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.
Privateer! I absolutely loved that game - I must have racked hundreds of hours on it as a kid!
I liked WC:Prophecy a lot too, but the trade aspect of Privateer was what really got me hooked. Also, the sheer size of the Privateer universe was mind boggling at the time. That and the graphics almost seemed like witchcraft given PC capabilities of the day.
Indeed. Though revisiting it I find it's brutally difficult without a small deadzone joystick and careful choices early on. Like stay in Troy, Meson blasters, afterburners, run away from most fights, scout don't patrol, etc.
Also lack of in flight saves and close asteroid spawning makes it tough even with the best ship and shields.
My friend and I would team up. He would fly with the joystick and operate trigger weapons. I would run the missiles and other keyboard systems. We'd also track system to system trading with notes, etc. Much debate on which missions to choose. Those were good times. We'd play for literally days, leaving only for food (we were old enough that we were independent enough to get away with this but young enough to have nothing else to do).
I mean, half the fun was that you had to run away. There were some fights you were not going to win.
Lack of saves really enhanced the risk aspect of those fights too. Something lost in a lot of games today IMO.
If you remembered the advice given in the original wing commander that the safest speed to traverse asteroid fields is 250, they were far more survivable :)
Wing Commander II was just amazing. Had a long, fairly well thought out story with meaningful twists, emotional moments, tension and accompanies by a great soundtrack.
I will see you in heaven.
Some remastered bits of soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJD6YpHD5O0&list=PLFB7GcAB-z...
> 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
Starflight
Starflight! Probably the first video game I ever got day-and-night absorbed by. Still one of my all-time favorite games. Not even Star Control 2 had a universe that felt as large as Starflight - and it came on 2 360k floppy disks!
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.
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 game over a weekend.
As a result of this, I'd spend many, many hours on the same game. I'd "beat" the game, but I'd also have this sort of mental model of challenges or 'perfect' gameplay that I'd try to achieve. It might be a score. It might be a time. It might be collecting all of a thing. It might be getting to a particular location that appeared to be 'off limits.' It was basically 'achievements' before there were achievement systems, but they were generally a lot harder and all the rewards for doing it where self-generated and internal. (I also spent a lot of time thinking about whether a thing was possible, and if it wasn't, why not.) This also allowed me to spend a lot of time on games that weren't very good and find some good within them.
This post reminded me of this, because Wing Commander (the original) was one of those games I played over and over again. (I can't really recall what my goals were for the game, but I remember it being particularly difficult to achieve them.)
I don't really do this with games anymore. Even in the case where I don't have the next game chosen and already in my line-up, it's easy to buy a game online and have it downloaded and playable within an hour. There aren't any surprises: readily available game reviews tell me basically exactly what to expect. On a game I particularly enjoy, I might spend some more time on it by gathering the achievements, but achievements really pale in comparison (in terms of both difficulty and reward) to what I remember of doing this myself in my youth.
It's like the difference between reading a novel and really understanding a novel at a deep level. I think I'd like to get back to those deeper dives; but with more money than time (versus more time than money that I used to have), so many excellent games available, and all kinds of other distractions, I'm not really sure how or where to begin. I'm also not sure it's just me, or if games in general have lost a sort of magic they used to have.
I think there's a lot going on here. Some of it is just general maturity and experience. Things that were novel when you were a child wear off when you're older. Those achievements that you aimed for as a child (having 'perfect' gameplay) may seem less meaningful when you're an adult, especially in the context of other real world achievements.
The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging things about aging. You can't feel the excitement of certain things again as you did when you did them for the first time. I think this is why it's important to try new hobbies.
Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!).
I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the space theme) all the recent iterations of Star Wars and Star Trek. People love to complain that the new SW trilogy (or the prequel trilogy) or Star Trek Discovery is a load of rubbish but the reality is that we're just older. Things aren't going to spark in the way they did when we first watched. And that's fine.
I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.
While I've been a fan of Discovery for the most part, and it occasionally shows glimpses of promise, it's largely not "Star Trek." The story telling is simply just not rooted same soul that Trek has been built upon. I'm okay with change, but not so much with creating flashy spectacles at the expense of meaningful story telling.
Star Control II was THE defining game of my childhood. After completing the quest - with difficulty, since my command of English then was not what it is now - my brother and I spent countless hours in Melee mode.
I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal to generate random ship combinations.
Few years ago I replaced SCII story mode and found it to be a total delight, especially now that I recognize the fine humor in English.
And now I have two sons about the same age that I was, and they got hooked on Melee as well and would play each other and myself, bringing warm happiness to my heart. One of them drew some ships for me on paper and they're on my corkboard in here, making me smile every time I look to the left.
I wish there was a SC3!
> But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction
Or maybe not. I'm yet to see any modern game that would even remotely approach the magnitude of SC2. So far, the closest competitor was the original Mass Effect game, itself clearly influenced by Star Control games, but even it failed to surpass it.
The story/campaign for SCII was great, but it also came with a local multiplayer arcade mode! It was an awesome time.
> The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging things about aging.
To me, this is where the āstart a new company doing something good and interestingā kicks in, it seems. The best part of ageing seem to me that they grey hairs that I acquired during the last startup make it easier to the next one.
I feel the same way.
I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my favorite classic games less than an hour, sometimes in minutes. Some of that is cutting weird corners but often it's pure excellent execution.
I often wonder about doing that myself, playing hundreds of hours of a single game to master it. Putting all of my focus on a single game like I used to as a kid, but I don't find anything keeps my attention that way now.
I think partially it's what you said, more money than time and I naturally gravitate towards spending my time on novelty instead of mastery. That's just how my brain works.
The other piece is when I look back, I don't think I spend nearly as much time replaying the same things in the past as I feel like I did. I think those memories of playing and replaying games are somewhat distorted by my memories.
I also spent a great deal of time watching those games being played by friends and their siblings and so forth, during sleepovers and after school.
"I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my favorite classic games less than an hour, sometimes in minutes. Some of that is cutting weird corners but often it's pure excellent execution."
Ocarina of Time speedrunning has gotten to a really weird place now, where they basically set the character's name to a string of bytes which are executable code, and then de-reference a pointer to it and warp directly to the end credits, all within a few minutes of gaining control of Link. But, the community has a whole bunch of categories for different types of runs, from ones that are basically the Any% category before SRM (stale reference manipulation), to semi-legitimately beating all the dungeons (though with lots of sequence-breaking), to fully glitchless. It's a lot of fun watching some of those other-category runs for a taste of "normal" gameplay done at a very high level.
Another thing that's fun to watch runs of is randomizers (chest contents, quest rewards, sometimes even doors), since then you're not just seeing high level play, you're also seeing someone doing the live work of reasoning about their route through familiar-but-scrambled territory:
I'm aware of all of this, but I'm really glad you posted it in case some others read it and it catches their interest.
OoT speedrunning is very unique, and since it was a game I played a lot as a kid I'm always excited to watch the ways it's beaten.
I do admit I prefer the categories that emphasize more gameplay though, even if the glitches are incredible.
I think it's just the novelty of things. And the free time aspect.
I remember playing Dragon Warrior on NES late into the night with friends. Grinding away to get that next item and leveling up to fight bigger monsters. It was really fun, really exciting.
A few years ago I got an emulator and fired it up. Played about 5 minutes before I couldn't continue. Just didn't have the desire to grind away. And the emulator had a fastfoward button, which I found. So I just kept zipping around and running into monsters, not even wanting to spend the time to fight them. Spoiled because I didn't have to die, I could just reset to a save point.
I dunno. Maybe that just happens when you get old. Maybe it's just that there's so much instant gratification. I remember playing zelda and meticulously making maps on graph paper etc. Today you can just look it up on the internet in a minute and print a glorious, in color complete map.
It's just not the same anymore.
This week I reconnected to the MUD I used to play 20 years ago. I'm amazed it's still running. I've forgotten nearly everything.
I've been having a blast these past few days exploring the vast world.
There's nothing that Google can tell me about it. There's still people playing (and building) it, so I can ask for help - my old clan is still going even - but there's no instant fix on everything.
I don't know how long it'll last, and the time it will take is too much to fully immerse, but I've already started making some maps and trying to tackle some quests.
Out of curiosity, which MUD?
I used to play EliteMUD a ton decades ago. We used to get up at 6am to grab some computer terminals at the city's computer center and play all day.
I could've played from home but the phone bill would've been crippling.
Please share. Perhaps if a few more join it can last longer.
Mmm, achievements don't really seem as special anymore for a variety of reasons. Everything is so regimented in games now. You get an achievement for completing the tutorial mission. You get an achievement for finding the thing you can't progress in the game without it in your possession. You get an achievement for collecting 1000 blivets from radio towers. It's all uninteresting, uninspired busywork or crap put into the game because it's expected.
There's also accumulated gaming experience. I've been gaming for more than 4 decades, there ain't nothing new under the sun.
Also, real life cheevos are harder, and some would say more important, to attain.
I'd say for me, the magic of a lot of things wore off a long time ago. YMMV. GL HF
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 has aged that badly at all, compared to many other games that came out around the same time.
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.
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 much more realistic. It would be even - again - rewarding to work through a storyline to finally get a new cutscene. With all the cheap greenscreen tech, I wish there would be be a trend of movie cutscenes coming back.
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.
I miss those too. I also feel that having these movie cutscenes helps the imagination. It doesnāt matter so much that a Mammoth tank in game looks like a few squares with some stripes because in your mind you see the one with full details that drove over you. (RA or C&C, I might be mixing up unit names and games now.)
I remember a major debate about in-engine cut-scenes when Interstate-76 used them, which came out not too many years after WC3.
Of course the final fantasy series used in-engine cutscenes up through the sixth installment.
I don't really understand the concept of playing a game to be "rewarded" with the opportunity to watch a movie and not play the game. The ongoing trend towards integrating story with play is a massive improvement over extensive plot cutscenes, in-engine, prerendered, or filmed.
I was so hyped when this game came out; I remember waiting 5-10 minutes for each mission to start on my computer at the time (a 486 dx2? Or a Pentium? Hard to remember). Clearing space to play it was a pain too.
I missed some of the wc2 gameplay and was not a fan of how the story kept resetting the progress from the previous games ("humanity suddenly comes to an agreement and dismantles its full fleet", "ragtag peripheral colonies are the only ones who understood the enemy" etc...). The way Hobbes' character was retconned wasn't great - especially since they left out his final message (seriously wtf?)
I still loved the game, enough so that I remembered all of that from years ago.
Yeah, WC3 did Hobbes dirty in a way that seriously trashed a lot of what WC2 seemed to be trying to do.
The parts of that story involving Cobra are almost uncomfortable to discuss. It was an attempt to raise the stakes but I didn't like it at all.
Even putting the weird "we should exterminate them all" Cobra character aside, the idea made no sense logically. The Kilrathi didn't activate Hobbes during WC 1's Secret Missions 2 (during their holiest rituals for Sivar) but suddenly decided to do so when they were basically about to win (and had no idea about the Temblor Bomb et al)
It's part of a problem I have with a lot of fiction with sequels that has the heroes make significant character strides with implicit guarantees to the reader/viewer, only for those to be completely thrown away in the next volume / installment / etc..
In this case, Hobbes proves himself through Secret Missions 2 (when you fly the Kilrathi fighters) and then in WC2 (which seemed far more pivotal than the situation in WC3). Then for cheap drama and fake "serious" points, they flip the script in WC3 because your well-supported implicit understanding was only implicit and "it doesn't count".
(I still loved the game)
What happened to Angel seemed like cheap drama to me, too. With the added "benefit" of allowing another romance plotline for Blair. It overall just seemed like a less mature, more melodramatic story than the previous two games.
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) get lost in the process unless the right HN user is posting it.
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.
You can get lost on filfre.net for days. The PC gaming era was never my bag but heās spot on on the old 8-bit stories - his articles on Imagine/Psygnosis, and Melbourne Houseās The Hobbit, are superb.
Wing Commander II is quite memorable to me because as a child I could never get it to work properly and it introduced me to the world of autoexec.bat and HIMEM.SYS. No matter what I did, I could never get both the in-game speech and the mouse working at the same time, it was either one or the other.
Yes! I often think about how my childhood fiddling with this kind of stuff gave me the confidence and background to become a "computer person" and how little of that exists today for kids - apps just work so there's no educational struggle to get them going.
> I often think about how my childhood fiddling with this kind of stuff gave me the confidence and background to become a "computer person"
So much of this.
Actually taught one an approach to problem solving in that domain, in a a way that few other things can ...
Often wonder if there's an equivalent activity nowadays that would amount to this for newer generations.
I just loved launch bays, hanger decks, briefing rooms, flying CAP, and defending the fleet. It started with Elite, went into overdrive when I watched the original series of Battlestar Galactica, then Playing Wing commander 3. Something really cool about going down the launch bay, straight into an ambush, and limping your fighter back in one piece. Loved it.
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