Get Super Wing Commander Smarter With These Cutscenes (December 12, 2021)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
LOAF has been mining Super Wing Commander this month and has extracted lots of great cutscenes. Lots of fans are familiar with the classic Wing Commander remake, but there's a good chance they haven't seen these videos unless they've got a 3DO or vintage Mac. Check out a whole playlist for more and some highlights below!

I've put together some Super Wing Commander videos! Don't you just love that we-just-discovered-3ds-Max aesthetic? Here's a playlist with all the midgames plus all the takeoffs and landings!

For example, here are the winning and losing versions of a "mid game" cutscene. The Confed ships are an Exeter and Venture as they begin an orbital bombardment. The difference is whether we were able to hold up a Kilrathi missile shipment!




You've got to love these takeoff and landing clips!




Last, but not least, damage states!


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Original update published on December 12, 2021
 
I remember trying to manage assets for a project in the days of DOS filenames - 8 character name + 3 character extension. I'd never experienced anything different, so didn't think much of it at the time. But today, thought of doing so for something the size of SWC makes my skin crawl. I'm also wondering if it was technically necessary - what filesystem did the 3DO use? Even the very first Macs supported at least 31 characters (or 63 or 255, depending on how you count them.) But many of the assets would have been created on DOS PCs (maybe running Windows 3.1, but those were still subject to DOS limits), so I'm not surprised that all of the filenames here conform to that pattern.

It might be instructive to divide the size of each file by its duration in seconds, to get the bytes per second. (More accurate, but much more work, would be to find or write a program that can measure the bytes required for each frame.) In particular, I'm wondering if the unused midgame video MESA.MOV was too much for the slow CD-ROM speeds of the era, and that's why it was left out.

The ending seems to have a weird bridge of art styles, but it's also somehow appropriate. First the starbase sparks with bursts of the style used in WC3. But when it finally detonates, isn't that the capital ship explosion from WC2? (Star Wars sourcing discussed here, and frame sequence here) The same explosion also destroys the carrier in the introduction.
 
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