Award-winning games, a feature film, an animated TV series, and books - the franchise created in 1990 by Chris Roberts has expanded beyond imagination. The 30th anniversary of the Wing Commander release is the perfect opportunity to look back at the story behind one of the most famous space simulators of all time.
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I am Dyslexic of Borg, prepare to have your ass laminated.
I guess Ray Butts has ate his last pancake. http://steamcommunity.com/id/daehawk
"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
I actually played these in the completely wrong order. First I played 3, then 2, then 1. Couldn't get all the way through some of the expansions of 1 and 2. I tried to play IV a couple of years ago, but got blown up repeatedly in the first mission. Could never get Prophecy to work on any of my machines back in the day, and haven't had the motivation to buy it more recently. I think I briefly played one of the Privateers. Actually watched some episodes of the cartoon when I was a kid. The movie was... not that great.
But III was basically the gold standard for games with cheesy FMV. One of my favorite parts was when Blair finds out his girlfriend got geeked by the Kilrathi and starts drinking - if you keep drinking, you get scrambled for some fleet defense mission but you're so loaded, you can't fly in a straight line. And then, within about two days, you go on to boning either your mechanic or one of your subordinates. Way to keep it professional there, bro.
The ship captain berating you every time you ejected from your craft or got shot down was pretty hilarious, too. "You think I've got little elves running around back there?!"
And it had a lot of innovative things - being able to go down planetside and do dogfighting down there, being able to fly through the hangars in enemy ships (a little risky, but damn).
I still don't get why they did what they did with Hobbes, though.
One thing I remember about WC1 is that I first started playing it when I was I guess 9 or 10, and I wasn't very good. But then I realized that you could just fly to the first waypoint on a mission, then fly back to the Tiger's Claw, and they'll let you land. Now, the commander would chew you out for, you know, not doing the mission and all, but you could progress in the game. But then, between missions they'd have these animated cinematics about how the war was going, and I was perpetually bummed that they kept showing the war going badly for the humans. Only later did I realize that there was a link between me basically not doing any of my missions and the war going badly.
The other thing I remember about WC1 was that the Kilrathi cruisers had less rear armor than the Kilrathi heavy fighters. Which was great, except that there was one mission where you had to protect a Kilrathi cruiser that was trying to defect. That was...not easy.
But yeah, WC3 was the best, and the cheesy cinematics was amazing. That game really did a lot to rehabilitate Maniac / Biff Tannen. But agreed that they screwed over Hobbes in a stupid way.
Thinking back on Wing Commander brings to mind the lost art of optimizing DOS memory with QEMM, and tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat.
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." — P. J. O'Rourke
Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2020 4:01 pm
Thinking back on Wing Commander brings to mind the lost art of optimizing DOS memory with QEMM, and tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat.
I created a boot script that would let me pick which game I was going to play and it adjusted the memory settings specifically for that game. I do not miss those days.
Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2020 4:01 pm
Thinking back on Wing Commander brings to mind the lost art of optimizing DOS memory with QEMM, and tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat.
I tried the remastered Command & Conquer this week, and when you first start it up it does a lovely reenactment of the game installers of the era. It shows a list of Sound Blasters and Ad-Libs and Roland MT-32s and ends up selecting "high definition audio", and then when it shows the choices for IRQ and DMA channels, it just overwrites it with "obsolete".
But yeah, truly a lost art. I remember being very proud of my 3.5" boot disk that had the perfect setup to give me the most base memory as possible when I had to load mouse drivers for a game.
I learned to edit my bat and cfg in a way I could just leave it that way all the time for all games ..almost. I never allowed Windows to load. Never used it. Also loaded all I could HIGH and made stacks 0,0. I used to have about 619 or 629 or something like that. I could get more than my friend could somehow. And he taught me most PC stuff I was proud.
--------------------------------------------
I am Dyslexic of Borg, prepare to have your ass laminated.
I guess Ray Butts has ate his last pancake. http://steamcommunity.com/id/daehawk
"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2020 4:01 pm
Thinking back on Wing Commander brings to mind the lost art of optimizing DOS memory with QEMM, and tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat.
Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2020 4:01 pm
Thinking back on Wing Commander brings to mind the lost art of optimizing DOS memory with QEMM, and tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat.
Wow. Blast from the past. I had forgotten about all of the optimization hoops we had to jump through until you mentioned this. I don't miss that.
On the other hand, as soon as I saw and started reading this thread, I had some of the music running through my head....
It really did. Tandy 1000 TL with 768K of RAM, has the Tandy (basically PC jr) graphics, and Tandy was able to get origin to make a version that runs on the Tandy graphics.
Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2020 4:01 pm
Thinking back on Wing Commander brings to mind the lost art of optimizing DOS memory with QEMM, and tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat.
The one time when you could really just "download more RAM"
Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2020 4:01 pm
Thinking back on Wing Commander brings to mind the lost art of optimizing DOS memory with QEMM, and tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat.
I created a boot script that would let me pick which game I was going to play and it adjusted the memory settings specifically for that game. I do not miss those days.
I do miss those days! I too had a menu setup and I loved tweaking it just a little more or even just creating the menu in the first place!
I was proud.
