4 ms·

What's bafflingly off-base about it? I haven't played it so I'm not disagreeing, that's just a very harsh criticism without any elaboration.

civilized 4y ago
For my part, I just don't get the point of writing this. Within the part of the article that's actually about the game, the author does basically nothing but scoff at things like the "workmanlike", "not ... subtle", "primary colors" nature of the story, or the "cheap, sparse, painfully plastic-looking sets", or how the characters use the callsign rather than the full real name of a fallen soldier during a funeral. There is almost nothing there about the story itself or its characters. I played this game a lot as a teen, and I thought the story had a lot of deeply sympathetic characters and emotionally resonant themes. It felt great to be the protagonist who uncovers fascist treachery at the top and averts a war. It felt great to do that with a team of comrades who shared your values and vigorously debated tactics. None of that gets a single word in this review. Of course not everyone is going to agree about what's a good movie, but I thought it deserved better than a collection of nitpicks that doesn't engage with the story at all. It seems like the critic just wanted the game/movie to be in a different genre, something more sophisticated or "subtle" with more "shades of gray"? But what's the point of that? It seems like criticizing Saving Private Ryan for not being Apocalypse Now or Starship Troopers. Okay, it's not the type of movie you wanted to see, I guess? But isn't it a little cliche, in itself, to reflexively disdain everything that is straightforward rather than meta, ironic, deconstructive, and self-referential?
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  You probably haven't been reading The Digital Antiquarian over the past five years. The site is an enormous dissertation on the art of interactivity. You could call it an attempt to put every major development in narrative gaming into context for their era. Jimmy Maher went all the way back to the early Plato-era mainframe games. He's covering everything from Adventure to Zork. [I'm joking, those two games happened almost at the same time.] But for "the point of writing this", that's why. It's a history of all the major games and being included in it is a pretty serious endorsement of Wing Commander IV's cultural value. In the context of the history of interactivity Wing Commander IV doesn't do that well. They spent a ton of money to make a game that's arguably less interactive than the earlier games in the series. That was how the 90s went. More and more money spent on bad full-motion video, fewer and fewer actual game choices. It's hard not to snark on the production values when they spent $12 million to make it. Again, it's a historical account... videogame budgets for absolute classics six years earlier were like $100k if you were lucky. It doesn't matter if it's a fun and enjoyable game. It's part of the fall of adventure gaming. That's the story.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Agreed. WC4 may not have been Chris Roberts' best work, but this review certainly wasn't Jimmy Maher's best. It would be just as big a mistake to blow off the whole Wing Commander franchise based on this review, as it would be to dismiss filfre.net as a collection of jeremiads about obsolete games. They are both great works in reality, and both have a lot more to offer than meets the eye in this instance.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  The author basically dislikes all the trends of 90's gaming, but he had already run through the old stuff at this point. Anyway, he does have a point in that as a piece of interactive narrative, it's more expensive, and adding a lot of production has its own charm, but it's also a step back from the very best Infocom adventure games when you're looking at the kind of play experience it presents, which is basically a CYOA book - the only experimenting to do is to choose option A over option B. This isn't necessarily wrong, even - visual novels have made a real art of that - but it's about the craft behind that kind of narrative, and not the direct engagement with technology. One respect in which I differ from Maher's view is that I don't really see the direct engagement as important. In most instances games are performing cartooning in their use of technology, and so adding more legible "player verbs" and "simulation elements" isn't necessarily adding that much to the message. Sometimes all you need to do to make a game narrative stick is to hide a major branch within a subtle decision, or force a replay to allow a different option to appear.
jmull 4y ago
The review is pretty long and has numerous complaints... pretty much none of which were seen as problems as the time. There are a lot of perspectives from which to judge a work from the past, especially a video game, where so, so much has changed since then. But this review doesn't seem to have a coherent perspective, other than the reviewer just personally didn't like it. (That's fine, BTW, we all have our opinions, but that doesn't make a review.) Was too much money spent on the game? Or were the production values too low? The review paradoxically complains about both. There's a half-hearted attempt to resolve that by suggesting some kind of uncanny valley problem, but no one ever thought that at the time... it's the authors now personal valley, apparently. (Perhaps the author is mixing in some modern expectations about video game production values into this, which makes no sense, of course). Also, I wonder if the reviewer is really considering the medium as it was. This game was designed to be played on 14-15" lo-res CRTs and play video off low-speed CD-ROM drives. It's pure nonsense to compare this even to movies of the day. The set detail had to be simple, to register at all. Even if you were so up-to-date you had a DVD drive and could play the higher-quality version of the cuts scenes, does it really make sense to complain the sets designed for that medium looked "plastic"? They looked great back then. There are many complaints about the writing of the cutscenes. I won't defend it as great art, but... it's a sci-fi adventure. There are supposed to be campy, punchy lines. This isn't the place for the deep treatment of serious themes or subtle character development, or nuanced story-telling. It's just baffling to me to judge this game because of what it was never meant to be, could never have been, and definitely never should have been. (From my perspective, WC IV was somewhat worse than III... it was too expensive, too short, and really needed a more powerful PC than I had at the time, so it didn't play that great. I think I remember there was one mission that was way too hard too, though maybe I wasn't approaching it the right way.)

civilized 4y ago

For my part, I just don't get the point of writing this. Within the part of the article that's actually about the game, the author does basically nothing but scoff at things like the "workmanlike", "not ... subtle", "primary colors" nature of the story, or the "cheap, sparse, painfully plastic-looking sets", or how the characters use the callsign rather than the full real name of a fallen soldier during a funeral. There is almost nothing there about the story itself or its characters. I played this game a lot as a teen, and I thought the story had a lot of deeply sympathetic characters and emotionally resonant themes. It felt great to be the protagonist who uncovers fascist treachery at the top and averts a war. It felt great to do that with a team of comrades who shared your values and vigorously debated tactics. None of that gets a single word in this review. Of course not everyone is going to agree about what's a good movie, but I thought it deserved better than a collection of nitpicks that doesn't engage with the story at all. It seems like the critic just wanted the game/movie to be in a different genre, something more sophisticated or "subtle" with more "shades of gray"? But what's the point of that? It seems like criticizing Saving Private Ryan for not being Apocalypse Now or Starship Troopers. Okay, it's not the type of movie you wanted to see, I guess? But isn't it a little cliche, in itself, to reflexively disdain everything that is straightforward rather than meta, ironic, deconstructive, and self-referential?

StrictDabbler 4y ago
You probably haven't been reading The Digital Antiquarian over the past five years. The site is an enormous dissertation on the art of interactivity. You could call it an attempt to put every major development in narrative gaming into context for their era. Jimmy Maher went all the way back to the early Plato-era mainframe games. He's covering everything from Adventure to Zork. [I'm joking, those two games happened almost at the same time.] But for "the point of writing this", that's why. It's a history of all the major games and being included in it is a pretty serious endorsement of Wing Commander IV's cultural value. In the context of the history of interactivity Wing Commander IV doesn't do that well. They spent a ton of money to make a game that's arguably less interactive than the earlier games in the series. That was how the 90s went. More and more money spent on bad full-motion video, fewer and fewer actual game choices. It's hard not to snark on the production values when they spent $12 million to make it. Again, it's a historical account... videogame budgets for absolute classics six years earlier were like $100k if you were lucky. It doesn't matter if it's a fun and enjoyable game. It's part of the fall of adventure gaming. That's the story.
CamperBob2 4y ago
Agreed. WC4 may not have been Chris Roberts' best work, but this review certainly wasn't Jimmy Maher's best. It would be just as big a mistake to blow off the whole Wing Commander franchise based on this review, as it would be to dismiss filfre.net as a collection of jeremiads about obsolete games. They are both great works in reality, and both have a lot more to offer than meets the eye in this instance.
syntheweave 4y ago
The author basically dislikes all the trends of 90's gaming, but he had already run through the old stuff at this point. Anyway, he does have a point in that as a piece of interactive narrative, it's more expensive, and adding a lot of production has its own charm, but it's also a step back from the very best Infocom adventure games when you're looking at the kind of play experience it presents, which is basically a CYOA book - the only experimenting to do is to choose option A over option B. This isn't necessarily wrong, even - visual novels have made a real art of that - but it's about the craft behind that kind of narrative, and not the direct engagement with technology. One respect in which I differ from Maher's view is that I don't really see the direct engagement as important. In most instances games are performing cartooning in their use of technology, and so adding more legible "player verbs" and "simulation elements" isn't necessarily adding that much to the message. Sometimes all you need to do to make a game narrative stick is to hide a major branch within a subtle decision, or force a replay to allow a different option to appear.

jmull 4y ago

The review is pretty long and has numerous complaints... pretty much none of which were seen as problems as the time. There are a lot of perspectives from which to judge a work from the past, especially a video game, where so, so much has changed since then. But this review doesn't seem to have a coherent perspective, other than the reviewer just personally didn't like it. (That's fine, BTW, we all have our opinions, but that doesn't make a review.) Was too much money spent on the game? Or were the production values too low? The review paradoxically complains about both. There's a half-hearted attempt to resolve that by suggesting some kind of uncanny valley problem, but no one ever thought that at the time... it's the authors now personal valley, apparently. (Perhaps the author is mixing in some modern expectations about video game production values into this, which makes no sense, of course). Also, I wonder if the reviewer is really considering the medium as it was. This game was designed to be played on 14-15" lo-res CRTs and play video off low-speed CD-ROM drives. It's pure nonsense to compare this even to movies of the day. The set detail had to be simple, to register at all. Even if you were so up-to-date you had a DVD drive and could play the higher-quality version of the cuts scenes, does it really make sense to complain the sets designed for that medium looked "plastic"? They looked great back then. There are many complaints about the writing of the cutscenes. I won't defend it as great art, but... it's a sci-fi adventure. There are supposed to be campy, punchy lines. This isn't the place for the deep treatment of serious themes or subtle character development, or nuanced story-telling. It's just baffling to me to judge this game because of what it was never meant to be, could never have been, and definitely never should have been. (From my perspective, WC IV was somewhat worse than III... it was too expensive, too short, and really needed a more powerful PC than I had at the time, so it didn't play that great. I think I remember there was one mission that was way too hard too, though maybe I wasn't approaching it the right way.)