Memory laneeeeeee. This game I had on PC was sooo enjoyable! As someone who shifted over to console RPGs, the storytelling in the SNES generation games is something I always loved; but this game, the story via the cutscenes... I wasn't the greatest at space combat, but always soooo motivated to get past each next sortie just to see the next round of story exposition. WC3 and 4 and even Prophecy were a whole other storytelling beast... but if not specifically for this WC2, I may never have gotten to those later games
Just finished watching through all of this... thanks again for sharing this! It's kinda funny, the way sound/music has evolved on PC... but to listen to this basically the way it sounded on my adlib in early 90's (and slightly enhanced due to it being pushed through surround generation and bass boost middleware) was just perfect *chef's kiss*
what an amazing game , instant classic ; so many fond memories , and looking back at how ahead of the curve these devs were is just jaw-dropping honestly ; so much of this games design beats would become industry staples today , truly ground breaking , both technically and artistically for the medium
I saw the Wing Commander movie in the theaters back in 99. I was so hyped for it as I absolutely loved the games. Especially WC3 and WC4. That dumpster fire of a movie wasn't Wing Commander. The story was crap, the ships were crap, the characters were crap. It was such a letdown that I'm still mad to this day.
There were a few good performances in the movie. Tcheky Karyo as Paladin and Jurgen Prochney as the Tiger's Claw Exec stand out to me, as both are great actors. David Warner as Tolwyn as all right as well in a lesser role. And finally, I do have a weakness for Saffron Burrows, who did a decent job as Angel and a wing commander.
And the ships didn't like like any we were all familiar with. Greatest disappointment was that for me. I discovered WC with WCA (on a game compilation) and the manual had all the fighters in 3 views. As a kid I wanted to memorize them all
The crazy thing is that I want to blame someone for not understanding, wink commander, but it was directed by Chris Roberts. So there is nobody to get mad at.
Considering it's been 30 years, I wouldn't say I remember it but it all still feels very very familiar, played these games so much. Too bad Chris Roberts doesn't own the rights to his own creation, would have loved to see these games get a complete overhaul and re-released.
have you heard of his great work? star citizen [freelancer remake], and squadron 42 [wing commander remake], the largest crowdfunded project ever! in development for over 10 years and no release in sight!
Nah, a remake would involve a strong female chara who needs no man and a lot of adjustment for modern audiences. It would just become another shit show like so many remakes in the US.
Likewise! It was the first time I heard actual spoken dialogue coming from my 486, and it kinda blew my mind. I didn't understand a word of what they were saying since I didn't know much English back then, but damn... it was really cool.
@@enjibkk6850 IRQ stands for interrupt request and DMA stands for Direct Memory Address. They're still a thing but they're handled automatically now. That was part of what was such a big deal about "plug and play" with Windows 95 back in the day. You can look this info up in the device manager.
I played the wing commander series first on a friends "286". I was lucky enough to get a copy of it on the Amiga 500, the first one, as the sequel never came out on the Amiga. The Amiga version was completable but ran very slow on a stock Amiga on the later levels. Still a great game and for sure you can appreciate the talent and enthusiasm involved in constructing the story. Too bad many games today, even AAA titles cant match the story telling of many early titles. Thanks for the video, i will watch it all soon.
The game physics are tied to the frame rate, so let's say the game runs at normal physics at 10fps, then if you run it at 60fps, everything goes 6x faster, which means it's unplayable on faster machines. The Amiga 500 was actually running the game at about the right speed for the physics. That's a big weakness in this game, because it means we can't even play it nicely on emulators like DosBox, if you try then you must underclock the processor like crazy for the game to be playable. It's a bit like Space Quest.
@@youuuuuuuuuuutube 1) There already was a windows release that didn't have that problem. You can find it, it's the Kilrathi Saga version. There are mods out there to play it on modern hardware. 2) Wing Commander 1's the one known for the huge problems in slowdown in the DOS versions. Even so, what exactly is the problem with underclocking the processor to what the game was meant to run at? That's all we were doing back then at release. When these game came out I was running it on a 66Mhz machine so if you're emulating it on a machine at about that speed it should be about right. Even back then I'd have to run a TSR to slow down my computer like Moslo to get my PC running at the speed WC1 needed. Point is, you can get it running at the right speed. You just have to accept the downsides of that, meaning longer load times, slowdowns, etc. Is it optimal, no, but it is authentic. I don't blame you for wanting to skip that but it's not really fair to complain about the game's code when it worked perfectly fine for what it was designed for.
Era un juego fantástico, lo jugué entero con todas sus misiones especiales desde el wing commander 1 hasta el 3, el 4 profecía no lo llegue a terminar, de todos creo que el que mas disfrute fue justamente este el Wing2, un juego muy épico... cosa curiosa el que grabo esto uso el mismo nick que usaba yo en el juego Mad Max JA!
Man i remember back then. Was on sooo many floppydisks. And then my dad bough me an 100mb HD I could put the entire game ON the harddrive! No more changing disk every minute.
When I was in the navy I was part of the technical dept on a warship. I had a bloke from the seamanship dept who outranked me come to me in the morning saying “hey I think there’s a compressed air line leaking in the void space by my cabin, you wanna take a look at that?” I was like “dude there isn’t compressed air lines running by your cabin, the only system there is the sewage system” His face was hilarious in that moment, I totally feel for sparks when she says there isn’t a fuel line there, she knows her system layout by the sounds of things
Gods, what a mature game and story. Love, random death, rage, sadness, the reality of war and having to continue. The hero doesn't forgive the traitor and wants to murder him. I don't get how the movie could have been so bad
That’s how games used to be - they came on physical, magnetic floppy disks that could hold 1.44 MEGAbytes each. The original was all text, but then later ’Speech Packs’ were made - these added speech for the lines the pilots spoke in the cockpit, and often mostly for the intro cutscene animations. When you have initial speech, that’s the game’s intro. When you move on to the in-game cutscenes, that’s when this reverts back to just text. The Wing II Speech Pack I had came on like three floppies, and the game itself on something like nine. A space issue (pun intended), plain and simple. If anything like the whopping crazy 700mb of CD-ROM (😁😁) had been cheaply available back in the early nineties and the optical drive hardware had been ubiquitous already when this came out, we’d have full speech for sure. This is meant for anyone who wasn’t alive back then. It was a different world for sure.
I'm just going to say it. This game, and it's two story follow ups, namely secret ops 1 and 2, was the high point of this entire series. Was just a slow and frankly at times *painful* to watch death from WC3 on.
Is it just me, or does Khasra Redclaw sound very much like Doctor Claw from Inspector Gadget? They are different voice actors (I looked into it) but that voice.... "I'll get you next time Gadget... Next time!" and of course, the iconic Mad Cat Meow that comes afterwards... although the Kilrathi could definitely put the Mad Cat in his place for sure, they are definitely the Alphapuss of the two LOL :)
Nice. I only played the Amiga version of Wing Commander 1, the Amiga never got 2, then I played 3 and 4 och playstation, so I always felt I missed a part of the story.
No DLC packs, but you had to pay extra for the speech discs. Wing Commander and Ultima 7 were the games that made many people in the EU dump their C-64/Amigas/ST and jump over to PC. Remember playing Wing Commander 3 on a 486DX3 100mhz overclocked to 120mhz. Had a vacuum cleaner pressed against the CPU to dispurce heat. The good old days. Games developed on SGI workstations and ported to PC that no chance playing the games with smooth gameplay.
Wing Commander 4 was too much movie and thinks like funeral missing Wing Commander 1 was too less Story then WC2 Its a battle of Wing Commander 2 vs. 3 - better Movies on 3, better storytelling in 2 - some missions in 2 are better then in 3, Music even - both have some nice tracks, Jazz musictracks on the Piano. Damn. Still cannot say what is better 2 or 3? In terms of more missions with the Special Ops - WC2!!! Start this in 1990 with Wing Commander at the age of 15! and now at the age of 49 i play Chris Roberts Star Citizen and cannot wait for SQ42! Watch the Prologue if you missed them! Its a Movie :D
IIRC There were no voice lines for dialogue in which you character might be addressed directly by your crewmates with the custom name you chose at the beginning of the campaign.
@@remyschrader9286 First DLC ever?? No we pay for everything. BTW, i started the series on WC3... don't get if this is the end, why WC3 starts with the TCS Concordia completely wrecked and Prince Thrakkath back alive.
@jesusfranco No DL, just C. Publishers knew Software was going to go out the door in a realworld box. Most games actually worked on Day One release. Imagine that!
I grew up with this game. Truly ahead of its time. SUCH A SHAME NOTHINGS BEEN DONE TO REBOOT WING COMMANDER. Shame of Chris Robert's for letting it die out.
Life goes on, gamers grow up, and combat simulation tastes change. When Ye Olde CH Flight Stick died, I turned to LucasArts games, such as X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Then I moved on to RPGs with Indiana Jones.;)
Devs have to move on to new things, that's how we get fresh/new stuff to play with. The world would be so boring if it was always just the same 7 or 8 IPs being recycled over and over again (*kof* star wars *kof*). Roberts has been working on Star Citizen for a while now. Also, the current gaming market really doesn't seem to have a lot of room for space shooters and the sort of games WC games are, I would expect the reason he had to stop making them, is they didn't generate enough profits/sales, so he couldn't find financing from banks/studios to make more of them...
@@ArthurWolf Agreed to a point. But it doesn't mean you can't take Wing Commander down a different path. Introduce new content and storyline instead of just letting die out completely. That's almost a slap in the face to the fans that made W.C what it was from jump street.
@@theforgottentruth1978 I guarantee you if Wing Commander games sold a billion USD worth, they'd be making one a year like clockwork. It's not about slaps in the face of fans, it's about gamers not being very interested in space simulators overall, it's just not a very popular genre, so studios just don't invest in it, because they invest in what's profitable. Even if they wanted to make more of these, they couldn't, because it's not what currently sells... It sold at the time because it was new, then newer/more exciting things came along, and gamers forgot about it. It's how the industry works.
To be fair to Roberts he was only producer on this, he was working on Strike Commander at the time. A different team wrote and directed this - it's probably why he reversed everything in WCIII (dropped the Ghorah Khar rebels storyline, destroyed the Concordia, killed Angel, made Hobbes a traitor, etc).
![Wing Commander II: The Visual Novel - Special Operations 2 (no combat, only story!) [PC version]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wVtQLUnN2SA/mqdefault.jpg)
![Wing Commander II: The Visual Novel – Special Operations 2 (no combat, only story!) [PC version]](/img/tr.png)
Feels like seeing a dear friend again after all these years! Of all the games I've ever played, this has probably had the most profound effect on me.
Memory laneeeeeee. This game I had on PC was sooo enjoyable! As someone who shifted over to console RPGs, the storytelling in the SNES generation games is something I always loved; but this game, the story via the cutscenes... I wasn't the greatest at space combat, but always soooo motivated to get past each next sortie just to see the next round of story exposition. WC3 and 4 and even Prophecy were a whole other storytelling beast... but if not specifically for this WC2, I may never have gotten to those later games
Just finished watching through all of this... thanks again for sharing this! It's kinda funny, the way sound/music has evolved on PC... but to listen to this basically the way it sounded on my adlib in early 90's (and slightly enhanced due to it being pushed through surround generation and bass boost middleware) was just perfect *chef's kiss*
what an amazing game , instant classic ; so many fond memories , and looking back at how ahead of the curve these devs were is just jaw-dropping honestly ; so much of this games design beats would become industry staples today , truly ground breaking , both technically and artistically for the medium
Good on you for being honest enough to not edit out all the cutscenes of your wingman ejecting, haha
NPC suicide by unskippable, unavoidable cutscene.
Oh, I see now. @44:15
I saw the Wing Commander movie in the theaters back in 99. I was so hyped for it as I absolutely loved the games. Especially WC3 and WC4. That dumpster fire of a movie wasn't Wing Commander. The story was crap, the ships were crap, the characters were crap. It was such a letdown that I'm still mad to this day.
There were a few good performances in the movie. Tcheky Karyo as Paladin and Jurgen Prochney as the Tiger's Claw Exec stand out to me, as both are great actors. David Warner as Tolwyn as all right as well in a lesser role. And finally, I do have a weakness for Saffron Burrows, who did a decent job as Angel and a wing commander.
And the ships didn't like like any we were all familiar with. Greatest disappointment was that for me. I discovered WC with WCA (on a game compilation) and the manual had all the fighters in 3 views. As a kid I wanted to memorize them all
The crazy thing is that I want to blame someone for not understanding, wink commander, but it was directed by Chris Roberts. So there is nobody to get mad at.
Considering it's been 30 years, I wouldn't say I remember it but it all still feels very very familiar, played these games so much. Too bad Chris Roberts doesn't own the rights to his own creation, would have loved to see these games get a complete overhaul and re-released.
have you heard of his great work?
star citizen [freelancer remake], and squadron 42 [wing commander remake],
the largest crowdfunded project ever!
in development for over 10 years and no release in sight!
Nah, a remake would involve a strong female chara who needs no man and a lot of adjustment for modern audiences. It would just become another shit show like so many remakes in the US.
@@jackiechan7909 Critical Drinker fan? ;)
@@FiliusFidelis best dude
Too bad Chris Roberts went insane.
I remember getting the voices to actually work was a big deal back on DOS!
Yeah, I remember even voice acting this weak still counted as amazing 🤣
Likewise! It was the first time I heard actual spoken dialogue coming from my 486, and it kinda blew my mind. I didn't understand a word of what they were saying since I didn't know much English back then, but damn... it was really cool.
Good Ole 486 and dos
Wtf is an IRQ and a DMA channel anyway?
@@enjibkk6850 IRQ stands for interrupt request and DMA stands for Direct Memory Address. They're still a thing but they're handled automatically now. That was part of what was such a big deal about "plug and play" with Windows 95 back in the day. You can look this info up in the device manager.
Thanks for the upload! This is my favorite of the series.
I played the wing commander series first on a friends "286". I was lucky enough to get a copy of it on the Amiga 500, the first one, as the sequel never came out on the Amiga. The Amiga version was completable but ran very slow on a stock Amiga on the later levels. Still a great game and for sure you can appreciate the talent and enthusiasm involved in constructing the story. Too bad many games today, even AAA titles cant match the story telling of many early titles. Thanks for the video, i will watch it all soon.
The game physics are tied to the frame rate, so let's say the game runs at normal physics at 10fps, then if you run it at 60fps, everything goes 6x faster, which means it's unplayable on faster machines. The Amiga 500 was actually running the game at about the right speed for the physics. That's a big weakness in this game, because it means we can't even play it nicely on emulators like DosBox, if you try then you must underclock the processor like crazy for the game to be playable. It's a bit like Space Quest.
@@youuuuuuuuuuutube 1) There already was a windows release that didn't have that problem. You can find it, it's the Kilrathi Saga version. There are mods out there to play it on modern hardware. 2) Wing Commander 1's the one known for the huge problems in slowdown in the DOS versions. Even so, what exactly is the problem with underclocking the processor to what the game was meant to run at? That's all we were doing back then at release. When these game came out I was running it on a 66Mhz machine so if you're emulating it on a machine at about that speed it should be about right. Even back then I'd have to run a TSR to slow down my computer like Moslo to get my PC running at the speed WC1 needed. Point is, you can get it running at the right speed. You just have to accept the downsides of that, meaning longer load times, slowdowns, etc. Is it optimal, no, but it is authentic. I don't blame you for wanting to skip that but it's not really fair to complain about the game's code when it worked perfectly fine for what it was designed for.
Childhood memories. Good days.
RIP Specalist McGuffin.
MacGauffin really lived up to his name- driving the plot forward 😂
The first PC videogame I bought. sweet memories
Great memories. Love the ending. Get to my quarters with a bottle of champagne.. Ha.
Era un juego fantástico, lo jugué entero con todas sus misiones especiales desde el wing commander 1 hasta el 3, el 4 profecía no lo llegue a terminar, de todos creo que el que mas disfrute fue justamente este el Wing2, un juego muy épico... cosa curiosa el que grabo esto uso el mismo nick que usaba yo en el juego Mad Max JA!
1991. Game came on floppy disks. We paid extra for the "Speech Pack". And bought and installed a sound card to run it. Not joking
A lot of floppy disks. I remember.
@Themaritimes99 My original copy of WC1 had a bad sector somewhere on Disk 5 -- killed me
@@remyschrader9286yep..I always made backup copies
@@bjornjosephI did that too. For backup purposes. Yeah.
Man i remember back then. Was on sooo many floppydisks. And then my dad bough me an 100mb HD I could put the entire game ON the harddrive! No more changing disk every minute.
This game was my Kung fu back in the 90s. So happy gog released a copy for modern computers
Just wish they add the secret missions
Oh man…the nostalgia is strong with this one
When I was in the navy I was part of the technical dept on a warship. I had a bloke from the seamanship dept who outranked me come to me in the morning saying “hey I think there’s a compressed air line leaking in the void space by my cabin, you wanna take a look at that?”
I was like “dude there isn’t compressed air lines running by your cabin, the only system there is the sewage system”
His face was hilarious in that moment, I totally feel for sparks when she says there isn’t a fuel line there, she knows her system layout by the sounds of things
1:02:12 - Hobbes got 6 and you got 1? I think HE DID save Olympus station. XD
Gods, what a mature game and story. Love, random death, rage, sadness, the reality of war and having to continue. The hero doesn't forgive the traitor and wants to murder him. I don't get how the movie could have been so bad
Why no speech sound anymore after a while??
That’s how games used to be - they came on physical, magnetic floppy disks that could hold 1.44 MEGAbytes each. The original was all text, but then later ’Speech Packs’ were made - these added speech for the lines the pilots spoke in the cockpit, and often mostly for the intro cutscene animations. When you have initial speech, that’s the game’s intro. When you move on to the in-game cutscenes, that’s when this reverts back to just text. The Wing II Speech Pack I had came on like three floppies, and the game itself on something like nine. A space issue (pun intended), plain and simple. If anything like the whopping crazy 700mb of CD-ROM (😁😁) had been cheaply available back in the early nineties and the optical drive hardware had been ubiquitous already when this came out, we’d have full speech for sure.
This is meant for anyone who wasn’t alive back then. It was a different world for sure.
I'm just going to say it. This game, and it's two story follow ups, namely secret ops 1 and 2, was the high point of this entire series.
Was just a slow and frankly at times *painful* to watch death from WC3 on.
You guys remember when prophecy came out, they offered it as downloads over dialup... lol ffs times were tough. 8 years to download 1 gb
when the opening to WC2 looks like an 8bit tech demo from 2024
RIP Shadow!
Back in the day I accidentally bought the low density disc version of this... 28 floppy discs!
Also - Specialist McGuffin. :D
wholesome
I enjoyed this but couldn't stop laughing on how much your wing mans ejected. I don't think it was necessary to keep those in though lol.
MIDI sound is underrated
Wait, you named your character Max "Mad Max" Rock?
Well, could have been something worse like Christopher "Maverick" Blair I guess. ;-)
Is it just me, or does Khasra Redclaw sound very much like Doctor Claw from Inspector Gadget? They are different voice actors (I looked into it) but that voice.... "I'll get you next time Gadget... Next time!" and of course, the iconic Mad Cat Meow that comes afterwards... although the Kilrathi could definitely put the Mad Cat in his place for sure, they are definitely the Alphapuss of the two LOL :)
Nice. I only played the Amiga version of Wing Commander 1, the Amiga never got 2, then I played 3 and 4 och playstation, so I always felt I missed a part of the story.
The narrative reason for the poker game, @1:19:30 🥺
Love me some Adlib sound!!
Is mad max Christopher Blair?! Im confused
As a rule of thumb, if he's the one with blue hair, then yes. That's how Blair got his name in the first place.
No DLC packs, but you had to pay extra for the speech discs. Wing Commander and Ultima 7 were the games that made many people in the EU dump their C-64/Amigas/ST and jump over to PC. Remember playing Wing Commander 3 on a 486DX3 100mhz overclocked to 120mhz. Had a vacuum cleaner pressed against the CPU to dispurce heat. The good old days. Games developed on SGI workstations and ported to PC that no chance playing the games with smooth gameplay.
I remember playing this game as a teen and thinking it was "high tech" lol. Still a great game though!
Mad Max Fury Wing.
Ten years ?
And nobody aged a day :)
So... did they drink the champagne?
I hate to be that guy, but Stingray was right.
Thank you, but would there be a version with voices available, perhaps? :) A visual AND an audio novel. My old eyes just aren't what they used to be!
Stefan won't you answer. He's passed away on 2021 :(
@@OSH0891 Wait, what?
There is no version with voices
Wing Commander 4 was too much movie and thinks like funeral missing
Wing Commander 1 was too less Story then WC2
Its a battle of Wing Commander 2 vs. 3 - better Movies on 3, better storytelling in 2 - some missions in 2 are better then in 3, Music even - both have some nice tracks, Jazz musictracks on the Piano. Damn. Still cannot say what is better 2 or 3? In terms of more missions with the Special Ops - WC2!!!
Start this in 1990 with Wing Commander at the age of 15! and now at the age of 49 i play Chris Roberts Star Citizen and cannot wait for SQ42! Watch the Prologue if you missed them! Its a Movie :D
They just stopped voice acting the game 5% into it?
IIRC There were no voice lines for dialogue in which you character might be addressed directly by your crewmates with the custom name you chose at the beginning of the campaign.
1991. Game came on floppy disks. We paid extra for the "Speech Pack". Not joking
@@remyschrader9286 First DLC ever??
No we pay for everything.
BTW, i started the series on WC3... don't get if this is the end, why WC3 starts with the TCS Concordia completely wrecked and Prince Thrakkath back alive.
@jesusfranco No DL, just C. Publishers knew Software was going to go out the door in a realworld box. Most games actually worked on Day One release. Imagine that!
protagonist looks like Bryan Kohberger
I used to blow away my wing men when we were in combat because they were annoying me.
I grew up with this game. Truly ahead of its time. SUCH A SHAME NOTHINGS BEEN DONE TO REBOOT WING COMMANDER. Shame of Chris Robert's for letting it die out.
Life goes on, gamers grow up, and combat simulation tastes change. When Ye Olde CH Flight Stick died, I turned to LucasArts games, such as X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Then I moved on to RPGs with Indiana Jones.;)
@@Otokichi786 I did those as well except for Indiana Jones, went with the homework series and if memory services right star trek command 3 online.
Devs have to move on to new things, that's how we get fresh/new stuff to play with. The world would be so boring if it was always just the same 7 or 8 IPs being recycled over and over again (*kof* star wars *kof*). Roberts has been working on Star Citizen for a while now.
Also, the current gaming market really doesn't seem to have a lot of room for space shooters and the sort of games WC games are, I would expect the reason he had to stop making them, is they didn't generate enough profits/sales, so he couldn't find financing from banks/studios to make more of them...
@@ArthurWolf Agreed to a point. But it doesn't mean you can't take Wing Commander down a different path. Introduce new content and storyline instead of just letting die out completely. That's almost a slap in the face to the fans that made W.C what it was from jump street.
@@theforgottentruth1978 I guarantee you if Wing Commander games sold a billion USD worth, they'd be making one a year like clockwork.
It's not about slaps in the face of fans, it's about gamers not being very interested in space simulators overall, it's just not a very popular genre, so studios just don't invest in it, because they invest in what's profitable. Even if they wanted to make more of these, they couldn't, because it's not what currently sells...
It sold at the time because it was new, then newer/more exciting things came along, and gamers forgot about it. It's how the industry works.
Games were just better when they were not made for a wide audience
lol this rocked so much when I was 10 but holy shit is it bad now. chris roberts' problem is he still thinks this is good storytelling!
To be fair to Roberts he was only producer on this, he was working on Strike Commander at the time. A different team wrote and directed this - it's probably why he reversed everything in WCIII (dropped the Ghorah Khar rebels storyline, destroyed the Concordia, killed Angel, made Hobbes a traitor, etc).