor to get tevery furball on my tail. It works.
(also, I hope you realize that talking about "how good (you are) at Wing Commander" while making a point of how you were not able to complete Secret Missions 2 is bound to get at least a chuckle from those of us who racked 100% kills in the game back in the 90s. ;-) Fortunately, we played in a time before toxic players would spam "git gud", so _that_ won't happen here)
@Tirpiz believe it or not, I didn't knew the aces returned. DIsadvantage of not letting any of them alive. I deliberately failed missions in playthroughs to get to play all series, but never thought of letting aces live. Unexpected (and hilarious) that I get to learn news hings now about the game that I played the most in the 90s. Thank you for that info, mate. Time to fish my old 386 (still with the original game) back from storage...
I am watching the 1970s Battlestar Galatica TV show and I can see how Wing Commander is directly influenced by that. It is a heartwarming feeling.
60 year old gamer here. Absolutely loved this review. I still remember playing it on an old XT computer getting 1 fps at times.
Tried it years later on a 386 and it was too fast to play LoL.
I got up and went over to my game book shelf and found the old boxes of WC II and WC III, not sure where my WC 1 box is. Also found my Tie Fighter retail box.
Such nostalgia. Thx so much for this video. You had me laughing many times. You are very talented.
I enjoyed the video a lot, thank you for the time and effort you put into making it. I would love to see more content like this. I really enjoy listening to people talk about old games like these. 😊
This is great stuff, man. I grew up playing (and loving) the Wing Commander series, so this was a nice walk down memory lane. Can't wait for you to get to the Mark Hamill era!
Amazing work on this video. Lots of memories.
Thanks!
Great work, and thanks for the effort. I really enjoyed the video, it brought back some great memories from my early gaming days. Keep it up, looking forward to the next video.
Enjoyed the video, thanks for making it. Grew up with these series, the nostalgia is still there!
Thanks for all the effort you put into this. I grew up playing Wing Commander III, and man that story really gripped me. It's interesting to see where it came from. The more I learn about games of the late 80s/early 90s (that i didn't learn experientially) the more I am impressed with the cleverness and depth put into so many of them.
This was my absolute favorite game on the SNES. It starts out pretty easy but by mid-campaign the tone of the game really starts putting the screws to you if your missions aren't going well, and the music and atmosphere, especially when fighting enemy aces, makes your hair stand up.
Is it the same campaign as the PC version.
@@Tony_Cardoza It is, IIRC. Everything is basically the same.
For me though, the issue in the SNES version is that the Scimitar is just too slow, and trying to fly it with a gamepad is incredibly difficult, so those missions become disproportionately difficult compared to on PC.
I played it there as well. I would also sometimes get lost and unable to get back to the mothership, had to reload old saves
@@Tony_CardozaUnfortunately, they omitted the cutscenes. I never got to enjoy them as a kid, though I loved the game and watching my dad play it!
Played these as a kid. Remember it running slow on our 286 or 386. When we upgraded to a 486 though these games screamed. Had a sweet joystick as well to play them with. So addictive. Loved when they came out with the privateer.
Really looking forward to future content. This was amazing, subscribed
The whole thing about Capital Ships reminds me of how Battlefleet Gothic points out that you really need to wager out even the different types of capital ships and not attempt to destroy a cruiser with a destroyer or a battleship with even the heaviest cruiser at least one-on-one. Fighters are more like buzzing bees or attacking by swarm rather than a single one making much difference. One of the closest examples to doing fighter participation on capital ship possibly right (and already likely mentioned more than once) is with the Sathanas from Freespace 2 where you just take out its turrets and mainguns while the equivalent sized Colossus is dueling against it.
Yeah, there's plenty of ways a fighter can participate without single-handedly taking them down with lasers.
@@spacecadetrewind I think it was a good decision in WC2 that you need dedicated torpedoes - and a bomber able to carry them - to breach a cap ship's shields.
Unless you have a cap ship of your own on your side, which coincidentally makes for a fun mission variant, too. It's the evolution of an escort mission where the escortee can take care of themselves and reward you with a satisfying fireworks display.
I still prefer being able to be like a painfully stinging bee from Star Wars: TIE Fighter, what with turret interception and occasionally overpowered ion cannons. Goodbye, perceived annoyances called Nebulon-B Frigates!
Star Raiders on the old Atari is my first Star-Sim, but I still have such fond memories of Wing Commander. I really hope my children, or maybe grandchildren will be able to fly the freelancer I purchased a decade ago. The dream of Star Citizen is real.
The sun will burn out before that scam game ever arrives.
That was my first thought, what about Star Raiders. That was a game ahead of its time.
@@scottneil1187 It may never get out of alpha, but it's still a fully playable game. ....when it runs, anyway.
I remember Star Raiders on an Atari 400, was absolutely astounded! Years later, I had my own PC, and was playing Starflight and Space Rogue.
I just found this channel, and this video, and it was marvelous. I always knew wing commander by name, as a seasoned space sim enjoyed, however, I never quite "got it" when I tried playing it. Your analysis makes approaching it much easier, placing it in the timeframe of history that is according to itself.
It feels kinda funny that in a war against literal bipedal tigers in space, that your main base in the first game is called the Tiger's Claw.
A fantastic vide about one of my favourite games of all time and one that defined my early childhood. I love the WC series and it even defined my family's PC purchases! Needed to upgrade the damn machine to even play the next games in the franchise 🤣
I wish you had millions of views and subs. I really hope you would do these kinds of videos on WC2, WC3, WC4 and WC5.
As a fan of the old X-Wing games who's never played any Wing Commander, this was a really interesting look at the game that really got the space dogfight ball rolling. I may have to try to get wcdx up and running one of these days. Even if I will miss my power management controls.
I jumped from playing Star Raiders straight to Wing Commander Privateer in 1993, borrowing our copy from a friend. It really blew me away, and still sort of does because it nailed the atmosphere so precisely, expanding on all the little details that were in Wing Commander and giving you some trading and exploration gameplay with a MacGuffin plot. You never saw a capital ship so there was no experiencing the glitchy mess that is the cap ships in this engine. The earlier WC games, which I got around to years after, didn't engage me quite as much, but are definitely landmarks.
I think that what actually changed with space sims has nothing to do with the technologies or game mechanics: it's that the narrative around space changed. Wing Commander wasn't the start, it was the anomaly, along with the Star Wars sims. The way in which Wing Commander engaged with space was to copy old space opera tropes, seat them in the Star Raiders arcade-combat formula, add a bit of Top Gun banter, and be the first to make a big, shiny game production out of all of it. The games before and after the brief Wing Commander/Star Wars era were always more...simmy. They made the aesthetic more desolate, clinical or alien, complicated the flight model and so on. Even Star Raiders itself, all the way back in 1979, borrowed a whole strategy component from the mainframe "Star Trek" game that made it a little deeper than Wing Commander. And the 90's Elite sequels, which were actually pretty graphically impressive(even when I played them many, many years later), just bogged you down with fuel calculations and time compression options and all of those gory details of running a trading business in space. But you could actually enter the atmosphere of a planet, land, and see buildings! Pretty cool stuff! But not a lot going on in terms of human elements.
Wing Commander is also the subject of an old game design drama: Chris Crawford saw it as the turning point the industry made to embrace Hollywood thrill rides, and wrote and spoke about this. He wanted games - a concept which he also wanted to move beyond in favor of "interactive narrative" - to be crunchy, rationalist simulations with deterministic outcomes and minimal scripting, and if you look at any of his output, you can see that in just about every case, he made an incomprehensible game for aliens, albeit one that nonetheless inspired critical attention at the time and influenced later, similar experiments like the oft-memed "Facade" (aka Trip and Grace kick you out simulator). I'm pretty sure all the effort and attention in that space has moved towards LLM AI now. Meanwhile games have mostly spent the years refining the essentials of narrative: there aren't many brilliant never-seen-before gimmicks left to sell a product with, and it's settled down into genres that are relatively more or relatively less heavy on story.
This was great, awesome job! Im sure it took a lot of work, but Im looking forward to the next one!
I thoroughly enjoyed watching this video and think your analysis is spot on. I can’t believe I played this game 33 years ago and remember the strife I gave my dad trying to get the extended memory to work so that I could see all the extras such as your hand moving the controls!
The escort missions were the worst!
I have just finished playing WC2 again and in my opinion WC1 is much better due to: the less scripted nature; having wingmen who could die which meant the war felt more realistic and the opportunity to earn medals and promotions for your efforts. I come back to these games every few years and thoroughly enjoyed your video. The music is so nostalgic!
Thanks! I prefer WC2 mostly because of what felt like much better difficulty balance to me, but I can see the appeal of having some agency over how the war goes.
I also prefer WC1 to WC2! I didn't like the Confed ships as much in 2 (both fighters and the carriers) and hated the pointless renames of the Kilrathi ones. Thankfully, the good old Dralthi was back for WC3!
I played this a lot when I was a kid. I figured out that you could do the nav points in any order you wanted to so I would avoid the asteroid and mine fields that way.
Yeah, can't stand those. Unfortunately a few navs were in the bloody middle of asteroid fields😢.
Man, Tie Fighter was so awesome, it was my absolute favorite space sim ever but I have fond memories of Wing Commander, it was fun! Another good one was Colony Wars.
I've always had a special place in my heart for Wing Commander 1 & 2 . Played them both around time of original release on a 386, then a 486 pc. Wing Commander had 3, 3.5 inch floppy discs to install, then you had to wait for it to unpack everything. Had to make a boot disk with manual memory management and sound card settings for DOS. You could use a multi-button joystick, mouse, and or keyboard to control the ships. I don't remember having too many of the frame rate or stuttering issues. Replayed countless times. I remember thinking I was pretty good. lol
My nostalgia. Replayed it three times. On occasionally, trying to land on TigerClaw, aiming at its nose, TigerClaw swat me like a fly, exploding, funeral, and mission red. 😅 One time, my comm system was damaged. Had to wait for auto repair. Before getting TigerClaw's permission to land. Another fond memory is improving odd by aggressively afterburner to nearest enemy, and launching dumb missile.
One strategy for damaged comms that I figured out was to mash the button. If you just keep trying eventually it'll work, even if the system isn't fully repaired.
You could also trick some escort missions by flying ahead without the autopilot and pre-cleaning the flight path :)
I had a copy of this for my Amiga 500 plus back in the day, great game for it's time
I had a plus as well!, hated it until I changed the kickstart ROM.
Cannot believe the fluidity of those animations! Congrats, you're getting close to your first 1K.
That was beautiful! As an 80s Boomer its really fun to hear the impression from a youngster about WC. I never played the first, but II, III, IV and Armada, that was my whole world until EVE came along :-)
Great to know that so much of the Gameplay still holds up.
I watched this during a series of sessions over my breakfasts, and yes, I was Informed and entertained! Thanks for that
I own every WC game they put out. 1, 2 with speech pack (the secret missions/spec ops for both, of course!), Academy, Armada (loved this one!), 3, 4, Prophecy, Privateer (with Righteous Fire and speech), Privateer 2 (loved this one too - learned that Clive Owen was a thing from Priv 2...) Point being, WC is why I am a computer nerd today. My first big boy PC was simply so I could play WC. I somehow coaxed my folks into buying a 486 DX 50 (not DX2) with a huge 8 MB of ram, spent my own money for a second hard drive JUST FOR MY WC games, and played the hell out of them.
This really is an excellent insight into this game. It must have taken you absolutely ages to pull off! You've done a really good, thorough, entertaining and subtly very funny video here. I hope you keep making videos like this!
When I was a kid I spent countless hours playing Wing Commander games on my SNES and since then all I’ve really wanted were more Wing Commander games. Freelancer actually managed to scratch that itch even though it felt unfinished with the last part if the game feeling tacked on just to push it out the door. Had Roberts just dialed back the ambition a bit Freelancer could have been incredible. I felt a glimmer of hope when Roberts declared that he was going to make a new “Wing Commander” game, but we all see how that’s panned out. At this point I’m convinced that it’s never going to happen and I should just feel fortunate that we at least have Everspace.
I remember pouring over the blueprints for each of your four ships that came in the box with the game as a kid. I might've spent more time looking at those blueprints than I did actually flying the ships. They included them as piracy protection, but for some reason pouring over fake schematics of fictional machines was one of my favorite things to do as a little boy. As you can imagine, I was very fun at parties.
Great retrospective, I played the crap out of the SNES version as a kid and still am nostalgic for it. Honestly never played the 'real' version. Was a lot of fun to hear someone talk about one of my favorite games ever in such detail.
I remember playing the SNES version a long time ago. Good times.
Lookin forward to the next video.
I'll be here for future videos. Hope you'll get to do the whole series judgement like you did with the first game. Great content!
I'm assuming you decided not to continue your work, but this video was just served to me and I loved it. My first experience with WC was the SNES port and I spent hours and hours playing it. Thanks for taking me back. Maybe someday I'll come back and find a video on the sequel 😁
Oh man... I sunk countless hours into this, the sequel, and the Secret Missions as a kid. My playtime was probably only eventually beaten out by Doom.
Thanks for this video dude!
Edit after watching more of the video: When you said "if you're extremely good at Wing Commander you just might pull it off!" and then play cutscenes I definitely saw when I was a little one. I played it *a lot.*
Same, those truly were halycon days.
Thanks for the video, and for highlighting a classic. One quick note. Wing Commander 2 leans into what worked, while giving the pilots more involvement in the story, and requiring bomber-like heavy fighters armed with torpedoes to take out capital ships, after a long lock-on sequence that's ostensibly to decode the enemy shield patterns and program these very finite stand-off weapons to slip past them. For the days of Adlib and Soundblaster, it also had some great music.
Unfortunately, Wing Commander 3 & 4 were products of the early 3D era, and as such, their graphics haven't aged gracefully. Which proved too distracting for me to revisit them, even as a fan of the series. Then Academy was a stand-alone mission builder, Armada was a bunch of easy 1v1 fights with a dirt-simple strategy game overlay, and the beloved Privateer is painfully short on enemy fighter types. While Privateer 2 is weird, and may as well not be a Wing Commander game, but it works. And we don't talk about Prophecy or that Xbox Live Arcade game or that movie.
The graphics may have aged, but come on, at least they run well on Steam/GOG at most, while the older WC titles... ugggh.
Wing Commander was the first game I recall ever playing, so seeing such an in depth video on it was great! Thanks for this!
This is a Very impressive first video. I look forward to seeing more. Wing commander was one of my first video games and I positively worshiped it at the time.
I would not have guessed this was your first video. The production value, information, and entertainment were all top notch. I hope it didn't suck your life force out to make.
I've been such a big fan of space sims, but never really knew much about their history or their origins. This video solved that and now has inspired me to try out the older space sims which I was previously averse to actually trying out. Thanks a lot for that!
Wing Commander II and IV feature Mark Hamill.
Some space sims like Independence War Deluxe Edition have a steep learning curve. Great game if you do not mind those nearly impossible missions.
@@josepablolunasanchez1283 Thanks a lot for the recommend! I'll give it a try
Freespace 1 and 2 are great, too. Privateer was *chef's kiss*. I think Privateer 2 got a lot of bad reviews, but I loved it, its aesthetic, and the fmv cutscenes! And Clive Owen and Christopher Walken, among others, were in it!
Great video and presentation, it was a blast from the past. Subscribed!
Happy memories of playing this as a kid when it was new. Subbed and looking forward to you doing more videos
Honestly thoroughly enjoyed my time watching this. Learning about older games is always fun, especially a cult classic like wing commander. This sort of long-form review/retrospective that lets you vicariously experience an otherwise potentially frustrating game through the lens of someone good at it is great particularly for these older games. Of course these sort of videos take a huge amount of effort (to the point that even people who do content like thi full times are barely able to release maybe 2-3 videos a year) so for now i hope you don't lose motivation from low viewer numbers and look forward to more content in the far future. What I'm curious about is what sort of games you plan to cover for future reviews. Will you stick with retro games? Do you plan to make videos on all the Wing Commander games (it sounded like you were maybe already working on WC2)?
Thanks! As you mentioned, these videos can be a terrifying time suck, so it would be almost irresponsible to continue if there isn't an audience for it. And yet I can't seem to resist, because here I am back on my bullsh*t, recording footage from an X-Wing playthrough. I'll use that as a test to see if I can take advantage of what I've learned to make a video on a less outrageously long timeline, and if a massive, still-relevant IP like Star Wars can draw a few more eyeballs.
The plan was to follow the genre as it evolved, jumping from series to series, rarely or never covering two games from the same series or lineage in a row. So if this X-Wing video works out (no guarantees), I would probably follow it up with Wing Commander 2, then either Tie Fighter or Frontier: Elite 2, and so on.
@@spacecadetrewind drawing eyeballs is kind of a roll of the dice, too, though, as you probably know. the algorithm is nothing if not capricious..
It's crazy how good your script, audio, sourcing, and editing are for a first video. Excited to see where you go from here.
I was surprised to see this is his only upload.
@@planescapedNot anymore as of October 2023.
I look forward to seeing more old space sim videos! You're right, there aren't nearly enough of them out there. Keep up the fantastic work!
Loved the video! With my only reference for space sims being a Battlestar Galactica game I played as a kid and hearing about star citizen from other people, it was great to hear someone go into depth about one, especially one of the first!
I played the Wing Commander games when I was a kid but I don't remember there being any frame rate issues with the first one. My dad was an engineer and knew how to put together a PC so maybe ours was top of the line? No idea.
But for the record, in any real life air force that knows what it's doing it's a wingman's job to stick on the lead's tail and not engage everything in sight. Lead does the killing, wingman watches his back. That's why the wingmen in Wing Commander don't run off on their own.
Having been an aircraft nut my entire life, I can see a lot of similarities to air combat pre-WC. I'm sure they also got inspiration for the wingman AI from there.
Really cool. I played Wing Commander 1 on SNES. Two years or so later my buddy showed me Wing Commander 3 and it was shocking lol
Like watching Matrix or Avatar for the first time. The quality was mindblowing if you only knew snes to this point.
I bought the original WC in a physical box in 1990. It came on 5 3.5" HD floppy disks. The blueprints you showed for the ships came in poster-sized format, and 13 y/o me put them up on my wall. I tried to play it as soon as I got home, however, this game required something called expanded memory, which required a 386 processor. So, the next week, I dragged my mom to a computer show and built a 386 SX-20 system. When we got home, I installed it right away. I was amazed by the graphics, the music, the missions. Thank you for bringing back some of those memories. Please accept my subscription, and job well done, sir. I was wondering if you had looked at Lightspeed by Microprose. I have only found one version which still works on modern systems, and it is played via a browser. Even the version on GoG doesn't work well. Sorry to ramble, and thanks again for an awesome video!
Great video, man. Through, entertaining, and well put together. Subscribed and looking forward to WC2, WC3 and all Star Wars space fighters.
Loved WC1-WC3. WC3 with Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and Biff Tannen was simply awesome!
19:18 or you just switch direktions very fast (up and down for example) and just afterburn through.
1:39:43 They also couldnt fit the jalthi in it so they used a reskinned salthi (green instead of brown) as a replacement sprite.
Dude, what a great video. I've rarely been so enthralled by a story about a game I've never played.
I played the first Wing Commander on a 386sx/16MHz back in 1990 and its graphics blew my mind! At the time, most of the games would fit in a single 1.2MB diskette, and this game was a staggering 5MB in size! Right when I was thinking, how big these games could possibly become, comes Wing Commander II at 15MB while others at the time would shyly reach one third of it, and the next shock was Wing Commander 3 with its 4 CDs, Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell and Tom Wilson (Beef from Back to the future). I was really blown away with every version of this game that came out back then!
Wow. This is a really amazing video which deserves WAY more views. Thanks for making this. I really appreciate the guided walk down memory lane.
The good old times, played it on a AMD 40 Mhz and a expensive 64 MB graphic card. I loved the first 2 WC and the X-Wing plus Tie Fighter games.
64 MB on a video card? Surely you jest or mistyped. The AMD 40 MHz likely only have had enough dip/sim slots for at most 16 MB. That amount of memory in a PC did not become mainstream until at least the late 1990’s early 2000’s.
"die by the weapons you adore" :D .. Wing Commander Privateer is still a very fond memory. The video communication in the cockpit was awesome and worldbuilding in general was great.
Thank you for the detailed review. It's my childhood memory. You bring back all the memory!
I'd like you to continue with the WC games as well as X-wing series. Possibly, my favorite WC game was Privateer, which was fairly wide open story wise for the time it was made.
Wing Commander isn't just a game, it's an experience...
Just like tabletop games have a starter box, this is the starter game for anyone wanting to play space combat sims.
I’d say it’s more of a life style and possible a religion. Even with its own extremist zealots which I imagine are the people still pouring money into Star Citizen.
I bought into Star Citizen, just the starter pack. My PC won’t even run it now but dam if it ever gets finished I will definitely upgrade my PC
Amazing video! Really enjoyed the watch. Can't wait to see what you make next!
I watched this entire video... very nicely done!
You must have put a TON of work into it. Looking forward to the next one, happy to sub to you!
I'm always a sucker for extensive analysis and backstory for gorgeous looking classic games and you have great presentation. Consider me subscribed.
The amount of keys required to fly your ship in X-Wing and Tie Fighter was classic good. Makes you feel like a real pilot with complete control over your craft.
Thanks for the video. Was my favourite game when it came out, I recall being blown away by the graphics and gameplay. My two longest term memories were probably the Kilrathi surprise attack (when a housemate's cat ran up my back with it's claws out, whilst I was playing), and the first attempt to get my original disks to load up on a modern PC, where the speed was so high if no ship was on screen that the mission ended instantly that happened!
Wing Commander was the first game I got for my "brand new" MS DOS PC in 1990, and to this day, probably the most memorable videogame experience of my life. It was quite amazing for its time. I replayed it a few months ago-- still fun!
Reminds me a lot of the snes game 'Turn and Burn'. Which is basically this game, slightly pared down and based on modern (for the early '90's) fighter jets. It even has carrier and enemy base assaults. I remember that game fondly, so I bet I'd have liked this one too.
For anyone who loves the original Wing Commander and has never done it, look up the full audio recordings made from an authentic MPU-401 MIDI system. The depth of sound they crammed into the final version of the game was incredible for the time, and sounds great even now. Roberts was ahead of everyone else in the tech field for games, and it's a shame that Star Citizen has dragged on forever. Too big to fail at this point, I guess.
Awesome. It's great this series is being recognized these days, great to hear just how well the music, the gameplay, the story, was for a 1990 game, and it's about time for a remake.
A proper remake where we get the same characters but with 2023 graphics.
What a great video, I grew up playing the wing commander games, one of my fav series. I think my last one was the Clive Owen privateer game.
Such good memories.