I seem to recall a Wing Commander animated series at one point. Seemed like dreck. USA Cartoon Express really knew how to pick 'em.

I'm a fan of the series, though my only exposure to the games were the SNES and PS1 ports. I found them quite fun. It's unfortunate EA won't (can't?) continue the series proper.

There was a Wing Commander animated series entitld "Wing Commander Academy". It was supposed to be a prequal to the first game, and had many of the actors reprising their parts.

I never cared for it too much, even if they did probably have the best versoin of the Kilrathi. As much as I hated the Kilrathi in the movie, they weren't a ton better then the version in the games from 3 onward. Those looked like angry muppets.

EDIT: Also, I'm surprised to hear of someone whose main exposure to the game was on a console. I don't know how I'd ever be able to play the game with an analog D-pad. I needed a joystick and the entire keyboard to play the game, so I never understood how someone could also play it with a D-pad and four buttons.

Well, the D-Pad's roughly analogous to the arrow keys. Button mapping, on the other hand, I can't say (having played exactly 0 Wing Commander games), so it really depends on how many actions the game needs. I'd imagine it'd be pretty high, but perhaps manageable on about 6-8 buttons with some trickery. (But then, again: never played Wing Commander. Ever.)

That said, the video of the game kinda looks fun. I understand where everyone's coming from, and I agree that this doesn't look like the full-3D flight sim that everyone loves, but take away the Wing Commander license causing all the controversy, and it actually looks decent (albeit not groundbreaking).

D-pad and 8-10 buttons, actually. And all of them were put to use in those games (I remember the Select button being pivotal in the SNES versions, you held it in concert with other buttons to initiate more commands). I would imagine the game controlling a lot better on a PC, turning was a bit of a shore... especially when you were on an Kilrathi Ace pilot's tail. They squirmed about all over the screen like roaches on fresh-- well, you get my drift.

I also remember how the SNES version chugged along when there was more than one Kilrathi fighter in close proximity at one time and how pixellated Mode 7 made the ships look. However, even through all that one can see that the game was quality. I wouldn't mind playing it again now that I think of it, it's always fun to see your Kill Score rise up through the ranks.

Not too big a fan of the 3D games, the b-movie quality cutscenes kind of kill the novelty that were the cinema scenes from the first game (I still haven't played WCII). But the space combat looked nicer.

I think, for me, StarFox Command would have been better received if it followed in the footsteps of the original WC in terms of incorporating strategy into an arcade-style space sim. Actually, anything would of been better than the lame fog-of-war crap.

EDIT: Also a big fan of the Colony Wars games. I need to play those again, too. Psygnosis represent, yo.

You do know that Wing Commander II was in the same vein as the first one. Same sort of animation style I mean. They changed the way the cinema scenes were deliverred. Still, WC2 is when the game became really epic, and the player character became more then just "Bluehair".

And don't knock the FMV cutscenes, they were greenscreenerific. That was when the game stopped being just a flight sim and became a Flight sim/RPG. Your conversation choices outside of action would reflect upon the morale of the pilots, and how well they performed in combat. And in Wing Commander IV, they could influence the entire outcome of the game.

I just have a thing for talking heads.

I never played WC2 because it was never made available. The game was cancelled in mid port. My only experience with Wing Commander Classic is WC and Secret Missions.

My real gripe with III and IV's fmvs were that they were deviations from I and II's hand-drawn stuff. The games came out during the 'dark ages' of CD media, when it afforded developers the ability to use actors to portray story events in games when it simply wasn't needed or necessary. Hiring actors and buying "green scene" equipment only served to balloon a game's budget, many times at the cost of actual game development. All this so marketing could tag each copy of the game with a "starring so-and-so" and pump up sales.

But, what could they do? They wanted to take advantage of the media but CGI was still in its early stages of development and/or prohibitively expensive to produce, and real-time game engine produced cutscenes would probably look like crap.

Not that the games didn't do a good job with what they had, muppets notwithstanding.

I kind of agree with you on Wing commander III, but Wing Commander IV really did a very good job with its FMV sequences. Unlike Wing Commander III, a majority of the sets were actually built as sets with maybe some green screen flavoring, as opposed to the Wing Commander III sets which were almost entirely green screen.

It's a common meme among Wing Commander fans that if you edited together all of the video clips from Wing Commander IV, and added some CGI for the space battles, you'd have a superior film to the Wing Commander movie.

I find your stance interesting because it's not common among Wing Commander fans. I think it may be because you missed Wing Commander II. The story became very cinematic at that point, and while the story was epic and fascinating, it was definately clear that Chris Roberts had ambitions the talking heads could not fill. There's a scene where Angel and Blair(still Bluehair and whatever you name him then) kiss, and the kiss is so poorly animated, it happsn almost in stages. Stage 1: Grab each other. Stage 2: Move in, almost there! Stage 3: We have contact.

It's too bad you'll probably never get to play WC2. In the late 90's, EA issued a compilation pack called the Kilrathi Saga that contained Wing Commanders I through III for the PC. Nowadays, the Kilrathi Saga is so rare, it fetches prices in the five hundred dollar range on ebay.

Again, I hope you all can excuse my sentimentality on this, because Wing Commander was the first game I ever personally owned.

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It's too bad you'll probably never get to play WC2. In the late 90's, EA issued a compilation pack called the Kilrathi Saga that contained Wing Commanders I through III for the PC. Nowadays, the Kilrathi Saga is so rare, it fetches prices in the five hundred dollar range on ebay.

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Piracy being what it is these days, if I cared to look I'm sure I could find it within a reasonable amount of time. As a matter of fact, if I recall correctly I have an old PC Gamer disc lying around that might have the first game, in full (the magazine was doing a special on retro classics and included a ton of shareware demos and free, full-fledged games from PC yesteryear on that months disc, all made to be fully playable on more up-to-date systems). Not that I would, but it's nice to know I have the option.

PC Gamer did release the first game like years ago, yes. Some websites figured out how to add the bonus campaigns onto that too.

And also WC1 is on EA Replay that was just released for the PSP.

I've been playing that game since I was little. Obviously, though, I've only recently been able to comprehend it... but after finishing the first mission, I couldn't figure out how to f'n dock. For like twenty minutes. Then I quit.

🙁

haha, you know I had a similar problem the first time I played. I didn't realize I had to radio my carrier and request permission to land. I kept on dieing because I'd end up ramming the Tiger's Claw flight deck.

You know, that's one of the few things that stayed in the game throughout every iteration, the radioing to land.

"Good God, open the dock! My left engine is fried, my wingman's pushing up spacedust and two Ace furballs are closing in on my six!!!" *rams for the unmpteenth time*

TIGER'S CLAW: "~i hear you knockin' but you can't come eeeeeen~!"