Wing Commander™ 1+2

I have fond memories of Wing Commander. I used to play it as a child and as a teen. I have always hated EA for killing the franchise after they bought Origin (much like when they bought Bullfrog). I picked up the Wing Commander pack when it was on sale last weekend (despite actually owning all games, having them all on CD or floppy still to this day, though I do not have a floppy rive any more) and I couldn't be happier. All of the games play on my modern computer and I was astonished that I was thoroughly enjoying Wing Commander 1 again, it may have aged but it is still an amazing classic. I am looking forward to playing through 2, 3 and 4 all over again and hope that gog.com see fit to release Prophecy soon as well. If you have not played these games, you need to.

If you can get around the dated graphics, and the bleep boop sound effects and score, you'll be in for a real treat. Challenging and immersive from the get go, Wing Commanders I and II will afford you literally dozens of hours of enjoyment. If you're into retro gaming, don't miss this outstanding package.

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!