bosd

Veteran Spaceman
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Firstly, this game is cinematic as hell, and while the story is meh overall (it's just go kill bad guys so we win) but the presentation is great!
It's also very, very hard. ANd the wingmates don't help either (F**k Maniac), but that's not a bad thing. The game is challenging in a way that's enjoyable and every death felt like I had made progress and gained insight on how to win instead of just hitting my head on a wall repeatedly.

I really liked the aces system and how if you failed to defeat an ace they can reappear in a future level. In my case it was Bhurak Starkiller and i really enjoyed beating the living hell out of that bastard with missiles.

It's also cool how all of the ships have their own different way of playing and different strategies, except the Scimitar which I hate.

I also used the WingLoader mod to add voice acting from the Sega CD version. The acting is decent but considering there isn't excactly any good dialogue in the first place the actors did a good job with what they had.

Overall I really enjoyed this gem of a game and I'm really looking forward to Wing Commander: The Secret Missions!

P.S. I was bored and made a custom secret missions logo with the base game logo as well in my free time so might as well share it:
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Firstly, this game is cinematic as hell, and while the story is meh overall (it's just go kill bad guys so we win) but the presentation is great!

I always liked how Wing Commander I was this weird cinematic roguelite choose your own adventure type thing where everything, including which characters lived and died, was based entirely on your performance in the actual missions. It makes it something fairly unique even today.

As for the story itself being super threadbare Origin acutally made fun of it themselves. In System Shock you could get what was essentially a space gameboy with acutal games on it, and one of them was basically a Wing Commander clone where the final mission briefing boiled down to 'you know what? Just go take out the entire enemy fleet all by yourself.'
 
I always liked how Wing Commander I was this weird cinematic roguelite choose your own adventure type thing where everything, including which characters lived and died, was based entirely on your performance in the actual missions. It makes it something fairly unique even today.

As for the story itself being super threadbare Origin acutally made fun of it themselves. In System Shock you could get what was essentially a space gameboy with acutal games on it, and one of them was basically a Wing Commander clone where the final mission briefing boiled down to 'you know what? Just go take out the entire enemy fleet all by yourself.'
Dang I really need to play System Shock.

Also, I had no idea Wing Commander, System Shock and Crusader were in the same universe!
 
It is a great thought, for some time I was trying to collect the tidbits in the briefings and in the games in order to do a sort-of-lore.

Also Ben is working on that for some time I think, right @Bandit LOAF ?
 
Awesome, I'm glad you liked it! The later games will have much more character-driven stories... but you'll see you also lose something in gaining that, they end up with less of the freedom that's pretty neat in WC1 (any wingman can die at any time, more losing missions than winning ones, etc.)

Also, I had no idea Wing Commander, System Shock and Crusader were in the same universe!

Origin liked to reference their other games! Ultima and Wing Commander share the biggest footprint. They don't always quite go together: in Wing Commander we're told that the WEC was the world government in Earth's past... but also that System Shock is a fictional movie. While Crusader has an article about building the actual SHODAN!

(Of course the craziest is Wing Commander Academy having a soft crossover with Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter...)
Also Ben is working on that for some time I think, right @Bandit LOAF ?

When I timeline a crossover like that I don't involve anything that isn't in the reference... it would be neat to see someone take the actual history of Crusader and System Shock and so on and add that to a Wing Commander timeline!
 
Yes, there was a cartoon series called the Warrior King where the hero has to travel to various dimensions, including the Wing Commander, Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat worlds. The first thirty minutes of this video has the whole story. It is from a series of live streams Ben and Jason did some years ago.
 
Huh, cool.
So that means Wing Commander, Crusader, System Shock (and Ultima?) are one universe, part of a larger multiverse including Street Fighter and all 3 Mortal Kombat universes right?
 
I did some research and appearently the Warrior King guy also appears in a TV show called Savage Dragon which is set in the Image Universe.

Do you know what else is in the Image Universe?

Invincible.

Holy hell, this is definitely not actually canon but it's still an interesting thought...
 
Dang I really need to play System Shock.

Also, I had no idea Wing Commander, System Shock and Crusader were in the same universe!
They really aren't.... or I should say it's more complicated than that. The main thing is that they are all Origin titles and they would throw in references to each other here and there during development as an Easter egg more than to say that the universes were the same. There's a government entity in Crusader that shares a name with one in Wing Commander, but that's about all the actual crossover at least until the much later Wing Commander Arena. Arena also doesn't have much lore (though there's a bit thrown in to the descriptions etc) but the acompanying manual was an excuse to flesh out a few blank spots in the WC canon. Crusader gets a bif of a joke nod in the manual in the form of a fake movie poster ad that borrows the title of the third cancelled game in the series. So in a way we kind of made some of the water-color type details of the Crusader series canon I guess. But they were never developed with the intention of being in the same universe.


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So that means Wing Commander, Crusader, System Shock (and Ultima?) are one universe, part of a larger multiverse including Street Fighter and all 3 Mortal Kombat universes right?
I think there are just references or Easter eggs, the concept of the multiverse did not exist back then for video games.
 
Yeah it's super fun to think about.

Ultima is probably the closest! You can find a Kilrathi ship in Ultima VII, the Avatar flies by the Tiger's Claw in Super Wing Commander... Britannia (and some of the other Ultima places like Pagan) are systems on the WC universe map... and there's a bunch more.