Wing Commander™ 1+2

Complete gaming satisfaction is surviving a huge melee in space, blasting aliens left and right (and up and down), having your fighter shot to hell but still completing the mission to limp back to your carrier flying on fumes and basking in the halo of victory.

One of the greatest impact a game had on me. It was one of the first space sims that had a dense cinematic story to tell. It was also one of the first games that had full speech with good quality. To bad it isn't included here, so you can skip directly to WC3 and its sequel. You don't have to play the first two parts. Yet i enjoyed it a lot. Please add the speech packs so it is worth the download. Now it is less than the stuff i played 20 Years ago at the price of the 7GB WC4. That is just off. Gee, sell the speech pack separatly :) but sell it !

It seems the game becomes impassable at some point. The game has an unstable frame rate, when approaching with ships or with a large number of enemies even 6000 CPU speed is not enough, although before it was all as if accelerated (i7 13700k). With the second part there are no such problems, it works perfectly at once. Better find somewhere a disk with Kilrathi Saga for windows. Nothing compares to the briefings of the first part.

I don't think it's possible for me to write an unbiased review of these games. For one lonely summer working in an unfamiliar town, Wing Commander was my primary source of entertainment - and sanity. I memorized ship specs and played through the campaigns many, many times. These were the games that changed the face of PC gaming - in some ways, for the worse, with the spiraling blockbuster budgets that persist to this day. They combined the popularity (at the time) of flight simulators and mission-based gameplay with Star Wars fantasies and with interesting stories and characters. While today, these kinds of combos are the norm, but at the time, it was pretty amazing. The other trick (following Lawrence Holland's use of it in LucasArts' Their Finest Hour) was to use graphically lush bitmaps for spacecraft & other objects rather than the far more limited flat-shaded polygonal objects of most flight sims at the time. This made dogfights a little trickier, as it was harder to determine the true direction of movement of the enemy ships, but it made for some incredible screenshots and a more believable cinematic experience. Other efforts made to improve the immersive quality of the game included the visual appearance of damage inside the cockpit, and the virtual hand of your pilot on the joystick as you flew. Once you get used to the lower resolution (and dig up a joystick if you don't have one already), you'll find the games quite fun and playable today. They still hold up.

The Graphics are out of date, but this was the game i have started playing games on PC (386er, 4 MB RAM, DOS 3.5). I hope Wing Commander 3-5 will be the next by GOG.