Wing Commander™ 1+2

Full disclosure: after initially struggling with the DOSBox version of Wing Commander 1 offered by GoG, I relented and downloaded The Kilrathi Saga version, patched with a fan update. This is currently the most comfortable way to play the game in its original form, as the GoG release suffers from such poor performance that framerates can dip into single digits during combat with more than 2-3 ships. Unfortunately, this makes the game nearly unplayable, and I wouldn't recommend playing it that way. Despite this, I'm very much enjoying Wing Commander so far. Being such a legendary franchise, I wanted to finally scratch it off my bucket list, and this was actually my first time playing this game. Initially, the transition from modern 3D space sims like Elite Dangerous to Wing Commander's 2D sprite-based space took some getting used to. It may sound funny, but during my first mission, I spent nearly 20 minutes just figuring out where the front of the Tiger Claw was to land and finish the mission. And then it took me another few minutes of fiddling with random keys to initiate the landing sequence, as I initially ended up rubbing against an unidentifiable blob of pixels, wondering why nothing's happening. Once my imagination kicked in and my eyes adjusted to the dated visuals, though, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the game. Blasting enemy ships is a ton of fun, and the little cinematic cutscenes and interactions with my squadmates is really immersive and engaging. The movie-like presentation and the ability to mess up some objectives, leading to different story outcomes or missing squad interactions, add significant replay value and genuinely raise the stakes of the campaign. I appreciate the game's ambition, and I can see how it made such a strong impression back in the day.

Great games its a shame WC1 becomes a slideshow when heavy fighters start showing up in the campaign. There should be a DISCLAIMER!! I usually trust GOG to deliver old games that run well but this has shaken my trust for sure.

I bought these when they were first released and played them repeatedly through the 90s. I had every motivation to get this GOG version to work and after many many hours I give up. I tried every trick from everywhere. I tried reinstalling, changing DOSBOX, changing mouses, buying a joystick, etc. It is unplayable. My game whiplashes between way too slow and way too fast. It doesn't recognize half of the commands, so it doesn't shoot when I tell it to, it doesn't turn when I need it to, and missiles will not fire without repeatedly hammering the button. The mouse freezes, and the only fix it to alt-tab away and then back to it. I sincerely hope you get this amazing game to run for yourself, but buyer beware.

I love this game and it is what made me a gamer 20 some years ago. Now the painful part. I installed the game AND ITS BROKEN Dos box starts up and stalls. I have a copy of WC2 an original cd that works fine under another instance of dosbox. Whats up GOG you dropped the ball

Well, there are two games in this pack. The first wing commander might have been a big revolution back in its days but now it's virtually unplayable. It's tied to the CPU speed and is either too slow (if you have too many things going on on the screen) or too fast. There is also no way to adjust detail settings and the like. The second one is much better programmed and is quite playable but both of them suffer from the same thing - the crafts are represented as sprites which have only finite pre-rendered view angles. This makes it often hard to notice which way enemy craft is facing. And makes the movement and rotation of big spaceships (destroyers, carriers) jerky. The writing though is good and lets you get gently into the lore of all WC saga.