15 Years of Wing Commander - What Was Your First Time Like?

it was the summer of 1991.. i was about 7 years old. i was visiting my cousins in the city (i grew up on a farm). I saw the blueprints for the WC fighters and i said "what is this?" and he said "its to this game i got.. its fun." i played the opening mission, got slaughtered endlessly, and was hooked since.
 
I'm happy to report that after 4 years of not being able to play WC I finally have access to a PC and have already started playing KS again...I plan on shortly d/ling standoff and finally joining actively in the debate about it...the year was 2006..."and so it begins"
 
I was speaking of the debate of which ships are hard to fly, which are fun, etc...not the ongoing Saga saga....
 
My first experience with Wing Commander was in 1991 watching my friend playing Wing Commander on his 286 with EMS and an adlib sound card. He was flying a raptor shooting up a fralthi. The graphics were okay (x-wing was just about to come out) but what really captivated me was the interactive music...!

I got my own copy soon after, but my computer didn't have EMS or a soundcard. So I finished WC1 without seeing the pilot's hand and hearing the music... did the same for WC2 too... and learned to enjoy the flying as such.

I spent my time going through Academy and Privateer and Righteous Fire too, but they were just side dishes for me. I actually found the "free" elements of Privateer boring, having spoilt myself on the freeform play that you could do in RPGs like Ultima 6.

Then the big upgrade from 286/25 to a 486/33, in the days of DOOM and null modem cables. It was a while before I actually bought a second-hand adlib card, and then I played the old games again in a completely new light.

I started playing Armada, wanting to deathmatch my friends, and was bitterly disappointed at the lack of framerate. Roll on 1994 I splashed out on a Pentium 66, 16MB ram, Gravis UltraSound MAX and a ET4000 PCI video card. Then I realised that Armada was locked at 10fps :( Anyway it ran WC3 perfectly while my friends struggled...

At 1996 I grabbed Windows 95 and the Kilrathi Saga at the same time. I also played WC4 and Privateer 2 on a Pentium 133.

I didn't play Prophecy and SO until two years ago when I bought it second hand. Just couldn't play it without using HCl's high res patches :D

Right now I'm just amazed at the production quality on fan mods like Standoff. Having immersed myself in a 3d animation course for one year I know it's not the easiest thing to do - from artistic direction to mundane project management...
 
whoa... 15 yrs... i first played wc 1 on my cousin's computer..and then my brother brought back wc2 on my home pc... i missed out on wc3, got a copy of KS but couldnt get it to work on XP..sucks..
Been away from the forum for a couple of years while i was in the army.. glad to see the WC spirit is still pretty much alive after so long! Great work guys!
 
I was a very late comer to the Wing Commander universe, and was deprived of playing the games chronogically.

First game was Wing Commander: Prophecy when we got our new Pentium 2-300.
Excellent stuff, although I didn't really like fighting the Nephilium, too boring, I wanted to fight Kilrathi, although the Nephilium did scare the absolute crap through me in the cutscenes, as I was rather young at the time :D. I played Secret Ops a little while after as well.

I finally got the chance to play Wing Commander 3 three years ago, and absolutely loved it, so much better than Prophecy, I love being able to choose what you said in the cutscenes (Yep, I ended up with Flint :D). And getting to fight in the Kilrathi war was the don.

Wing Commander 2 was next, still haven't finished it, I started playing it, but I had to wipe the drive, so I lost my saves. I can't find the CD I burnt the game on, but I'll do some searching today or tomorrow and find it.

Then, only about a month ago, I got to play Wing Commander 1, I played it through in one day, was so much fun, I think I'll go play it after this post is finished. :D.

I still haven't played 4...I want to get it, but I don't think I'll be able to, won't stop me trying though.

Well, off to play WC1...Cheerio
 
i was over a friend of mines and he was playing part 2
i would play dungeons and dragons with his brother while his ship was spittin toasters on the monitor, i thought man that game rocks
after i stopped going over there a few years later a friend of mine had gotten wc3 for the 3do i couldnt stop playing it remembering that i had seen the originals a few years earlier i had to get a comp so basically the reason for getting a comp was to play all the wing commanders soon they cam out with wc4 which after 3 i feel they drifted off fronm good ideas
on a final note mac ahad a space game i cant remember for the life of me what the name of it was it invloved flying thru differnet space systems doing missions and collecting resources its kinda old sorry kinda vague description but wing commander will always be my favorite game!!!!!!!!!!
 
the joke was: I first played WC3 then WC4 around 1995 at the age of 7, so I didn't really understand the game. But with ALT+O nothing could bother me, right?:)
So as I got WC1 I already knew what will happen (e.g. the destruction of the tiger's claw etc.pp) and the last WC game I played was WC2...that's reeeeeaaallly genius isn't it? :)
 
Hi all, new here!

I think my first time playing Wing Commander was way back in 1991 (possibly 92') when I got it for my Amiga 1200 ( I still have it somewhere), I used to love it and played it until I could get all the medals possible completing the game in the shortest number of missions, 17 missions I think it was. I was proper happy when I got the planet medal on the last mission by killing everything, I forget what that medal was called.

About a year later I got an Amiga CD32 (don't laugh) with the 256 colour version bundled in which looked surprisingly quite a bit better than the other version.

Then I saw the box for Wing Commander 2 for the PC and really wanted to play it, but it was never released for the Amiga, at least not that I know of. I didn't get to play that until early 96' when we got our first PC which came with Wing Commander 3, that was amazing at the time.
 
I first played WC1 when my dad got a copy from a friend of his back in 1991(I think) I was about 5-6 years old and all I could realy do was eject over and over ~~~. The only way I got through the game back then was by sitting on my dads knee while he played it. Its the first real memory I have of my dad and I having fun together back then and I think thats what keeped me playing it back then when I was hopeless at it ~~~. But as I got older I got a hell of alot better and realy got into it. After that I was hooked and I got every WC game after that and the novels aswell.
 
has it already been 15 years?

I'm not quite sure when I got into Wing Commander... I got my first computer for christmas '89, a 286 with 16 Mhz. I think at some point someone loaded WC2 onto it when it was brand new. Being from Germany and not having learned any english at that point I couldn't make much of it. Somehow I did buy WC quite soon afterwards, must have been end of 1992 or january 1993. Although I still didnt understand a word in it I liked it lots. When I finally started learning english it helped me lots (like a bunch of other games that weren't translated for the german market).

I've always been a bit backward about PC games which means I mostly discovered games when they were already considered outdated... including WC3 which I bought as Origin Original (an origin budget line in germany), WC4 in a cheap bundle with privateer 2 and some other game and WC5 which I again bought cheaply.

Altogether I still think Wing Commander has one of the greatest stories ever. It stuck me to the computer for countless hours and I dont regret the time I spent with it. After all these years of computer gaming the epic story of wing commander still sticks out as the most interesting one, especially WC1, WC2 and WC4. Technically I liked WC Prophecy most though. I might add that I've been heavily into the star wars games series, X-Wing and Tie-Fighter which I also liked a lots but the Wing Commander story always was bigger! If I could chose a universe to live in, Enigma sector I'm coming ;-)
 
Let's summarise: The good ol' 90's were a damn good time with all the good games. I mean, today, there aren't any really good games sry.
back in the 90's we got C&C, NFS,Star-Wars-Games,The SIm...game series,etc.
oh and of course we had WING COMMANDER :)
 
Black-Wulf said:
Let's summarise: The good ol' 90's were a damn good time with all the good games. I mean, today, there aren't any really good games sry.
back in the 90's we got C&C, NFS,Star-Wars-Games,The SIm...game series,etc.
oh and of course we had WING COMMANDER :)
Click to expand...

There's lots and lots of great games coming out today. I wouldn't even count Need For Speed or hardly any Star Wars game in the classic 90s lots. There were dozens of superior titles and franchises, then and now.
 
ChrisReid said:
There's lots and lots of great games coming out today. I wouldn't even count Need For Speed or hardly any Star Wars game in the classic 90s lots. There were dozens of superior titles and franchises, then and now.
Click to expand...

Grand Theft Auto is one of them (Though in 10 years from now the game will be a fitting example to the new generation of gamers of just how those guys at Rockstar games were pathetic of glorifying violence in a way). NFS, FIFA, cannot think of anyelse. Stars Wars - certainly not.

Right now we are entering an era of the MMORPG...which is certainly hittings it peak - i.e. Oblivion, Eve, etc.

And the FPS is another genre that is "going beyond the milestone". Just wait for Killzone 2 :)
 
Since when is Oblivion MMORPG? Also, I'm not sure what you mean about FPS going beyond the milestone, can you clarify that?
 
Alright i was probably exaggerating there. Just check out Killzone 2 for the playstation 3.

and isn't Oblivion an online multiplayer game?
 
No, Oblivion is a single-player-only RPG. It's incredibly popular and actually a counter-example to your point: multiplayer games aren't the only ones that enjoy great success today.
 
DanG! since when did i think oblivion was such thing.

And i wasn't actually saying that MMORPG are the only ones enjoying great success. I did point a few other games. but thats all
 
My first Wing Commander was Wing Commander III, in 1994. I had always been a fan of space flight sims, but X-Wing and TIE Fighter primarily held my fancy, so I didn't really get drawn to Wing Commander until I watched one of those entertainment hollywood shows on tv, and saw that Mark Hamill himself was going to play Christopher Blair. That's it, I thought, if Luke Skywalker himself was going to be in this game series, I wanted to play it.

Only one problem, my PC did not have enough RAM. So I went to Costco, I think, bought some cheap RAM (or maybe I bought the actual WC4 game in Costco only, but I do remember buying ram there too ;p ), installed it myself for the first time, and I was hooked. The flight mechanics we're different from the X-wing series, so it took me some time to get used to, but after a while, I loved it. I also enjoyed WC4 and Prophecy immensely, and was saddened to see that no more WC were being made.

Overall, however, the blend of cinematics, voice acting in combat, and the actual combat itself, made for the best gaming experience I've had in a while. I still keep my WC discs in great condition, and it's definetely up there with my favorite gaming series of all time. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top