[HN Gopher] Wing Commander III
___________________________________________________________________
Wing Commander III
Author : doppp
Score : 156 points
Date : 2021-03-05 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.filfre.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.filfre.net)
| thom wrote:
| Loved this game, and it's a permanent fixture in DOSBox on every
| machine I own. I was lucky that my dad had a machine that could
| run it properly, and an expensive analogue joystick to boot. I
| really don't have any negative memories of either the story or
| the gameplay, so the review makes me a little sad. I still have
| nightmares about chasing cloaked torpedoes down before they can
| hit my base.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The author points here (and I think in older posts) to the change
| of setting for the reason that Strike Commander failed.
|
| That's definitely part of it, but the game was essentially
| unplayable without QEMM386 (a commercial expanded-memory manager
| of the time). With the MS EMM386, you would regularly get crashes
| to the dos prompt (I think the typical error included a .OVL file
| in the output).
|
| Prior to the knowledge of QEMM being needed to play it, it just
| had the reputation of "buggy as hell" which had to be
| contributory to its poor sales (I think a WC branded game that
| was equally buggy would have probably sold much better, but the
| bugs were the nail-in-the-coffin)
| Firehawke wrote:
| It's amusing in a dark and cynical way that this was the second
| time they'd managed to screw up in regards to EMS/XMS.
|
| JEMM, integrated into Ultima 7, made that particular title
| hellish to get working. You needed to find a mouse driver that
| was small enough to fit in conventional memory because JEMM
| wouldn't work with EMM386.SYS or QEMM386.SYS loaded and would
| not let you play if either were loaded or you didn't have
| enough conventional memory.
|
| Their best efforts to make the game friendly to people who
| didn't have the technical knowledge to deal with EMS/XMS
| actually made it significantly harder for non-technical users
| AND technical users alike!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| JEMM was used by Origin in pretty much all the games of that
| era, including Strike Commander, Privateer and WC Armada.
|
| However, as it goes with anything game related, there wasn't
| a single version of JEMM (just like there wasn't a single
| version of e.g. Sierra's SCI runtime), so they all had
| different features and quirks. I believe they mostly shared
| the same VCPI interface though, as MyJEMM[1] was reported to
| work with most of those games despite being developed
| specifically for Privateer.
|
| 1: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/MyJEMM
| pgt wrote:
| I loved the setting of Strike Commander! It had a far more
| complex game mechanic, especially for an 8 year-old: you had to
| budget to buy your missiles as a mercenary, outfit your craft
| and then go out on complex missions with waypoints and
| bombings.
|
| Wing Commander was simpler: shoot to kill.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| This was also the perfect way to learn your dad knew who Ginger
| Lynn is but also to for him to learn how his then ~15 year old
| also knew.
| hinkley wrote:
| One evening we are watching some reality show where they show
| up at your house and fix things, and this one episode they
| introduce the owner. Owner, nothing, that's Ginger Lynn. They
| never did name her. The whole episode she was just "the owner".
| I had nobody to share this realization with, as you can
| imagine.
|
| So she is still out there somewhere, living her best life from
| the sounds of it.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Good for her - honestly the way we treat porn stars (all sex
| workers really) as a society is so awful. I would bet most,
| including the pious and self-righteous, what have you, are at
| once consumers but then have no qualms shaming them.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| It must be Origin retrogames quarter on HN!
|
| We had an article about what made Ultima IX (or was it VIII?) a
| complete disaster and it was exactly from this same web domain.
|
| I read the entirety of the WCIII article then ,since the ultima
| article linked to it.
|
| I think the article is well sourced, and for sure i learned a
| thing or two, but more importantly, it made me think on how
| valuable sources of information (domains) get lost in the process
| unless the right HN user is posting it.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| You can get lost on filfre.net for days. The PC gaming era was
| never my bag but he's spot on on the old 8-bit stories - his
| articles on Imagine/Psygnosis, and Melbourne House's The
| Hobbit, are superb.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| Fwiw, if you click the domain listed to the right of the title;
| (filfre.net),[1] it will take you to a list of all submissions
| to HN under that domain.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=filfre.net
| FrenchTouch42 wrote:
| Wing Commander IV was just much more polished to me and just mind
| blowing all around.
| ekianjo wrote:
| I think the article kind of fails to capture how amazing the game
| was when it came out. Amazing, as in jaw-dropping. There was
| nothing like that at the time with the same kind of production
| values: it was certainly an expensive game to make, and it showed
| in every aspect of it. It was also the first game to use SVGA
| which was a revolution in itself in VGA land. I still have fond
| memories of WC3, and I don't think it has aged that badly at all,
| compared to many other games that came out around the same time.
| m463 wrote:
| It all kind of runs together, but I distinctly remember walking
| into NCA (I think?) in sunnyvale california in the mid 90's.
| They had shelves full of huge crt monitors, all of them with
| wing commander, with full motion video and sound piped through
| computer speakers.
|
| Of course, that got you thinking about upgrading your system
| and making sure your system could pull it off.
| otachack wrote:
| I played this on the PlayStation 1. It was the biggest pain since
| you had to swap discs constantly but it paid off as it felt like
| playing a movie. It also didn't click in my head that Mark Hamil
| was the lead until some time later.
|
| I love the author's write ups but honestly I need to set aside
| time to read them thoroughly since they're so dense. Thanks so
| much for these!
| standardUser wrote:
| A legendary gaming experience. Not just the cinematics, but the
| story and gameplay were as good as it got in that era.
|
| It doesn't get too much attention in this story, but it sounds
| like this was a rare occurrence where EA actually _improved_ a
| beloved gaming franchise! As opposed to burying it in a shallow
| grave and urinating on its still-warm corpse, as is their tactic
| with most franchise acquisitions in recent years.
| allenu wrote:
| Wing Commander II is quite memorable to me because as a child I
| could never get it to work properly and it introduced me to the
| world of autoexec.bat and HIMEM.SYS. No matter what I did, I
| could never get both the in-game speech and the mouse working at
| the same time, it was either one or the other.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Yes! I often think about how my childhood fiddling with this
| kind of stuff gave me the confidence and background to become a
| "computer person" and how little of that exists today for kids
| - apps just work so there's no educational struggle to get them
| going.
| grawprog wrote:
| >Having been recently acquired by Electronic Arts,
|
| >The goal was, if someone said, "What's an interactive movie?"
| we'd just hand them the CDs from Wing Commander III and say,
| "Here, check this out."
|
| >This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course...but
| the lack of any real gameplay evolution within that look and feel
| perhaps is.
|
| So...even back then, EA was in the habit of buying successful
| game properties and ruining the core gameplay by turning them
| into essentially interactive movies full of cut scenes.
|
| Sometimes I wonder what video games would be like today if EA and
| a few other choice
| companies...cough...activision...Ubisoft...cough just didn't
| exist at all....
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Ubisoft - amazed at how many Assassins' Creed/Far Cry/The
| Division games they can churn out on a yearly basis unlike
| Rockstar who takes time to craft their open sandbox games.
| poisonborz wrote:
| I really miss actual movie cutscenes. Good graphics and cheaper
| mocap, and the general notion that we see the same characters led
| game studios believe they were a better option. I still think
| actual actors are hundred percent better at delivering a story.
| We don't need to uphold this belief that in-game scenes were
| "real", in the way that an actual movie cutscene would hurt the
| "magic" - it would actually make it much more realistic. It would
| be even - again - rewarding to work through a storyline to
| finally get a new cutscene. With all the cheap greenscreen tech,
| I wish there would be be a trend of movie cutscenes coming back.
| ballenf wrote:
| I wonder if the master recordings for WC3 were kept or still
| exist. Imagine taking them and remastering the game.
| spockz wrote:
| I miss those too. I also feel that having these movie cutscenes
| helps the imagination. It doesn't matter so much that a Mammoth
| tank in game looks like a few squares with some stripes because
| in your mind you see the one with full details that drove over
| you. (RA or C&C, I might be mixing up unit names and games
| now.)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I remember a major debate about in-engine cut-scenes when
| Interstate-76 used them, which came out not too many years
| after WC3.
|
| Of course the final fantasy series used in-engine cutscenes up
| through the sixth installment.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I've lost something.
|
| When I was a kid, buying a new game was nearly impossible; If I
| was lucky, I'd get one for a birthday present or a Christmas
| gift. Occasionally a cool friend would lend me a copy of
| something. For a very short time, I lived about a mile away from
| a video game rental store and I'd sometimes be able to convince
| an adult I was responsible enough to return the game and spend my
| own money renting a game over a weekend.
|
| As a result of this, I'd spend many, many hours on the same game.
| I'd "beat" the game, but I'd also have this sort of mental model
| of challenges or 'perfect' gameplay that I'd try to achieve. It
| might be a score. It might be a time. It might be collecting all
| of a thing. It might be getting to a particular location that
| appeared to be 'off limits.' It was basically 'achievements'
| before there were achievement systems, but they were generally a
| lot harder and all the rewards for doing it where self-generated
| and internal. (I also spent a lot of time thinking about whether
| a thing was possible, and if it wasn't, why not.) This also
| allowed me to spend a lot of time on games that weren't very good
| and find some good within them.
|
| This post reminded me of this, because Wing Commander (the
| original) was one of those games I played over and over again. (I
| can't really recall what my goals were for the game, but I
| remember it being particularly difficult to achieve them.)
|
| I don't really do this with games anymore. Even in the case where
| I don't have the next game chosen and already in my line-up, it's
| easy to buy a game online and have it downloaded and playable
| within an hour. There aren't any surprises: readily available
| game reviews tell me basically exactly what to expect. On a game
| I particularly enjoy, I might spend some more time on it by
| gathering the achievements, but achievements really pale in
| comparison (in terms of both difficulty and reward) to what I
| remember of doing this myself in my youth.
|
| It's like the difference between reading a novel and really
| understanding a novel at a deep level. I think I'd like to get
| back to those deeper dives; but with more money than time (versus
| more time than money that I used to have), so many excellent
| games available, and all kinds of other distractions, I'm not
| really sure how or where to begin. I'm also not sure it's just
| me, or if games in general have lost a sort of magic they used to
| have.
| abledon wrote:
| Its like eating a few table spoons of maple syrup, then biting
| into a fresh orange. your tastebuds will have become less
| receptive to the sweetness of the orange. Pretty much the
| overload of media/games today for the youth, hard to appreciate
| and enjoy the 'taste' of a sweet game, when theres 382472398407
| games easily accessible on steam to play, or free for that
| matter e.g. LoL, engineered to blast open (crit chance 0.95x)
| your dopamine circuits.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. Part of it is the medium has so much
| choice now, and the other part is that we're adults with both
| more money and less time to spend on things.
|
| I remember playing a handful of NES games countless times, and
| being able to beat several of them in a single sitting.
|
| I think some people manage to hold onto that (see speedrunners
| and/or world-class players of this or that game), but you'd
| have to be very intentional about it.
| allenu wrote:
| I think there's a lot going on here. Some of it is just general
| maturity and experience. Things that were novel when you were a
| child wear off when you're older. Those achievements that you
| aimed for as a child (having 'perfect' gameplay) may seem less
| meaningful when you're an adult, especially in the context of
| other real world achievements.
|
| The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging
| things about aging. You can't feel the excitement of certain
| things again as you did when you did them for the first time. I
| think this is why it's important to try new hobbies.
| afavour wrote:
| Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world
| alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully
| realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a
| sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented
| with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty
| muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play
| it!).
|
| I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the
| space theme) all the recent iterations of Star Wars and Star
| Trek. People love to complain that the new SW trilogy (or the
| prequel trilogy) or Star Trek Discovery is a load of rubbish
| but the reality is that we're just older. Things aren't going
| to spark in the way they did when we first watched. And
| that's fine.
| mrexroad wrote:
| I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the
| prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly
| the things folks said were impossible.
|
| While I've been a fan of Discovery for the most part, and
| it occasionally shows glimpses of promise, it's largely not
| "Star Trek." The story telling is simply just not rooted
| same soul that Trek has been built upon. I'm okay with
| change, but not so much with creating flashy spectacles at
| the expense of meaningful story telling.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that
| the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did
| exactly the things folks said were impossible.
|
| That's a good way to put it. Entirely agree.
| dwd wrote:
| Seeing characters from the original be the bad-ass your
| younger self imagined they were but couldn't be is what
| The Mandalorian achieved. They crafted a story that
| allowed that to happen.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I know it's been discussed to death, but just wanted to
| say I was late to the Mandalorian and I completely agree
| with you-- it felt very true to the Star Wars universe,
| while at the same time expanding it considerably and not
| relying on cheap recycling of past characters and plot
| arcs.
|
| _And_ all of this on the kind of technology platform
| which could easily have enabled the absolute worst of the
| Lucas instincts to thrive as far as overcomplicated plots
| and gee-whiz special effects. Somehow it managed to take
| us to a dozen different planets and yet stay firmly
| rooted in a story about parenthood-- and that, between a
| faceless warrior and a voiceless puppet. Wild!
| grillvogel wrote:
| check out The Orville, it is more of a classic star trek
| than the new official star treks
| danielodievich wrote:
| Star Control II was THE defining game of my childhood.
| After completing the quest - with difficulty, since my
| command of English then was not what it is now - my brother
| and I spent countless hours in Melee mode.
|
| I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by
| hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and
| wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal
| to generate random ship combinations.
|
| Few years ago I replaced SCII story mode and found it to be
| a total delight, especially now that I recognize the fine
| humor in English.
|
| And now I have two sons about the same age that I was, and
| they got hooked on Melee as well and would play each other
| and myself, bringing warm happiness to my heart. One of
| them drew some ships for me on paper and they're on my
| corkboard in here, making me smile every time I look to the
| left.
|
| I wish there was a SC3!
| afavour wrote:
| > I wish there was a SC3!
|
| :)
| alyandon wrote:
| I, too, wrote a program that would assemble random teams
| of ships so you could have ladder style type combat
| amongst friends!
|
| The driving factor is that some ships were virtually
| impossible to defeat in a skilled player's hand so we had
| to resort to random selection to be even remotely fair to
| everyone.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude
| today I'd have a pretty muted reaction
|
| Or maybe not. I'm yet to see any modern game that would
| even remotely approach the magnitude of SC2. So far, the
| closest competitor was the original Mass Effect game,
| itself clearly influenced by Star Control games, but even
| it failed to surpass it.
| swivelmaster wrote:
| The problem here is that it is basically impossible for a
| modern game to achieve the magnitude of those old CRPGs
| if you just mean that in the sense of how big the
| universe is and how much story it contains, but with
| modern AAA standards. The man-hours required to create
| all that content would be ridiculous.
|
| That being said, if you count the totality of the Mass
| Effect trilogy, including all its DLC, I think you do get
| the magnitude of one Star Control 2, and it's generally
| fantastic.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You don't need to create everything with modern AAA
| standards. Games like FTL show that you can achieve a lot
| with much less effort. You just need to be bolder. And i
| think being bolder is the hard part: games these days are
| more timid in their aprroach to than they were in early
| 90s, like always trying to stick to a working formula.
| Mashups of different genres like SC2 are somehow
| nonexistent.
| swivelmaster wrote:
| If you think that, you're not looking hard enough. There
| are countless incredible (and bold) indie games doing
| really interesting and unusual things.
|
| Off the top of my head:
|
| - Outer Wilds (an entire solar system is a puzzle stuck
| in a time loop)
|
| - Hades (a roguelike where dying progresses the story)
|
| - Slay the Spire (a hybrid deckbuilder/roguelike where
| different runs can produce drastically different gameplay
| and builds)
|
| - Dead Cells (a hybrid Metroidvania/Roguelike with
| Diablo-style random weapon/item spawns that force the
| player to use different strategies with every
| playthrough)
|
| - Into the Breach (from the guys who made FTL)
|
| - Undertale (a fourth-wall-breaking RPG in which you can
| talk your way out of any battle, with multiple endings)
|
| - Signs of the Sojourner (a narrative deckbuilding game
| where your cards represent different types of
| conversation)
|
| - Her Story (a game all about watching pieces of footage
| from a deposition about a death... or is it a murder?...
| and trying to figure out what happened)
|
| - Baba Is You (a puzzle game in which the rules are also
| objects in the game that can be moved and changed)
|
| - Hypnospace Outlaw (a simulation of an alternate-reality
| 90's internet)
|
| - The Stanley Parable (a game about following directions,
| or not following them and irritating the narrator)
|
| - The Beginner's Guide (a narrated tour through the games
| of another developer, possibly without their approval)
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Last I checked I had spent around 700hrs in skyrim...
| wyldfire wrote:
| The story/campaign for SCII was great, but it also came
| with a local multiplayer arcade mode! It was an awesome
| time.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| > The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging
| things about aging.
|
| To me, this is where the "start a new company doing something
| good and interesting" kicks in, it seems. The best part of
| ageing seem to me that they grey hairs that I acquired during
| the last startup make it easier to the next one.
| aequitas wrote:
| I feel the same. I used to be able to get uncountable hours of
| gameplay out of simple demo's of games because I didn't have
| the money for full games. The examples that come to mind are
| Cavewars and Fallen Haven. Both strategy games with a time
| limit. My brother and I would play the demo level over and over
| again and try to progress further and further within the set
| time limit. In a way it was like speedrunning but the other way
| around.
| caoilte wrote:
| Z
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| There was a time when I loved playing JRPGs, which can become a
| mindless grind if you're trying to maximize a character for
| fun.
|
| I still like them, but on an emulator, with cheats for easy
| experience or money. I enjoy the story without the grind, and
| although I lost the perseverance and endurance I had then, I
| don't think I'll ever have the time (or the patience) to play
| them properly again.
|
| You lost something to gain something else.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I feel the same way.
|
| I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my favorite
| classic games less than an hour, sometimes in minutes. Some of
| that is cutting weird corners but often it's pure excellent
| execution.
|
| I often wonder about doing that myself, playing hundreds of
| hours of a single game to master it. Putting all of my focus on
| a single game like I used to as a kid, but I don't find
| anything keeps my attention that way now.
|
| I think partially it's what you said, more money than time and
| I naturally gravitate towards spending my time on novelty
| instead of mastery. That's just how my brain works.
|
| The other piece is when I look back, I don't think I spend
| nearly as much time replaying the same things in the past as I
| feel like I did. I think those memories of playing and
| replaying games are somewhat distorted by my memories.
|
| I also spent a great deal of time _watching_ those games being
| played by friends and their siblings and so forth, during
| sleepovers and after school.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| "I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my
| favorite classic games less than an hour, sometimes in
| minutes. Some of that is cutting weird corners but often it's
| pure excellent execution."
|
| Ocarina of Time speedrunning has gotten to a really weird
| place now, where they basically set the character's name to a
| string of bytes which are executable code, and then de-
| reference a pointer to it and warp directly to the end
| credits, all within a few minutes of gaining control of Link.
| But, the community has a whole bunch of categories for
| different types of runs, from ones that are basically the
| Any% category before SRM (stale reference manipulation), to
| semi-legitimately beating all the dungeons (though with lots
| of sequence-breaking), to fully glitchless. It's a lot of fun
| watching some of those other-category runs for a taste of
| "normal" gameplay done at a very high level.
|
| Another thing that's fun to watch runs of is randomizers
| (chest contents, quest rewards, sometimes even doors), since
| then you're not just seeing high level play, you're also
| seeing someone doing the live work of reasoning about their
| route through familiar-but-scrambled territory:
|
| https://ootrandomizer.com/
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I'm aware of all of this, but I'm really glad you posted it
| in case some others read it and it catches their interest.
|
| OoT speedrunning is very unique, and since it was a game I
| played a lot as a kid I'm always excited to watch the ways
| it's beaten.
|
| I do admit I prefer the categories that emphasize more
| gameplay though, even if the glitches are incredible.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| For me, this magic was in playing the shit out of demo games
| that came with my PC Games magazine subscription. I fondly
| remember playing Diablo I and War Wind (a WarCraft 2 clone)
| demos over and over again.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| I still prefer to play a few games many many times instead of a
| lot of games a little. I've replayed the Dark Souls games so
| many times I have to backup my save file because I reached the
| save slot limit. Each time I replay I tend to have a theme or
| challenge. I also play factory style games for hundreds of
| hours. (Was up to 4am playing Factorio)
|
| If I've lost anything as an adult it's that I'm less tolerant
| of games that don't capture my interest. As a kid I replayed
| certain games because I simply had fewer games to play. Now
| there are so many free or cheap games available but I find I
| quit new games quickly unless they capture my interest.
| suicas wrote:
| I was thinking along similar lines the other day. One of the
| things I realised was that imagination played a much bigger
| part in my enjoyment of games than it does now (as it did with
| playing with toy cars, lego etc. back at that age).
|
| I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega
| Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back
| and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who
| occupied various buildings and their work days.
|
| There was also a mountain range in one of the backgrounds on
| one level, and I recall spending time planning to explore it
| later, even pausing the game to draw a map of an imagined
| village there.
|
| Of course now the vocabulary of games (and my understanding of
| them) has changed a lot, and it's far more obvious what the
| limits of a game and its interactive areas are - to me they're
| now throwaway pieces of entertainment, no longer worlds to
| inhabit and explore.
| ggggtez wrote:
| There are communities devoted to _deep_ understanding of games.
| These tend to be in the Speedrun or Tool-Assisted-Speedrun
| communities. Both tend to be high time investments, but can
| reveal deep understandings of a game, including how to exploit
| coding flaws.
|
| Of course, gaming is not the only hobby that a person can gain
| satisfaction from, and you can similarly get that sense of
| growth from other goal or skill based hobbies. Painting, music,
| or even just learning a foreign language. The payoff may be
| much greater than mastering a game, as society at large tends
| to value these "worldly" skills more than gaming skill.
| unixhero wrote:
| You are not alone. This was my experience precisely as well.
| htek wrote:
| Mmm, achievements don't really seem as special anymore for a
| variety of reasons. Everything is so regimented in games now.
| You get an achievement for completing the tutorial mission. You
| get an achievement for finding the thing you can't progress in
| the game without it in your possession. You get an achievement
| for collecting 1000 blivets from radio towers. It's all
| uninteresting, uninspired busywork or crap put into the game
| because it's expected.
|
| There's also accumulated gaming experience. I've been gaming
| for more than 4 decades, there ain't nothing new under the sun.
|
| Also, real life cheevos are harder, and some would say more
| important, to attain.
|
| I'd say for me, the magic of a lot of things wore off a long
| time ago. YMMV. GL HF
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > readily available game reviews tell me basically exactly what
| to expect.
|
| this is why I actively avoid reviews for any media I might be
| interested in watching. I don't want any influence on my
| experience at all. I don't even let my friends tell me why they
| like a movie: if they recommend it, that's the most I want to
| know. It's awesome! I can pick something up like Nier or the
| first Avengers movie, and it's a completely immersive
| experience. I don't think it's difficult; it's not like reviews
| are some core part of life that can't be lived without. And I
| can't speak for you, but for me, not having reviews is part of
| the magic of gaming that I experienced as a kid: blindly
| choosing games to try based on cover art, the name, the studio,
| the console, etc. Building up my own idea of what the game will
| be like, making sense of the game as I experience it with no
| expectations, and finally forming my own opinion of it makes
| gaming feel like it did when I was a kid.
|
| The exception is for games that I just never would have heard
| of. There are literally thousands of games out there, and if
| it's not modern, it's probably not going to be talked about. So
| I'll watch stuff like Ross's Game Dungeon or Civvie 11 to get a
| taste of older things that would be harder for me to stumble
| upon, and just keep a distant finger on the pulse of what's hot
| today, like Among Us or Fall Guys.
|
| There's also minor stuff that I think people underestimate.
| When I play games, I don't have a second monitor with
| discord/netflix/youtube, I don't constantly text people. I just
| play and if I get bored, I take that as a sign that I need to
| work harder to figure the game out or just play a different
| game, like kids do. If you get stuck, try to find a PDF of the
| strategy guide instead of looking up youtube walkthroughs.
|
| In my experience, gaming has always, continuously changed.
| There's some magic that older games have that new ones just
| don't, but there's also magic to newer games that older ones
| just don't. And there's also the player's ability to immerse
| themselves into the games. I try to be mindful and actively
| fine-tune the way I game and it's had great results for me
| whether I'm playing my childhood classics, experiencing old
| games for the first time, or jumping on the bandwagon of what's
| shiny and new.
| benlivengood wrote:
| As adults we've found higher payoff/cost activities and
| generally, at least for me, _other people_ are more interesting
| than games. I never saw that coming.
|
| EDIT: not to say that I don't still enjoy games, but games have
| to either be really fascinating (factorio, surviving mars, city
| skylines) on a technical level, be social (multiplayer
| minecraft with my kids), or emotionally engaging (some RPGs,
| but usually only one playthrough)
| aksss wrote:
| I think that's really on point for me. I try to recreate the
| magic I used to feel playing Ultima, Wing Commander, Gunship,
| Commanche, Falcon 3, etc. with modern games and find I just
| don't... care. In terms of personal activities, I could be
| building something cool in the garage, or out on a real-life
| adventure, or playing with some electronics experiment, or
| doing research on a topic of special interest to me. Games
| feel very boring and unproductive _to me_ even though I
| periodically attempt to check myself on this.
| mycall wrote:
| Augmented Reality could bridge the gap. Take a look at
| Pokemon Go or Geocaching as examples.
| m12k wrote:
| You should give Hades a try. It's built from the ground up to
| be replayed - in fact that's woven into the story in a very
| compelling way.
| elorant wrote:
| Games lasted longer twenty years ago. It was easier to immerse
| in the game for this reason. Nowadays, blockbuster action games
| give you twenty hours of gameplay give or take. Even RPG games
| are shorter these days. Baldur's Gate took me weeks to finish.
| I can't remember the last time I played a contemporary game
| that lasted that long.
| prox wrote:
| They are still there : Rimworld, Space Engineers... Factorio
| is a fan favorite on HN. You can also count Minecraft and
| Skyrim as long enduring successes.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Baldur's Gate took me weeks to finish.
|
| The great games have no "finish". Where is the finish line in
| SimCity? Factorio never really stops, just getting bigger
| each time you play. I don't like SeaOfThieves but I
| appreciate that it is about playing rather than winning. And
| I cannot be the only one who has never bothered to kill the
| ender dragon.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| > The great games have no "finish".
|
| Hah well this is obviously _highly_ subjective.
| caoilte wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I get hundreds of hours out of great
| games like Rimworld, FTL, They are Billions and Hades.
|
| There are just as many great games, they're just not the ones
| advertised to you.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Games lasted longer twenty years ago. It was easier to
| immerse in the game for this reason_
|
| I think part of this was because games used to be about the
| gameplay, and not about the special effects.
|
| A few weeks ago I got an old Pong cart in the mail. By the
| time I looked up from playing it, I'd lost half a day.
|
| No special effects. Minimal sound. Irritating controllers.
| But almost entirely about the gameplay, and not about the
| game.
| lou1306 wrote:
| However, some old games' gameplay, unlike Pong's, was
| awful. Sometimes, terrible gameplay was actually a legit
| "strategy" by the devs to artificially make a game last
| longer, so people wouldn't feel ripped off. Good gameplay
| was appreciated, sure, but bad gameplay was often swept
| under the "challenging/hard-to-beat" rug.
| taeric wrote:
| I challenge this. Most games were really short. They were
| just very quick to kick you back to the title screen. :)
| dunnevens wrote:
| There are many games that will give you much longer than 20
| hours. It's actually a complaint by some about modern open
| world games and how they're geared towards 40+ hours for even
| a basic completion. Longer if the player wants to finish some
| of the side quests. And then that's not counting mods and how
| those extend game time even further. And also not counting
| all those open-ended games which last as long as you're
| interested.
|
| Gaming is in very good shape right now. I think most of the
| lack of immersion comes down to age. And also comes down to
| having many more diversions when you have an afternoon to
| yourself with time to play.
| zelon88 wrote:
| They have lost some of the magic I think. I remember as a child
| doing something similar with games. Back then I wasn't as
| skilled with games, and as a kid in the 90s it wasn't common to
| ask your mom or dad to "beat this level for you" because they
| were often worse than you.
|
| So I'd just play the same levels over and over again. It would
| take me years to eventually beat Wing Commander 2 and 3. But it
| wasn't repetitive because I didn't feel any pressure to
| actually beat the game. I think I was actually more invested in
| exploring the logic of the game and creating imaginative
| storylines instead of actually getting invested in the game.
|
| This one alternate mode of play contrasts to my kids where they
| seem to have two modes of play. One where they do the same
| thing and just explore game mechanics while dying over and
| over, and another where they actually want to make forward
| progress and often reach out for help. Luckily my generation is
| more acclimated to this type of interaction so we help out
| where in the past we would just struggle along or get
| sidetracked.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Funny you should mention the mental model of challenges because
| I do the same thing. I've started role-playing in games that
| neither require nor request any real role-play. For example, I
| find it much easier to suspend my disbelief in a shooter game
| if my character doesn't have to survive 10s of bullets without
| even a wince. As a result, I play and replay shooter levels
| until I can beat the game without taking a single bullet.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I'd hazard a guess your WC goals would've been seeing how many
| variations of the storyline there were. If memory serves there
| were 4, you doing great, OK, not so great or terrible and the
| war story would depend on how you do. Suppose you could include
| 5 in being blown up.
|
| There were a range of medals you could get, too. Think I had to
| complete it several times over before I was sure how many there
| were!
|
| I played 100s of games on the Amstrad CPC and Amiga in late
| 80s/early 90s. Think for me the magnus opus of gaming was the
| possibility of being able to play people online. The level of
| competition is high and it almost feels like work, so I stick
| to turn based games like Civ - but still fond of all the
| nostalgic game titles.
| david422 wrote:
| I think it's just the novelty of things. And the free time
| aspect.
|
| I remember playing Dragon Warrior on NES late into the night
| with friends. Grinding away to get that next item and leveling
| up to fight bigger monsters. It was really fun, really
| exciting.
|
| A few years ago I got an emulator and fired it up. Played about
| 5 minutes before I couldn't continue. Just didn't have the
| desire to grind away. And the emulator had a fastfoward button,
| which I found. So I just kept zipping around and running into
| monsters, not even wanting to spend the time to fight them.
| Spoiled because I didn't have to die, I could just reset to a
| save point.
|
| I dunno. Maybe that just happens when you get old. Maybe it's
| just that there's so much instant gratification. I remember
| playing zelda and meticulously making maps on graph paper etc.
| Today you can just look it up on the internet in a minute and
| print a glorious, in color complete map.
|
| It's just not the same anymore.
| codebje wrote:
| This week I reconnected to the MUD I used to play 20 years
| ago. I'm amazed it's still running. I've forgotten nearly
| everything.
|
| I've been having a blast these past few days exploring the
| vast world.
|
| There's nothing that Google can tell me about it. There's
| still people playing (and building) it, so I can ask for help
| - my old clan is still going even - but there's no instant
| fix on everything.
|
| I don't know how long it'll last, and the time it will take
| is too much to fully immerse, but I've already started making
| some maps and trying to tackle some quests.
| vinger wrote:
| Please share. Perhaps if a few more join it can last
| longer.
| rrauenza wrote:
| I loved that game, but I'm still not over Hobbes' plot point.
| buescher wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the genre, played at least one of the Wing
| Commander games a while after it came out, and I think Tie
| Fighter also. I never understood the appeal compared to say, Star
| Raiders or the Star Wars vector arcade game.
|
| Maybe I was just getting too old for video games, but I played
| Oolite (never played Elite when it was current) for a little
| while when I was between jobs at 40 and loved it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I must be too old too. When "cut scenes" started becoming
| the norm I felt like video games had lost their way....
|
| Additionally, the big studios with their cut scenes set a kind
| of bar that the indie game dev couldn't match. It eventually
| sorted itself out but at the time it looked like the big
| players were moving in and the indies should probably head off
| and get "real" jobs.
| techrat wrote:
| And then Half Life came along and showed you could have a
| game without any cutscenes whatsoever, with story and
| expositional moments parts of the game you could still
| interact within the map. Listening to the security guards in
| the main hall, finding that button under the desk... and
| pushing it.
| burlesona wrote:
| One of my all time favorite games, because as a ~10 year old I
| can think of nothing cooler than playing Luke Skywalker in a sci-
| fi top-gun movie about saving earth from murderous Cat Aliens. :)
|
| Privateer 2 was a more ambitious and interesting take on the same
| theme, I loved that one too.
| caoilte wrote:
| It crashed on a specific cut scene point for me every time.
| Didn't buy another game until Rimworld. Still so angry.
| alfiesmith wrote:
| I just loved launch bays, hanger decks, briefing rooms, flying
| CAP, and defending the fleet. It started with Elite, went into
| overdrive when I watched the original series of Battlestar
| Galactica, then Playing Wing commander 3. Something really cool
| about going down the launch bay, straight into an ambush, and
| limping your fighter back in one piece. Loved it.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I used to play so much Privateer when I was a kid! So much fun!
| standardUser wrote:
| What a game. I'll always remember grappling with the moral
| ambiguity of buying and selling human slaves in a game for
| profit.
| l0b0 wrote:
| On GOG:
| https://www.gog.com/game/wing_commander_3_heart_of_the_tiger
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Owned it. It was campy fun even then but WCII and WC:Privateer
| were far and away the better games. III was one of many attempts
| at a game-movie crossover that never really worked imho.
| Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless
| other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with
| SimCity and Civilization.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer
| tomca32 wrote:
| Wing Commander II was just amazing. Had a long, fairly well
| thought out story with meaningful twists, emotional moments,
| tension and accompanies by a great soundtrack.
|
| I will see you in heaven.
|
| Some remastered bits of soundtrack:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJD6YpHD5O0&list=PLFB7GcAB-z...
| GordonS wrote:
| Privateer! I absolutely loved that game - I must have racked
| hundreds of hours on it as a kid!
|
| I liked WC:Prophecy a lot too, but the trade aspect of
| Privateer was what really got me hooked. Also, the sheer _size_
| of the Privateer universe was mind boggling at the time. That
| and the graphics almost seemed like witchcraft given PC
| capabilities of the day.
| leoc wrote:
| > Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and
| countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up
| there with SimCity and Civilization.
|
| Surely Elite and Elite II deserve more of the credit there?
| Shivetya wrote:
| Elite and Elite II, played them both, however I give the nod
| to the Wing Commander series and specifically Privateer for
| one simple reason. They did not making flying difficult let
| alone everyone's badge of honor in Elite in making your first
| successful docking with the rotating stations.
|
| Still my favorite space game ever had to be Starflight though
| Starflight II came close. Not the same play style but early
| games on computers during that time were such a marvel for
| how much they did with so little
| bentcorner wrote:
| Privateer was a lot of fun. I remember playing it and the
| sequel. I'd be interested to see more behind-the-scenes of
| Privateer 2. It also had FMV and (from what I recall) had this
| sort of campy sci-fi TV movie feel. Great game, although I'm
| hesitant to look at it without the lens of nostalgia.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Well Chris Roberts is back with Star Citizen , 500 million
| dollars for an eternal beta of nostalgia.
| datameta wrote:
| I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series...
| It totally captivated me as a kid, but I sure as heck
| didn't know who was responsible for its creation. It just
| sort of _existed_ as a different realm without much thought
| of the behind-the-scenes
| lovegoblin wrote:
| > Privateer was a lot of fun.
|
| You'd probably be interested in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (2019).
| It's extremely Privateer-influenced.
| skohan wrote:
| I believe it was WCII which had a framerate which was dependent
| on the speed of the processor. I remember trying to play it
| some years after it came out, and you literally couldn't
| understand what was happening on screen because it was too
| fast.
| daniel_rh wrote:
| It was WC1 and I disassembled the code and added in a time-
| dependent limiter in dosbox. I also added multiplayer--it's
| not quite documented and ready for consumption, but if you're
| interested in how it works, the code is right now up as a
| patch to dosbox in the wcmulti branch
| https://github.com/danielrh/dosbox3d/tree/wcmulti most of the
| changes are in the src/cpu/core_Normal.cpp and
| src/cpu/wc_net.cpp
| daniel_rh wrote:
| the way you run it is... run a retail copy of WC.EXE with
| the branch of dosbox3d then do wcnet startserver <port> on
| one machine and wcnet connect <ip addr> <port> then both
| machines just run wing commander as normal. and the first
| one can start the first mission and the other connects in
| and gets to play as spirit. You can play through the whole
| campaign this way
| plussed_reader wrote:
| dosbox has a setting to lock the clock rate at a chosen rate
| for those older games that are timing dependent like that.
| daniel_rh wrote:
| the clock rate isn't quite enough--because more enemies do
| cause it to advance the program counter more... really you
| do want to measure how long the frame took and sleep the
| interim
| lessthanseventy wrote:
| That's what the turbo button was for.
| akgoel wrote:
| Both WC 1 and 2 depended on processor speed, but WCII had a
| slowdown feature (I believe it was Ctrl-+ and Ctrl--) that
| allowed you slow it down.
| caoilte wrote:
| I got so good at WC1 by playing on a 286 and then being
| able to speed up my reflexes on a 486. I could read every
| bitmap.
| Firehawke wrote:
| I feel that Special Operations 2, with the Morningstar and the
| plot around Jazz, was probably the high point for WC2.
|
| The ending was certainly cathartic after everything that had
| happened from the beginning until that point.
|
| Oddly, I feel like Prophecy may have had the best fleshed-out
| flight system, but I wasn't a huge fan of the story. WC4 had
| the second best ending, though! Only behind SO2 in terms of
| relieving you of the frustration.
|
| Privateer is definitely an interesting game, and it's really
| weird that they never really tried to follow that model again.
| Privateer 2 is best not brought up, and by the time any
| theoretical P3 could have been in development Origin was
| already dead.
| jbm wrote:
| I was so hyped when this game came out; I remember waiting 5-10
| minutes for each mission to start on my computer at the time (a
| 486 dx2? Or a Pentium? Hard to remember). Clearing space to play
| it was a pain too.
|
| I missed some of the wc2 gameplay and was not a fan of how the
| story kept resetting the progress from the previous games
| ("humanity suddenly comes to an agreement and dismantles its full
| fleet", "ragtag peripheral colonies are the only ones who
| understood the enemy" etc...). The way Hobbes' character was
| retconned wasn't great - especially since they left out his final
| message (seriously wtf?)
|
| I still loved the game, enough so that I remembered all of that
| from years ago.
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