Wing Commander™ 1+2

NOTE: (I am playing the first one right now, because I want to play these in order, but here is the review for the first game alone! I bet the second one will be just as great if not better!) For 1990, this is incredible! I wasn't even born yet!! I already completed my first major mission, and it seems so realistic for its time. I am being praised by one of the upper hands in the game, with amazing animation with the lip syncing, and even the animation of actions, including running, and especially clapping are so well done. This feels rather lively! The controls are extremely responsive, and enemies are made easier to take out with the lock-on system. The detail on the ships are super realistic for the time; it has the digitized sprites that don't look cartoony. I recommend this to any gamer who wants to get their hands on a piece of gaming history!

Wing Commander reminds me of why building a ridiculously expensive (and almost instantly obsolete) game rig and boning up on DOS manuals was such a joy. In order to play Chris Roberts's masterpieces, you needed all the latest hardware: top of the line processors, sticker shocking memory chips, the latest DOS version, Sound Blaster cards, and fast video boards. This could add up to thousands of dollars if you were starting completely from scratch, and we would tack on hundreds more to upgrade hardware for the latest versions and all their expensive add-ons. Why? Because flight sims allowed tech-savvy adults to live out their childhood dreams to be fighter pilots without all the hassle of getting an aeronautical engineering degree and joining the air force. Space sims opened the door to a whole new level of guilty pleasure, to become the main character in a Star Wars movie. Everything about this game, despite the obviously dated graphics and sound, pulled off that immersive experience. The adlib-compatible tinny, chirpy, and beepy music score still drew us into the mood of a particular scene or a crisis in the middle of a mission. The cutscenes, simply done to fit into tiny floppy disks, elegantly introduced us to an entire universe of characters, exotically beautiful planets, and an epic adventure. It's surprisingly easy to become attached to the characters, and perhaps evolving those relationships is even more appealing than revealing the story itself. The conclusion of each mission, with new dialog, cutscenes, and honors, was like unwrapping a long-anticipated present. Replaying it some twenty years later, I'm pleased to notice that successive waves of simulators with everything from real-world physics to lifelike graphics and actual movie cutscenes have not tarnished the appeal of the simple original. If anything, the new generation's movie scenes often couldn't live up to the highly polished comic book animations of the original-- either the b-movie actors, the cheap costumes, or the cgi sets disappointed in ways that painstakingly chosen pixel by pixel artwork could not. Above all, the Wing Commander odyssey is a polished and rewarding experience throughout, so you will stay motivated to keep undertaking what can sometimes become missions that feel like busy work. Finally, you'll still need to show off your techno-geek patience and troubleshooting skills even to get this latest version to run the way you want it to. There are occasional crashes and bugs, though not nearly as many as in the original and, yes, processor speed still affects game play, even with the infinite speed of contemporary processors available to us. All we have to do now, though, is make sure that the cycles setting in the DosBox configuration file is tweaked just so, adjusting it upwards for missions with lots of ships and asteroids and downwards for small duels, and that the rendering setting give us full screen video. Compared to the old days, that's a piece of cake!

Classic, This game taught me the word bastard :) I just ordered a joystick for this game alone!

These are definitely classics but it's hard to get as excited about the gameplay after more advanced space combat engines were released. I think one of my fondest memories was of blowing up a Kilrathi carrier you were supposed to scout with a Hornet in one of the secret missions packs and then getting a mix of praise and being cussed out for not following orders on returning to home base. This was considerably cooler than X-Wing's approach which was to simply to rename the ironically named "Invincible," "Invincible 2," "Invincible 3" etc... when you blew it up on missions you weren't really supposed to.

This is so exciting. One of my personal favorite games is now easily available. The only down side is that it doesn't come with SM 1+2 or SO 1+2. Lets hope they fix that soon as that has some of the my favorite moments in the WC series.