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!
