Vintage Television Show Reviews WC2 (October 3, 2022)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Today we've got a tiny 1992 video review from the British television show GamesMaster. Non-print reviews are quite rare from this era since we were still a couple years before magazines starting including multimedia cover discs. Wing Commander 2 is one of my favorite games, so I was anxious to see what they had to say. And boy, they did not like it! Both reviewers say the game just has graphics going for it and award it a failing 59% score. I'm honestly pretty shocked at that assessment. The graphics were only minimally refined over WC1, but there were some wonderful advances in terms of storytelling, sound/speech and gameplay mechanics (torpedo bombing, turrets, tractor beams, jump points, etc). Ah well, check out this thirty year old clip below! Thanks to Oli for archiving this.


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Original update published on October 3, 2022
 
Garbage opinions for sure, but not uncommon for the British gaming media at the time. They were not particularly supportive of Wing Commander!
 
That's true. I remember buying a British magazine with the review of Wing Commanfer IV. They gave it 66% or something. Totally ridiculous. Those blokes must have been drunk
 
I've always wondered if there was some baked in bad blood over Garriott/Origin poaching up-and-coming star Chris Roberts from the (then pretty tightly knit) UK development scene. I find British people don't generally have such wildly different tastes, except in what they consider to be pizza!
 
"except in what they consider to be pizza!"

Well, for food in general I wouldn't trust the Brits.

Also, they insist on putting an extra syllable in "aluminum" which takes some getting used to...
 
WC2 definitely raised the bar, not just in the Wing Commander world, but in video games in general, when it came to storytelling. The characters were a little bit tropish at times, but that was true of many video games of the era.

Some of the new gameplay elements really didn't work as well as they probably were envisioned to (player-controllable turrets, or ECM pods, for example), so I could see some criticism there, but overall I don't get people not liking WC2.
 
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