The Digital Antiquarian on Wing Commander, ancestor of all popamole

[octavius]

How do you use the joystick in space games? Held in both hands, or fastened so that you can use one handed and more like a real flight stick?

 

[warpig]

One hand on joystick another on the keyboard. I have a basic bitch logitech attack 3 it's not attached to the desk in any way but the base is heavy enough so it doesn't slide on move. It's a good joystick for games like Freespace, Tie Fighter etc. In the 90s joysticks often had those suckers to prevent from moving.

 

[Severian Silk]

I wouldn't try a space sim without a mechanical keyboard, but joysticks are def the way to go.

If you play flight sims with a gamepad tho, fuck you.

I played all those games using original PS1 gamepad with no analog sticks connected via USB dongle. I bought a Saitek joystick for X-Wing Alliance, but don't like it since it's way too tall.

 

[SerratedBiz]

I played all those games using original PS1 gamepad with no analog sticks connected via USB dongle.

Just because you can build castles out of poop doesn't mean you should.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Never played Wing Commander, but Lucas Arts' space sims had better graphics. Those 2D sprites look goofy compared to Lucas Arts' 3D polygons IMO.

Obviously that's true when Wing Commander was released in 1990 and X-Wing in 1993. They may only look like three years on paper, but in video gaming those years were more like 30 years.

It's worth noticing that previous LucasArts simulators, the WWII ones, used the same kind of sprites as wing commander. And it was made by the same devs whom made x-wing series.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[vonAchdorf]

IIRC these games where designed with a joystick as the controller of choice in mind (it's even shown on the HUD). The first game which they developed explicitly with mouse control as the primary method in mind was Freelancer (or Starlancer?).

 

[OndrejSc]

How do you use the joystick in space games? Held in both hands, or fastened so that you can use one handed and more like a real flight stick?

The way I watch porn. Left hand on keyboard.

 

[Infinitron]

He's gotten to Wing Commander II, and OK, this might be controversial: https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/wing-commander-ii/

In the years that followed Wing Commander II‘s release, a cadre of designers and theorists would unite under the “games are not movies” banner, using this game and its successors as some of their favorite examples of offenders against all that is good and holy in ludology. But we need not become overly strident or pedantic, as so many of them have been prone to do. Rather than continuing to dwell on what was lost, we can try to judge Wing Commander II on its own terms, as the modestly interactive cinematic thrill ride it wants to be. I’m by no means willing to reject the notion that a game can succeed on these terms, provided that the story is indeed catching.

The problem for Wing Commander II from this perspective is that the story winds up being more Plan 9 from Outer Space than The Empire Strikes Back. No one — with, I suppose, the possible exception of Computer Gaming World‘s Mr. Emrich — is looking for deathless cinematic art from a videogame called Wing Commander II. Yet there is a level of craftsmanship that we ought to be able to expect from a game with this one’s stated ambitions, and Wing Commander II fails to clear even that bar.

Put bluntly, the story we get just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. What exactly did Bluehair do to cause the destruction of the Tiger’s Claw, a tragedy for which only he among the carrier’s entire air group was blamed? Why was everyone so quick to believe that a decorated war hero had suddenly switched sides? Why on earth — excuse me, on Terra — would the Terran Confederation reassign someone widely suspected of high treason to even an out-of-the-way posting? And once the game proper gets going, why does Bluehair’s commander persist in believing that he’s a traitor even after he’s saved the life of said commander and everyone aboard his ship half a dozen times? And if the commander does still believe Bluehair is a traitor, why does he keep assigning him to vital missions in between bitching about what a traitor he is and how much it sucks to have him on his ship? Etc., etc.

Now, you could accuse me of over-analyzing the game’s action-movie screenplay, and you’d perhaps have a point. After all, Wing Commander‘s inspiration of Star Wars is hardly the most grounded narrative in the world. What I would also say in response, however, is that there’s a craft — a sleight of hand, if you will — to keeping the reader or viewer from focusing too much on a story’s incongruities. The writer or screenwriter accomplishes this by offering up compelling characters that are easy to root for or against and by keeping the excitement ever on the boil.

And here too Wing Commander II drops the ball. At the center of the action is the charisma vacuum that is Bluehair. The first game held back on characterizing him, letting the player imagine him to be the person she wished him to be. That can no longer work in the more developed narrative of the second game, but Origin still seems reluctant to fill in the lines of his character, with the result that he falls smack into an uncanny valley between the two classic models of the adventure-game protagonist: the fully fleshed-out individual whose personality the player is expected to assume, and the proverbial “nameless, faceless adventurer” that she can imagine to be herself. Bluehair becomes what my dear old dad would call a “lunk,” a monosyllabic non-presence who rarely has much to say beyond “Yes, Sir,” and “No, Sir.” It feels like a veritable soliloquy when he can manage to muster up an “I’m not guilty, sir. I won’t sign it!” or a “Go to hell, Jazz!” And when the romance subplot kicks in — duly following the stated desires of their players in this as in all things, Origin made Angel the love interest — it starts to get really painful. One does have to wonder why everyone is getting so hot and bothered over this guy of all people. Luke Skywalker — much less Han Solo — he definitely ain’t.

So, we might ask, how did we wind up here? How did one of the first Origin games to take advantage of real, professional writers not turn out at least a little bit better? A strong clue lives in a document that’s been made public by the website Wing Commander Combat Information Center. It’s the initial script for the game, as prepared by Ellen Guon and Stephen Beeman and completed on November 29, 1990, before production got underway in earnest. The version of the story found herein differs considerably from that found in the completed game. The story is more detailed, better explained, and richer all the way around, including a much more dynamic and assertive Bluehair. It might be instructive to compare the opening of the story as it was originally conceived with what that of the finished game. Here’s how things started back in November of 1990:

Spoiler

Establishing shot — Tiger’s Claw floating in space.

Narration: CSS Tiger’s Claw, six months after the Vega Sector Campaign…

Establishing shot — Tiger’s Claw briefing room. We can’t tell yet who the commander is.

Bluehair: Okay, everyone, settle down…

Cut to Bluehair. Now we see that Bluehair is in Colonel Halcyon’s familiar position.

Bluehair: Pilots, I’d like to welcome you to the Tiger’s Claw. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Bluehair Ourhero, your new commanding officer. I hope everyone’s recovered from the farewell party for Paladin, Angel, Spirit, Iceman, and General Halcyon.

Hunter: An’ don’t forget that bloody lunatic, Maniac! They finally transferred ‘im to the psych ‘ospital.

Bluehair: Sad but true, Hunter. Now, pay close attention, pilots. We’ve just been assigned a top-priority mission, to spearhead a major raid deep into Kilrathi space to their sector command post in the K’Tithrak Mang system. The plan is to jump in with a few carriers and Marine transports, hit the starbase hard, then jump out.

Hunter: ‘nother bleedin’ starbase, eh?

Bluehair: (smiles) You got it, mate. Let’s just hope it’s as easy as the last one. Now, listen close, everyone. Knight and Bossman are Alpha Wing — check for enemy fighters at Nav 2 and 3. Kilroy and Sabra are Beta Wing…

Narration: You assign all the wings. All but one.

Bluehair: I saved the most important wing for last. Computer, display Kappa. On our way to the starbase, the Claw will pass close to the asteroid field at Nav 1. We don’t know what’s out there, so Hunter and I are going to sweep the rocks as the Claw begins its approach. We’ll either take out whatever we find or hightail it back here to warn the Claw. Any questions, pilots? Good. The Claw will complete her last jump in approximately seven minutes. Get ready for immediate launch. Dismissed.

Animation of crowd rising — different backs! Animation of Tiger’s Claw jumping.

Narration: K’Tithrak Mang system, deep within Kilrathi space.

Animation of launch-tube sequence.

Mission 0. This really should be a basically easy mission. However, just as Bluehair is returning to the action sphere that contains the Claw, we cut to a canned scene.

Bluehair: No!

The Tiger’s Claw floats in the medium distance. Close to us, three Kilrathi stealth fighters in a chevron uncloak, launch missiles, then peel off in different directions. The missiles impact the Claw and blow it to kingdom come.

Dust motes are zooming past us, as if we were headed into the starfield. Now a space station appears in the far distance, rapidly getting closer. We zoom in on this until we start moving around the station. As we do so, the planet Earth comes into view on one edge of the screen. The station itself remains center frame.

Narration: Confederation High Command, Terra system, six months after the destruction of the Tiger’s Claw.

Admiral Tolwyn presides over Bluehair’s court martial. A very formal-looking bench with seven dress-uniformed figures, Tolwyn in the middle, is in the back pane. Bluehair and his counsel are sitting at a table. Spot animations of camera drones with Klieg lights will help convey the information that this trial is based more on media image than justice.

Tolwyn: Lieutenant Colonel Ourhero, stand at attention. Lieutenant Colonel Ourhero, you stand accused of negligence, incompetence, and cowardice under fire. Your actions resulted in the death of 61,000 Confederation defenders. Despite your plea of not guilty and your ridiculous claim that the Kilrathi used some non-existent stealth technology, flying invisible ships past your position…

Bluehair: It’s true, sir.

Tolwyn: …you are obviously guilty of these crimes against the Confederation. But, fortunately for you, this court cannot prove your guilt. Our primary evidence, your black-box flight recorder, is missing from the Confed Security offices. Because of the lack of physical evidence, this court is required by law to dismiss your case. We find you not guilty of crimes against the Confederation. This court is adjourned. Lieutenant Colonel Ourhero, report to my office at once.

Establishing shot — Tolwyn’s office

Tolwyn: I wanted to talk to you in private, Bluehair. The court couldn’t convict you because of a technicality, but we all know the truth, Ourhero. You’re a coward and a traitor, and I’ll personally guarantee that you’ll never fly again. Your career with the Navy is over. As I assumed that you have some small amount of honor left, my secretary has drawn up your resignation papers…

Bluehair: I won’t resign, Admiral.

Tolwyn: What??

Bluehair: I’m not guilty, sir. I refuse to resign.

Tolwyn: Then I’ll offer you one more option, just because I never want to see your face again. I have a request from Insystem Security for a mid-ranked pilot. If you’ll accept a demotion to captain, it’s yours. Otherwise, pilot, you’re grounded for life.

Bluehair: I’ll accept the demotion, sir.

Tolwyn: Very well. Get out of here… and you’d better hope we never meet again, traitor.

Below you can see the finished game’s interpretation of the story’s opening beats.

Some of the choices made by the finished game, such as the decision to introduce the villain of the piece from the beginning rather than wait until some eight missions in, are valid enough in the name of punching up the anticipation and excitement. (One could, of course, still wish that said introduction had been written a bit better: “Speak of your plans, not of your toys.” What does that even mean?) In other place, however, the cuts made to the story have, even during this opening sequence, already gone deeper than trimming fat. Note, for instance, how the off-hand epithet of “traitor” which Admiral Tolwyn hurls at Bluehair in the initial script is taken to mean literal treason by the final game. And note how the shot showing the court martial to be a media circus, thus providing the beginning of an explanation as to why the powers that be have chosen to scapegoat one decorated pilot for a disastrous failure of a military operation, gets excised. Much more of that sort of subtlety — the sort of subtly that makes the story told by the first draft a credible yarn within its action-movie template — will continue to be lost as the game progresses.

There’s no single villain we can point to who decided that Wing Commander II should be gutted, much less a smoking gun we can identify in the form of a single decision that made all the difference. The closest we can come to a money quote is this one from Chris Roberts, made just after the game’s release: “We learned some lessons. We tried to do too much in too little time. None of us had any idea that the game had grown so large.” Like politics, commercial game development has always been the art of the possible. Origin did the best they could with the time and money they had, and if what they came up with wasn’t quite the second coming of The Empire Strikes Back which Roberts had so wished for, it served its purpose well enough from a business perspective, giving gamers a much more concentrated dose of what they had found so entrancing in the first game and giving Origin the big hit which they needed in order to stay solvent.

Origin, you see, had a lot going on while Wing Commander II was in production, and this provides an explanation for the pressure to get it out so quickly. Much of the money the series generated was being poured into Ultima VII, a CRPG of a scale and scope the likes of which had never been attempted before, a project which became the first game at Origin — and possibly the first computer game ever — with a development budget that hit $1 million. Origin’s two series made for a telling study in contrasts. While Wing Commander II saw its scope of interactivity pared back dramatically from that of its predecessor, Ultima VII remained as formally as it was audiovisually ambitious. Wing Commander had become the cash cow, but it seemed that, for some at Origin anyway, the heart and soul still belonged to Ultima.

Origin thus continued to monetize Wing Commander like crazy to pay for their latest Ultima. In a cash grab that feels almost unbelievably blatant today, they shipped a separate “Speech Accessory Pack” simultaneously with the core game. It added digitized voices to a few cut scenes, such as the opening movie above, and let your wingmen and your Kilrathi enemies shout occasional canned phrases during missions. “You want to buy our new game?” said Origin. “Okay, that will be $50. Oh… you want to play the game with all of the sound? Well, that will cost you another $25.” Like so much else about Wing Commander II, the speech, voiced by members of the development team, is terminally cheesy today, but in its day the Speech Pack drove the purchase of the latest Sound Blaster cards, which were adept at handling such samples, just as the core game drove the purchase of the hottest new 80386-based computers. And then two more add-on mission disks, known this time as Special Operations 1 and 2, joined the core Wing Commander II and the Speech Pack on store shelves. Well before the second anniversary of the first game’s release, Origin had no fewer than seven boxes sporting the Wing Commander logo on said shelves: the two core games, the four add-on mission packs, and the Speech Pack. Few new gaming franchises have ever generated quite so much product quite so quickly.

Of course, all this product was being generated for one reason only: because it sold. In 1991, with no new mainline Ultima game appearing and with the Worlds of Ultima spin-offs having flopped, the Wing Commander product line alone accounted for an astonishing 90 percent of Origin’s total revenue. Through that year and the one that followed, it remained undisputed as the biggest franchise in computer gaming, still the only games out there scratching an itch most publishers had never even realized that their customers had. The lessons Origin’s rivals would draw from all this success wouldn’t always be the best ones from the standpoint of games as a form of creative expression, but the first Wing Commander had, for better or for worse, changed the conversation around games forever. Now, Wing Commander II was piling on still more proof for the thesis that a sizable percentage of gamers really, really loved a story to provide context for game play — even if it was a really, really bad story. After plenty of false starts, the marriage of games and movies was now well and truly underway, and a divorce didn’t look likely anytime soon.

 

[MRY]

Adult contrarian explains why children's cartoon characters lack rich nuance sufficient to satisfy his needs, wonders, "Where is the Citizen Kane of cartoon video game cutscenes?"

 

[Sceptic]

I love you MRY

There's nothing "controversial" in there, he's just being his usual shitstirrer that he's been for a couple of years now.

Anyway as usual there's a lot of stuff he outright makes up, some stuff that he interprets as he wants because it's convenient to his established agenda, and some stuff that's so retarded I wonder if he reread what he wrote before publishing, the most obvious of the latter is him complaining that the "speak of your plans" line makes no sense. Of course it doesn't make sense when you cut off half the line. The full line is "Speak of your plans, not of your toys! tell me HOW you will defeat the humans" (emphasis in the original voice acting). The lines before is the prince boasting how his stealth fighters will bring them complete victory. The line after is the prince responding "Yes my emperor" followed by him detailing his plan. "What does that even mean?" is crystal clear when you don't take half a line out of context and then wonder. "The closest we can come to a money quote is this one from Chris Roberts, made just after the game’s release" is also a line that makes no sense if we take it out of context and present it on its own.

The frustrating thing is that he's right about some of the game's problems, including the writing and the heavy push towards even more of a cinematic experience than WC1, but it's impossible to take him seriously when even the examples he presents to prove the points he's right about are either stupid or false. I also find the omissions he perpetuates to push his revisionism incredibly annoying. Yes WC2 was heavily cinematic; it was also an excellent action game - and make no mistake, no one bought it and praised it for being a good flight simulator, just like nobody praised the Falcon games for being great CRPGs. Yes they sold the speech pack separately; and considering the vast majority of gamers still didn't own any way to HEAR the speech (I didn't get a Sound Blaster until a few months after getting WC2) I'm quite glad they didn't fold even a fraction of its price into the main game and sold it as part of it. Yes they made the game so they could sell - heaven forbid good games be sold! they should all be given away for free instead? It's the same retarded accusation he made at Sierra some time ago, and it's not any fresher now than it was then. He puts way too much weight on intent and way too little on what's actually in his hands.

 

[Infinitron]

He puts way too much weight on intent and way too little on what's actually in his hands.

Yes, well said.

He complains that Wing Commander II's story was cut but...what exactly is he comparing it to? It's still ten times more story-driven than the first game was. Seems like something rubbed him wrong about the game and so he went looking for rationalizations as to why it was actually a WELL-KNOWN DEEPLY FLAWED game. No it wasn't dude, all games have cut content and Wing Commander II does not feel incomplete, you're just weird.

EDIT: Fuck it, commented.

 

[Infinitron]

At last, Wing Commander III: https://www.filfre.net/2021/03/wing-commander-iii/

By the standards of most productions of this nature, the game’s cinematic sequences don’t acquit themselves too horribly. If you can look past the inherent cheesiness of pixelated human actors overlaid upon computer-generated backgrounds, you can see some competent directing and acting going on. The game’s eleven-minute opening sequence in particular shows a familiarity with the language of cinema that eludes most other interactive movies. Throughout the game, there is a notable lack of the endless pregnant pauses, the painful periods where the director seems to have no idea where to point the camera, the aura of intense discomfort and vague embarrassment radiating from the actors that was such par for the course during the full-motion-video era. Likewise, the script shows an awareness of how to set up dialog and use it to convey information clearly and concisely.

I give the film-making professionals who helped Chris Roberts to “direct” his first feature film more credit for all of this than I do that young man himself. (Anyone who has seen the later, non-interactive Wing Commander movie knows that Roberts is no natural-born cinematic auteur.) Rather credit him and the rest of Origin for realizing that they needed help and going out and getting it. This unusual degree of self-awareness alone placed them well ahead of most of their peers.

At the same time, though, the production’s competence never translates into goodness. There’s a sort of fecklessness that clings to the thing, of professionals doing a professional job out of professional pride, but never really putting their hearts into it. It’s hard to blame them; the plot outline provided by Roberts was formulaic, derivative stuff, right down to climaxing with a breakneck flight down a long trench. (Star Wars much, Mr. Roberts?) And the less said the better about the inevitable love triangle, in which you must chose between a good girl and a bad girl who both have the hots for you; it’s just awful, on multiple levels.

In cinematic terms, the whole thing is hopelessly stretched in length to boot, a result of the need to give customers their $90 worth. One extended blind alley, involving a secret weapon that’s supposed to end the war with the Kilrathi at a stroke, ends up consuming more than a quarter of the script before it’s on to the next secret weapon and the next last remaining hope for humanity… no, for real this time. The screenwriters noted that their movie wound up having seventeen or eighteen acts instead of the typical three. Putting the best spin they could on things, they said said that scripting Wing Commander III was like scripting “a little miniseries.”

The acting as well is a study in competence without much heart. The actors do their jobs, but never appear to invest much of themselves into their roles; Mark Hamill seems to have had much more fun playing the slovenly Detective Moseley in Gabriel Knight that he did playing the straight-laced Colonel Blair here. Again, though, the script gives the actors so little to work with that it’s hard to blame them. The parade of walking, talking war-movie clichés which they’re forced to play are all surface on the page, so that’s how the actors portray them on the screen. Only Tom Wilson and Ginger Lynn Allen bring any real gusto to their roles. Tellingly, they do so by not taking things very seriously, chewing the (virtual) scenery with a B-movie relish. I don’t know whether more of that sort of thing from the others would have made Wing Commander III a better film under the criteria Chris Roberts was aiming for, but it certainly would have made it a more knowing, entertaining one in my eyes.

Instead, and as usual for a Chris Roberts production, the painful earnestness of the whole affair just drags it down. For all its indebtedness to Star Wars, Wing Commander III lacks those movies’ sense of extravagant fun. Roberts wants us to take all of this seriously, but that’s just impossible to do. The villains are giant cats, for heaven’s sake, who look even more ridiculous here than they do in the earlier games, like some overgrown conglomeration of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh and the anthropomorphic chimpanzees from Planet of the Apes.

As is the norm in games of this style, your degree of actual plot agency in all of this is considerably less than advertised. Yes, you can pick the good girl or the bad girl, or reject them both; you can pick your wingman for each mission; you can choose your character’s attitude in dialog, which sometimes has some effect on others’ attitudes toward you later on. But your agency is sharply circumscribed by the inherent limitations of pre-shot, static snippets of video and the amount of storage space said video requires; it was enough of a challenge for Origin to pack one movie onto four CDs, thank you very much. These limitations mean you can’t steer the story in genuinely new directions during the movie segments. The “interactive” script is, in other words, a string of pearls rather than a branching tree; when you make a choice, the developers’ priority is to acknowledge it more or less perfunctorily and then to get you back into the main flow of their pre-ordained plot.

The developers did design a branching mission tree into the game, but your progression down it is dictated by your performance in the cockpit rather than by any conscious choices you make outside your spacecraft. Nevertheless, there are some generous touches here, including a heroic but doomed last stand of a mission if the war goes really badly. But Origin knew well by this point that most players preferred to replay failed missions instead of taking their lumps and continuing down the story’s “losing” branch, and this knowledge understandably influenced the amount of work they were willing to put into crafting missions which most players would never see; the alleged mission tree in this game is really a linear stream with just a few branching tributaries which either end or rejoin the main flow as quickly as possible. Certainly the most obvious problem with the approach — the fact that the branching mission tree gives less skilled players harder missions so that they can fail even worse after failing the first time, while it gives more skilled players easier missions that might well bore them — is not solved by Wing Commander III.

When it comes to its nuts and bolts as a space simulator, Wing Commander III surprises mostly by how little it’s progressed in comparison to the first two games. The 3D engine looks much better than what came before, is smoother and more consistent, and boasts the welcome addition of user-selectable difficulty levels. At bottom, though, the experience in space remains the same; neither the ships you fly nor their weapons load-outs have changed all that much. In some ways, the series has even regressed; you can no longer jump behind the controls of a rear-facing laser turret, as you could in Wing Commander II. The engine’s one genuinely new trick is an ability to simulate flight over a terrestrial landscape, a legacy of its origins with the twentieth-century techno-thriller Strike Commander. Yet even this new capability isn’t utilized until the very end of the game, when you lead an attack on the Kilrathi home world.

Wing Commander III runs at a much higher resolution than the first Wing Commander, but the general look of the game is surprisingly little changed, as this direct comparison shows. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course — there’s something to be said for a franchise holding onto its look and feel, as Origin learned all too well when they attempted to foist the misbegotten Ultima VIII upon the world — but the lack of any real gameplay evolution within that look and feel perhaps is.

Each of the 50 or so missions which you have to fly before you get to that bravura climax breaks down into one of just a few types — patrol these waypoints, destroy that target, or protect this vessel — that play out in very similar ways each time. There’s never much sense of a larger unfolding battle, just a shooting gallery of Kilrathi coming at you. The artificial triggers of the mission designs are seldom well-concealed: reaching this waypoint magically spawns a Kilrathi fighter squadron from out of nowhere, reaching that one spawns a corvette. Meanwhile the need to turn on the auto-pilot and slew your way between the widely separated waypoints within most missions does little for your sense of immersion. Wing Commander III isn’t a complete failure as an arcadey space shooter; some players might even prefer its gung-ho, run-and-gun personality to more nuanced approaches. But I would venture to say that even some of them might find that it gets a little samey well before the 50 missions are complete. (Personally, I maintain that the first Wing Commander, which didn’t stretch itself so thin over so many missions and which was developed first and foremost as a compelling action game rather than an interactive movie, remains the best of the series from the standpoint of excitement in the cockpit.)

Looking back on 1994 from the rarefied heights of 2021, I find that Wing Commander III‘s weaknesses as both interactive movie and space simulator are highlighted by the strengths of a contemporary competitor in both categories.

In the former category, we have Access Software’s Under a Killing Moon, which was released almost simultaneously with Wing Commander III; the two games were often mentioned in the same breath by the trade press because each packed four CDs to the bursting point, giving each an equal claim to the title of largest game ever in terms of sheer number of bytes. Under a Killing Moon was a more typical early full-motion-video production than Wing Commander III in many ways, being a home-grown project that utilized the talents of only a few hired guns from Hollywood. But, for all that the actors’ performances and the camera work often betray this, the whole combines infectious enthusiasm — “We’re making a movie, people!” — with that edge of irony and humor that Chris Roberts’s work always seems to lack. If Wing Commander III is the glossy mainstream take on interactive cinema, Under a Killing Moon is the upstart indie version. It remains as endearing as ever today, one of the relatively few games of its ilk that I can unreservedly recommend. But then, I do tend to prefer the ditch to the middle of the road…

In the realm of space simulators, we have LucasArts’s Star Wars: TIE Fighter, which shipped about six months before Wing Commander III. Ironically given its own cinematic pedigree, TIE Fighter had no interest in Hollywood actors, love triangles, or even branching mission trees, but was rather content merely to be the best pure space simulator to date. Here you can’t hope to succeed as the lone hero charging in with guns blazing; instead you have to coordinate with your comrades-in-arms to carry out missions whose goals are far more complex than hitting a set sequence of waypoints, missions where dozens of ships might be pursuing individual agendas at any given time in dynamic unfolding battles of awesome scale. It’s true that TIE Fighter and its slightly less impressive predecessor X-Wing would probably never have come to exist without the example of the Wing Commander franchise — but it’s also true that LucasArts had well and truly bettered their mentors by the time of TIE Fighter, just their second attempt at the genre.

 

[Hag]

I've followed this guy for years and read god-knows many of his articles, but I can't take it anymore. The signal-to-noise is simply to low, and as a non-native English speaker I find that for the last 3 or 4 years his prose has gotten more complex and roundabout in a pretentious way. Sometimes painful to read. Feels like eating twelve boxes of fine chocolates at the same time. Too much. Not tasty anymore.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I've followed this guy for years and read god-knows many of his articles, but I can't take it anymore. The signal-to-noise is simply to low, and as a non-native English speaker I find that for the last 3 or 4 years his prose has gotten more complex and roundabout in a pretentious way. Sometimes painful to read. Feels like eating twelve boxes of fine chocolates at the same time. Too much. Not tasty anymore.

I assumed at first this was just a problem for a non-native speaker...oh...boy...that is some pretentious prose. The way he's writing you'd think he was some fourth-rate fantasy writer or something. Makes me glad I never really read his blog. I always saw errors in his entries on games I knew about and figured there were errors in the ones I didn't know about.

 

[Nutria]

as a non-native English speaker

No no no it's not that. You actually know English well enough to see that this guy really sucks at writing. He thinks he's goddamn Shakespeare and is always making these smug comments about other people's writing, but I feel exhausted just getting through one of his paragraphs.

I try not to say negative things about people, but I cannot fucking stand this guy. Everything he writes is trashing people who are better than him. And he's so goddamn smug. Who the fuck is he? He's just some guy with a blog and he acts like you're supposed to respect his (usually really fucking moronic) opinions about stuff that he usually doesn't understand.

 

[OndrejSc]

I like his style.

 

[sser]

I like the articles, but sometimes the writing is tinged with a sense of its author grinding an axe. It reminds me of some contrarian history books where sometimes it feels like I'm reading a historian breaking focus to throw shade at his peers. Other times its just a point of contrarianism to rise the writing above a crowded field. Either way it can be very apparent because they do their due diligence on the subject matter, as one has to do if they're going against the current, and then right in the middle of their text will come some sentence or two that sticks out like a sore thumb.

This one makes a very large claim in saying WCIII isn't a good game. I feel like that sorta lofty claim better have some weight backing it up, but the argument he makes is ridiculously vague, and he even at one point makes an observation about creators being the makers of their own demise, and in doing so takes a very positive review of the game and inserts words and meaning into it which are not there. Talk about irony. For that many words he should have done more. As usual, the historiography is the article's strongest parts.

 

[vonAchdorf]

WC3 is not TIE Fighter and neither a hipster indie movie. So what?
Of 3, 4 and "5", I liked 4 best, but still have good memories of 3.

 

[OndrejSc]

Off of all of the WC, I liked Privateer, 1 and Prophecy most.

 

[Dayyālu]

I never got into Wing Commander (the gameplay never clicked with me properly) but as a game series it's outright fascinating in development with its FMV and "plot" focus. Can't comment on WCIII, I never managed to finish it properly, it simply didn't click.

The main problem with Roberts, I guess, coming from a man that has watched the Wing Commander movie more than once and even read the tie-in materials - the movie guide is fascinating because it was written before the movie got extensively recut so half of the plot elements make no sense at all - is that Dread Pirate Roberts loves a lot movies but he isn't a good moviemaker. Maybe that's why I somewhat like the Wing Commander movie, it's one of those few bad movies that were trying their damnedest to be good but the skill simply wasn't there.

There's some... weird love there. Roberts got Prochnow in and even aped Das Boot because he could. A shitton of work was done on special effects - and the much-maligned Kilrathi costumes were a goddamn legit attempt to make giant cats as scary sci-fi opponents. Nothing worked out properly and the young cast performed dismally. Roberts could not resist to even cameo in it.

I do think that without the FMV WC would not have been such a success tho: tastes were simpler back then, and it's not like even contemporary sci-fi on the great screen is this paragon of quality. Take Hamill and ham out of it and you're left with a mediocre flight sim.

If we need to talk about a game that was damaged by FMVs, there's the can of worms of Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.... that one was a pity.

 

[Nutria]

Roberts is one of the early examples of a really terrible trend in games, where they get made by people who really wanted to make movies but knew they weren't good enough to ever make it in Hollywood.

 

[OndrejSc]

Roberts is one of the early examples of a really terrible trend in games, where they get made by people who really wanted to make movies but knew they weren't good enough to ever make it in Hollywood.

I.E: Non-Jews.

 

[Dayyālu]

Roberts is one of the early examples of a really terrible trend in games, where they get made by people who really wanted to make movies but knew they weren't good enough to ever make it in Hollywood.

That's the traditional narrative regarding him. I don't necessarily disagree, and post Wing Commander movie Roberts truly tried his hardest to ram into the scene through shady shit and married your garden variety failed-actress skank. Roberts had also real skills in gamemaking when he got into Origin, he wasn't a failed screenwriter/Academia reject like our contemporary crop of "video game writing teams".

Wing Commander 1999 from what I read tho, strikes me more as an almost "honest" Neil Breen type of thing: he made big money with something else, gaming, and wanted to earnestly show the world how it was done. Maybe it's me, but there's an honest attempt to make a real movie in the dismal failure, he simply lacked the skills.

Contemporary Roberts is just a grifter, tho.

 

[Ahnx]

I've followed this guy for years and read god-knows many of his articles, but I can't take it anymore. The signal-to-noise is simply to low, and as a non-native English speaker I find that for the last 3 or 4 years his prose has gotten more complex and roundabout in a pretentious way. Sometimes painful to read. Feels like eating twelve boxes of fine chocolates at the same time. Too much. Not tasty anymore.

He's just woke, man. Can't read his stuff too - constant uses of "she/her" instead of "he/him" alone makes it hard to read.