17 ms·

Wing Commander III

264 points by doppp 6y ago

buescher 6y ago
I'm a big fan of the genre, played at least one of the Wing Commander games a while after it came out, and I think Tie Fighter also. I never understood the appeal compared to say, Star Raiders or the Star Wars vector arcade game. Maybe I was just getting too old for video games, but I played Oolite (never played Elite when it was current) for a little while when I was between jobs at 40 and loved it.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Yeah, I must be too old too. When "cut scenes" started becoming the norm I felt like video games had lost their way.... Additionally, the big studios with their cut scenes set a kind of bar that the indie game dev couldn't match. It eventually sorted itself out but at the time it looked like the big players were moving in and the indies should probably head off and get "real" jobs.
  - techrat 6y ago
    And then Half Life came along and showed you could have a game without any cutscenes whatsoever, with story and expositional moments parts of the game you could still interact within the map. Listening to the security guards in the main hall, finding that button under the desk... and pushing it.
sandworm101 6y ago
Owned it. It was campy fun even then but WCII and WC:Privateer were far and away the better games. III was one of many attempts at a game-movie crossover that never really worked imho. Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with SimCity and Civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer
- bentcorner 6y ago
  Privateer was a lot of fun. I remember playing it and the sequel. I'd be interested to see more behind-the-scenes of Privateer 2. It also had FMV and (from what I recall) had this sort of campy sci-fi TV movie feel. Great game, although I'm hesitant to look at it without the lens of nostalgia.
  - tibbydudeza 6y ago
    Well Chris Roberts is back with Star Citizen , 500 million dollars for an eternal beta of nostalgia.
    - datameta 6y ago
      I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series... It totally captivated me as a kid, but I sure as heck didn't know who was responsible for its creation. It just sort of existed as a different realm without much thought of the behind-the-scenes
      - lovegoblin 6y ago
        > I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series His name was on the cover of the box haha. But yeah him being the showrunner was one of the primary reasons the original Star Citizen scam^W kickstarter went so well. The space sim genre/community was so dead back then that at that point we would've thrown money at anything.
  - lovegoblin 6y ago
    > Privateer was a lot of fun. You'd probably be interested in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (2019). It's extremely Privateer-influenced.
    - fogihujy 6y ago
      The first game, Rebel galaxy, is also highly entertaining, though much less Privateery.
grawprog 6y ago
>Having been recently acquired by Electronic Arts, >The goal was, if someone said, “What’s an interactive movie?” we’d just hand them the CDs from Wing Commander III and say, “Here, check this out.” >This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course...but the lack of any real gameplay evolution within that look and feel perhaps is. So...even back then, EA was in the habit of buying successful game properties and ruining the core gameplay by turning them into essentially interactive movies full of cut scenes. Sometimes I wonder what video games would be like today if EA and a few other choice companies...cough...activision...Ubisoft...cough just didn't exist at all....
- tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Ubisoft - amazed at how many Assassins' Creed/Far Cry/The Division games they can churn out on a yearly basis unlike Rockstar who takes time to craft their open sandbox games.
- djur 6y ago
  Nah, it's clear that Chris Roberts was very interested in going that direction. EA might have enabled that interest, but it's not like some of Origin's independent contemporaries weren't similarly dashing themselves on the rocks of FMV (Sierra, for one). If EA didn't exist, it's very likely that Origin would have either been bought out by some other company or collapsed. They were in dire straits at the time of acquisition.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    I know, my comment was mostly...i dunno facetious...sarcastic?? I did read the article...it wasn't EA's influence that led to the game's direction it that case...i just thought it was funny that EA got involved in the series at the point where they started going for visuals over gameplay. Seemed fitting for what EA would eventually do. >If EA didn't exist, it's very likely that Origin would have either been bought out by some other company or collapsed I know...my wonderings were more... 'What would video games look like today if corporate profit as a primary motive hadn't won out and major game studios still made games with that nostalgic 80's-90's gameplay first ethos i'm likely looking back at with rose tinted glasses...' Still...sometimes i wish games had gone more the way me and my cousins and friends had always hoped they would back in the days 3d games started emerging rather than the profit driven, microtransaction oriented, interactive movies video games actually became...largely driven by the companies mentioned in my earlier comment.
cgriswald 6y ago
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.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  Funny you should mention the mental model of challenges because I do the same thing. I've started role-playing in games that neither require nor request any real role-play. For example, I find it much easier to suspend my disbelief in a shooter game if my character doesn't have to survive 10s of bullets without even a wince. As a result, I play and replay shooter levels until I can beat the game without taking a single bullet.
jbm 6y ago
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.
- djur 6y ago
  Yeah, WC3 did Hobbes dirty in a way that seriously trashed a lot of what WC2 seemed to be trying to do.
  - jbm 6y ago
    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)
    - djur 6y ago
      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.
burlesona 6y ago
One of my all time favorite games, because as a ~10 year old I can think of nothing cooler than playing Luke Skywalker in a sci-fi top-gun movie about saving earth from murderous Cat Aliens. :) Privateer 2 was a more ambitious and interesting take on the same theme, I loved that one too.
- caoilte 6y ago
  It crashed on a specific cut scene point for me every time. Didn't buy another game until Rimworld. Still so angry.
ekianjo 6y ago
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.
- m463 6y ago
  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.
allenu 6y ago
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.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  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.
  - Bluestein 6y ago
    > 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.
jonplackett 6y ago
I used to play so much Privateer when I was a kid! So much fun!
- standardUser 6y ago
  What a game. I'll always remember grappling with the moral ambiguity of buying and selling human slaves in a game for profit.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Haha, I mostly stuck to Tungsten Ore... until I could buy a Centurion with 4X Tachyon Cannons. Then the world was MINE. If you feel like playing someone did an update: http://privateer.sourceforge.net/files.shtml http://privateer.sourceforge.net/files.shtml
thom 6y ago
Loved this game, and it’s a permanent fixture in DOSBox on every machine I own. I was lucky that my dad had a machine that could run it properly, and an expensive analogue joystick to boot. I really don’t have any negative memories of either the story or the gameplay, so the review makes me a little sad. I still have nightmares about chasing cloaked torpedoes down before they can hit my base.
otachack 6y ago
I played this on the PlayStation 1. It was the biggest pain since you had to swap discs constantly but it paid off as it felt like playing a movie. It also didn't click in my head that Mark Hamil was the lead until some time later. I love the author's write ups but honestly I need to set aside time to read them thoroughly since they're so dense. Thanks so much for these!
l0b0 6y ago
On GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger
bigmattystyles 6y ago
This was also the perfect way to learn your dad knew who Ginger Lynn is but also to for him to learn how his then ~15 year old also knew.
- hinkley 6y ago
  One evening we are watching some reality show where they show up at your house and fix things, and this one episode they introduce the owner. Owner, nothing, that’s Ginger Lynn. They never did name her. The whole episode she was just “the owner”. I had nobody to share this realization with, as you can imagine. So she is still out there somewhere, living her best life from the sounds of it.
  - bigmattystyles 6y ago
    Good for her - honestly the way we treat porn stars (all sex workers really) as a society is so awful. I would bet most, including the pious and self-righteous, what have you, are at once consumers but then have no qualms shaming them.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      I try to treat every employee I meet as a human who is just trying to do their best. Some people sound genuinely surprised when I respond "you too" to their "have a nice day" which sometimes makes me happy, other times makes me sad. I won't draw cause and effect here, but I didn't really Become the Change in this regard until after I encountered Violet Blue's writing, who for a time was practically a spokesperson in the area you're talking about.
poisonborz 6y ago
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.
- spockz 6y ago
  I miss those too. I also feel that having these movie cutscenes helps the imagination. It doesn’t 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.)
- aidenn0 6y ago
  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.
- ballenf 6y ago
  I wonder if the master recordings for WC3 were kept or still exist. Imagine taking them and remastering the game.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- djur 6y ago
  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.
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
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.
- ohyeshedid 6y ago
  Fwiw, if you click the domain listed to the right of the title; (filfre.net),[1] it will take you to a list of all submissions to HN under that domain. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=filfre.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=filfre.net
- Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
  You can get lost on filfre.net for days. The PC gaming era was never my bag but he’s spot on on the old 8-bit stories - his articles on Imagine/Psygnosis, and Melbourne House’s The Hobbit, are superb.
FrenchTouch42 6y ago
Wing Commander IV was just much more polished to me and just mind blowing all around.
- rixrax 6y ago
  Some people are working on remake it looks like: https://wcrespace.com https://wcrespace.com .
aidenn0 6y ago
The author points here (and I think in older posts) to the change of setting for the reason that Strike Commander failed. That's definitely part of it, but the game was essentially unplayable without QEMM386 (a commercial expanded-memory manager of the time). With the MS EMM386, you would regularly get crashes to the dos prompt (I think the typical error included a .OVL file in the output). Prior to the knowledge of QEMM being needed to play it, it just had the reputation of "buggy as hell" which had to be contributory to its poor sales (I think a WC branded game that was equally buggy would have probably sold much better, but the bugs were the nail-in-the-coffin)
- pgt 6y ago
  I loved the setting of Strike Commander! It had a far more complex game mechanic, especially for an 8 year-old: you had to budget to buy your missiles as a mercenary, outfit your craft and then go out on complex missions with waypoints and bombings. Wing Commander was simpler: shoot to kill.
- Firehawke 6y ago
  It's amusing in a dark and cynical way that this was the second time they'd managed to screw up in regards to EMS/XMS. JEMM, integrated into Ultima 7, made that particular title hellish to get working. You needed to find a mouse driver that was small enough to fit in conventional memory because JEMM wouldn't work with EMM386.SYS or QEMM386.SYS loaded and would not let you play if either were loaded or you didn't have enough conventional memory. Their best efforts to make the game friendly to people who didn't have the technical knowledge to deal with EMS/XMS actually made it significantly harder for non-technical users AND technical users alike!
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    JEMM was used by Origin in pretty much all the games of that era, including Strike Commander, Privateer and WC Armada. However, as it goes with anything game related, there wasn't a single version of JEMM (just like there wasn't a single version of e.g. Sierra's SCI runtime), so they all had different features and quirks. I believe they mostly shared the same VCPI interface though, as MyJEMM[1] was reported to work with most of those games despite being developed specifically for Privateer. 1: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/MyJEMM https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/MyJEMM
rrauenza 6y ago
I loved that game, but I'm still not over Hobbes' plot point.
standardUser 6y ago
A legendary gaming experience. Not just the cinematics, but the story and gameplay were as good as it got in that era. It doesn't get too much attention in this story, but it sounds like this was a rare occurrence where EA actually improved a beloved gaming franchise! As opposed to burying it in a shallow grave and urinating on its still-warm corpse, as is their tactic with most franchise acquisitions in recent years.
alfiesmith 6y ago
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.
jkhdigital 6y ago
Wing Commander III is the only computer game my 67 year-old father has ever purchased and played in his adult life.
spiritplumber 6y ago
This game, its sequel, and Privateer helped me thru a very tough time in my life.
Bluestein 6y ago
> John Rhys-Davies, who had played Indiana Jones’s sidekick Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films) ... Blown away as I was by this ("What? Sallah and Gimli ... wow") ... ... it is even nicer/weirder to find him here.- (He shows up in the most onexpected places ...) He was also, allegedly "taller than any of his fellow [LoTR] castmates" (Then again, that whole franchise plays very well with heights and perspective, effects, etc ...) See: - https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7kd163/til_the_actor_who_played_the_dwarf_gimli_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7kd163/til_t...
- Bluestein 6y ago
  > Tom Wilson, who had played the cretinous bully Biff Tannen in the three Back to the Future movies. (He replaced Hamill in the role of Maniac — a role not that far removed from his most famous one, come to think of it.) ... And ... this.- Speechless :)
  - bobbyi_settv 6y ago
    Tom Wilson later gained some internet fame for this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y
- cma 6y ago
  > >he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films Don't forget his role in 'Sliders.'
  - Bluestein 6y ago
    Oh, of course ... Great flick, by the way.- (At least I liked it ...)
Pxtl 6y ago
At some point I need to give Tie Fighter another try. The more I played of X-wing the less I liked it, and so when my friends were raving about Tie Fighter I was less than enthused.
- mekster 6y ago
  Games were good back then because only serious people were creating against a small market. Nowadays, you create shit games and throw money on advertising, you get millions back...
fullstop 6y ago
I have all of the CD-ROMs for this in my basement. I never played it because my PC at the time couldn't handle it and it took a good 10-15 minutes to get into space.
exporectomy 6y ago
Just a personal story - I had an regret filled experience with this game that was my own fault. Just bought my first computer and first real computer game WC III. Exceeded all the recommended specs on the box but it ran at a very low framerate all jerky and unplayable. So slow you couldn't avoid getting killed without turning the cheats on. Hated it. Even worse, I had no idea who Mark Hamill was! It was totally wasted on me. I ended up selling it to a friend but later discovered why it was slow. The stupid turbo button on the computer acted backwards! Either push it in or turn the LED on to make it run in slow mode. For several months I'd been carefully and mistakenly keeping turbo turned off thinking that made it go faster and had never used such a fast computer so I thought that was just normal.
cable2600 6y ago
It is on Gog for $6, a real good deal. https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger
Kye 6y ago
I remember this! My computer wouldn't run it. A letter to Origin about it and a few weeks resulted in a choice between several options for replacement. I think I went for the WCI/II + special ops and secret missions bundle CD.
anonygler 6y ago
The Wing Commander/Privateer series are one of my fondest childhood memories. I really wish I could have something like it again. Same goes for EverQuest. So much fun.

264 points by doppp 6y ago

I'm a big fan of the genre, played at least one of the Wing Commander games a while after it came out, and I think Tie Fighter also. I never understood the appeal compared to say, Star Raiders or the Star Wars vector arcade game. Maybe I was just getting too old for video games, but I played Oolite (never played Elite when it was current) for a little while when I was between jobs at 40 and loved it.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
Yeah, I must be too old too. When "cut scenes" started becoming the norm I felt like video games had lost their way.... Additionally, the big studios with their cut scenes set a kind of bar that the indie game dev couldn't match. It eventually sorted itself out but at the time it looked like the big players were moving in and the indies should probably head off and get "real" jobs.
- techrat 6y ago
  And then Half Life came along and showed you could have a game without any cutscenes whatsoever, with story and expositional moments parts of the game you could still interact within the map. Listening to the security guards in the main hall, finding that button under the desk... and pushing it.

sandworm101 6y ago

Owned it. It was campy fun even then but WCII and WC:Privateer were far and away the better games. III was one of many attempts at a game-movie crossover that never really worked imho. Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with SimCity and Civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer

bentcorner 6y ago
Privateer was a lot of fun. I remember playing it and the sequel. I'd be interested to see more behind-the-scenes of Privateer 2. It also had FMV and (from what I recall) had this sort of campy sci-fi TV movie feel. Great game, although I'm hesitant to look at it without the lens of nostalgia.
- tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Well Chris Roberts is back with Star Citizen , 500 million dollars for an eternal beta of nostalgia.
  - datameta 6y ago
    I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series... It totally captivated me as a kid, but I sure as heck didn't know who was responsible for its creation. It just sort of existed as a different realm without much thought of the behind-the-scenes
    - lovegoblin 6y ago
      > I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series His name was on the cover of the box haha. But yeah him being the showrunner was one of the primary reasons the original Star Citizen scam^W kickstarter went so well. The space sim genre/community was so dead back then that at that point we would've thrown money at anything.
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  > Privateer was a lot of fun. You'd probably be interested in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (2019). It's extremely Privateer-influenced.
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    The first game, Rebel galaxy, is also highly entertaining, though much less Privateery.

grawprog 6y ago

>Having been recently acquired by Electronic Arts, >The goal was, if someone said, “What’s an interactive movie?” we’d just hand them the CDs from Wing Commander III and say, “Here, check this out.” >This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course...but the lack of any real gameplay evolution within that look and feel perhaps is. So...even back then, EA was in the habit of buying successful game properties and ruining the core gameplay by turning them into essentially interactive movies full of cut scenes. Sometimes I wonder what video games would be like today if EA and a few other choice companies...cough...activision...Ubisoft...cough just didn't exist at all....

tibbydudeza 6y ago
Ubisoft - amazed at how many Assassins' Creed/Far Cry/The Division games they can churn out on a yearly basis unlike Rockstar who takes time to craft their open sandbox games.
djur 6y ago
Nah, it's clear that Chris Roberts was very interested in going that direction. EA might have enabled that interest, but it's not like some of Origin's independent contemporaries weren't similarly dashing themselves on the rocks of FMV (Sierra, for one). If EA didn't exist, it's very likely that Origin would have either been bought out by some other company or collapsed. They were in dire straits at the time of acquisition.
- grawprog 6y ago
  I know, my comment was mostly...i dunno facetious...sarcastic?? I did read the article...it wasn't EA's influence that led to the game's direction it that case...i just thought it was funny that EA got involved in the series at the point where they started going for visuals over gameplay. Seemed fitting for what EA would eventually do. >If EA didn't exist, it's very likely that Origin would have either been bought out by some other company or collapsed I know...my wonderings were more... 'What would video games look like today if corporate profit as a primary motive hadn't won out and major game studios still made games with that nostalgic 80's-90's gameplay first ethos i'm likely looking back at with rose tinted glasses...' Still...sometimes i wish games had gone more the way me and my cousins and friends had always hoped they would back in the days 3d games started emerging rather than the profit driven, microtransaction oriented, interactive movies video games actually became...largely driven by the companies mentioned in my earlier comment.

cgriswald 6y ago

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.

jimbob45 6y ago
Funny you should mention the mental model of challenges because I do the same thing. I've started role-playing in games that neither require nor request any real role-play. For example, I find it much easier to suspend my disbelief in a shooter game if my character doesn't have to survive 10s of bullets without even a wince. As a result, I play and replay shooter levels until I can beat the game without taking a single bullet.

jbm 6y ago

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.

djur 6y ago
Yeah, WC3 did Hobbes dirty in a way that seriously trashed a lot of what WC2 seemed to be trying to do.
- jbm 6y ago
  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)
  - djur 6y ago
    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.

burlesona 6y ago

One of my all time favorite games, because as a ~10 year old I can think of nothing cooler than playing Luke Skywalker in a sci-fi top-gun movie about saving earth from murderous Cat Aliens. :) Privateer 2 was a more ambitious and interesting take on the same theme, I loved that one too.

caoilte 6y ago
It crashed on a specific cut scene point for me every time. Didn't buy another game until Rimworld. Still so angry.

ekianjo 6y ago

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.

m463 6y ago
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.

allenu 6y ago

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.

xyzelement 6y ago
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.
- Bluestein 6y ago
  > 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.

jonplackett 6y ago

I used to play so much Privateer when I was a kid! So much fun!

standardUser 6y ago
What a game. I'll always remember grappling with the moral ambiguity of buying and selling human slaves in a game for profit.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Haha, I mostly stuck to Tungsten Ore... until I could buy a Centurion with 4X Tachyon Cannons. Then the world was MINE. If you feel like playing someone did an update: http://privateer.sourceforge.net/files.shtml http://privateer.sourceforge.net/files.shtml

thom 6y ago

Loved this game, and it’s a permanent fixture in DOSBox on every machine I own. I was lucky that my dad had a machine that could run it properly, and an expensive analogue joystick to boot. I really don’t have any negative memories of either the story or the gameplay, so the review makes me a little sad. I still have nightmares about chasing cloaked torpedoes down before they can hit my base.

otachack 6y ago

I played this on the PlayStation 1. It was the biggest pain since you had to swap discs constantly but it paid off as it felt like playing a movie. It also didn't click in my head that Mark Hamil was the lead until some time later. I love the author's write ups but honestly I need to set aside time to read them thoroughly since they're so dense. Thanks so much for these!

l0b0 6y ago

On GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger

bigmattystyles 6y ago

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

hinkley 6y ago
One evening we are watching some reality show where they show up at your house and fix things, and this one episode they introduce the owner. Owner, nothing, that’s Ginger Lynn. They never did name her. The whole episode she was just “the owner”. I had nobody to share this realization with, as you can imagine. So she is still out there somewhere, living her best life from the sounds of it.
- bigmattystyles 6y ago
  Good for her - honestly the way we treat porn stars (all sex workers really) as a society is so awful. I would bet most, including the pious and self-righteous, what have you, are at once consumers but then have no qualms shaming them.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I try to treat every employee I meet as a human who is just trying to do their best. Some people sound genuinely surprised when I respond "you too" to their "have a nice day" which sometimes makes me happy, other times makes me sad. I won't draw cause and effect here, but I didn't really Become the Change in this regard until after I encountered Violet Blue's writing, who for a time was practically a spokesperson in the area you're talking about.

poisonborz 6y ago

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.

spockz 6y ago
I miss those too. I also feel that having these movie cutscenes helps the imagination. It doesn’t 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.)
aidenn0 6y ago
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.
ballenf 6y ago
I wonder if the master recordings for WC3 were kept or still exist. Imagine taking them and remastering the game.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
djur 6y ago
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.

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

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.

ohyeshedid 6y ago
Fwiw, if you click the domain listed to the right of the title; (filfre.net),[1] it will take you to a list of all submissions to HN under that domain. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=filfre.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=filfre.net
Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
You can get lost on filfre.net for days. The PC gaming era was never my bag but he’s spot on on the old 8-bit stories - his articles on Imagine/Psygnosis, and Melbourne House’s The Hobbit, are superb.

FrenchTouch42 6y ago

Wing Commander IV was just much more polished to me and just mind blowing all around.

rixrax 6y ago
Some people are working on remake it looks like: https://wcrespace.com https://wcrespace.com .

aidenn0 6y ago

The author points here (and I think in older posts) to the change of setting for the reason that Strike Commander failed. That's definitely part of it, but the game was essentially unplayable without QEMM386 (a commercial expanded-memory manager of the time). With the MS EMM386, you would regularly get crashes to the dos prompt (I think the typical error included a .OVL file in the output). Prior to the knowledge of QEMM being needed to play it, it just had the reputation of "buggy as hell" which had to be contributory to its poor sales (I think a WC branded game that was equally buggy would have probably sold much better, but the bugs were the nail-in-the-coffin)

pgt 6y ago
I loved the setting of Strike Commander! It had a far more complex game mechanic, especially for an 8 year-old: you had to budget to buy your missiles as a mercenary, outfit your craft and then go out on complex missions with waypoints and bombings. Wing Commander was simpler: shoot to kill.
Firehawke 6y ago
It's amusing in a dark and cynical way that this was the second time they'd managed to screw up in regards to EMS/XMS. JEMM, integrated into Ultima 7, made that particular title hellish to get working. You needed to find a mouse driver that was small enough to fit in conventional memory because JEMM wouldn't work with EMM386.SYS or QEMM386.SYS loaded and would not let you play if either were loaded or you didn't have enough conventional memory. Their best efforts to make the game friendly to people who didn't have the technical knowledge to deal with EMS/XMS actually made it significantly harder for non-technical users AND technical users alike!
- aidenn0 6y ago
  JEMM was used by Origin in pretty much all the games of that era, including Strike Commander, Privateer and WC Armada. However, as it goes with anything game related, there wasn't a single version of JEMM (just like there wasn't a single version of e.g. Sierra's SCI runtime), so they all had different features and quirks. I believe they mostly shared the same VCPI interface though, as MyJEMM[1] was reported to work with most of those games despite being developed specifically for Privateer. 1: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/MyJEMM https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/MyJEMM

rrauenza 6y ago

I loved that game, but I'm still not over Hobbes' plot point.

standardUser 6y ago

A legendary gaming experience. Not just the cinematics, but the story and gameplay were as good as it got in that era. It doesn't get too much attention in this story, but it sounds like this was a rare occurrence where EA actually improved a beloved gaming franchise! As opposed to burying it in a shallow grave and urinating on its still-warm corpse, as is their tactic with most franchise acquisitions in recent years.

alfiesmith 6y ago

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.

jkhdigital 6y ago

Wing Commander III is the only computer game my 67 year-old father has ever purchased and played in his adult life.

spiritplumber 6y ago

This game, its sequel, and Privateer helped me thru a very tough time in my life.

Bluestein 6y ago

> John Rhys-Davies, who had played Indiana Jones’s sidekick Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films) ... Blown away as I was by this ("What? Sallah and Gimli ... wow") ... ... it is even nicer/weirder to find him here.- (He shows up in the most onexpected places ...) He was also, allegedly "taller than any of his fellow [LoTR] castmates" (Then again, that whole franchise plays very well with heights and perspective, effects, etc ...) See: - https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7kd163/til_the_actor_who_played_the_dwarf_gimli_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7kd163/til_t...

Bluestein 6y ago
> Tom Wilson, who had played the cretinous bully Biff Tannen in the three Back to the Future movies. (He replaced Hamill in the role of Maniac — a role not that far removed from his most famous one, come to think of it.) ... And ... this.- Speechless :)
- bobbyi_settv 6y ago
  Tom Wilson later gained some internet fame for this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y
cma 6y ago
> >he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films Don't forget his role in 'Sliders.'
- Bluestein 6y ago
  Oh, of course ... Great flick, by the way.- (At least I liked it ...)

Pxtl 6y ago

At some point I need to give Tie Fighter another try. The more I played of X-wing the less I liked it, and so when my friends were raving about Tie Fighter I was less than enthused.

mekster 6y ago
Games were good back then because only serious people were creating against a small market. Nowadays, you create shit games and throw money on advertising, you get millions back...

fullstop 6y ago

I have all of the CD-ROMs for this in my basement. I never played it because my PC at the time couldn't handle it and it took a good 10-15 minutes to get into space.

exporectomy 6y ago

Just a personal story - I had an regret filled experience with this game that was my own fault. Just bought my first computer and first real computer game WC III. Exceeded all the recommended specs on the box but it ran at a very low framerate all jerky and unplayable. So slow you couldn't avoid getting killed without turning the cheats on. Hated it. Even worse, I had no idea who Mark Hamill was! It was totally wasted on me. I ended up selling it to a friend but later discovered why it was slow. The stupid turbo button on the computer acted backwards! Either push it in or turn the LED on to make it run in slow mode. For several months I'd been carefully and mistakenly keeping turbo turned off thinking that made it go faster and had never used such a fast computer so I thought that was just normal.

cable2600 6y ago

It is on Gog for $6, a real good deal. https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger

Kye 6y ago

I remember this! My computer wouldn't run it. A letter to Origin about it and a few weeks resulted in a choice between several options for replacement. I think I went for the WCI/II + special ops and secret missions bundle CD.

anonygler 6y ago

The Wing Commander/Privateer series are one of my fondest childhood memories. I really wish I could have something like it again. Same goes for EverQuest. So much fun.