Looks interesting... Although I'm still waiting for jetfighter...

Great! I will happily buy it when that time comes.

I've got that one on Blu-ray though like everything else haven't had time to watch it yet.

I love you :D Wings! is my all-time favourite Amiga game and now knowing the original will be here brings me great joy

Well there is the possibility that GOG would gain more customers with free keys there is also the possibility that it means nothing to people who aren't already GOG Customers.

There is a financial loss as GOG pays for the download traffic via their CDN (Content Delivery Network) provider costs. Maybe less of an issue with small games, but would be a bigger impact when it comes for multi gigabyte games.

--- I'm one of those minority people who is happy to buy a game again on special to get it on a platform of choice eg GOG or Steam. It's a bonus if I get a key for one of those platforms for backing, but I don't expect it.

I see often in the forums people complaining (not referring to you here) that they don't get a copy with GOG or steam or so on when that isn't part of the original Kickstarter / indie gogo etc backer deal. So to all those folks be thankful if you get a key from your store of choice (or not really it is the big two GOG or steam), but don't complain if you don't. You are not owed anything beyond what is promised when you backed a game.
I've no problem with people asking for a key, my only issue is those who act like it is owed to them.
After all we are all adults (making the assumption that most who are project bakers are).

Problem is - quite a few devs who go the KS route are either deliberately vague or noncommital (pretty unfair to backers who would like their reward via a given store) when it comes to offering drm free standalone or offering gogkeys (haven't seen any yet who offerred gogkeys to backers upfront without being asked by backers in first instance).
But your right, there is definitely no obligation for devs to offer things to backers which aren't already spelt out in the rewards available for a given project.

True, but the number of backers is known and limited.
Free giveaways, such as Fallout or Aliens vs. Predator 2000 will have much more people redeeming and downloading the game than any single crowdfunding reward could have.

And if one sees free keys as a form of advertising, there's really no advertisment medium that will have 100% positive response. I think free keys will still work much better, and cause much less negative connotations, than banners on other sites etc.


Yeah, but what practically speaking all projects do, is that they give those keys if their game is accepted to GOG/Steam/some place. Some projects even give Humble keys over a year before the game is even supposed to be finished. I guess it can be argued that backers have been spoiled by too kind developers, but be that as it may, it does create certain expectations towards all other projects too.


Well... it's not only the backers that's the problem. There have been some weird issues with certain crowdfunding projects and their creators, which really don't seem adult-like at all. I'm not mentioning any names, but maybe people know anyway which projects or persons we're talking about.

And of course too aggressive whining about keys is not really helping anyone. But then there is also the fact that without backers, these games wouldn't exist. So while there may be no legal obligation to give backers anything, most projects acknowledge the fact that backers were willing to risk their own money to get the game made.

Of course some backer behaviour does seem very childish, like whining about few hour delay when the keys get activated (Gabriel Knight remake being the latest example of that).

So far I am having alot of fun playing the new version of Wings. One thing that changed is the perma-death option, at least while I was playing the beta you could reload the game from the last mission.

You can reload it from the last save, not the last mission. However, exactly what a "save" is is somewhat unclear. As far as I can tell, the game only saves when you quit out of it entirely, which is stupid in the extreme.

Perma-death was always part of Wings. I'm glad that it is back in the remastered version.

The beta had for obvious reasons (testing the beta) an option to reload.

WW2?
;-)

Might I make a suggestion for further enhancement then? Well, I say "enhancement", but what I really mean is "fix what you buggered up".

1. Take the text of all the journal entries and mission intros and flush them down the toilet.
2. Listen to the (very good) voice actor's recordings for those same journal entries and mission intros and write down what he says.
3. Use those new texts instead of the old ones.

How on earth did you manage to screw up the texts so badly? It's like you had an excellent script to begin with, and then some time after you did the voice recordings, some American programmer looked at the script, saw some words he didn't recognize, decided to rewrite the whole thing in the English dialect he was familiar with, and make it seem like the pilot was American while he was at it, then put it back into the game.

Did nobody on the development team even notice that the on-screen text and the voice-over don't match? That all British expressions in the voice-over are replaced by American expressions in the on-screen text? That the on-screen text frequently refers to "the British", as if the pilot isn't British himself, even though the voice-over says "we" rather than "the British"?

And while you're at it, have a look at the save system, or at least explain properly how it works.

Other than that, the game is an excellent and faithful remake of the original ;-)

Dear Wishbone,

The text in the game is EXACTLY the same as in the original Amiga version, so there's nothing wrong with them. The voice-over is slightly different at times because the British actor thought that in some instances certain experessions would sound better when spoken in British accent - so we let them differ in favor of some creative freedom. In creative media, voice-over does not necessarily have to copy text word-for-word. The user experiences both in mind differently.

Hope you enjoy the game nonetheless!

I have not compared texts with the original, so I'll take your word for it. However, this is supposed to be a modern remake which updates and improves upon the original, not a 1:1 copy. If that was what you were going for, you should just have re-released the original.

Your voice actor had exactly the right idea. His delivery is convincing, and his phrasing is believable as coming from a British WWI airman. The on-screen texts are not convincing, nor believable, and you really should change them to match his phrasing. You have been given better phrasings than the game had originally, it would be a great pity not to take advantage of this. After all, you've updated the graphics and sound as well, why not the texts?

Your use of "creative freedom" sounds like a cheap cop-out, sorry. The on-screen texts are, in effect, subtitles for the voice-over. It doesn't matter that they were written more than 20 years ago while the voice-over is brand new. The voice-over is supposed to represent the airman reading aloud (or internally) his journal entries from the war. The two sets of words have to match, since they are presented to the user simultaneously. Having them differ from one another makes for a very jarring experience when looking at the text while listening to the voice-over.

DVDs and BluRays of English-language movies don't have several sets of English-dialect subtitles, do they? No they don't, because even though Americans are not Australian, they know that Crocodile Dundee is supposed to say "G'day mate", not "Hi pal" or "Hey buddy", and changing his words to a local English dialect equivalent in the subtitles would be so weird an idea that nobody in their right mind would think of it.

Right now you have a game about a British airman reading aloud his own journal entries written in British English, while showing the player those same journal entries obviously written by an American. This is not "creative freedom", it is "lack of quality control". If your argument is that "the text has to match the original in every aspect", then you shouldn't have allowed the voice actor to stray from the written script. This would have been a bad choice I think, because hearing him read the original text in a British accent would have sounded very unnatural.

I know I do go on when I'm passionate about a subject, sorry about that. Regardless of all this, I do find the game very enjoyable, just so you know ;-)

"The on-screen texts are not convincing, nor believable,..."

It seems this goes against the opinion of 99,99% of Wings fans. Wings in fact is known within the industry for having one of the best-written stories, a central quality of the original game which has been widely recognized and which we have kept intact. It was written by a professional writer - someone quite well known with an impressive track record in the games biz (you can do your research).

Yet, you feel it's not convincing, nor believable. We apologize. But we don't cop-out.

In addition, the VO is supposed to be a feature you can turn on/off. Many Wings players will chose to just read the text and not have VO on, since it might be distracting for some.

We feel sorry if you think this is poor quality control. We will let the community at large judge.

Thanks for posting!