Wing Commander™ 1+2

If you’re truly interested in retro gaming and space sims, this is a must. The first two have certainly aged, but they are true classics. Wing commander I was state of the art during its initial release. There was nothing else like it on the market at the time. In Wing Commander I the story is interesting and sets the stage for the entire series. However, it is not as fleshed out as Wing Commander II or the later installments of the series. WC2 is a true epic. It refines the engine of WC1 and tells a dynamic and engaging story. The story branches available in WC1 are impressive, but WC2 improves upon it and not many games were able to match it until recently. My personal favorites in the core series (WC1-WC5) are WC 2 and WC 4. WC 1 is a classic, but WC2 takes all of the elements of WC1, refines it, and the result is one of the greatest gaming experiences of the 1990’s. Turn off the lights, grab a flight stick, and lose yourself in this sci-fi epic.

First of all. This game is an awesome deal. I have heard some people complain about the lack of expansions and such. But you would be hard pressed to find the hard copies for this much. Why? Partly because sellers on Amazon want to milk you of your cash. But also because it is generally well accepted that this is a landmark franchise. Story, music, graphics...the overall experience...all of it is A+. I cannot recommend these games enough. They have haunted me through my entire childhood, and adult years. These game is the epitome of the word classic and needs to be on your shelf if you are any kind of self respecting retro-gamer.

The holy grail of classic PC action games. The series that made sound cards, VGA cards, and extra memory desirable. And the only game that satisfied players' Star Wars cravings until X-Wing arrived. Nothing from that era comes close to Wing Commander. Wing Commander is an arcade space shooter layered with many sim features and an epic storyline. Huge, branching campaign takes you from fighting simple scouting patrols all the way through capital ships, ace fighters, and even a station or two. Large roster of pilots to fly alongside, each with their own distinct styles. Extensive dialogue scenes between each mission, minor and major cutscenes throughout. Wing Commander was the first series to seriously draw comparison with movies. Everything about this series is a product of its time. The sound effects are simple, yet abundant. The music is beautiful when played through an old Roland MIDI card or FM synthesis. In-flight ship models are blocky at short range, character animation is usually restricted to faces, and the graphics are full of pixels and unrealistic colors. But they all pushed the limits of what computers could do when the games came out. Like few others, Wing Commander holds together as a complete artistic vision that elevates its outdated technology. After a mission or two, you'll forget to pay attention to its age. Will people still enjoy the gameplay? Wing Commander is not as diverse as a modern game, but it's as deep and polished as an arcade sim should be. Shields and armor are sturdy enough to survive a few hits, though flying straight is a quick way to perish. Missiles and collisions are dangerous. Afterburners offer extreme speed until fuel runs out. Most fighters carry two banks of guns that can be toggled on or off. All systems can take partial or complete damage during a mission, potentially leaving you with no radar, cracked displays, destroyed weapons, reduced speed, broken turning, you name it. The view of your pock-marked fighter cockpit on the landing deck is especially satisfying after enduring such odds. Dynamic music, some of the best of its day, adjusts to every aspect of battle. There are unique tunes for free flight, engagement, dogfighting, missile threats, tailing an enemy, torpedo runs, critical damage, victory, and defeat. If you enjoyed Freespace, this series is where it all began. Difficulty can be high in places. The player is usually outnumbered and outgunned. Ejecting can be used in moderation to bypass some missions, but not all. Certain missions grind the player's ship down by attrition or mount a heavy attack on a friendly ship. Stealth fighters and light fighters are deadly in swarms. In Wing Commander 2, capital ships are impervious to all weapons except torpedoes, which are in extremely short supply. If one misses, is shot down, or is destroyed prior to launch, you might be unable to complete that mission successfully. The Wing Commander universe is large, rich, and colorful. The storyline fits in plenty of cliches, but it's always interesting. Missions are memorable despite their almost total reliance on traveling to generic waypoints to fight enemy waves. Mission briefings and related cutscenes, differences between player ships, and well-chosen enemy distributions all help each sortie stand out. The campaign branches, which means losing certain missions, or ejecting to bypass the toughest, will give the player a different set of missions and a less optimal storyline. The one major flaw with the game engine is the sprite animation used for enemy ships. It's good sprite animation, probably the best you'll find from that era. But the sprites can't show every possible position of a ship. This leads to sudden transitions between ship facings, making it difficult to predict an enemy's exact heading. The game is balanced to allow for frequent missed shots. Nevertheless, the inaccurate ship representation is always present and often frustrating. Close flybys turn ships into blobs of massive pixels, breaking the illusion of depth, but this only hurts gameplay when trying to navigate close to large capital ships, a rare occurrence. Get it for the history, play it for the timeless arcade action and space opera.

I played "SpaceSims" since I was eleven and had a 486DX 25Mhz, but I never had the chance of playing Wing Commander properly till a week or so ago when I bought this package on GOG.com (I did get the windows port of the first one from a magazine in the late 90s but it was insanely buggy on Windows 98 and refused to run after the first few times). The graphics for the time it came out were outstanding (much better than the monochromatic 3D models used in other similar games at the time) but unfortunately have a very bad influence on gameplay. The sprites used to render the ships work well enough for fighters and smaller crafts but are really impractical when it comes to asteroids and capital ships: The asteroids because they tend to pop up at a very short distance even while you can see supposedly smaller fighters much farther thus making dodging them a matter more of luck than ability simetimes; For the capital ships the problem is that you don't get a real sense of the distance you are from them when you are flying against them, making missions where you have to defend or (in Wing Commander II) bombard them frustrating because often you find yourself dead because you flew too close to them without noticing! A peculiarity of Wing Commander I and II compared to the more-or-less contemporary X-wing is the more arcade approach to combat: You don't get to manage your systems energy to compensate your fighter's faults so if you find yourself on a strike mission with a light fighter (it happens a couple of times) you cannot for instance trasfer your engine power to the shield when hammered down by an entire squadron of enemy interceptors. The gameplay remains essentially the same in both games although the second game shows a series of improvements in pacing (main guns are a bit more powerful so you can destroy less powerful enemy fighters more rapidly) and balance, in particular capital ships in the first game were ludicrously easy to kill once you eliminated their fighter escort, while in the second game you had to use torpedoes (which need a lock and take a veeery long time to get it) which can be carried only by certain fighters and need to be launched really close to the capital ship without evasive manouvers lest you lose the lock. There are also some problems with keyboard and mouse controls with the savegame menu in the second game which made me lose savegames several frustrating times, essentially when you clicked on save/load game with a mouse or by pressing enter the game instead of just loading the save/load menu loaded a game randomly, fortunately while using the Joystick to access the save/load menu I didn't have any particular issue. Another problem are the game crashes that happen in the second game sometimes during missions. You might also want to change the dosbox cycles to a higher or lower number if you feel the gameplay and animations go too slow or too fast for your taste because the games were made specifically for very old CPUs and don't handle well with anything faster. The good is essentially in how the story is told, your wingmen have a personality (even though in the first game they are often stereotyped way too much, even for an old school game) and you can have a chat with them between missions and in the non-linear campaign (there are two endings depending on how well you played) of the first game they can even die in combat and have a funeral cutscene with personalized dialogue from the CAG and the protagonist. The second game instead has a more cinematic approach with longer and more elaborate in-game cutscenes and although the campaign is a bit more linear the story is much better told and overall enjoyable even though it is not much more elaborate than the first. My advice is: if you aren't scared by the graphics (and the bugs of the second game) and you like spacesims this game is worth a try, prepare to die a lot (often in really frustrating ways, sometimes the only way to remain sane is using cheats) and at the same time enjoy one of the first experiments in implementing cinematic storytelling in an action game. The only thing that keeps me from giving four or five stars are the gameplay issues, otherwise I would have rated it a must buy. NOTE: edited for typos (nice noticing I typed a 3 instead of a 4 when mentioning the CPU of my first PC, though considering I had an uncommon downlocked 486 maybe a 386 would have been an improvement...) some added details and sentence clarity. Hooray for the higher character limit and being able to edit the reviews!