#125: Wing Commander

CAW?

Wing Commander opens with a credits screen where it starts off with the 3 writer/directors. Considering most of the games I've played in this adventure have felt like the plot could have come off the back of a cereal box that's really encouraging. Now, I played a lot of this game as a kid (my friend Robin owned it and lent it to us every now and then), so I remembered it as being pretty sweet as far as story goes. You go on a bunch of space combat missions with a variety of goals and the story changes based on how good you do on those goals. You can lead humanity to victory or you can actually be forced to run away from the bad guys.

Ten-Forward!

The game opens with what feels like an old Sierra point and click game. I move the cursor around and click to interact with the people and things on the screen. There's a training simulator, a bartender, some fellow pilots with advice, a scoreboard, and an exit. The whole time there's some pretty great background music playing.

RIP ZIGGYNY

This game really went all out on the cutscenes. When I go for my first mission it has lots of little videos with people standing up, and running, and it all looks really awesome. I was doing pretty good on my first mission (I killed 3 enemies!) but then I flew into an asteroid and died. It did a death replay video, and then it went to a memorial cutscene where they gave me a eulogy and then sent my body off into space. I hope I land on the Genesis planet!

I did some reading and apparently this game was first released on PC and was ported to the SNES two years later. It spawned an entire genre of games, including one of my favourite PC games in high school, Tie Fighter. It was well received at the time, and it was still pretty fun now. The graphics and the music and the sound are all top notch. Having a real, coherent plot that changes based on your actions is mind blowing. And then to actually have a pretty good space combat game on top of that? I'm flabbergasted.

Rating: S