Wing Commander III | Hacker News Reader

Wing Commander III

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264 pointsdoppp164 comments

Owned it. It was campy fun even then but WCII and WC:Privateer were far and away the better games. III was one of many attempts at a game-movie crossover that never really worked imho. Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with SimCity and Civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer

Privateer was a lot of fun. I remember playing it and the sequel. I'd be interested to see more behind-the-scenes of Privateer 2. It also had FMV and (from what I recall) had this sort of campy sci-fi TV movie feel. Great game, although I'm hesitant to look at it without the lens of nostalgia.

Well Chris Roberts is back with Star Citizen , 500 million dollars for an eternal beta of nostalgia.

I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series... It totally captivated me as a kid, but I sure as heck didn't know who was responsible for its creation. It just sort of existed as a different realm without much thought of the behind-the-scenes

> I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series

His name was on the cover of the box haha.

But yeah him being the showrunner was one of the primary reasons the original Star Citizen scam^W kickstarter went so well. The space sim genre/community was so dead back then that at that point we would've thrown money at anything.

> Privateer was a lot of fun.

You'd probably be interested in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (2019). It's extremely Privateer-influenced.

The first game, Rebel galaxy, is also highly entertaining, though much less Privateery.

I remember Privateer 2, with the guy who played Darius in the old Highlander show.

I believe it was WCII which had a framerate which was dependent on the speed of the processor. I remember trying to play it some years after it came out, and you literally couldn't understand what was happening on screen because it was too fast.

dosbox has a setting to lock the clock rate at a chosen rate for those older games that are timing dependent like that.

the clock rate isn't quite enough--because more enemies do cause it to advance the program counter more... really you do want to measure how long the frame took and sleep the interim

That's what the turbo button was for.

It was WC1 and I disassembled the code and added in a time-dependent limiter in dosbox. I also added multiplayer--it's not quite documented and ready for consumption, but if you're interested in how it works, the code is right now up as a patch to dosbox in the wcmulti branch https://github.com/danielrh/dosbox3d/tree/wcmulti most of the changes are in the src/cpu/core_Normal.cpp and src/cpu/wc_net.cpp

the way you run it is... run a retail copy of WC.EXE with the branch of dosbox3d then do wcnet startserver <port> on one machine and wcnet connect <ip addr> <port> then both machines just run wing commander as normal. and the first one can start the first mission and the other connects in and gets to play as spirit. You can play through the whole campaign this way

Now I almost regret never having really played WC back then. Suddenly having the ability to play a round or two in co-op sounds pretty amazing and it's the first time I've seen DOSBox used to augment a running program by peek- and poking around in its address space. I feel like this almost deserves its own post.

Hi! Long time no see! Looks like you're still kicking a lot of ass :D :D :D

Both WC 1 and 2 depended on processor speed, but WCII had a slowdown feature (I believe it was Ctrl-+ and Ctrl--) that allowed you slow it down.

I got so good at WC1 by playing on a 286 and then being able to speed up my reflexes on a 486. I could read every bitmap.

> Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with SimCity and Civilization.

Surely Elite and Elite II deserve more of the credit there?

Elite and Elite II, played them both, however I give the nod to the Wing Commander series and specifically Privateer for one simple reason. They did not making flying difficult let alone everyone's badge of honor in Elite in making your first successful docking with the rotating stations.

Still my favorite space game ever had to be Starflight though Starflight II came close. Not the same play style but early games on computers during that time were such a marvel for how much they did with so little

Starflight

Starflight! Probably the first video game I ever got day-and-night absorbed by. Still one of my all-time favorite games. Not even Star Control 2 had a universe that felt as large as Starflight - and it came on 2 360k floppy disks!

I feel that Special Operations 2, with the Morningstar and the plot around Jazz, was probably the high point for WC2.

The ending was certainly cathartic after everything that had happened from the beginning until that point.

Oddly, I feel like Prophecy may have had the best fleshed-out flight system, but I wasn't a huge fan of the story. WC4 had the second best ending, though! Only behind SO2 in terms of relieving you of the frustration.

Privateer is definitely an interesting game, and it's really weird that they never really tried to follow that model again. Privateer 2 is best not brought up, and by the time any theoretical P3 could have been in development Origin was already dead.

Privateer! I absolutely loved that game - I must have racked hundreds of hours on it as a kid!

I liked WC:Prophecy a lot too, but the trade aspect of Privateer was what really got me hooked. Also, the sheer size of the Privateer universe was mind boggling at the time. That and the graphics almost seemed like witchcraft given PC capabilities of the day.

Indeed. Though revisiting it I find it's brutally difficult without a small deadzone joystick and careful choices early on. Like stay in Troy, Meson blasters, afterburners, run away from most fights, scout don't patrol, etc.

Also lack of in flight saves and close asteroid spawning makes it tough even with the best ship and shields.

I mean, half the fun was that you had to run away. There were some fights you were not going to win.

Lack of saves really enhanced the risk aspect of those fights too. Something lost in a lot of games today IMO.

If you remembered the advice given in the original wing commander that the safest speed to traverse asteroid fields is 250, they were far more survivable :)

That is the magic number. My frustration was that enemies so often appeared in them, and could not be escaped. One bad asteroid collision and the weakest enemies were only a few lucky shots away from destroying my ship.

My friend and I would team up. He would fly with the joystick and operate trigger weapons. I would run the missiles and other keyboard systems. We'd also track system to system trading with notes, etc. Much debate on which missions to choose. Those were good times. We'd play for literally days, leaving only for food (we were old enough that we were independent enough to get away with this but young enough to have nothing else to do).

Wing Commander II was just amazing. Had a long, fairly well thought out story with meaningful twists, emotional moments, tension and accompanies by a great soundtrack.

I will see you in heaven.

Some remastered bits of soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJD6YpHD5O0&list=PLFB7GcAB-z...

I loved Privateer. I found an iOS game called Galaxy on Fire which is basically in the same spirit and it took me back.

I wonder how many people remember Privateer 2 with all the cut scenes with the guy who played Darius in the old Highlander TV series?

Just for your information there is Privateer Gemini Gold (a perfect remake) free to download:

http://privateer.sourceforge.net/

Based on the VegaStrike Engine (a really cool game by itself):

https://www.vega-strike.org/

I've lost something.

When I was a kid, buying a new game was nearly impossible; If I was lucky, I'd get one for a birthday present or a Christmas gift. Occasionally a cool friend would lend me a copy of something. For a very short time, I lived about a mile away from a video game rental store and I'd sometimes be able to convince an adult I was responsible enough to return the game and spend my own money renting a game over a weekend.

As a result of this, I'd spend many, many hours on the same game. I'd "beat" the game, but I'd also have this sort of mental model of challenges or 'perfect' gameplay that I'd try to achieve. It might be a score. It might be a time. It might be collecting all of a thing. It might be getting to a particular location that appeared to be 'off limits.' It was basically 'achievements' before there were achievement systems, but they were generally a lot harder and all the rewards for doing it where self-generated and internal. (I also spent a lot of time thinking about whether a thing was possible, and if it wasn't, why not.) This also allowed me to spend a lot of time on games that weren't very good and find some good within them.

This post reminded me of this, because Wing Commander (the original) was one of those games I played over and over again. (I can't really recall what my goals were for the game, but I remember it being particularly difficult to achieve them.)

I don't really do this with games anymore. Even in the case where I don't have the next game chosen and already in my line-up, it's easy to buy a game online and have it downloaded and playable within an hour. There aren't any surprises: readily available game reviews tell me basically exactly what to expect. On a game I particularly enjoy, I might spend some more time on it by gathering the achievements, but achievements really pale in comparison (in terms of both difficulty and reward) to what I remember of doing this myself in my youth.

It's like the difference between reading a novel and really understanding a novel at a deep level. I think I'd like to get back to those deeper dives; but with more money than time (versus more time than money that I used to have), so many excellent games available, and all kinds of other distractions, I'm not really sure how or where to begin. I'm also not sure it's just me, or if games in general have lost a sort of magic they used to have.

Funny you should mention the mental model of challenges because I do the same thing. I've started role-playing in games that neither require nor request any real role-play. For example, I find it much easier to suspend my disbelief in a shooter game if my character doesn't have to survive 10s of bullets without even a wince. As a result, I play and replay shooter levels until I can beat the game without taking a single bullet.

I'm in the same boat. Part of it is the medium has so much choice now, and the other part is that we're adults with both more money and less time to spend on things.

I remember playing a handful of NES games countless times, and being able to beat several of them in a single sitting.

I think some people manage to hold onto that (see speedrunners and/or world-class players of this or that game), but you'd have to be very intentional about it.

I feel the same. I used to be able to get uncountable hours of gameplay out of simple demo's of games because I didn't have the money for full games. The examples that come to mind are Cavewars and Fallen Haven. Both strategy games with a time limit. My brother and I would play the demo level over and over again and try to progress further and further within the set time limit. In a way it was like speedrunning but the other way around.

I feel the same way.

I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my favorite classic games less than an hour, sometimes in minutes. Some of that is cutting weird corners but often it's pure excellent execution.

I often wonder about doing that myself, playing hundreds of hours of a single game to master it. Putting all of my focus on a single game like I used to as a kid, but I don't find anything keeps my attention that way now.

I think partially it's what you said, more money than time and I naturally gravitate towards spending my time on novelty instead of mastery. That's just how my brain works.

The other piece is when I look back, I don't think I spend nearly as much time replaying the same things in the past as I feel like I did. I think those memories of playing and replaying games are somewhat distorted by my memories.

I also spent a great deal of time watching those games being played by friends and their siblings and so forth, during sleepovers and after school.

"I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my favorite classic games less than an hour, sometimes in minutes. Some of that is cutting weird corners but often it's pure excellent execution."

Ocarina of Time speedrunning has gotten to a really weird place now, where they basically set the character's name to a string of bytes which are executable code, and then de-reference a pointer to it and warp directly to the end credits, all within a few minutes of gaining control of Link. But, the community has a whole bunch of categories for different types of runs, from ones that are basically the Any% category before SRM (stale reference manipulation), to semi-legitimately beating all the dungeons (though with lots of sequence-breaking), to fully glitchless. It's a lot of fun watching some of those other-category runs for a taste of "normal" gameplay done at a very high level.

Another thing that's fun to watch runs of is randomizers (chest contents, quest rewards, sometimes even doors), since then you're not just seeing high level play, you're also seeing someone doing the live work of reasoning about their route through familiar-but-scrambled territory:

https://ootrandomizer.com/

I'm aware of all of this, but I'm really glad you posted it in case some others read it and it catches their interest.

OoT speedrunning is very unique, and since it was a game I played a lot as a kid I'm always excited to watch the ways it's beaten.

I do admit I prefer the categories that emphasize more gameplay though, even if the glitches are incredible.

For me, this magic was in playing the shit out of demo games that came with my PC Games magazine subscription. I fondly remember playing Diablo I and War Wind (a WarCraft 2 clone) demos over and over again.

You are not alone. This was my experience precisely as well.

Games lasted longer twenty years ago. It was easier to immerse in the game for this reason. Nowadays, blockbuster action games give you twenty hours of gameplay give or take. Even RPG games are shorter these days. Baldur's Gate took me weeks to finish. I can't remember the last time I played a contemporary game that lasted that long.

They are still there : Rimworld, Space Engineers... Factorio is a fan favorite on HN. You can also count Minecraft and Skyrim as long enduring successes.

>> Baldur's Gate took me weeks to finish.

The great games have no "finish". Where is the finish line in SimCity? Factorio never really stops, just getting bigger each time you play. I don't like SeaOfThieves but I appreciate that it is about playing rather than winning. And I cannot be the only one who has never bothered to kill the ender dragon.

> The great games have no "finish".

Hah well this is obviously highly subjective.

Games lasted longer twenty years ago. It was easier to immerse in the game for this reason

I think part of this was because games used to be about the gameplay, and not about the special effects.

A few weeks ago I got an old Pong cart in the mail. By the time I looked up from playing it, I'd lost half a day.

No special effects. Minimal sound. Irritating controllers. But almost entirely about the gameplay, and not about the game.

However, some old games' gameplay, unlike Pong's, was awful. Sometimes, terrible gameplay was actually a legit "strategy" by the devs to artificially make a game last longer, so people wouldn't feel ripped off. Good gameplay was appreciated, sure, but bad gameplay was often swept under the "challenging/hard-to-beat" rug.

I challenge this. Most games were really short. They were just very quick to kick you back to the title screen. :)

There are many games that will give you much longer than 20 hours. It's actually a complaint by some about modern open world games and how they're geared towards 40+ hours for even a basic completion. Longer if the player wants to finish some of the side quests. And then that's not counting mods and how those extend game time even further. And also not counting all those open-ended games which last as long as you're interested.

Gaming is in very good shape right now. I think most of the lack of immersion comes down to age. And also comes down to having many more diversions when you have an afternoon to yourself with time to play.

Speak for yourself. I get hundreds of hours out of great games like Rimworld, FTL, They are Billions and Hades.

There are just as many great games, they're just not the ones advertised to you.

Speak for yourself

I always speak for myself dude. Like everyone else in here.

they're just not the ones advertised to you

I'm not learning about new games from ads. I don't view ads at all online.

Its like eating a few table spoons of maple syrup, then biting into a fresh orange. your tastebuds will have become less receptive to the sweetness of the orange. Pretty much the overload of media/games today for the youth, hard to appreciate and enjoy the 'taste' of a sweet game, when theres 382472398407 games easily accessible on steam to play, or free for that matter e.g. LoL, engineered to blast open (crit chance 0.95x) your dopamine circuits.

I think there's a lot going on here. Some of it is just general maturity and experience. Things that were novel when you were a child wear off when you're older. Those achievements that you aimed for as a child (having 'perfect' gameplay) may seem less meaningful when you're an adult, especially in the context of other real world achievements.

The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging things about aging. You can't feel the excitement of certain things again as you did when you did them for the first time. I think this is why it's important to try new hobbies.

Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!).

I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the space theme) all the recent iterations of Star Wars and Star Trek. People love to complain that the new SW trilogy (or the prequel trilogy) or Star Trek Discovery is a load of rubbish but the reality is that we're just older. Things aren't going to spark in the way they did when we first watched. And that's fine.

> But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction

Or maybe not. I'm yet to see any modern game that would even remotely approach the magnitude of SC2. So far, the closest competitor was the original Mass Effect game, itself clearly influenced by Star Control games, but even it failed to surpass it.

The problem here is that it is basically impossible for a modern game to achieve the magnitude of those old CRPGs if you just mean that in the sense of how big the universe is and how much story it contains, but with modern AAA standards. The man-hours required to create all that content would be ridiculous.

That being said, if you count the totality of the Mass Effect trilogy, including all its DLC, I think you do get the magnitude of one Star Control 2, and it's generally fantastic.

You don't need to create everything with modern AAA standards. Games like FTL show that you can achieve a lot with much less effort. You just need to be bolder. And i think being bolder is the hard part: games these days are more timid in their aprroach to than they were in early 90s, like always trying to stick to a working formula. Mashups of different genres like SC2 are somehow nonexistent.

If you think that, you're not looking hard enough. There are countless incredible (and bold) indie games doing really interesting and unusual things.

Off the top of my head:

- Outer Wilds (an entire solar system is a puzzle stuck in a time loop)

- Hades (a roguelike where dying progresses the story)

- Slay the Spire (a hybrid deckbuilder/roguelike where different runs can produce drastically different gameplay and builds)

- Dead Cells (a hybrid Metroidvania/Roguelike with Diablo-style random weapon/item spawns that force the player to use different strategies with every playthrough)

- Into the Breach (from the guys who made FTL)

- Undertale (a fourth-wall-breaking RPG in which you can talk your way out of any battle, with multiple endings)

- Signs of the Sojourner (a narrative deckbuilding game where your cards represent different types of conversation)

- Her Story (a game all about watching pieces of footage from a deposition about a death... or is it a murder?... and trying to figure out what happened)

- Baba Is You (a puzzle game in which the rules are also objects in the game that can be moved and changed)

- Hypnospace Outlaw (a simulation of an alternate-reality 90's internet)

- The Stanley Parable (a game about following directions, or not following them and irritating the narrator)

- The Beginner's Guide (a narrated tour through the games of another developer, possibly without their approval)

StarSector - ~Star Control

RimWorld - "sims"

AFAIK RimWorld is more like Dwarf Fortress

Of this list, I've seen ads of most on Steam and checked the reviews. That's not what I'm talking about. Most of your list is still one genre, maybe with some new mechanics (not so new in Hades, for example, I've seen shades of this in 1992's Ragnarok).

What I was talking about are games like Star Control 2 and Dune 1, where they boldly mixed completely different genres and, in SC2 case, added a very deep lore and managed to feed it to you at the right pace, not overwhelming you with information, and giving it in entertaining way.

For example, I would love some nice space RPG with FTL-like space combat. But they just don't mix genres that way these days.

Star Control 2 shipped with a text file containing a story where Fred Ford and Paul Reiche disappeared for 9 months to hole up in a cabin in Alaska building out the game (including planet surface exploration and hundreds of pages of alien dialogue), in isolation from their publisher, who had to hire a private investigator to find them.

I have no idea if there's any truth to it, but it sounded like my idea of heaven for a long time. When I learned that they were still working together (Toys for Bob) many years later, I harbored a fantasy about going to work for them.

By pure coincidence, after playing Star Control 2 when I was about 8, my family moved to Novato, CA - home to Toys for Bob - when I was a bit older. I ended up getting a temp contract job there on the Madagascar game when I was 19. Paul and Fred were great to work with and as far as I know TfB is still a great place to work.

I doubt that Paul and Fred would have actually disappeared to write the game, but the story is 100% Paul's sense of humor.

It makes me happy to hear that, thank you for your reply.

Last I checked I had spent around 700hrs in skyrim...

I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.

While I've been a fan of Discovery for the most part, and it occasionally shows glimpses of promise, it's largely not "Star Trek." The story telling is simply just not rooted same soul that Trek has been built upon. I'm okay with change, but not so much with creating flashy spectacles at the expense of meaningful story telling.

I know it's been discussed to death, but just wanted to say I was late to the Mandalorian and I completely agree with you— it felt very true to the Star Wars universe, while at the same time expanding it considerably and not relying on cheap recycling of past characters and plot arcs.

And all of this on the kind of technology platform which could easily have enabled the absolute worst of the Lucas instincts to thrive as far as overcomplicated plots and gee-whiz special effects. Somehow it managed to take us to a dozen different planets and yet stay firmly rooted in a story about parenthood— and that, between a faceless warrior and a voiceless puppet. Wild!

> I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.

That's a good way to put it. Entirely agree.

Seeing characters from the original be the bad-ass your younger self imagined they were but couldn't be is what The Mandalorian achieved. They crafted a story that allowed that to happen.

check out The Orville, it is more of a classic star trek than the new official star treks

The story/campaign for SCII was great, but it also came with a local multiplayer arcade mode! It was an awesome time.

Star Control II was THE defining game of my childhood. After completing the quest - with difficulty, since my command of English then was not what it is now - my brother and I spent countless hours in Melee mode.

I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal to generate random ship combinations.

Few years ago I replaced SCII story mode and found it to be a total delight, especially now that I recognize the fine humor in English.

And now I have two sons about the same age that I was, and they got hooked on Melee as well and would play each other and myself, bringing warm happiness to my heart. One of them drew some ships for me on paper and they're on my corkboard in here, making me smile every time I look to the left.

I wish there was a SC3!

> I wish there was a SC3!

I, too, wrote a program that would assemble random teams of ships so you could have ladder style type combat amongst friends!

The driving factor is that some ships were virtually impossible to defeat in a skilled player's hand so we had to resort to random selection to be even remotely fair to everyone.

Freaking Utwig, man. I never had a really good answer to an Utwig with a skilled pilot. I would just throw ships at it in melee and expend way more than the "points" the Utwig ship is worth.

We used to play highest ranking vs lowest ranking ships a fair bit. If the Arilou didn't teleport into the planet more often than not, it would've been a lot more dangerous.

> The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging things about aging.

To me, this is where the “start a new company doing something good and interesting” kicks in, it seems. The best part of ageing seem to me that they grey hairs that I acquired during the last startup make it easier to the next one.

There was a time when I loved playing JRPGs, which can become a mindless grind if you're trying to maximize a character for fun.

I still like them, but on an emulator, with cheats for easy experience or money. I enjoy the story without the grind, and although I lost the perseverance and endurance I had then, I don't think I'll ever have the time (or the patience) to play them properly again.

You lost something to gain something else.

I still prefer to play a few games many many times instead of a lot of games a little. I've replayed the Dark Souls games so many times I have to backup my save file because I reached the save slot limit. Each time I replay I tend to have a theme or challenge. I also play factory style games for hundreds of hours. (Was up to 4am playing Factorio)

If I've lost anything as an adult it's that I'm less tolerant of games that don't capture my interest. As a kid I replayed certain games because I simply had fewer games to play. Now there are so many free or cheap games available but I find I quit new games quickly unless they capture my interest.

> readily available game reviews tell me basically exactly what to expect.

this is why I actively avoid reviews for any media I might be interested in watching. I don't want any influence on my experience at all. I don't even let my friends tell me why they like a movie: if they recommend it, that's the most I want to know. It's awesome! I can pick something up like Nier or the first Avengers movie, and it's a completely immersive experience. I don't think it's difficult; it's not like reviews are some core part of life that can't be lived without. And I can't speak for you, but for me, not having reviews is part of the magic of gaming that I experienced as a kid: blindly choosing games to try based on cover art, the name, the studio, the console, etc. Building up my own idea of what the game will be like, making sense of the game as I experience it with no expectations, and finally forming my own opinion of it makes gaming feel like it did when I was a kid.

The exception is for games that I just never would have heard of. There are literally thousands of games out there, and if it's not modern, it's probably not going to be talked about. So I'll watch stuff like Ross's Game Dungeon or Civvie 11 to get a taste of older things that would be harder for me to stumble upon, and just keep a distant finger on the pulse of what's hot today, like Among Us or Fall Guys.

There's also minor stuff that I think people underestimate. When I play games, I don't have a second monitor with discord/netflix/youtube, I don't constantly text people. I just play and if I get bored, I take that as a sign that I need to work harder to figure the game out or just play a different game, like kids do. If you get stuck, try to find a PDF of the strategy guide instead of looking up youtube walkthroughs.

In my experience, gaming has always, continuously changed. There's some magic that older games have that new ones just don't, but there's also magic to newer games that older ones just don't. And there's also the player's ability to immerse themselves into the games. I try to be mindful and actively fine-tune the way I game and it's had great results for me whether I'm playing my childhood classics, experiencing old games for the first time, or jumping on the bandwagon of what's shiny and new.

As adults we've found higher payoff/cost activities and generally, at least for me, other people are more interesting than games. I never saw that coming.

EDIT: not to say that I don't still enjoy games, but games have to either be really fascinating (factorio, surviving mars, city skylines) on a technical level, be social (multiplayer minecraft with my kids), or emotionally engaging (some RPGs, but usually only one playthrough)

I think that's really on point for me. I try to recreate the magic I used to feel playing Ultima, Wing Commander, Gunship, Commanche, Falcon 3, etc. with modern games and find I just don't... care. In terms of personal activities, I could be building something cool in the garage, or out on a real-life adventure, or playing with some electronics experiment, or doing research on a topic of special interest to me. Games feel very boring and unproductive to me even though I periodically attempt to check myself on this.

Augmented Reality could bridge the gap. Take a look at Pokemon Go or Geocaching as examples.

Pokemon Go was the last game I really played and it was so incredibly fresh and had an experience I will never experience again.. crowds of people outside doing the same thing with servers crashing.

How rare is that?

I stopped playing it years ago when they changed the gym system from a stacked tower to some system where your guys would lose health automatically just by being in the gym. Took the challenge out of it.. I was a completely solo player and enjoyed the challenge of taking on a fully stacked gym tower by myself.

Just as well. It did a number on my phone's battery with their poor coding (e.g. loading graphical assets over and over through an uncached encryption routine or something).

They have lost some of the magic I think. I remember as a child doing something similar with games. Back then I wasn't as skilled with games, and as a kid in the 90s it wasn't common to ask your mom or dad to "beat this level for you" because they were often worse than you.

So I'd just play the same levels over and over again. It would take me years to eventually beat Wing Commander 2 and 3. But it wasn't repetitive because I didn't feel any pressure to actually beat the game. I think I was actually more invested in exploring the logic of the game and creating imaginative storylines instead of actually getting invested in the game.

This one alternate mode of play contrasts to my kids where they seem to have two modes of play. One where they do the same thing and just explore game mechanics while dying over and over, and another where they actually want to make forward progress and often reach out for help. Luckily my generation is more acclimated to this type of interaction so we help out where in the past we would just struggle along or get sidetracked.

The lack of save systems on most console games back then led to the same result. I spent hours exploring the early levels of Sonic and Sonic 3D, because I was only so good and could only get so far in one play session.

This somehow led me and my friends to discover a very unintended way to reach the level select in Sonic 3D: place the cartridge in as loose as you can, and then shove it down fully on the Traveler's Tale logo. Crashes 9 times out of 10, but always worked eventually.

I think it's just the novelty of things. And the free time aspect.

I remember playing Dragon Warrior on NES late into the night with friends. Grinding away to get that next item and leveling up to fight bigger monsters. It was really fun, really exciting.

A few years ago I got an emulator and fired it up. Played about 5 minutes before I couldn't continue. Just didn't have the desire to grind away. And the emulator had a fastfoward button, which I found. So I just kept zipping around and running into monsters, not even wanting to spend the time to fight them. Spoiled because I didn't have to die, I could just reset to a save point.

I dunno. Maybe that just happens when you get old. Maybe it's just that there's so much instant gratification. I remember playing zelda and meticulously making maps on graph paper etc. Today you can just look it up on the internet in a minute and print a glorious, in color complete map.

It's just not the same anymore.

This week I reconnected to the MUD I used to play 20 years ago. I'm amazed it's still running. I've forgotten nearly everything.

I've been having a blast these past few days exploring the vast world.

There's nothing that Google can tell me about it. There's still people playing (and building) it, so I can ask for help - my old clan is still going even - but there's no instant fix on everything.

I don't know how long it'll last, and the time it will take is too much to fully immerse, but I've already started making some maps and trying to tackle some quests.

Please share. Perhaps if a few more join it can last longer.

The MUD I think will be fine, it's my interest in playing it that I'm not so sure about :-)

As I said in the other reply on this thread, it's RavenMUD, ravenmud.com 6060.

Out of curiosity, which MUD?

I used to play EliteMUD a ton decades ago. We used to get up at 6am to grab some computer terminals at the city's computer center and play all day.

I could've played from home but the phone bill would've been crippling.

RavenMUD. It's now running on ravenmud.com port 6060.

There are communities devoted to deep understanding of games. These tend to be in the Speedrun or Tool-Assisted-Speedrun communities. Both tend to be high time investments, but can reveal deep understandings of a game, including how to exploit coding flaws.

Of course, gaming is not the only hobby that a person can gain satisfaction from, and you can similarly get that sense of growth from other goal or skill based hobbies. Painting, music, or even just learning a foreign language. The payoff may be much greater than mastering a game, as society at large tends to value these "worldly" skills more than gaming skill.

You should give Hades a try. It's built from the ground up to be replayed - in fact that's woven into the story in a very compelling way.

I've only recently had the financial capacity to purchase games. However, I find that I've lost my appetite in playing them. I wonder with so many games at my fingertips I'm unable to find the motivation to play them like I used to. I'm baffled that I'd rather read about bash scripting.

Thanks for mentioning Hades, based on the steam reviews and gameplay trailer, it looks promising.

I'd hazard a guess your WC goals would've been seeing how many variations of the storyline there were. If memory serves there were 4, you doing great, OK, not so great or terrible and the war story would depend on how you do. Suppose you could include 5 in being blown up.

There were a range of medals you could get, too. Think I had to complete it several times over before I was sure how many there were!

I played 100s of games on the Amstrad CPC and Amiga in late 80s/early 90s. Think for me the magnus opus of gaming was the possibility of being able to play people online. The level of competition is high and it almost feels like work, so I stick to turn based games like Civ - but still fond of all the nostalgic game titles.

I was thinking along similar lines the other day. One of the things I realised was that imagination played a much bigger part in my enjoyment of games than it does now (as it did with playing with toy cars, lego etc. back at that age).

I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who occupied various buildings and their work days.

There was also a mountain range in one of the backgrounds on one level, and I recall spending time planning to explore it later, even pausing the game to draw a map of an imagined village there.

Of course now the vocabulary of games (and my understanding of them) has changed a lot, and it's far more obvious what the limits of a game and its interactive areas are - to me they're now throwaway pieces of entertainment, no longer worlds to inhabit and explore.

> I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who occupied various buildings and their work days.

I remember Choplifter for the Sega Master System. Half the fun was the story in my head regarding the hostages, the behind the scenes operation of rescue attempt, etc. And the tragedy of it all going wrong when you'd crash with people on board...

Mmm, achievements don't really seem as special anymore for a variety of reasons. Everything is so regimented in games now. You get an achievement for completing the tutorial mission. You get an achievement for finding the thing you can't progress in the game without it in your possession. You get an achievement for collecting 1000 blivets from radio towers. It's all uninteresting, uninspired busywork or crap put into the game because it's expected.

There's also accumulated gaming experience. I've been gaming for more than 4 decades, there ain't nothing new under the sun.

Also, real life cheevos are harder, and some would say more important, to attain.

I'd say for me, the magic of a lot of things wore off a long time ago. YMMV. GL HF

Speedrunners can spend hours working on small incremental improvements to their runs on a very deep level, with some of that time wading through code and disassembly; they sometimes end up understanding a game's programming better than the original designers haha

It seems like a grind from the outside but with the right game and the right community... there is always a faster time to achieve :) https://www.speedrun.com/

Not sure if it's your style of game, but Red Dead Redemption can be a great use of idle time, just roaming around at golden hour admiring the natural environment. It's a separate idea to knocking off achievements or rushing on to the next game. More like sitting on the porch with a drink, for people without a porch or much of a view.

I think the article kind of fails to capture how amazing the game was when it came out. Amazing, as in jaw-dropping. There was nothing like that at the time with the same kind of production values: it was certainly an expensive game to make, and it showed in every aspect of it. It was also the first game to use SVGA which was a revolution in itself in VGA land. I still have fond memories of WC3, and I don't think it has aged that badly at all, compared to many other games that came out around the same time.

It all kind of runs together, but I distinctly remember walking into NCA (I think?) in sunnyvale california in the mid 90's. They had shelves full of huge crt monitors, all of them with wing commander, with full motion video and sound piped through computer speakers.

Of course, that got you thinking about upgrading your system and making sure your system could pull it off.

I really miss actual movie cutscenes. Good graphics and cheaper mocap, and the general notion that we see the same characters led game studios believe they were a better option. I still think actual actors are hundred percent better at delivering a story. We don't need to uphold this belief that in-game scenes were "real", in the way that an actual movie cutscene would hurt the "magic" - it would actually make it much more realistic. It would be even - again - rewarding to work through a storyline to finally get a new cutscene. With all the cheap greenscreen tech, I wish there would be be a trend of movie cutscenes coming back.

I miss those too. I also feel that having these movie cutscenes helps the imagination. It doesn’t matter so much that a Mammoth tank in game looks like a few squares with some stripes because in your mind you see the one with full details that drove over you. (RA or C&C, I might be mixing up unit names and games now.)

I remember a major debate about in-engine cut-scenes when Interstate-76 used them, which came out not too many years after WC3.

Of course the final fantasy series used in-engine cutscenes up through the sixth installment.

I wonder if the master recordings for WC3 were kept or still exist. Imagine taking them and remastering the game.

I don't really understand the concept of playing a game to be "rewarded" with the opportunity to watch a movie and not play the game. The ongoing trend towards integrating story with play is a massive improvement over extensive plot cutscenes, in-engine, prerendered, or filmed.

Agreed. Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies did a fantastic job in WC III. Makes total sense to go with "real" cutscenes if you can get actors of that caliber on board.

I was so hyped when this game came out; I remember waiting 5-10 minutes for each mission to start on my computer at the time (a 486 dx2? Or a Pentium? Hard to remember). Clearing space to play it was a pain too.

I missed some of the wc2 gameplay and was not a fan of how the story kept resetting the progress from the previous games ("humanity suddenly comes to an agreement and dismantles its full fleet", "ragtag peripheral colonies are the only ones who understood the enemy" etc...). The way Hobbes' character was retconned wasn't great - especially since they left out his final message (seriously wtf?)

I still loved the game, enough so that I remembered all of that from years ago.

Yeah, WC3 did Hobbes dirty in a way that seriously trashed a lot of what WC2 seemed to be trying to do.

The parts of that story involving Cobra are almost uncomfortable to discuss. It was an attempt to raise the stakes but I didn't like it at all.

Even putting the weird "we should exterminate them all" Cobra character aside, the idea made no sense logically. The Kilrathi didn't activate Hobbes during WC 1's Secret Missions 2 (during their holiest rituals for Sivar) but suddenly decided to do so when they were basically about to win (and had no idea about the Temblor Bomb et al)

It's part of a problem I have with a lot of fiction with sequels that has the heroes make significant character strides with implicit guarantees to the reader/viewer, only for those to be completely thrown away in the next volume / installment / etc..

In this case, Hobbes proves himself through Secret Missions 2 (when you fly the Kilrathi fighters) and then in WC2 (which seemed far more pivotal than the situation in WC3). Then for cheap drama and fake "serious" points, they flip the script in WC3 because your well-supported implicit understanding was only implicit and "it doesn't count".

(I still loved the game)

What happened to Angel seemed like cheap drama to me, too. With the added "benefit" of allowing another romance plotline for Blair. It overall just seemed like a less mature, more melodramatic story than the previous two games.

Yeah, I had completely forgotten the plot where the Captain of the Concordia and a former fighter pilot is sent on a commando mission (!). We never even find out why the Concordia was sunk (although I assume it was in some book).

I think a lot of this stems from Roberts' not-so-secret desire to be a movie director; my guess was he was trying to streamline it to make things more "cinematic", but the end result was as you see. (The ill-received Wing Commander movie didn't cure him of this apparently)

The more I think about it, the more I agree with you; WC really did peak with WC2 for me. I didn't buy WC4, and only bought Prophecy years afterwards on sale for 15$. Meanwhile, I actually bought WC2 on release (despite having more precarious finances), and both Secret Operations.

It must be Origin retrogames quarter on HN!

We had an article about what made Ultima IX (or was it VIII?) a complete disaster and it was exactly from this same web domain.

I read the entirety of the WCIII article then ,since the ultima article linked to it.

I think the article is well sourced, and for sure i learned a thing or two, but more importantly, it made me think on how valuable sources of information (domains) get lost in the process unless the right HN user is posting it.

Fwiw, if you click the domain listed to the right of the title; (filfre.net),[1] it will take you to a list of all submissions to HN under that domain.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=filfre.net

You can get lost on filfre.net for days. The PC gaming era was never my bag but he’s spot on on the old 8-bit stories - his articles on Imagine/Psygnosis, and Melbourne House’s The Hobbit, are superb.

Wing Commander II is quite memorable to me because as a child I could never get it to work properly and it introduced me to the world of autoexec.bat and HIMEM.SYS. No matter what I did, I could never get both the in-game speech and the mouse working at the same time, it was either one or the other.

Yes! I often think about how my childhood fiddling with this kind of stuff gave me the confidence and background to become a "computer person" and how little of that exists today for kids - apps just work so there's no educational struggle to get them going.

> I often think about how my childhood fiddling with this kind of stuff gave me the confidence and background to become a "computer person"

So much of this.

Actually taught one an approach to problem solving in that domain, in a a way that few other things can ...

Often wonder if there's an equivalent activity nowadays that would amount to this for newer generations.

I just loved launch bays, hanger decks, briefing rooms, flying CAP, and defending the fleet. It started with Elite, went into overdrive when I watched the original series of Battlestar Galactica, then Playing Wing commander 3. Something really cool about going down the launch bay, straight into an ambush, and limping your fighter back in one piece. Loved it.

Just a personal story - I had an regret filled experience with this game that was my own fault. Just bought my first computer and first real computer game WC III. Exceeded all the recommended specs on the box but it ran at a very low framerate all jerky and unplayable. So slow you couldn't avoid getting killed without turning the cheats on. Hated it. Even worse, I had no idea who Mark Hamill was! It was totally wasted on me. I ended up selling it to a friend but later discovered why it was slow. The stupid turbo button on the computer acted backwards! Either push it in or turn the LED on to make it run in slow mode. For several months I'd been carefully and mistakenly keeping turbo turned off thinking that made it go faster and had never used such a fast computer so I thought that was just normal.

> John Rhys-Davies, who had played Indiana Jones’s sidekick Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films) ...

Blown away as I was by this ("What? Sallah and Gimli ... wow") ...

... it is even nicer/weirder to find him here.-

(He shows up in the most onexpected places ...)

  He was also, allegedly "taller than any of his fellow [LoTR] castmates"

(Then again, that whole franchise plays very well with heights and perspective, effects, etc ...)

See:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7kd163/til_t...

> Tom Wilson, who had played the cretinous bully Biff Tannen in the three Back to the Future movies. (He replaced Hamill in the role of Maniac — a role not that far removed from his most famous one, come to think of it.) ...

And ... this.-

Speechless :)

Tom Wilson later gained some internet fame for this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y

> >he would go on to enjoy something of a late-career renaissance when he was cast as Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings films

Don't forget his role in 'Sliders.'

Oh, of course ...

  Great flick, by the way.-
  (At least I liked it ...)

A legendary gaming experience. Not just the cinematics, but the story and gameplay were as good as it got in that era.

It doesn't get too much attention in this story, but it sounds like this was a rare occurrence where EA actually improved a beloved gaming franchise! As opposed to burying it in a shallow grave and urinating on its still-warm corpse, as is their tactic with most franchise acquisitions in recent years.

One of my all time favorite games, because as a ~10 year old I can think of nothing cooler than playing Luke Skywalker in a sci-fi top-gun movie about saving earth from murderous Cat Aliens. :)

Privateer 2 was a more ambitious and interesting take on the same theme, I loved that one too.

It crashed on a specific cut scene point for me every time. Didn't buy another game until Rimworld. Still so angry.

I'm a big fan of the genre, played at least one of the Wing Commander games a while after it came out, and I think Tie Fighter also. I never understood the appeal compared to say, Star Raiders or the Star Wars vector arcade game.

Maybe I was just getting too old for video games, but I played Oolite (never played Elite when it was current) for a little while when I was between jobs at 40 and loved it.

Yeah, I must be too old too. When "cut scenes" started becoming the norm I felt like video games had lost their way....

Additionally, the big studios with their cut scenes set a kind of bar that the indie game dev couldn't match. It eventually sorted itself out but at the time it looked like the big players were moving in and the indies should probably head off and get "real" jobs.

And then Half Life came along and showed you could have a game without any cutscenes whatsoever, with story and expositional moments parts of the game you could still interact within the map. Listening to the security guards in the main hall, finding that button under the desk... and pushing it.

The author points here (and I think in older posts) to the change of setting for the reason that Strike Commander failed.

That's definitely part of it, but the game was essentially unplayable without QEMM386 (a commercial expanded-memory manager of the time). With the MS EMM386, you would regularly get crashes to the dos prompt (I think the typical error included a .OVL file in the output).

Prior to the knowledge of QEMM being needed to play it, it just had the reputation of "buggy as hell" which had to be contributory to its poor sales (I think a WC branded game that was equally buggy would have probably sold much better, but the bugs were the nail-in-the-coffin)

I loved the setting of Strike Commander! It had a far more complex game mechanic, especially for an 8 year-old: you had to budget to buy your missiles as a mercenary, outfit your craft and then go out on complex missions with waypoints and bombings.

Wing Commander was simpler: shoot to kill.

It's amusing in a dark and cynical way that this was the second time they'd managed to screw up in regards to EMS/XMS.

JEMM, integrated into Ultima 7, made that particular title hellish to get working. You needed to find a mouse driver that was small enough to fit in conventional memory because JEMM wouldn't work with EMM386.SYS or QEMM386.SYS loaded and would not let you play if either were loaded or you didn't have enough conventional memory.

Their best efforts to make the game friendly to people who didn't have the technical knowledge to deal with EMS/XMS actually made it significantly harder for non-technical users AND technical users alike!

JEMM was used by Origin in pretty much all the games of that era, including Strike Commander, Privateer and WC Armada.

However, as it goes with anything game related, there wasn't a single version of JEMM (just like there wasn't a single version of e.g. Sierra's SCI runtime), so they all had different features and quirks. I believe they mostly shared the same VCPI interface though, as MyJEMM[1] was reported to work with most of those games despite being developed specifically for Privateer.

1: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/MyJEMM

Wing Commander Armada was such good times. Buddy and I got half the keyboard and it was intense.

Loved that game. Sad to only see one mention of it here, but at least I know it wasn’t a fever dream I had.

I got a game-port Y adapter so we could play with 2 joysticks. It was a blast.

Loved this game, and it’s a permanent fixture in DOSBox on every machine I own. I was lucky that my dad had a machine that could run it properly, and an expensive analogue joystick to boot. I really don’t have any negative memories of either the story or the gameplay, so the review makes me a little sad. I still have nightmares about chasing cloaked torpedoes down before they can hit my base.

This game, its sequel, and Privateer helped me thru a very tough time in my life.

On GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger

I used to play so much Privateer when I was a kid! So much fun!

What a game. I'll always remember grappling with the moral ambiguity of buying and selling human slaves in a game for profit.

Haha, I mostly stuck to Tungsten Ore... until I could buy a Centurion with 4X Tachyon Cannons. Then the world was MINE.

If you feel like playing someone did an update: http://privateer.sourceforge.net/files.shtml

Wing Commander III is the only computer game my 67 year-old father has ever purchased and played in his adult life.

It is on Gog for $6, a real good deal. https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger

>Having been recently acquired by Electronic Arts,

>The goal was, if someone said, “What’s an interactive movie?” we’d just hand them the CDs from Wing Commander III and say, “Here, check this out.”

>This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course...but the lack of any real gameplay evolution within that look and feel perhaps is.

So...even back then, EA was in the habit of buying successful game properties and ruining the core gameplay by turning them into essentially interactive movies full of cut scenes.

Sometimes I wonder what video games would be like today if EA and a few other choice companies...cough...activision...Ubisoft...cough just didn't exist at all....

Ubisoft - amazed at how many Assassins' Creed/Far Cry/The Division games they can churn out on a yearly basis unlike Rockstar who takes time to craft their open sandbox games.

Nah, it's clear that Chris Roberts was very interested in going that direction. EA might have enabled that interest, but it's not like some of Origin's independent contemporaries weren't similarly dashing themselves on the rocks of FMV (Sierra, for one).

If EA didn't exist, it's very likely that Origin would have either been bought out by some other company or collapsed. They were in dire straits at the time of acquisition.

I know, my comment was mostly...i dunno facetious...sarcastic??

I did read the article...it wasn't EA's influence that led to the game's direction it that case...i just thought it was funny that EA got involved in the series at the point where they started going for visuals over gameplay. Seemed fitting for what EA would eventually do.

>If EA didn't exist, it's very likely that Origin would have either been bought out by some other company or collapsed

I know...my wonderings were more...

'What would video games look like today if corporate profit as a primary motive hadn't won out and major game studios still made games with that nostalgic 80's-90's gameplay first ethos i'm likely looking back at with rose tinted glasses...'

Still...sometimes i wish games had gone more the way me and my cousins and friends had always hoped they would back in the days 3d games started emerging rather than the profit driven, microtransaction oriented, interactive movies video games actually became...largely driven by the companies mentioned in my earlier comment.

At some point I need to give Tie Fighter another try. The more I played of X-wing the less I liked it, and so when my friends were raving about Tie Fighter I was less than enthused.

Games were good back then because only serious people were creating against a small market.

Nowadays, you create shit games and throw money on advertising, you get millions back...

I have all of the CD-ROMs for this in my basement. I never played it because my PC at the time couldn't handle it and it took a good 10-15 minutes to get into space.

I played this on the PlayStation 1. It was the biggest pain since you had to swap discs constantly but it paid off as it felt like playing a movie. It also didn't click in my head that Mark Hamil was the lead until some time later.

I love the author's write ups but honestly I need to set aside time to read them thoroughly since they're so dense. Thanks so much for these!

This was also the perfect way to learn your dad knew who Ginger Lynn is but also to for him to learn how his then ~15 year old also knew.

One evening we are watching some reality show where they show up at your house and fix things, and this one episode they introduce the owner. Owner, nothing, that’s Ginger Lynn. They never did name her. The whole episode she was just “the owner”. I had nobody to share this realization with, as you can imagine.

So she is still out there somewhere, living her best life from the sounds of it.

Good for her - honestly the way we treat porn stars (all sex workers really) as a society is so awful. I would bet most, including the pious and self-righteous, what have you, are at once consumers but then have no qualms shaming them.

I try to treat every employee I meet as a human who is just trying to do their best. Some people sound genuinely surprised when I respond "you too" to their "have a nice day" which sometimes makes me happy, other times makes me sad.

I won't draw cause and effect here, but I didn't really Become the Change in this regard until after I encountered Violet Blue's writing, who for a time was practically a spokesperson in the area you're talking about.

I remember this! My computer wouldn't run it. A letter to Origin about it and a few weeks resulted in a choice between several options for replacement. I think I went for the WCI/II + special ops and secret missions bundle CD.

Wing Commander IV was just much more polished to me and just mind blowing all around.

Some people are working on remake it looks like: https://wcrespace.com .

I loved that game, but I'm still not over Hobbes' plot point.

The Wing Commander/Privateer series are one of my fondest childhood memories. I really wish I could have something like it again.

Same goes for EverQuest. So much fun.

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