Advertising Gets Real

Rounding out his recent trilogy of classic Wing Commander advertisements (here, here and here), Alkarion has provided us with three scans relating to other amazing Origin games. In this case, it's Origin's three RealSpace engine flight games. The RealSpace 3D engine was also used on three Wing Commander games: Armada, Heart of the Tiger and The Price of Freedom.

First is Strike Commander, Chris Roberts' 'other' big interactive movie. Strike Commander a cross between Falcon and Privateer, with a Wing Commander style movie storyline thrown in for good measure. The player commanded a squadron of mercenary pilots flying F-16s... and was not only responible for shooting down a host of modern aircraft, but also for buying new weapons and picking from various paying missions. Strike Commander was also famous for its constant delays - it was released well over a year after its original announced date. Unfortunately, that delay meant that a followup game, Phoenix Force, was cancelled after being plotted.

Next is Pacific Strike, an earlier RealSpace game that met with a sadder fate. Pacific Strike was Origin's last disk-only game, and the version that shipped was unfortunately buggy. Low sales meant that two Pacific Strike followups, a '1946' mission disk and a full speech CD-ROM release, were cancelled during development. In the case of the full speech version, that was after all the dialogue had been recorded! Pacific Strike is actually a pretty cool game - one of its most exciting features is an entirely dynamic campaign... your performance not only defines how the war will end, but what kind of enemies you'll face in each mission (ie, kill enough carriers at Midway and fewer Japanese pilots will appear later on). The elaborate scripting was amazing!

Wings of Glory was the penultimate use of the RealSpace 3D engine, and certainly the most striking. The slower and more colorful world of World War I combat put Strike Commander and Pacific Strike to shame. The game also featured Privateer-style 'talking heads' and a classic Origin cinematic storyline (read: there is a traitor). If you haven't played WoG, give it a shot - it's on my personal top ten games list.