Getting Emotional About Wing 3

The retro blog Emotional Multimedia Ride has followed up on their WC1 and WC2 piece with a long look at Wing Commander 3 for PC. Like the one before it, this article touches all the bases with an overview of the main cast, the quality of the graphics and video, reflections on the gameplay mechanics and the way the player's actions (directly through conversation choices or indirectly through mission performance) impacts the storyline.

Technically, the game is a two-sided sword. On the one hand, the orchestral soundtrack is amazing and adds much to the cinematic flair, although the repetitive one-liners of the pilots’ communication channel can get annoying quite fast. The ship designs are detailed even up close with explosions looking particularly cool, while the game runs much smoother on modern systems thanks to DOSBox, compared to the slideshow or blink-of-an-eye-and-your-dead experience of the first two games. On the other hand, the low resolution of the full motion videos makes them a pain for the eyes to watch at times.