Brazilian Gaming Site Posts Arena Video (May 12, 2016)

[ChrisReid]

The Video Game Database website posted an interesting video of Wing Commander Arena in action. Since the game was released in 2007, it came a bit before recording and streaming things like this became common. They start the game, briefly peek at the modes, pick a ship and launch into space combat. It's not a particularly comprehensive overview, and the clip is actually about a year old, but new Arena movies are so uncommon that this is still a noteworthy sight. Were it to be a bit more inclusive, it'd have been nice to see more of the playable fighters and some of the variants like Meteor Storm, Satellite Defense, Bearpit or the Capital Ship assault. There's a lot of cool stuff packed into this tiny game! Learn more about it here.



LOAF recently took this photo of Arena's ship selector with flavor text. It talks about the Broadsword being used during the Pilgrim War: a nifty Movie reference - inside a WC game!




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Original update published on May 12, 2016

 

[Farbourne]

Cool. It's fun to see what Arena actually looks like. I never played it because I've never owned an X-Box and it was never released for PC or PS, but it actually looks like a fun little game (although not space-simish at all...)

 

[ChrisReid]

Cool. It's fun to see what Arena actually looks like. I never played it because I've never owned an X-Box and it was never released for PC or PS, but it actually looks like a fun little game (although not space-simish at all...)

Yeah, I think a lot of people are in the same boat as you, which is why I wanted to share the clip. It's certainly much more of an action shooter than the main WC games, but there's also a lot more complexity to Arena than your typical top-down scroller shooter. Your playable fighters have a fairly diverse loadout, so there can certainly be a lot of strategy that goes into building a squadron with your friends. Once in space, rather than just having a simple health bar, you have to manage power, shields, afterburners and special systems (like cloaking, anti-cloaking, etc) on the fly. In the vein of being "easy to pick up, difficult to master," there are also 3D acrobatic maneuvers you can pull off and little tricks for doing things like pulsing afterburners for greater speed/fuel economy that can be fun to get the hang of. There's even a "first person" mode that flies somewhat like a conventional WC game (although from just behind the ship rather than in the cockpit).

Although it's pretty unlikely, it would just be fantastic if they got backwards compatibility going for the game on the XBox One. It would really breathe new life into the game and probably garner a new little following. Plus, it would confer some new features from the newer system: 16-person parties, built-in screenshots & video clip reporting, Twitch streaming, multitasking, controller customization, etc.