Wing Commander IV
filfre.net
filfre.net
It was a great game and we felt so clever for "beating the system" but we didn't even leave the store with the money as we immediately spent it on Warcraft 2 which we kept and played forever.
I don't think there is a modern service equivalent to peak video-store era game rentals, at least none spring to mind right now.
GameTap was an interesting failure, too.
Even then, CD writers in the early days could be of dubious quality. I remember letting a friend borrow my prized copy of Starcraft so that he could clone it through his CD writer, and when it emerged from the disc tray, it was scratched to hell and back. I still have no idea how a the disc laser could do that.
Some CDROMs also could have the "wait until spun down before dropping down" mechanism not work, and you could hear it spinning in the tray.
For us we had a little store in a strip shopping center on the corner called "Floppy Joe's". When you rented the game it came with the full box it came in, disks and instruction manuals. We'd goto the library and xerox the manual for the copy protection questions then copy the game contents onto a repurposed AOL floppy disk. I remember my dad being so pissed when AOL switched to read-only disks. After we did that we'd return the rental game. It's not surprising that business model went away. It was just the thinnest possible veil over piracy.
I still have really fond memories of Floppy Joe's though. I remember going in once and seeing two people playing Doom multiplayer. It blew my mind. I had no idea such a thing was possible. I kept trying to tell one of the guys about IDDQD so he could beat his friend. He was being really sweet and patient to what, in retrospect, was probably a super annoying nerd kid bothering him while he was trying play.
Poor bastard. I stole his cd key and got it banned online for playing with cheats.
Later on, I really enjoyed Freelancer but by then I was older and it didn't have the same effect on me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game)
I always suspected that the game was developed with a multiplayer first approach and the single player mode seemed like an addon. Which was a pity I would have liked to explored this universe more.
Such a good experience, hard to imagine replicating it these days - both because modern games are different, and because you only get to be 12 once.
It's a nice homage to the original with improved graphics, more variety of ships and engaging space combat.
The game is incredibly ambitious in terms of both content and technology. The game is playable, if very buggy, and release an updated alpha version every quarter (except recently, due problems with introducing global persistence). Funding has steadily increased as those alphas have become steadily more capable.
It’s an open question whether the game will ever meet its lofty goals. But it’s disingenuous to imply that the game isn’t making progress.
Proof in point: Their roadmap doesn't even have these goals.
I don't think it's being uncharitable to call out that they're still years away from release 10 years after their nominal release date.
Wing Commander is space without the opera. It's humanistic and free of woo. There are no supernaturally gifted gurus wielding magic. The good guys do not seem predestined to win. Everyone in this big cosmic drama is just an ordinary person (or other sentient being) muddling through familiar problems.
Seems like this reviewer wanted the movie parts to be more wacky and fun. Given that the premise is essentially (spoilers) space Nazis attempting a coup, I'm not sure how this would have made sense. If you want wacky fun, there are plenty of other space movies that will oblige you.
Gameplay and story wise I really think WC2 is by far the best in the series. The camaraderie between characters is just beautifully portrayed, and so many moments of betrayal, death, and tragedy were very emotional.
I will wait for you in heaven…
On an aside: Star Wars: Jedi Knight (first game) also had acting that rivaled that of the original Star Wars movies. In comparison, Jedi Knight 2 (released in the early 2000s) had blocky 3D cutscenes, similar to other games of the time. What a bummer.
Still, I'm glad they tried and yet also glad they went back to CG.
BTW, OpenJKDF2 is a nice way to play today, with some modern enhancements.
All because he was evil in WC3. And that’s my touchstone for him.
Second game! It was Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. The first one (Dark Forces) had charming 2d animated cutscenes. The second (Jedi Knight) had live-action video cutscenes.
> also had acting that rivaled that of the original Star Wars movies.
I remembered really liking them, but on revisiting the game a couple years back... well, if you haven't seen them in a while, give them another look.
> In comparison, Jedi Knight 2 (released in the early 2000s) had blocky 3D cutscenes, similar to other games of the time. What a bummer.
But much, MUCH better lightsaber fighting.
The most frustrating part was getting halfway through the campaign, only to discover that disk 10 was corrupt. I had to send away for a new one, which was a bit of a process because companies at the time were loathe to give additional physical media to avoid piracy. It took about 3 months to finally get the new disk.
I always admired the series for its world-building sensibilities. It's simple stuff - Star Raiders had the essence of the gameplay in 1979 - but injected with a lot of atmosphere.
"Won't even know what hit 'em!"
I remember thinking it would make much more sense on a DVD, but I’m guessing nowhere near enough people had DVD drives at the time and it would have destroyed sales.
EDIT: I was partially wrong. After reading the article, there was a version that was essentially all of the CDs' data on one DVD, but that was replaced with the version I mentioned.
It probably came bundled with a creative DVD set that included an MPEG decoding card and required some kind of video passthrough.
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/creative-ct7240-wh...
HN totally delivers on a slow Friday for me.
Within the part of the article that's actually about the game, the author does basically nothing but scoff at things like the "workmanlike", "not ... subtle", "primary colors" nature of the story, or the "cheap, sparse, painfully plastic-looking sets", or how the characters use the callsign rather than the full real name of a fallen soldier during a funeral. There is almost nothing there about the story itself or its characters.
I played this game a lot as a teen, and I thought the story had a lot of deeply sympathetic characters and emotionally resonant themes. It felt great to be the protagonist who uncovers fascist treachery at the top and averts a war. It felt great to do that with a team of comrades who shared your values and vigorously debated tactics. None of that gets a single word in this review.
Of course not everyone is going to agree about what's a good movie, but I thought it deserved better than a collection of nitpicks that doesn't engage with the story at all. It seems like the critic just wanted the game/movie to be in a different genre, something more sophisticated or "subtle" with more "shades of gray"? But what's the point of that? It seems like criticizing Saving Private Ryan for not being Apocalypse Now or Starship Troopers. Okay, it's not the type of movie you wanted to see, I guess? But isn't it a little cliche, in itself, to reflexively disdain everything that is straightforward rather than meta, ironic, deconstructive, and self-referential?
The site is an enormous dissertation on the art of interactivity. You could call it an attempt to put every major development in narrative gaming into context for their era.
Jimmy Maher went all the way back to the early Plato-era mainframe games. He's covering everything from Adventure to Zork.
[I'm joking, those two games happened almost at the same time.]
But for "the point of writing this", that's why. It's a history of all the major games and being included in it is a pretty serious endorsement of Wing Commander IV's cultural value.
In the context of the history of interactivity Wing Commander IV doesn't do that well. They spent a ton of money to make a game that's arguably less interactive than the earlier games in the series. That was how the 90s went. More and more money spent on bad full-motion video, fewer and fewer actual game choices.
It's hard not to snark on the production values when they spent $12 million to make it. Again, it's a historical account... videogame budgets for absolute classics six years earlier were like $100k if you were lucky.
It doesn't matter if it's a fun and enjoyable game. It's part of the fall of adventure gaming. That's the story.
It would be just as big a mistake to blow off the whole Wing Commander franchise based on this review, as it would be to dismiss filfre.net as a collection of jeremiads about obsolete games. They are both great works in reality, and both have a lot more to offer than meets the eye in this instance.
Anyway, he does have a point in that as a piece of interactive narrative, it's more expensive, and adding a lot of production has its own charm, but it's also a step back from the very best Infocom adventure games when you're looking at the kind of play experience it presents, which is basically a CYOA book - the only experimenting to do is to choose option A over option B. This isn't necessarily wrong, even - visual novels have made a real art of that - but it's about the craft behind that kind of narrative, and not the direct engagement with technology.
One respect in which I differ from Maher's view is that I don't really see the direct engagement as important. In most instances games are performing cartooning in their use of technology, and so adding more legible "player verbs" and "simulation elements" isn't necessarily adding that much to the message. Sometimes all you need to do to make a game narrative stick is to hide a major branch within a subtle decision, or force a replay to allow a different option to appear.
There are a lot of perspectives from which to judge a work from the past, especially a video game, where so, so much has changed since then. But this review doesn't seem to have a coherent perspective, other than the reviewer just personally didn't like it. (That's fine, BTW, we all have our opinions, but that doesn't make a review.)
Was too much money spent on the game? Or were the production values too low? The review paradoxically complains about both. There's a half-hearted attempt to resolve that by suggesting some kind of uncanny valley problem, but no one ever thought that at the time... it's the authors now personal valley, apparently. (Perhaps the author is mixing in some modern expectations about video game production values into this, which makes no sense, of course).
Also, I wonder if the reviewer is really considering the medium as it was. This game was designed to be played on 14-15" lo-res CRTs and play video off low-speed CD-ROM drives. It's pure nonsense to compare this even to movies of the day. The set detail had to be simple, to register at all. Even if you were so up-to-date you had a DVD drive and could play the higher-quality version of the cuts scenes, does it really make sense to complain the sets designed for that medium looked "plastic"? They looked great back then.
There are many complaints about the writing of the cutscenes. I won't defend it as great art, but... it's a sci-fi adventure. There are supposed to be campy, punchy lines. This isn't the place for the deep treatment of serious themes or subtle character development, or nuanced story-telling. It's just baffling to me to judge this game because of what it was never meant to be, could never have been, and definitely never should have been.
(From my perspective, WC IV was somewhat worse than III... it was too expensive, too short, and really needed a more powerful PC than I had at the time, so it didn't play that great. I think I remember there was one mission that was way too hard too, though maybe I wasn't approaching it the right way.)