Finally! After all those Budokan screenshots and some really, really long videos of someone playing Road Rash and Syndicate, we get a batch of Wing Commander images. The PSP Gamezone has eight in-flight screenshots that feature a Krant, a Scimitar, a Salthi and a distant Dralthi. We also get a first look at the target and comms VDU. These and all other screenshots have been archived in our EA Replay section. Hopefully we'll get some shots of the other ships and aboard the Tiger's Claw as we approach the European release date. In the meantime, we will try to make our own.
Retro gaming compilations don't always get properly reviewed, but the first few have started to trickle out. Game Informer is up first with a very brief synopsis. Assigning a single rating a pack with more than a dozen games seems pretty difficult, so we wouldn't read much into their 6.75 score. Games Radar has a more complete review. Greg Sewart, who's been scoring Wing Commander games since the late nineties, was a bit a more critical this time. He starts with a caution: "All of the games on EA Replay suffer from a sort of "smearing," where fast-moving characters or vehicles streak a bit. It's a symptom of the PSP's screen. It doesn't hinder every game to the same degree, though." It's potentially a valid warning any time you're looking at an LCD screen, but none of the CIC staff has noticed this at all in Wing Commander (or really any other PSP game to a noticeable degree). Technical issues are the main problems he says affect the Wing Commander ports, and some people might just be more sensitive to this. He also would have preferred the PC version, but using the SNES port and its controller-friendly interface seem to be a more logical choice. The final score is a 7/10. Last but not least, we missed a relatively complete preview of EA Replay that FutureGameZ posted a short while back.
So in the end, you get six great games, and six mediocre ones. Not bad for 2,000 pennies, really. EA's history houses some great, forgotten franchises, and it's nice to see the publishing behemoth remembering its roots. EA Replay is a cool little history lesson for younger gamers, and a great trip down memory lane for the oldsters among us, despite its problems.
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