In a fit of nostalgia I decided to re-install Wing Commanders 1, 2 , 3, 4, and 5.
I played 3 and 4 when they came out in the mid 90s and they left a lasting impression on me. I was so completely sucked into their world. The game had this gravitas which turned what should have been something hokey and ridiculous ( men and women in spaceships shooting lasers at giant furries) into an epic tale of survival on the fringes of space.
Wing Commander was one among a few games that actually forces you to go out and buy a joystick. Keyboard support was technically there, but good luck trying to win a dogfight using the arrow keys. In fact, even if you had "the right tools" a single stray missile would be enough to turn your ship into space dust. Likewise, if you weren't paying constant attention to the radio transmissions from your commander ( which played out in distracting FMV boxes on your HUD and were largely drowned out by the sound of gunfire) you might not realize that you were intended to rescue those ships, not blow them up. "Oops" was I word I said a lot when playing Wing commander. Actually it was another four letter exclamation. But you get the idea.
Now it's easy to look back with disdain on all the flaws these old games had as we sail through the year 2010, with our high definition textures and autosaves. Back in the day it was just accepted that taking your hands off the keys for a second to scratch your nose was screwing up. Not paying attention to obscure details was screwing up. Sometimes you'd screw up because you made the logical choice instead of the screwed up one. In the 90s there were a whole lot of ways to screw up. And that was ok. You kept trying.
In my eyes nothing demonstrates the shift toward a more "user friendly" form of gaming than the difficulty trend line inherent in the Wing Commander series. Wing Commander I and II were wrist slashingly hard, even for their time. Several missions seemed like they were set up for you to fail. But on your 99th attempt you somehow pulled through. You learned to study your spaceship and feel out its every idiosyncrasy. You knew how many times you could fire your guns before you ran out of juice and exactly how fast you can turn to track an enemy. You and all the other 90s gamers who were used to being subjected to such punishment with their entertainment. To a 90s game it was not enough that gamers merely played it. we had to live it.
Fast forward to Wing III and you could see the punishing realism of the first games was making concessions, if only slight, to playability. For one thing the rendered cockpit you had to put up with in Wing 1 and 2 (it was a lot like having a cardboard box over your head) could be toggled on or off at the player's leisure. Also, the challenging gameplay segments were padded with lengthy chunks of FMV featuring a world weary Luke Skywalker and an assortment of B and C list porn stars. They put on a pretty convincing act and succeeded in bringing the story to life. This was a huge step up from the clunky animated cartoons of the first games and for its time, was nothing short of mind blowing.
The last of the Wings ( excluding addons) was Wing V : Prophecy. It came out in '97 and I missed out on it completely. I can't really remember whether it was under advertised, or whether I had just moved on to other games by that point, but it was off my radar. Because of this I really didn't know what to expect when I booted it up on Windows 7.
To begin with, Tom Wilson is still around, and rotund . (At some point I'll make a line graph plotting Biff's body weight between wing commanders) Mark Hamil reprises his role as Christopher Blaire only he is no longer the player character. You control a young pilot called Casey, played by an unknown who could be mistaken for Jeremy Renner. It's all very nice, but it is immediate from the outset that the FMV stuff has taken a backseat to gameplay. You can only hang out in one of two locations between missions - The bar or the ready room. It cuts down on the pointless elevator travel of Wing 3, but it does make the game feel a bit claustrophobic.
At the default difficulty setting, the game is surprisingly manageable. Enemies come in small groups at first and expose themselves to weapon fire if you can stay on their tail long enough. Having worked my way through to the final CD (some 20 odd missions), I have noted that mission failure occurs when I am either :
A) Blatantly ignoring orders
B) Flying under the influence
C) Doing A&B together.
So, quite a departure from the one hit KO missile-death of the prior wings, or the mindfuck "choice" missions of yore. In fact, the only time I've been presented with a moral dilemma at all was during an uneventful mid-game mission where my wingman tried to egg me into doing something dumb and I ignored him. Upon returning to my carrier, I quickly realized I had passed the "morality mission" with flying colours and that all was well in the world.
Yikes. Kind of a far cry from the "Rescue Flint" dilemma in Wing 3 which took me 18 attempts on the default difficulty setting because I had to single handedly cut through a small army of Kilrathi fighters to get to her. When I had blasted all of them to bits and dragged her back home by the narrowest margin, the game honored my dedication by pretending that another pilot had performed the rescue and scolded me for not being more on the ball. That's Ol' Dirty Wing Commander for ya.
I see Wing V as an example of how the games have moved from being obscure challenges for only the nerdiest and most dedicated, to easily digestible slices of entertainment for the masses. I'm going to leave it at that. I'm not going to pass judgement one way or the other. I'd be a liar if I said I was 100% pleased with the change, just as It'd be blowing hot air and trying to look hardcore if I said that all games should return to the trial-and-error format of the "good ol' days".
For now, I think i'll just finish Wing V. it's fun
