By John Walker on September 13th, 2011 at 2:20 pm.
When Good Old Games released their first batch of EA games, it seemed pretty odd that the Wing Commander included was Privateer. Fortunately they’ve now righted that wrong by previously sticking up Wing Commanders 1 and 2 for $6 for the pair, and today they’ve added the most famous of the series, Wing Commander III: Heart Of The Tiger. Or as it’s more commonly known, The One With Mark Hamill In It.
This one is $6 alone, but still, coo, it’s a big game with a lot of stilted acting. And cat people! Cat people are the best people.
If you don’t mind my going all Gaming Made Me for a moment, I have some pretty heavy memories attached to this game, although as is so often the case, not of actually playing it. And as ever, in my memory I was about 9 at the time, but in reality I was almost an adult. In 1994, when I was 17 years old, I remember watching my older cousin, James, playing it. He lived in Wales, in a farmhouse, and seemed so impossibly adult to me, being in his early 20s. And there was his PC running this game that looked so impossibly complicated, with all these actors from real life! Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, Thomas F. Wilson, Jason Bernard, Tim Curry and, er, Ginger Lynn Allen. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the game. Just the cutscenes. Which were mesmerising.
Can that possibly still be the case? Who knows. But you can find out, at last. Also, have a blooper roll:
13/09/2011 at 14:26 Stellar Duck says:
Ah, yes. Ginger Lynn Allen. I actually saw her in Wing Commander before I saw her… elsewhere.
Imagine my surprise though, one day, with my Gentleman’s Relaxations Videos.
13/09/2011 at 14:44 Rinox says:
I can only assume those involve pipe smoking, drinking whiskey in leatherbound chairs, and being generally stuffy and moustached.
13/09/2011 at 15:14 djbriandamage says:
Insert unsavoury “being moustached” joke here.
13/09/2011 at 18:51 Nick says:
Who wants a moustache ride?
13/09/2011 at 14:28 N'Al says:
AFAIK, WC4 and Prophecy had Mark Hamill in it too, innit?
13/09/2011 at 14:32 Jams O'Donnell says:
They did, aye. And those two were my favourite WCs, too.
13/09/2011 at 21:10 Gunsmith says:
it also had Malcolm McDowell and was 6 cd’s long, a record for 1995 iirc
14/09/2011 at 08:11 Screamer says:
Wasn’t it more like 10 cds? With over 4 hours of cinematics!!! m/
I’ll go dig mine up and see :P
13/09/2011 at 14:28 Lars Westergren says:
> Cat people are the best people.
As cosmetic surgery advances, watch them go from stock fantasy characters to furry reality in the coming decades.
13/09/2011 at 14:38 Gnoupi says:
My skin is augmented.
13/09/2011 at 19:52 outoffeelinsobad says:
See these eyes so green…
13/09/2011 at 23:19 LionsPhil says:
There’s already a guy who’s rather infamously tried.
He looks like a guy who got into a car crash without a seatbelt and the surgeons “did all they could”.
13/09/2011 at 14:29 mod the world says:
I remember the days when i was tweaking the memory of my PC just to get Wing Commander 3 to run. Low-memory, high-memory, extended memory and so on. In the end, i had to boot from floppy disk to be able to play it. Also i had to buy an expensive new RAM modul with 4(!) MB. The kids today just don’t know how good they have it.
13/09/2011 at 14:43 jenkue says:
I really do prefer updating my hardware once in a while to playing games tailored for ancient console hardware and smartphones.
13/09/2011 at 17:20 aleander says:
That’s an idea for a puzzle in some game. Or, a game in itself. Configue EMM386.EXE to run this super-critical piece of software.
13/09/2011 at 21:33 Wulf says:
Ultima VII was the worst in this regard. It had its own custom memory manager and couldn’t run with EMM. It had to use XMM (or was it XMS?) only.
I remember how I had a config.sys and autoexec.bat with something like 20 boot options. One of them was named ‘Ultima VII’ and yet another one was named ‘TIE-Fighter.’ Some games were so bitchy that they even needed their own boot routines.
(I found Wing Commander III incredibly easy to run when compared in context to Ultima VII.)
—
Oh, and… did anyone actually ever use QEMM? I found next to no use for it, as custom configurations of the stock managers invariably worked better.
13/09/2011 at 14:31 _PixelNinja says:
One more to go to my personal favorite in the series — Wing Commander IV: The Price Of Freedom!
In my memories, Wing Commander III and IV hold some of my best times playing games. I loved the choice of full motion video and the great cast they had. I mean in c’mon, in IV you played Luke Skywalker, you had Biff as your wingman, The Shredder and Eric Draven as your team members and Warren Keffer as your arch enemy!
To me these games were epic, magic and so immersive. Good times it was!
13/09/2011 at 14:34 DanPryce says:
I can’t wait for the FPS reboot of Wing Commander.
13/09/2011 at 14:45 phenom_x8 says:
It was a FPS from the beginning by its default view I guess!
So, no reboot needed!
13/09/2011 at 17:19 aleander says:
It will be rebooted as an isometric view tactical strategy/shooter hybrid.
14/09/2011 at 09:58 mejoff says:
It already got rebooted as a shitty top down multiplayer XBLA game :(
13/09/2011 at 14:40 stkaye says:
God I loved these games as a youngster. I’m still a Price of Freedom evangelist. Heart of the Tiger was – and this is a strange thing to say these days – much too long, and quite unvaried in terms of narrative content (of course the gameplay was unvaried, it’s a wing commander title). It felt more like a long, serialised TV show – like Space Above and Beyond or something. Wing Commander IV actually felt like a movie; a pretty good movie, too.
13/09/2011 at 15:16 djbriandamage says:
Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell sure made great adversaries.
13/09/2011 at 14:43 djbriandamage says:
Luke Skywalker, Biff, a porn star, and a race of cat men walk into a bar… stop me if you’ve heard this one…
The production values of this game were ridiculous and the calibre of actors, sets, and holy frijoles the costumes, were all phenomenal. There’s a ton of FMV (as opposed to stop motion video I presume?) with branching conversations similar to Lucasarts games which made Wing Commander 3 and 4 truly deserving of the nebulously overused “Interactive Movie” categorization that was so en vogue at the time. (multimedia!!!)
This game is totally worth $6 and I recommend everyone play this.
However, if you’re more interested in the story than the pew pew I highly recommend this 2-hour “movie” version from the Wing Commander CIC website. It’s more or less a “let’s play” session, sans commentary and interface, and is very watchable.
http://www.wcnews.com/holovids/full_length_wing3.shtml
13/09/2011 at 16:16 stahlwerk says:
FMV is meant in contrast to animating only parts of the screen against a static background. See the Inca games, for example.
13/09/2011 at 23:21 LionsPhil says:
Or the previous Wing Commanders, I believe.
Y’see, once upon a time sonny, actually changing every pixel of the screen in real time was considered too much for the poor CPU to manage. That’s why we had palette cycling effects. And blitter chips? Pah, way back when there were player-missile graphics, where a GPU was advanced if it could plot a handful of sprites and some dots…*eyes glaze over wistfully*
13/09/2011 at 14:44 Abundant_Suede says:
FMV nostalgia aside, I always preferred Privateer.
13/09/2011 at 18:13 Burky says:
Agreed, it moved away from trying to be an “interactive movie”, a dead-end concept Chris Roberts became obsessed with, and became the greater game because of it.
13/09/2011 at 14:51 KingCathcart says:
Slightly off topic but this is worth a read:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/04/16/saturday-crapshoot-wing-commander-academy/
13/09/2011 at 14:53 Richard Cobbett says:
Since writing that, it’s been picked up for a DVD release.
13/09/2011 at 17:41 islisis says:
Great write-up, but if it’s going to be that long I feel I may as well be watching the actual 20-min episode =]
13/09/2011 at 23:19 Richard Cobbett says:
Sssh, you’ll give away the secret.
13/09/2011 at 14:57 MOKKA says:
I still have my original copy but I was never able to finish the game. When I played it the first time I somehow screwed up the story and ended up being in a mission which was impossible to win.
A few years back, as I went through my DOSBox Nostalgia Session, I was able to get to the second to last mission and then the game refused to let play any furhter by crashing continuously.
So I might pick this one up just to be able to play these last two missions.
13/09/2011 at 23:56 Bart Stewart says:
III and IV never did anything for me. I didn’t want to watch movies; I wanted kitty-shooting action.
For the past couple of years I’ve been randomly trying to find disk drives that would read my original disks for I and II (and the Secret Missions) so I could DOSbox them, but no joy.
Thank you, GOG! Between you and Rage and Skyrim, I will *never* get back to Morrowind to finish it….
13/09/2011 at 15:00 Theoban says:
NO GOG, NO. I say no. In the last few weeks I’ve bought six games from you, I need REST.
13/09/2011 at 15:00 deadly.by.design says:
Forget Mark Hammil…
…it’s BIFF!
13/09/2011 at 20:39 Andy_Panthro says:
Just don’t ask him about it…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y
13/09/2011 at 15:16 Xercies says:
Back when I was a nipper this was probably one of the hardest games I had ever played and I couldn’t even get passed the first mission!
13/09/2011 at 15:17 KrunkSplein says:
Okay, my memory is crap, to put it nicely. But something about WC3 has forever stuck in my memory.
First off, in the opening cutscene: “DIS-integration!”
Secondly, in one of the very first dialog trees, the two options were:
“Play along with him”
“This guy’s a loon!”
I spent way too much time as a kid toggling between the two in order to make Hamill do a little rap.
13/09/2011 at 22:42 Thants says:
I did the exact same thing!
14/09/2011 at 15:38 SurprisedMan says:
I did that!
13/09/2011 at 15:41 Doth Messar says:
I hate manure.
13/09/2011 at 15:46 Drake Sigar says:
WC3 – the game that has Luke Skywalker being bullied by Biff.
13/09/2011 at 18:32 food says:
Hmm… a young orphan raised by strangers fighting a tubby who’s a dick in every reality and hellbent on world domination.
Yer right, that is the story from Warcraft 3. :P
13/09/2011 at 16:11 digitalsoap says:
I played this game to heck when it first came out. Have always wanted to try WC4 but have never had the chance. Here’s hoping GOG can get WC4 pretty soon. In the meantime, I’m gonna shoot me some Kilrathi.
15/09/2011 at 19:52 ASBO says:
I have such fond memories of the entire series. The only disappointing part for me was when
SPOILER ALERT!
Hobbes inexplicably turns on you. All that work throughout the series building trust, and then that. What a shame. Still, how many games let you pilot a spacecraft while drunk (and in the game)?
13/09/2011 at 16:14 shoptroll says:
I get the sense that John owns multiple editions of James Cameron’s Avatar :p
On a serious note, with most of the Kilrathi Trilogy hitting GOG, do people recommend gamepads (I have a rumblepad 2) or joysticks for these games? I have fond memories of playing WC1 with a joystick but I don’t have a modern one at all… And since I’ve ditched my Audigy 2 for a Xonar, I think I’m without a Joystick port.
Anyone have recommendations for a good mid-range (preferably USB) joystick? Does anyone still make these?
13/09/2011 at 17:39 Torgen says:
Joysticks haven’t used joystick ports for many years. It’s all USB, baby. (Unless you’re saying you still have an *old* joystick that uses the port.) Grab a cheap $10 joystick so you can play WC and Freespace again!
Or, get one of these: http://saitek.com/uk/prod/x65f.html
13/09/2011 at 16:28 jonfitt says:
“And cat people! Cat people are the best people.”
Kill the Kilrathi spy!
14/09/2011 at 10:24 ZephyrSB says:
Kill Rathy!!!
No, wait, we’re not quite there yet, are we?
13/09/2011 at 16:45 Skystrider says:
And then there is this:
http://www.wcnews.com/news/4346
^.^
13/09/2011 at 17:48 shoptroll says:
I bet you a cup of tea that it’s a FPS with motion control grafted on :p
13/09/2011 at 19:27 Wooly Wugga Wugga says:
Wouldn’t it be nice…
Also the battle of Repleetah would make an absolutely awesome grungy, gritty FPS. Christ, I don’t believe I remember that.
13/09/2011 at 17:24 Demiath says:
Well, Mark Hamill was in WC4: Price of Freedom, too, so WC3 can hardly claim the title “The One With Mark Hamill In It”. WC4 did have significantly less fur, though, and maybe RPS has a principle of being soft on cats…
13/09/2011 at 17:40 Torgen says:
All those bribes Wulf has been sending them are starting to pay off.
13/09/2011 at 21:52 Wulf says:
Actually I think they’re just trying to be nice. It hasn’t gone unnoticed.
Really though, yeah, I liked both III and IV. I liked III more but only because IV was more professional, and in being so it lost a lot of its charm, for me. I mean, look at me today, one of my favourite games is Champions Online. I’m not so much into serious stuff.
In III I had people in entertainingly cheap suits yelling “EYE OF THE TIGER!” randomly at me. In IV I had po-faced people waxing on about the nature of humanity. I choose the former.
13/09/2011 at 17:40 ResonanceCascade says:
So as an old Tie Fighter fan who never played Wing Commander back in the day, I have two question: are these games like that, and if so, which one should I get?
Hopefully I’ll be ebaying a Sidewinder this week…
13/09/2011 at 17:44 Nick says:
Kind of.. and they are all quite good, really. Privateer is one of my favourite games, but the combat isn’t as good as in TIE Fighter (another of my favourites) and is essentially similar to the first few Wing Commander games, the 3rd and 4th feel a bit better to “fly” and have some fun with Mark Hamill and Biff.
14/09/2011 at 14:35 bill says:
They’re pretty much exactly like that – and yet as an old tie-fighter fan myself I could never get into them.
They have the same basic mission structure, and similar controls.
But for some reason I never felt any sense of movement or speed from the WC games… it always felt more like a floating FPS view than flying a ship.
But it’s probably just me, as essentially they’re the same game as X-Wing/Tie-Fighter which i love.
13/09/2011 at 17:57 Hardtarget says:
welp, gog have finally done it, they’ve made me buy a game for the first time in years
now if only they also put up Wing Commander IV my life will be completely
13/09/2011 at 20:45 shoptroll says:
completely what?
I WANT TO KNOW.
13/09/2011 at 21:48 Wulf says:
Complete?
13/09/2011 at 23:13 Drake Sigar says:
I think there’s someone out there assassinating commenters before they can finish their senta-
14/09/2011 at 17:24 Hardtarget says:
hahaha whoops!
meant to just say complete :)
13/09/2011 at 18:24 neolith says:
Oh, the joy!
Anyone know if the game will recognize my old Sidewinder FF?
13/09/2011 at 19:30 Wooly Wugga Wugga says:
I’e played 1,2 and three with bot a Logitec Wingman extreme and a Saitek X51 so they all play nicely with different modern joysticks.
13/09/2011 at 19:37 neolith says:
Thanks for the info, Wooly Wugga Wugga! :) Missing support for modern joysticks would’ve been the only thing possibly keeping me from buying the games.
I’ll be in space kicking some furry ass now.
13/09/2011 at 23:17 LionsPhil says:
I believe these all run under DOSBox, so it’s basically a question of if Windows supports your joystick, which DOSBox will then pretend to the game is something suitably antique.
Funnily enough that probably rules out anything of the right era, since the gameport is long dead in this barren USB wasteland.
13/09/2011 at 19:12 hjarg says:
I am old and wrinkled and this brings a tear of joy into my eye.
Now, i remember having being a proud owner of a joystick about 10 years or so ago… perhaps it’s time to go shopping again.
13/09/2011 at 21:43 Wulf says:
I’m oddly tempted, too.
I remember my old Saitek and Throttle, and how I still had things mapped to the keyboard. For my slightly younger self it was the closest thing I had to being in an actual spaceship.
I wouldn’t know a good joystick from a bad joystick these days, though.
13/09/2011 at 19:45 Daiv says:
Wing Commander III & IV, Freespace 2 (+ FSOpen updates) and a joystick. Enjoy the rest of your month without human contact.
13/09/2011 at 20:50 Hodge says:
Astonishingly, not the worst thing Hamill has done.
Like John, my memories of this consist entirely of watching an older cousin play it, and it’s only the FMV stuff I remember. That and one of his mates who couldn’t quite grasp that it wasn’t related to Star Wars and kept asking if it was set after Jedi.
About six years ago I saw a complete mint copy of the fourth game in an op shop for AU$5. I didn’t buy it for some reason (possibly I didn’t have any cash on me), but I went back a couple of days later and it was gone. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.
13/09/2011 at 23:15 LionsPhil says:
Wow. Thank you for drawing the existence of that film to my attention.
13/09/2011 at 21:40 Wulf says:
I’m still convinced that Hobbes wouldn’t have betrayed everyone willingly. What did they have on you, Hobbes? Some of the Kilrathi weren’t always the most honourable people, so blackmail or holding remnants of his family hostage wouldn’t be out of the question. Poor sod.
Also, I still fondly remember the cloaking device. And how crazy it drove one of the important opposing Kilrathi characters.
“EYE OF THE TIGER, WHERE ARE YOU? I CANNOT SEE YOU. SHOW YOURSELF, COWARD!“
13/09/2011 at 21:52 mod the world says:
hey wulf, don’t spoil it for the younglings!
13/09/2011 at 22:00 Wulf says:
Oh, right… whoops. >_>; But hey, if this were marketing, that would be incentive to play it. It was terribly cheesy but it was terribly cheesy in wonderful ’90s sorts of ways that were so, so funny.
I kind of like how the bad humour crossed over into other Origin games too, though. Does anyone remember the crashed ship in Ultima VII? Apparently the Kilrathi are as poor at piloting ships as the Qularr. The Qularr just crash into any planet broadcasting a radio signal. Not sure what does it for the Kilrathi, though. Probably the smell of delicious meat.
Poor, silly Kilrathi. But I still loved them, no matter how ludicrous or ineffectual they were as foes.
13/09/2011 at 22:53 Hyperion says:
Still waiting for them to add Strike Commander, the CD version (can dream).
Dont know about Wing Commander 3 and 4. I’ve only played WC1 but the “hollywood backed story” only reminds me of scifi Rick Berman/Babylon 5/Battlestar Galactica/Stargate soap opera junk.
I hope the story in the games isnt like that stuff.
Cant complain about the cast though. But Hamill was at the top of his game in the 90s. Especially villains like Adrian Ripburger from Full Throttle and the Joker from Batman.
Also, its great playing Origin games that doesnt require having to edit half of DOS to get everything to work right.
14/09/2011 at 02:39 matrices says:
Why did this guy and whoever played Princess Leia age so terribly in real life? It was so jarring to see their faces even 20 years later, I was like, damn…
14/09/2011 at 02:47 Vinraith says:
In Mark Hamill’s case it probably had a lot to do with the motorcycle accident (which is why he looks so different in Empire and Jedi, respectively). It’s a real shame, too, he’s a better acting talent than he’s usually given credit for. Some of his voice work, which is sadly almost all he can get anymore, is just outstanding.
In Carrie Fischer’s case, well, it’s hard to take care of yourself when you’re bipolar, and I’m guessing the drug problems took a pretty serious toll as well. Again, it’s a damn shame, the woman deserves a lifetime pass for that bit in the Blues Brothers alone.
14/09/2011 at 11:11 LionsPhil says:
“Oh, sir-r-r-r, that’s horrible. I am not waiting for you to die.”
14/09/2011 at 08:06 olemars says:
Good god, the graphics seemed so much better in the 90′s.