Wing Commander™ 3 Heart of the Tiger™

This game is a masterpeice. Excelllent and fun gameplay, top notch professional acting and script, fascinating enemy and universe. You really are made to feel like you are in the thick of an intergalactic war for mankinds very survival. I have played Elite Dangerours, and found myself bored stiff. When will developers realise that the key to good gameplay is a good story! Elite dangerous, for all it's slick graphics and high tech engine, pales in comparison to this early 90's dogfighting / interactive movie sim. I played WC4 when I was about 10, and always wanted to go back to it. Thanks GOG for giving me the change to play through WC3 and 4. If you're a space sim fan, this is essential, this is where is started. It's up there with Frontier first encounters, WC4 and Freespace as one of the all time greats.

On my (admittedly overburdened) MacBook the controls were frequently very choppy, and I can't imagine trying to play through this without cheating. Fortunately, I wasn't really interested in not cheating, so this wasn't a big deal for me. The story is what pulled me back to this title after all these years, wanting my son to see some good story development in a computer game. So, how to cheat? Well, while in the previous games it was pretty straightforward (at least for a geek like me) it took me some experimentation to get it right. I'm speaking here of the Mac, Dos-boxed version. Right-click on the App to bring up the contextual menu and choose "Show Package Contents". Then, in the Contents folder find the Resources folder in which find the game folder. Right-click on Wing Commander 3.app and Show Package Contents. Then, in Contents, in Resources, find Wing Commander 3.boxer. Right-click, Show Package Contents. Find the Game Info.plist file. Open this in a text editor -- Text Edit will work, but make sure it saves in plain text format. Now, find where it says <string>Wing Commander III</string>. On a new line, put <key>BXLauncherArguments</key>, and then on another new line<string>-mitchell</string>. Now, when you play, when you get into the cockpit a voice will shout "Mitchell!" and you will be able to insta-kill any ship on the screen. (I don't remember the key combo for that at the moment -- I bound it to a joystick button in ControllerMate, but it's the one you'll find when searching the Internet for Wing Commander 3 cheats). Anyway, I hope this helps some of the more tired gamers like me get to the good parts of this game -- the dialog and story development.

Game constantly has issues with mission progression/scripting. Not sure if it's dosbox or what the issue is. Not possible to finish as far as I can tell.

I'm not a flight simulation expert and have only played a few flight games like this before. The genre sounded interesting so I decided to test the waters lately and have been pleasantly surprised so far. WC3 is spoken quite highly of and after playing through it, I would mostly have to agree. Gameplay: It's a 3D flight simulator in space. So obviously no gravity, but it doesn't apply realistic momentum physics (or whatever the technical term would be). If you throttle down to zero you come to a stop. You can turn and roll, but no reverse or vertical thrusters. And on some spacecraft you can perform a slide maneuver so you can pivot and continue firing on your target while you slide past to gain a trailing position. The tradeoff between durability and maneuverability isn't just on paper and really makes you weigh what ship you think you need versus how confident you are in your skills. The ships handle smoothly and feel very different depending on which one you're in. I used a flight stick and keyboard for controls, but it also supports mouse and joystick controls. I definitely recommend a flight stick or joystick, I know I wouldn't enjoy sliding a mouse around to track down these enemies. You operate from a base (usually your capital ship) in between missions. Here you can move between a few designated areas and chat with the crew, practice on the simulator, and save/load your game. The conversations will sometimes let you choose a response which can raise or lower the morale of that individual or the whole ship. This will affect how well they perform in missions. At first I was very interested in talking to the crew, but it does become a little monotonous after a while. Too many of the scenes are too short and just aren't interesting enough to feel like it's worth it. You lead the other pilots and usually get to choose who you want for your wingman. They do have slightly different abilities and will behave differently during missions. You can issue a few simple commands to them, which - depending on their morale level - they'll usually follow. Remembering to use your wingman to your full advantage could be the difference between winning and losing. Before most missions you can choose from a couple different ships, select what kind of missile loadout you want and away you go. You can then change your cockpit view or camera angle, adjust your ship power levels, select your active guns and missiles, among other things. I thought I would feel overwhelmed when I read how many options and controls there were, but I soon realized it wasn't that difficult to keep track of everything and there wasn't nearly as much to worry about as I initially thought. Most of the time you're focused on managing targets and straight up dogfighting. The missions have about as much variety as could be expected, but things do feel a little repetitive at times. Attack that, scout here, protect this, escort these, that's the majority of what you do. But usually the action is entertaining enough that you won't bored. The difficulty doesn't seem to always progress evenly. Some missions seem to be suddenly much more difficult, while I remember a couple later ones were surprisingly easy. You're almost always outnumbered which can be quite frustrating at times. There might be 8 enemies all seeming to bear down on you from different directions and there's nowhere to hide. Situations like this will force you to slow down, think about your available options and strategize. There were a handful of times I failed a mission and I didn't know why. The objectives had some very specific rules to follow to achieve success, but those steps weren't conveyed clearly during the mission or after I had failed. And there are some outcomes that are out of your control or feel nearly so that I didn't really care for. Graphics: This is from the early days of polygons, but I still think it looks pretty good. The ship designs are pretty cool, but the enemy ones are better. The larger capital ships suffer from larger surface with little detail, but they're easily distinguishable from each other. Explosions are nice and you can even see chunks come off ships as you shoot them. There is quite a bit of detail pop-in, especially on the large ships, but most of the time I didn't notice. Don't expect much variety from the backgrounds. It's mostly just a generic space setting, with some planets and other various outer space scenery scattered around. There are also a couple planet-based missions and these are the worst of all. The terrain texture is awful, the mountains look like big pyramids, and it's mostly just a solid brownish color. Full-motion video was trendy at the time and generally terrible, but they mostly bucked the trend here. Other than being an obvious green screen background, the environments are decent. Quality acting talent is used, the alien enemies are surprisingly good, but the video quality is pretty bad (at least in the version I played). It's really grainy and washed out which is a shame because some of the scenes would be pretty cool if they were higher quality. Audio: The music ranges from forgettable to fairly good. I don't recall anything getting on my nerves, even though you'll hear certain tracks many, many times. Some of it fits the mood quite well and will usually change to match positive and negative outcomes. A couple times I heard a slight similarity to some Star Wars tracks, but just briefly, it's not up to that level. Sound effects are mostly limited to laser blasts, explosions, and engine whines. It's all fine, but nothing too exciting. With the setup I used, I didn't really notice any positional audio for engine sounds or shots fired, but maybe that's not normal. If you can enable some 3D effects I think it would add a lot to the combat. Story: It helps to be familiar with the preceding games as they are part of the same thread and a couple significant plot points are carried over. It's not anything ground-breaking and I actually thought the story in the earlier games was a little better. Outside of a couple surprises, it's fairly predictable. Although you can end up on a losing path with no way to win if you're not careful. So I suggest you keep multiple save files at various points if you don't want to risk having to start over from scratch due to as little as 1 critically important mission failure. The cutscene dialogue is ok and is acted fairly well, but it's just not very interesting. There aren't very many scenes I would consider important to the main storyline. And other than the mission briefings you get a little backstory on the rest of the crew, but it's mostly uneventful and feels like pointless filler. Replayability: It mostly comes down to your enjoyment of the ship combat. The better you like it, the more you could replay this and still be entertained. You could choose a couple different conversation paths with your crew, but that doesn't offer much. There are some losing path missions you can purposely follow which could provide some fresh material as well. Verdict: If you like flight simulators or would like to try one, I definitely suggest Wing Commander III. You can tweak some settings and the difficulty to suit your skill level whether you're a pro or don't know a flight stick from a drumstick. The graphics and audio are just advanced enough and it runs smoothly so it's not painful to play. Drop a couple bucks and start downing some bad guys!

Some say WCIV is the best. How so? They give it the "Try and Fail" "Have to do things exactly this way or you fail"-treatment, much like the X-Wing/Tie-Fighter games had (early on). That's no fun, that pisses gamers off! That sucks! WCIII goes the correct direction with space sims. Instead of that "do the mission exactly this way, but you have to die a bunch of times to figure out that's how we developers wanted you to 'play' it lol at you"-shenanigans many space sims with uninspired developers do, WCIII avoids much of that. The game has a straight-forward campaign. You can lose missions, and still win the game. Lose certain ones, that are of an "obvious" and well-stated to be of critical nature, then naturally, you'll lose the game, or go on the "losing path". On the "losing path", there are still ways to turn it around. It will be difficult. If you succeed, the game progresses toward the "good ending". If you fail, you progress toward the "bad ending". Graphically, this is the WC that finally goes into actual 3D. There's no "3dfx" or 3D acceleration (what people see in modern games basically). Instead, it's all "software" rendered/computed/processed. So it looks shaky, clunky, and perhaps "weird". But you'll be flying at the seat of your pants to not even worry. The sound FX are absolutely sick, and the mix of live-action actors with some of the action, helps add to the atmosphere. Overall, the game story, the atmosphere, everything is rather intense, and dark. The phenominal, epic-sounding soundtrack, evokes this extremely well. The game is full of FMV with familiar actors playing beloved characters of the series (think Gimli, Luke Skywalker, Biff, to name a few). This is the best of the series. It's not terribly difficult but you can adjust the difficulty settings. Some of the space battles can be pretty hair-raising, coupled with the story-telling that occurs alongside it, like I said...intense. Even the "good ending", is actually pretty dark.