You Got Wing Commander in my System Shock!

The original disk version of System Shock included a number of mini-games you could collect during the game's cyberspace mode and then play whenever you had a quiet moment. These were small, simple games that loaded in the player's left VDU - versions of things like Pong and Tic-Tac-Toe. For the subsequent CD version of System Shock the designers went all out and included a major homage to Wing Commander: Wing 0, a tiny Wing Commander shooter.

Wing 0 features a 13-mission campaign complete with traditional Wing Commander plot elements: wingmen, speech, traitors, nav points, talking heads, familiar fighters, autopilot flybys, lasers, dogfights and so on... all done in a 148x139 corner screen!

Thanks to a saved game kindly provided by Shadowcat of the Through The Looking Glass forums, I was able to jump right into Wing 0 to break it down into its component parts. The result is a brand new article, available here, that treats it like we would any new game -- it provides mission layouts, endgames, wingman comms, controls and ships!

I've also put the saved game I used to access Wing 0 directly online here (500k) -- if you have the PC-CD version of System Shock, give it a try (and if you don't have the game, go buy it!).

Wing 0 was developed for System Shock CD by Sean Barrett. His biography says the following about the game:

"...for the CD game I outdid myself with a relatively complete Wing Commander minigame, Wing 0--written just before Wing 3 was released, it's both an homage and a parody, featuring, for example, one pacifistic wingman who refuses to fight (and strangely never gets attacked either, because he's actually a traitor!!!), a mission where you get something like 8 wingmen, and a final 'aww, what the heck, let's send you out by yourself to defeat their entire armada' mission."