It is recommended to read Freedom Flight novel, which has more of Hobbes' story. However, I don’t recommend "Hobbes" stories in other works of this IP because I don’t think they have the same Hobbes.
I remember being SO EXCITED when this came out, since I loved the first one so much. I had a 386/33 with a Gravis Joystick and I was READY. I didn't have a CD-ROM at the time, though, so it came on about a million floppy disks. So many great memories. The cinematic quality of the cutscenes was really unprecedented for computer games at the time. Can't wait for your next video!
Although not perfect, WC2 lays out a good sci-fi war story pattern. Many of the characters have very good first half of arcs. I think the WC2 sequel story would have been fantastic if it could continue at this pace.
Just take your time. Your video is EXCELLENT, to say at least. I went through EACH of them, FULL, even when it takes day for me to watch it through once, I still managed that. These are my memories and you're bringing them back. You're doing excellent work here and thank you very much.
OUR memories my friend. OUR memories. This video is something special, I'm grateful for it. We were lucky to have lived through this very special time in gaming.
I remember this like it was yesterday. WC was my fav childhood game series. My Dad would take me to the store to buy the latest release and we'd play it together. When WC2 installed and the Emperor actually spoke, we thought it was the coolest thing. If memory serves, we were playing on a Packard Bell. WC3 was the first game we had that came on CD, and you could buy either an enormous box of 3 1/2 floppies, or the CD version. Good times man.
Remember playing Starlancer on the Dreamcast back in 2001. It was a good conversation but about half thru I got pretty sick of the games and it's escort missions. Just wasn't as interesting or fun as something like Wing Commander 3 or 4.
Easily stoked for the former, am curious on the central example, am apathetic to the latter because its still woefully abandonware sequel Freelancer is better.
So many memories. I was 13 years old, had my first 386 DX and jumped into this story and game. Loved every bit about it. Especially since I was a huge fan of the old Battle Star Series and loved the Vipers….
As an old gamer, Wing Commander II was possibly the first time that a PC game impressed me in terms of cinematic storytelling with both visuals and speech. Yes, the story itself wasn't that deep in the long run, but they were successful at making me feel like watching a movie or TV show. Randomly crashing to MS DOS right after getting shot down was definitely a thing back then, so I hear you. Incidentally, I went back to play the original Wing Commander a few years later and I enjoyed how it did more to make you feel like a pilot, even if the actual narrative was very barebones. You could argue it had a better sense of atmosphere than the sequel. I'm very thankful for your historical retrospective and documentation efforts too, because I never knew about the original script.
I played this when I got the Kilrathi Saga set. I dont remember having the problems you did but I did play this on Windows XP when it was new. I used a Joystick Throttle stick and it all ran just fine. Best guess was it was all on, at the time, 'normal' hardware. Great video, so glad your continuing this
@1:20:00 or so, I've noticed you don't do a lot of rolling in these clips. From my recollection, the key to utilizing the wider-spread cannons was rolling to align with the wide axis of the targets.
Love these vids! I bought & played these games when they came out in the early 90s. Yes using a joy stick was the key to improve targeting. Like others I played WC1 only using a keyboard which was not ideal. I didn't have internet so there were no helpful tips or cheats - Just slogging through each level failing most of the time, but learning new strategies. So frustrating & hard yet exhilarating when successful. I vote for you doing a video for Wing Commander 3. It was the first game in that era (that I'm aware of) with video cut scenes & real actors. I was blown away at how cool that was at the time. All I wanted to do was play WC at every opportunity. Thanks for the videos!
Completed every WC game, I was 11 in 1990 and grew up on Chris Roberts' games from wing commander to freespace. I hope i live long enough to see Star Citizen actually be released.
You may not have been as skilled with the joystick immediately, but your movements were much more precise, even in that first mission footage. I was able to pick it out easily.
Awesome to see another WC video from you. Great work once again! I grew up playing WC 1, 2 & Privateer on my 486 with keyboard and cheap gameport joysticks. I've always liked using joysticks for arcade flight games and mech sims, but I didn't always have / have a working one, so I played my share keyboard only too. Gamepads and thumbsticks just feel like wrong to me when it comes to flight and/or sim games (really felt this trying out Ace Combat) but for games like WC and Crimson Skies, I think it really does just come down to what the player is most comfortable with using. Definitely a classic WC thing to have such imprecise turning regardless of input method though!
About wingman death, they will always live, while they have a story element left. After their story is finished abs you can still fly with them, they won't eject.
Been looking forward to this one! I don't have much experience with Wing Commander 2, as I spent more time trying to get through the first game when I started playing the series. I'm encouraged it another shot after watching this retrospective. I'm glad your brought up the original screenplay when discussing the plot, as well as the reality of making a game story work when there are so many moving parts. I think it's an aspect of game development that's often overlooked when people complain about the linearity and restrictions of "cinematic" games. It certainly explains the messiness of Wing Commander 2's story, seeing how much has cut or changed.
I like how the leader of the Kilrathi's big speech to the current heir to the throne is basically an admission that the entire family is made up of stupid people, and that he's only allowing him to go into combat because if he gets himself killed, the throne will pass on to someone more capable and less impulsive. That, coupled with the fact that the heir is apparently motivated by his cousins teasing him (I know that you could interpret it as him feeling he doesn't measure up to them and their achievements, but it's much funnier to me if the cousins are all mocking and belittling the person who is going to inherit the throne at a family get together and he runs away, teary eyed, to go see his granddad and beg him to be allowed to pilot a spaceship so he can show the other boys that he's just as hard as they are), really doesn't paint the most threatening image 😂
Here's how I see these parts: The emperor was warning his grandson: "Don't think you can act recklessly just because you're my direct descendant." Thrakhath was trying to establish his own authority as quickly as possible, but the Emperor instinctively resented this, seeing it as a threat to his throne.
It's so interesting seeing the perspective of someone who is younger than me and didn't grow up during that time. For context, I was born in the late 70s and my teens started at the beginning of the 90s. Back then, having a joystick was commonplace. Everyone had them since so many games used them. I had a ZX Spectum 128, then an Amiga 500, followed by an Amiga 1200 before getting into the PlayStation consoles. I remember playing Wing Commander on my friend's PC using an analogue joystick. Back in those days the analogue joysticks on PCs were pretty terrible. They had no automatic centralisation for the stick and they had trim sliders on the X and Y axis. You had to calibrate them with every game, but since flight simulators were so popular back then everyone had at least one or more joysticks. The most popular were made by Quickshot or Zip Stick. They later came out with microswitched versions which handle and sound a lot like arcade sticks these days. I bought Wing Commander 1 for my Amiga 500 which I initially played from the floppy disks and it ran ok, I never had any issues with aiming and hitting the Kilrathi fighters (a criticism you made in the WC1 video I just re-watched) but that's most likely because playing it at the time, on a system at the time using a control method it was designed to be played with probably did factor into that a lot. I definitely played it to death, but when I got the Amiga 1200 and was able to install it on the HDD and it was able to make use of all that extra RAM the game ran so much better (like you said, game speed and frame rate seemed to be tied together). I was very sad that Wing Commander 2 and 3 weren't released on the Amiga as by this point I was thoroughly invested in the franchise, so enjoyed playing WC2 on my friend's PC but that didn't happen all that often. I didn't get back into the franchise until they released the later ones ported to PlayStation that featured FMV with Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies and many others. I have very fond memories of these games through my teenage years and it's so nice to see someone revisiting them and seeing it through your lens.
Enjoyed this trip down memory lane. When I was teenager I used to replay WC1 & 2 over and over again. What I wouldn't give to see these games re-made in the Freelancer engine.
37:05 Ooooooh yes, taking control of the turrets was so much fun in a Broadsword. No light fighter could ever sneak up on me! Unfortunately, turrets were never again this much fun in the series.
The joystick thing reminded me of my experiences trying FreeSpace 2 with a flight stick. I have played FreeSpace 2 with keyboard only for over 20 years, and every time I tried to use a flight stick the amount of skill I would have to develop just to make back my skills on the keyboard were forbidding. Even when I got into flight sims, it was still forbidding because none of the intuitions you develop about how a stick works and its relationship to the machine carry over to "steering" what is effectively a floating camera with no concepts of control authority, energy management (not in the sense of powering your ship's systems but rather treating its momentum as a resource that must be guarded and not wasted on willy-nilly, futile maneuvers), performance envelopes, or stall characteristics. Jerking a stick all the way to its detents, constantly, every maneuver feels extremely unnatural after learning how to feel out a plane's limits and maneuver using subtle, gradual inputs in a flight simulator. If anything, the joystick makes the limitations of the whole space sim format created by Wing Commander more apparent, casting a harsh and revealing light over how little physicality the spaceships have. There is no sense of simulated mechanical sympathy you get after an hour or two practicing with a plane in a flight sim. There is no need to even practice a ship at all because they all fly the same way. As for the Rapier vs. Jalkehi, plug in their numbers into a 3D engine and the Rapier is completely, *overwhelmingly* superior. Both in WC Standoff on the Prophecy engine and in my mod projects on the FreeSpace engine (which alas never came to proper fruition) the Rapier is incredibly nimble and difficult to hit, while the Jalkehi is a very slow, very large, very ponderous target. In fact all of the Kilrathi fighters in WC2, if using their printed stats, stack up extremely poorly in a 3D engine compared to not only their Confederation counterparts, but sometimes even their own WC1 predecessors. The Dralthi II for instance, exceeds the capabilities of the Drakhri in almost every way, and aside from the turret the Jalkehi is generally inferior to the Jalthi and Gratha.
As a very strong proponent of 'PCMR' (largely, from growing up on games like WingCommander, MechWarrior, Doom, etc.), your commentary on 'learned intuition' of control/input devices rings-true and gives me a newfound respect for skilled 'console kiddies'. Speaking towards the massive difference between 'classic space combat sims' and modern Air Combat Simulations: Personally, I look forward to post-Star Citizen efforts from smaller devs and individuals. There's a lot (figuratively) 'on the shelf' to make a quasi-newtonian Space Combat Simulation game Those same 'flight mechanics' and 'player-connection to the (virtualized) -craft' have been well-developed, for 'flight'. We're merely waiting for some intrepid minds that have watched The Expanse *and* grown up on Wing Commander, FreeSpace, etc. to re-imagine and re-apply those mechanics. After all, toolsets like UE make these monumental tasks much more manageable.
This is for the algorithm gods! Good to see this project still going strong. Cant wait to see what the next title is going to be. Doing these large projects takes time. Other people who actually cover long formate projects like this take a fair amount of time. These projects aren't quick to make.
I was soo happy too see this pop up. I love the idea of this series and you're doing a marvelous job. Can't wait for the next one. If you need to do a short one, there's always Wing Commander Academy.
They did charge for the voice pack but I recall some sound cards coming with it as part of the packed in software to try out the new product. It’s crazy to think of these days but before gamers were obsessed with crazy expensive GPUs, we had to beg our parents to buy us a sound card for the family PC. This changed a couple years later with the rise of the CD-ROM, as it was very common for the CD-ROM controller card to also be a sound card. Within a couple years every PC had one but in 92 it was a lot rarer
Great video. I never played Wing Commander 2 when I was a kid. After beating the first Wing Commander my parents were going to buy Wing Commander 2, but we saw X-Wing and decided to buy that instead. I never regretted the choice but after watching this video, I think it would have been a pretty fun game to play back in the day.
I've been playing these sorts of games since TIE Fighter and I've had a few different flight sticks over the years. Hands down my favorite control scheme for any of these games has been using the Dualshock 4 on the PS4 version of Elite Dangerous. I could move exactly how I wanted, access every function I wanted and even look anywhere I wanted all with the comfort of a lightweight game pad. For me, that's the new standard I compare any other space sim control scheme to.
5:40 BBS systems you could dial into to get files and such were a thing at the time so you could get patches that way, but the voice pack probably would not have been a download due to the file size. Though it is hard to say. 1991 is right in the middle of the shareware boom, and bbs owners are not too picky about copyright infringement. Copyrighted software or ways to remove copy protection are pretty easy to find on them.
YAY! this came out. Glad to see it. The joystick to gamepad comparison was interesting Nice to see that either way works well enough. Sorry i wasn't able to fund the entire flight stick then.
The series turned more into a movie as it went on and became a less satisfying space sim. I always preferred the approach that the first game took: you're just a regular pilot hearing the events of a war relayed to you as you work through a campaign that dynamically changes based on your performance. All the sequels were almost completely linear and scripted. I think WC2 was the last one where the space sim part was still satisfying. I don't think the torpedo runs were a terribly fun mechanic though. To this day, the ONLY other space sim I ever played with a campaign that dynamic was Colony Wars for the Playstation 1. I definitely recommend hunting that down if you're interested in the genre.
Ever since I started this channel there's been a sharp decline in the number of space sims I play "on my own time" if that makes sense, but I would like to make a video featuring your mod someday.
Oh hey! Huzzzah! I just had a thought the this video would finally be done and uploaded. Always a nice treat when long format content on youtube finally drops!
Hey there, I just wanted to ask -- have you ever tried DOSBox's key mapper? If you already mentioned it and I missed it, don't mind me. It's pretty fully featured and should hopefully give you less setup issues than Joystick Gremlin did. You just need to be sure to set your joystick type in DOSBox's configuration file to 'fcs', that'll give you access to the hat/D-Pad, along with the rest of the buttons. I know you already found a joystick, but for me, personally, I always enjoyed the Extreme 3D Pro Joystick -- you can pick one up for about $40, and it's nice and fairly compact, complete with its own little throttle at the base of the device. If you're enjoying your current setup, that's great, too, but I'd feel remiss not to mention it. Excellent video, can't wait to see how you like the third game!
I messed around with it, but it's a bit limited for my needs. Something like Joystick Gremlin is required to, among other things, synthesize the separate stick and throttle into a single input device. Otherwise many old games and DOSBox itself won't accept input from both at once.
I'd want to get all the most popular "genre greats" out of the way before getting into the more esoteric stuff, but once that's done with, mods and fan games are fully on the table as far as I'm concerned.
Actually as far as I know Stealth is actually outrageous difficult to pull off in space, because well, ships put off ALOT of heat, there isn't exactly alot of hiding places in space and a variety of other reasons I forget about. So it's not THAT weird people don't believe that a stealth ship is possible. That being said this is a game with alien tigers and a general disregard for newtonian physics so whatever.
I was still in the Army when the first two Wing Commander games came out. I had my 386 PC in my room in the barracks, and I played this in my downtime. The speech pack being sold separately wasn't some hideous crime at that time like Bethesda's horse armor DLC. It was a very new technology having voice acted scenes in home video games. The only others I recall having voice were the arcade games of the late 70s and after (Star Wars (the monochrome one), GORF, Sinistar, Dragon's Lair/Space Ace, etc.). I built my first PC in 1983 at age 11, but it wasn't until 1992 that I actually had state-of-the-art audio with my first Sound Blaster card. I primarily bought it for my Sierra adventure games, and this. Very few games at the time made full use of its capabilities, so buying a speech pack for a game at that point in time wasn't unreasonable. The ultimate audio setup back then was having a Sound Blaster with the Roland MT-32 which produced the best sound experience. Another thing of note is the Kilrathi ship scene at 06:25 is 3D rendered, which was also an emerging technology. The 3D renders in WC2 were among the best examples of it at the time. *Edit* Also, no one with a PC in 1992 was playing a flight sim with the arrow keys on the keyboard. You're thinking too "modern" where everyone has a PC now including the dumbest and laziest people on the planet. The only ones with PCs in 1992 were people who had intelligence, or had money, and just wanted cool "gadgets". If you were playing a flight/space combat sim in 1992, you had a joystick. Period. The Thrustmaster was a favorite budget friendly option, but there were some pretty hardcore joysticks with a separate throttle that would set you back a few hundred bucks in 1992 money. A Thrustmaster was about 50 bucks. Only a complete moron would seriously attempt to play a game like this, or Star Wars: X-Wing with the arrow keys. It's just not happening. I DID attempt to play WC2 with my mouse, but it wasn't as accurate as a joystick, so I stuck with that.
Agreed on your edit. During that era, flight sims, especially space combat flight sims, were prolific, so the flight stick was as heavily used as any other peripheral. I grew up playing the WC, Star Wars, MechWarrior, and real world fighter plane games. Not having a flight stick just wasn't an option through the '90's. Fun fact, these types of games are why I have to play inverted in shooters with a controller. Pushing a stick forward should never shift your aim up. It makes no sense.
I second your edit. I didn’t have a PC then because my family couldn’t afford one, but I had a few friends that did, and they all had the Wing Commander games AND joysticks. I didn’t even know you could play it with a keyboard. The concept would’ve seemed ludicrous. Computer stores like CompUSA at that time had a whole aisle dedicated to joysticks, from $15 budget ones all the way up to the most expensive Thrustmaster had to offer. I agree about the sound, too. The speech pack was incredible, and was, in my teenage mind at least, one of the things that elevated the PC experience above consoles like the SNES and Genesis. But not everyone had a nice sound card. It made sense that the sound pack was separate.
As to the problem of many fighters attacking you at once: You can cheese a large squadron by no locking any particular fighter but rather fire a few shots onto one, maybe tail it if you can but abort and turn towards another after only a few seconds. This takes a lot of patience and makes it harder to use missiles but it works, kinda…
Amazing work! My first WC was part 3 on the 3DO back in the mid nineties and it blew my mind haha. Hopefully I get to see your take but I’ll plant myself down for the duration for whatever is next haha
You could always chapterify your work and make a mega-cut at the end, although that doesn't help if you're worried about being able to edit any point at any time. It would definitely help the algorithim, and seeing your channel name more often helps with retention and subscribe count! Great work as always, love your 3 films!
Brought back some Memories. And I think I can STILL see "holes" in your play. 1. First, you were not using the joystick "pivot" to align ships horizontally on the screen. This is important, you turn faster side to side than up down. 2. Because of this you weren't developing proper slides, which help hit the enemy is their SIDE Shields, this is killing Jakalthi 101, they have WEAK flanks. You want to "coast" by pointing AT them but flying 90 degrees to target. 3. I found a lot of the time using half the guns was better (most sustained fire, and you rarely hit with all of them anyway). Especialy the lasers. 4. I you CAN slide, Sabres are a LOT better. For one thing you CAN boost to a safe distance sometimes. 5. You were trying too hard to pull THROUGH the enemy ship. Better to keep the cursor ahead you miss less. 6. The one time you use all guns is with the stealth dudes. Oh, and the generic name for our hero is "Blair" (as in "blue hair").
I love these videos Dont take it the wrong way i put them on if i need to sleep I think ive seen all of them like 5 times each I get nuce dreams with these
Great video, and well worth the wait too! I agree as well with your complaints about the story not properly conveying people's disdain for Maverick, it kind of reminds me of AC7's "you killed the president" plotline. Both have characters automatically accuse you of being directly responsible for the bad thing that happens despite that in both cases no matter how people interpret it, the worst conclusion they could've actually come up with is gross negligence. Not only that, but also the way the story writes their disdain makes it seem like the characters seem willfully ignorant to an almost annoying degree. The game's still fun and all, and the frustrations with the story can detract from it, but hey, they were breaking new ground and they tried their best. Also, in regards to the joystick, my personal experience with them is that using them with older games isn't all that different from other methods, but once you near to the 2000s the joystick seriously comes in clutch and definitely elevates the experience of the game, at least for me. Anyway, that's enough rambling from me, thanks again for the great vid! PS Don't worry about the others that say you take too long making the videos. It's your passion project, take as long as you want to. And if you're worried about the algorithm, it seems to actually just in general rewards youtubers with long uploads even if it isn't regular, or so says the youtube techpriest i'm familiar with at least.
Speaking of which, can agree that Ace Combat 7 is a weaker game than the Holy Trinity of 04: Shattered Skies, 5: The Unsung War, and Zero: The Belkan War, which sorely need multiplatform remasters.
I was wondering just the other day when we'd see a sequel to the Wing Commander retrospective, and lo and behold, here it is! Thanks! your retrospectives are really informative and interesting! May I live to see a Strike Commander retrospective one day. :)
About "the sci-fi last resort things", in original Macross anime, humanity is overwhelmed by sudden alien invasion, immediately starting to loose, trying to use repaired alien super ship, it's brokes down and then they trying to use ship's teleportation device and it's makes the whole situation so much worse. And this is only the begging of the series!
And then it culminates with... nah, I'm not gonna spoil that tragedy. Either way, Macross is one surprisingly gripping expanded storyline (at least, excluding II and Delta), and it really sucked that we got Robotech back in the day instead.
Sabre and Rapier are good examples of why you don't want all your guns active all the time, per se. I had... a very different experience, particularly with the former. Meanwhile, the Broadsword was my bane, as a mobility focused pilot who def afterburner slid a lot. Thank God for the Crossbow in the expac.
First boxed PC game I owned, 4 floppy disks, ahh the nostalgia :) And yeah, didn't have a SoundBlaster so I played with farts for explosions and no music or dialogue xD Also played with keyboard input and the biggest hurdle was that you had to stop turning to shoot as keyboard wouldn't accept multiple keys pressed at the same time, the final bossfight was really annoying because of that. Also regarding flak I've found that rolling through the attack run seems to mitigate some of the damage. But since so many years have passed can't tell if it was true or just confirmation bias on my part.
Still have Wing Commander II, even the Voice Pack. I had a top notch PC at that time, with CH Joystick, and Sound Blaster Card. And I still remember what I had to do to assign the IRQs for that and how to tweak DOS to get the games running smooth. I'm waiting for your take on WingCommander : Privateer.
I love your videos. I’m hoping you do a deep dive on WC3/4/prophecy and videos for Tie Fighter/XWvsTF/XWA. Top-notch coverage with the videos you have made up to this point.
Really hope he sings lots of praises for TIE Fighter. Will expect him to take justifiable potshots against the multiplayer-centric XWvsTF and the obvious beta (even with the Upgrade mod) that is X-Wing Alliance, as an aside. Say, where's Wing Commander: Privateer?
It's funny how I never played WC3 at all back in the day, despite getting WC4 eventually and enjoying it very much, so I'm looking forward to that video.
When I first played WC2, decades ago, I actually did not realize that there were story-related interludes behind one of the airlocks. I thought that the entire narrative was conveyed through the missions, pre-mission conversations, and in-mission cutscenes. That I still had no problems following the story and didn’t even notice that part of it was missing just reinforced how extraneous the airlock segments were. 20:50. Re: the Ferret. I was pleasantly surprised by how capable it was. Certainly, it was way better than the Hornet and Scimitar from the first game. For one thing, its “Gatling mass drivers” fired extremely rapidly and didn’t take long to recharge. It could pump out such a stream of projectiles that even heavy fighters like the Jalkehi could be easily downed with a well placed volley. In fact, I found the Ferret more deadly against Jalkehi than Sartha and Drakhri just because of how easily you could hit the heavier ship. Flying a Super Ferret against heavy fighters, in Special Operations, didn’t feel nearly as onerous as flying a Hornet against a Gratha, in Secret Missions. The Ferret was at least a glass cannon. Can’t take hits but can really dish out the damage. A later game using the same engine as WC2, Wing Commander Academy, allowed you to select any Terran ship from WC2 and fly it against increasingly powerful waves of enemies. One of my highest scores in that game was in a Ferret, surpassed only by my performance in a Broadsword. I think a large part of what made those ships so effective was the increased rate of fire of mass drivers.
My introduction to the world of flight sims was with elite dangerous and I got REALLY into it and bought a good HOTAS that cost ~$200usd and a VR headset. I got absolutely addicted and put over 3k hours into the game. The peripherals for games like this are an absolute gamechanger but there is definitely a learning curve lol
I'm pretty sure the huge joystick dead zone which affects WC1, WC2 and Privateer is a problem related to dosbox or modern hardware. I do not remember the controls being so laggy and imprecise when I originally played it back in the day. Maybe someone with original hardware could confirm. The main problem I remember back then was cheap joysticks drifting and needing to be recalibrated often.
@@tetsatou2815 I've only ever needed a replacement twice over like, 2 decades, and I do a LOT of flight sims on the couch with my husband on laptop. Trusty little thing, beat the game above with it! i get the HOTAS love though, needed one for Star Wars Squadrons. Some games just call for it.
Wing Commander 2 came out a year after...I didn't expect that for a Chris Robert game....
"He had minimal involvement"
Ah that explain it.
Guy's the space flight combat sim Peter Molyneux, I'll give him that.
@@michaelandreipalon359 Peter at least released a game.
@@BenCarverGraphicsOh, yes, the first Fable. Really good game despite the occasional quirks.
It's cocaine!
Hobbs, the Kilrathy defector is named HOBBS! I just got that 40+ years later! If I ever play wing Commander again, my callsign is going to be Calvin.
It is recommended to read Freedom Flight novel, which has more of Hobbes' story.
However, I don’t recommend "Hobbes" stories in other works of this IP because I don’t think they have the same Hobbes.
Wow. It's been over 20 years and I NEVER made that connection. I was obsessed with Garfield at that age...
Great documentary and insight into the Game. Thank you!
I really like how you weave the gameplay and story analysis together over the course of the video. It's really engaging. Keep up the great work!
I remember being SO EXCITED when this came out, since I loved the first one so much. I had a 386/33 with a Gravis Joystick and I was READY. I didn't have a CD-ROM at the time, though, so it came on about a million floppy disks. So many great memories. The cinematic quality of the cutscenes was really unprecedented for computer games at the time. Can't wait for your next video!
I wasn’t sure this day would come! Congratulations on the newest video. Can’t wait to sit down and watch it. WCII is an absolute favorite of mine.
Although not perfect, WC2 lays out a good sci-fi war story pattern. Many of the characters have very good first half of arcs. I think the WC2 sequel story would have been fantastic if it could continue at this pace.
Just take your time. Your video is EXCELLENT, to say at least. I went through EACH of them, FULL, even when it takes day for me to watch it through once, I still managed that. These are my memories and you're bringing them back. You're doing excellent work here and thank you very much.
OUR memories my friend. OUR memories. This video is something special, I'm grateful for it. We were lucky to have lived through this very special time in gaming.
I remember this like it was yesterday. WC was my fav childhood game series. My Dad would take me to the store to buy the latest release and we'd play it together. When WC2 installed and the Emperor actually spoke, we thought it was the coolest thing. If memory serves, we were playing on a Packard Bell. WC3 was the first game we had that came on CD, and you could buy either an enormous box of 3 1/2 floppies, or the CD version. Good times man.
Can't wait for Freespace, Strike Commander and Starlancer!
What about Privateer?
@@superhakujin What about it?
Awww yeah
Remember playing Starlancer on the Dreamcast back in 2001. It was a good conversation but about half thru I got pretty sick of the games and it's escort missions. Just wasn't as interesting or fun as something like Wing Commander 3 or 4.
Easily stoked for the former, am curious on the central example, am apathetic to the latter because its still woefully abandonware sequel Freelancer is better.
150+ minutes of unparalleled nostalgia?
You rule
So many memories. I was 13 years old, had my first 386 DX and jumped into this story and game. Loved every bit about it. Especially since I was a huge fan of the old Battle Star Series and loved the Vipers….
Back when you could pilot rather well with a mouse (at least, certainly in Tie Fighter!)
This was the one I had as a kid, where my love of Wing Commander comes from.
Liking and commenting for the algorithm because I want this channel to remain alive until he gets to Tachyon: The Fringe
Oh, same!
My engagement comment for Tachyon as well.
Awesome that there's still people making videos about these old DOS games!
Amazing channel, hope you reach 100k+ subs
Thank you for this video. I loved the WC games when I was a kid.
As an old gamer, Wing Commander II was possibly the first time that a PC game impressed me in terms of cinematic storytelling with both visuals and speech. Yes, the story itself wasn't that deep in the long run, but they were successful at making me feel like watching a movie or TV show. Randomly crashing to MS DOS right after getting shot down was definitely a thing back then, so I hear you. Incidentally, I went back to play the original Wing Commander a few years later and I enjoyed how it did more to make you feel like a pilot, even if the actual narrative was very barebones. You could argue it had a better sense of atmosphere than the sequel. I'm very thankful for your historical retrospective and documentation efforts too, because I never knew about the original script.
I hope one day you do Strike Commander. Such an awesome game too.
Wonder if he'll say if the game's a noticeably marked improvement over the older WC games?
I played this when I got the Kilrathi Saga set. I dont remember having the problems you did but I did play this on Windows XP when it was new. I used a Joystick Throttle stick and it all ran just fine. Best guess was it was all on, at the time, 'normal' hardware. Great video, so glad your continuing this
@1:20:00 or so, I've noticed you don't do a lot of rolling in these clips. From my recollection, the key to utilizing the wider-spread cannons was rolling to align with the wide axis of the targets.
Love these vids! I bought & played these games when they came out in the early 90s. Yes using a joy stick was the key to improve targeting. Like others I played WC1 only using a keyboard which was not ideal. I didn't have internet so there were no helpful tips or cheats - Just slogging through each level failing most of the time, but learning new strategies. So frustrating & hard yet exhilarating when successful.
I vote for you doing a video for Wing Commander 3. It was the first game in that era (that I'm aware of) with video cut scenes & real actors. I was blown away at how cool that was at the time. All I wanted to do was play WC at every opportunity. Thanks for the videos!
Completed every WC game, I was 11 in 1990 and grew up on Chris Roberts' games from wing commander to freespace. I hope i live long enough to see Star Citizen actually be released.
Your grandchildren will thank you for your pledge 🤣
We are the same age. Played all these games--even the Secret Ops 1 and 2. Good stuff!
Great show :) Cant wait for 3-5 ^^
You may not have been as skilled with the joystick immediately, but your movements were much more precise, even in that first mission footage.
I was able to pick it out easily.
Awesome to see another WC video from you. Great work once again!
I grew up playing WC 1, 2 & Privateer on my 486 with keyboard and cheap gameport joysticks. I've always liked using joysticks for arcade flight games and mech sims, but I didn't always have / have a working one, so I played my share keyboard only too. Gamepads and thumbsticks just feel like wrong to me when it comes to flight and/or sim games (really felt this trying out Ace Combat) but for games like WC and Crimson Skies, I think it really does just come down to what the player is most comfortable with using. Definitely a classic WC thing to have such imprecise turning regardless of input method though!
About wingman death, they will always live, while they have a story element left. After their story is finished abs you can still fly with them, they won't eject.
Been looking forward to this one! I don't have much experience with Wing Commander 2, as I spent more time trying to get through the first game when I started playing the series. I'm encouraged it another shot after watching this retrospective.
I'm glad your brought up the original screenplay when discussing the plot, as well as the reality of making a game story work when there are so many moving parts. I think it's an aspect of game development that's often overlooked when people complain about the linearity and restrictions of "cinematic" games. It certainly explains the messiness of Wing Commander 2's story, seeing how much has cut or changed.
Glad you're continuing with this. I hope this video also does well, tho I hear the Algorithm doesn't like long breaks between videos.
I like how the leader of the Kilrathi's big speech to the current heir to the throne is basically an admission that the entire family is made up of stupid people, and that he's only allowing him to go into combat because if he gets himself killed, the throne will pass on to someone more capable and less impulsive.
That, coupled with the fact that the heir is apparently motivated by his cousins teasing him (I know that you could interpret it as him feeling he doesn't measure up to them and their achievements, but it's much funnier to me if the cousins are all mocking and belittling the person who is going to inherit the throne at a family get together and he runs away, teary eyed, to go see his granddad and beg him to be allowed to pilot a spaceship so he can show the other boys that he's just as hard as they are), really doesn't paint the most threatening image 😂
Here's how I see these parts:
The emperor was warning his grandson: "Don't think you can act recklessly just because you're my direct descendant." Thrakhath was trying to establish his own authority as quickly as possible, but the Emperor instinctively resented this, seeing it as a threat to his throne.
Love your laid back style. another great watch!
It's so interesting seeing the perspective of someone who is younger than me and didn't grow up during that time. For context, I was born in the late 70s and my teens started at the beginning of the 90s. Back then, having a joystick was commonplace. Everyone had them since so many games used them. I had a ZX Spectum 128, then an Amiga 500, followed by an Amiga 1200 before getting into the PlayStation consoles. I remember playing Wing Commander on my friend's PC using an analogue joystick. Back in those days the analogue joysticks on PCs were pretty terrible. They had no automatic centralisation for the stick and they had trim sliders on the X and Y axis. You had to calibrate them with every game, but since flight simulators were so popular back then everyone had at least one or more joysticks. The most popular were made by Quickshot or Zip Stick. They later came out with microswitched versions which handle and sound a lot like arcade sticks these days. I bought Wing Commander 1 for my Amiga 500 which I initially played from the floppy disks and it ran ok, I never had any issues with aiming and hitting the Kilrathi fighters (a criticism you made in the WC1 video I just re-watched) but that's most likely because playing it at the time, on a system at the time using a control method it was designed to be played with probably did factor into that a lot. I definitely played it to death, but when I got the Amiga 1200 and was able to install it on the HDD and it was able to make use of all that extra RAM the game ran so much better (like you said, game speed and frame rate seemed to be tied together). I was very sad that Wing Commander 2 and 3 weren't released on the Amiga as by this point I was thoroughly invested in the franchise, so enjoyed playing WC2 on my friend's PC but that didn't happen all that often. I didn't get back into the franchise until they released the later ones ported to PlayStation that featured FMV with Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies and many others. I have very fond memories of these games through my teenage years and it's so nice to see someone revisiting them and seeing it through your lens.
Are you going to do a Wing Commander 3 and 4 videos as well?
Provided I get that far, yes!
❤❤❤ I hope the Wing Commander III video is five hours long (because two of those five hours will be dedicated to the Kilrathi puppets) ❤❤❤
Enjoyed this trip down memory lane. When I was teenager I used to replay WC1 & 2 over and over again. What I wouldn't give to see these games re-made in the Freelancer engine.
Remastering is fine. Remaking would ruin the nuance.
37:05 Ooooooh yes, taking control of the turrets was so much fun in a Broadsword. No light fighter could ever sneak up on me! Unfortunately, turrets were never again this much fun in the series.
I barely touched them in the other games.
The joystick thing reminded me of my experiences trying FreeSpace 2 with a flight stick. I have played FreeSpace 2 with keyboard only for over 20 years, and every time I tried to use a flight stick the amount of skill I would have to develop just to make back my skills on the keyboard were forbidding. Even when I got into flight sims, it was still forbidding because none of the intuitions you develop about how a stick works and its relationship to the machine carry over to "steering" what is effectively a floating camera with no concepts of control authority, energy management (not in the sense of powering your ship's systems but rather treating its momentum as a resource that must be guarded and not wasted on willy-nilly, futile maneuvers), performance envelopes, or stall characteristics. Jerking a stick all the way to its detents, constantly, every maneuver feels extremely unnatural after learning how to feel out a plane's limits and maneuver using subtle, gradual inputs in a flight simulator. If anything, the joystick makes the limitations of the whole space sim format created by Wing Commander more apparent, casting a harsh and revealing light over how little physicality the spaceships have. There is no sense of simulated mechanical sympathy you get after an hour or two practicing with a plane in a flight sim. There is no need to even practice a ship at all because they all fly the same way.
As for the Rapier vs. Jalkehi, plug in their numbers into a 3D engine and the Rapier is completely, *overwhelmingly* superior. Both in WC Standoff on the Prophecy engine and in my mod projects on the FreeSpace engine (which alas never came to proper fruition) the Rapier is incredibly nimble and difficult to hit, while the Jalkehi is a very slow, very large, very ponderous target. In fact all of the Kilrathi fighters in WC2, if using their printed stats, stack up extremely poorly in a 3D engine compared to not only their Confederation counterparts, but sometimes even their own WC1 predecessors. The Dralthi II for instance, exceeds the capabilities of the Drakhri in almost every way, and aside from the turret the Jalkehi is generally inferior to the Jalthi and Gratha.
As a very strong proponent of 'PCMR' (largely, from growing up on games like WingCommander, MechWarrior, Doom, etc.), your commentary on 'learned intuition' of control/input devices rings-true and gives me a newfound respect for skilled 'console kiddies'.
Speaking towards the massive difference between 'classic space combat sims' and modern Air Combat Simulations:
Personally, I look forward to post-Star Citizen efforts from smaller devs and individuals. There's a lot (figuratively) 'on the shelf' to make a quasi-newtonian Space Combat Simulation game
Those same 'flight mechanics' and 'player-connection to the (virtualized) -craft' have been well-developed, for 'flight'. We're merely waiting for some intrepid minds that have watched The Expanse *and* grown up on Wing Commander, FreeSpace, etc. to re-imagine and re-apply those mechanics.
After all, toolsets like UE make these monumental tasks much more manageable.
This is for the algorithm gods! Good to see this project still going strong. Cant wait to see what the next title is going to be. Doing these large projects takes time. Other people who actually cover long formate projects like this take a fair amount of time. These projects aren't quick to make.
I was soo happy too see this pop up. I love the idea of this series and you're doing a marvelous job. Can't wait for the next one. If you need to do a short one, there's always Wing Commander Academy.
Lets gooooooo! Been waiting on this since episode 1 was a few weeks old.
They did charge for the voice pack but I recall some sound cards coming with it as part of the packed in software to try out the new product. It’s crazy to think of these days but before gamers were obsessed with crazy expensive GPUs, we had to beg our parents to buy us a sound card for the family PC.
This changed a couple years later with the rise of the CD-ROM, as it was very common for the CD-ROM controller card to also be a sound card. Within a couple years every PC had one but in 92 it was a lot rarer
Great video. I never played Wing Commander 2 when I was a kid. After beating the first Wing Commander my parents were going to buy Wing Commander 2, but we saw X-Wing and decided to buy that instead. I never regretted the choice but after watching this video, I think it would have been a pretty fun game to play back in the day.
Can agree that buying X-Wing instead is the better choice. Still, TIE Fighter beats it by many, many margins.
Didn’t remember the swagger of Paladin’s outfit from back in the time I played the game. This rivals the Jake Sisko outfits of early DS9 😂.
Return of the King
I've been playing these sorts of games since TIE Fighter and I've had a few different flight sticks over the years. Hands down my favorite control scheme for any of these games has been using the Dualshock 4 on the PS4 version of Elite Dangerous. I could move exactly how I wanted, access every function I wanted and even look anywhere I wanted all with the comfort of a lightweight game pad. For me, that's the new standard I compare any other space sim control scheme to.
I did not see the Postmasters comment coming. Well done sir for memorialising that tragedy in your video
5:40 BBS systems you could dial into to get files and such were a thing at the time so you could get patches that way, but the voice pack probably would not have been a download due to the file size. Though it is hard to say. 1991 is right in the middle of the shareware boom, and bbs owners are not too picky about copyright infringement. Copyrighted software or ways to remove copy protection are pretty easy to find on them.
YAY! this came out. Glad to see it. The joystick to gamepad comparison was interesting Nice to see that either way works well enough. Sorry i wasn't able to fund the entire flight stick then.
The series turned more into a movie as it went on and became a less satisfying space sim. I always preferred the approach that the first game took: you're just a regular pilot hearing the events of a war relayed to you as you work through a campaign that dynamically changes based on your performance. All the sequels were almost completely linear and scripted. I think WC2 was the last one where the space sim part was still satisfying. I don't think the torpedo runs were a terribly fun mechanic though.
To this day, the ONLY other space sim I ever played with a campaign that dynamic was Colony Wars for the Playstation 1. I definitely recommend hunting that down if you're interested in the genre.
I love your videos and their quality makes the wait worth it for me.
Can't wait to go through this banger, much love
If you ever get around to it. Give our project from 2012 (Wing Commander Saga: Darkest Dawn) a go and tell me how you liked our gameplay and story :)
Ever since I started this channel there's been a sharp decline in the number of space sims I play "on my own time" if that makes sense, but I would like to make a video featuring your mod someday.
never heard of it before, interesting! Going to check it out now :)
Late to the party, but happy to see you upload a new video! Thank you for your hard work.
i was very fortunate to play these games in all thier glory with my Sound Blaster 32
Man I genuinely missed you
Oh hey! Huzzzah! I just had a thought the this video would finally be done and uploaded. Always a nice treat when long format content on youtube finally drops!
We making it out of Wing Command 1 with this one!!!1!!!11 💀💀🔥🔥🔥🔥💀
Hey there, I just wanted to ask -- have you ever tried DOSBox's key mapper? If you already mentioned it and I missed it, don't mind me. It's pretty fully featured and should hopefully give you less setup issues than Joystick Gremlin did. You just need to be sure to set your joystick type in DOSBox's configuration file to 'fcs', that'll give you access to the hat/D-Pad, along with the rest of the buttons.
I know you already found a joystick, but for me, personally, I always enjoyed the Extreme 3D Pro Joystick -- you can pick one up for about $40, and it's nice and fairly compact, complete with its own little throttle at the base of the device. If you're enjoying your current setup, that's great, too, but I'd feel remiss not to mention it.
Excellent video, can't wait to see how you like the third game!
I messed around with it, but it's a bit limited for my needs. Something like Joystick Gremlin is required to, among other things, synthesize the separate stick and throttle into a single input device. Otherwise many old games and DOSBox itself won't accept input from both at once.
I absolutely love your stuff. You've got a great sense of humor.
Planing on giving the player made Wing Commander the Darkest Dawn a retrospect when you get to it?
I'd want to get all the most popular "genre greats" out of the way before getting into the more esoteric stuff, but once that's done with, mods and fan games are fully on the table as far as I'm concerned.
As someone whose been watching Ross Scott since I was in highschool and am now in my mid 30's, I'm used to slow uploads, lol.
This is something else, again. Great stuff. I greedily hope for WC3 and WC4 documentaries of this quality.
Enjoyable and well thought out, as I've come to expect from your work. Good job.
Actually as far as I know Stealth is actually outrageous difficult to pull off in space, because well, ships put off ALOT of heat, there isn't exactly alot of hiding places in space and a variety of other reasons I forget about. So it's not THAT weird people don't believe that a stealth ship is possible.
That being said this is a game with alien tigers and a general disregard for newtonian physics so whatever.
Hobbs is such a good friend. I hope he never turns his back on Blair.
WC2 Hobbes is indeed a good friend of Blair. WC2 Hobbes does NOT turn his back on Blair.
I was still in the Army when the first two Wing Commander games came out. I had my 386 PC in my room in the barracks, and I played this in my downtime. The speech pack being sold separately wasn't some hideous crime at that time like Bethesda's horse armor DLC. It was a very new technology having voice acted scenes in home video games. The only others I recall having voice were the arcade games of the late 70s and after (Star Wars (the monochrome one), GORF, Sinistar, Dragon's Lair/Space Ace, etc.). I built my first PC in 1983 at age 11, but it wasn't until 1992 that I actually had state-of-the-art audio with my first Sound Blaster card. I primarily bought it for my Sierra adventure games, and this. Very few games at the time made full use of its capabilities, so buying a speech pack for a game at that point in time wasn't unreasonable. The ultimate audio setup back then was having a Sound Blaster with the Roland MT-32 which produced the best sound experience.
Another thing of note is the Kilrathi ship scene at 06:25 is 3D rendered, which was also an emerging technology. The 3D renders in WC2 were among the best examples of it at the time.
*Edit* Also, no one with a PC in 1992 was playing a flight sim with the arrow keys on the keyboard. You're thinking too "modern" where everyone has a PC now including the dumbest and laziest people on the planet. The only ones with PCs in 1992 were people who had intelligence, or had money, and just wanted cool "gadgets". If you were playing a flight/space combat sim in 1992, you had a joystick. Period. The Thrustmaster was a favorite budget friendly option, but there were some pretty hardcore joysticks with a separate throttle that would set you back a few hundred bucks in 1992 money. A Thrustmaster was about 50 bucks. Only a complete moron would seriously attempt to play a game like this, or Star Wars: X-Wing with the arrow keys. It's just not happening. I DID attempt to play WC2 with my mouse, but it wasn't as accurate as a joystick, so I stuck with that.
Agreed on your edit. During that era, flight sims, especially space combat flight sims, were prolific, so the flight stick was as heavily used as any other peripheral. I grew up playing the WC, Star Wars, MechWarrior, and real world fighter plane games. Not having a flight stick just wasn't an option through the '90's. Fun fact, these types of games are why I have to play inverted in shooters with a controller. Pushing a stick forward should never shift your aim up. It makes no sense.
I second your edit. I didn’t have a PC then because my family couldn’t afford one, but I had a few friends that did, and they all had the Wing Commander games AND joysticks. I didn’t even know you could play it with a keyboard. The concept would’ve seemed ludicrous. Computer stores like CompUSA at that time had a whole aisle dedicated to joysticks, from $15 budget ones all the way up to the most expensive Thrustmaster had to offer.
I agree about the sound, too. The speech pack was incredible, and was, in my teenage mind at least, one of the things that elevated the PC experience above consoles like the SNES and Genesis. But not everyone had a nice sound card. It made sense that the sound pack was separate.
As to the problem of many fighters attacking you at once: You can cheese a large squadron by no locking any particular fighter but rather fire a few shots onto one, maybe tail it if you can but abort and turn towards another after only a few seconds. This takes a lot of patience and makes it harder to use missiles but it works, kinda…
Glad to see you released again a Video :D
Fantastic work, this was epic.
Amazing work! My first WC was part 3 on the 3DO back in the mid nineties and it blew my mind haha. Hopefully I get to see your take but I’ll plant myself down for the duration for whatever is next haha
So happy to live this franchise through you.
This is my favorite series on TH-cam
Yeah, the 'Cant fire while turning' thing was something I ran into playing Earthsiege 2 as well.
Emblematic of gaming controls at the time I suppose.
You could always chapterify your work and make a mega-cut at the end, although that doesn't help if you're worried about being able to edit any point at any time. It would definitely help the algorithim, and seeing your channel name more often helps with retention and subscribe count! Great work as always, love your 3 films!
Fun video. I look forward to more videos.
Awesome video, can't wait to see what comes out next 👍
Brought back some Memories. And I think I can STILL see "holes" in your play.
1. First, you were not using the joystick "pivot" to align ships horizontally on the screen. This is important, you turn faster side to side than up down.
2. Because of this you weren't developing proper slides, which help hit the enemy is their SIDE Shields, this is killing Jakalthi 101, they have WEAK flanks. You want to "coast" by pointing AT them but flying 90 degrees to target.
3. I found a lot of the time using half the guns was better (most sustained fire, and you rarely hit with all of them anyway). Especialy the lasers.
4. I you CAN slide, Sabres are a LOT better. For one thing you CAN boost to a safe distance sometimes.
5. You were trying too hard to pull THROUGH the enemy ship. Better to keep the cursor ahead you miss less.
6. The one time you use all guns is with the stealth dudes.
Oh, and the generic name for our hero is "Blair" (as in "blue hair").
I love these videos
Dont take it the wrong way i put them on if i need to sleep
I think ive seen all of them like 5 times each
I get nuce dreams with these
Great video, and well worth the wait too! I agree as well with your complaints about the story not properly conveying people's disdain for Maverick, it kind of reminds me of AC7's "you killed the president" plotline. Both have characters automatically accuse you of being directly responsible for the bad thing that happens despite that in both cases no matter how people interpret it, the worst conclusion they could've actually come up with is gross negligence. Not only that, but also the way the story writes their disdain makes it seem like the characters seem willfully ignorant to an almost annoying degree. The game's still fun and all, and the frustrations with the story can detract from it, but hey, they were breaking new ground and they tried their best. Also, in regards to the joystick, my personal experience with them is that using them with older games isn't all that different from other methods, but once you near to the 2000s the joystick seriously comes in clutch and definitely elevates the experience of the game, at least for me. Anyway, that's enough rambling from me, thanks again for the great vid!
PS Don't worry about the others that say you take too long making the videos. It's your passion project, take as long as you want to. And if you're worried about the algorithm, it seems to actually just in general rewards youtubers with long uploads even if it isn't regular, or so says the youtube techpriest i'm familiar with at least.
Speaking of which, can agree that Ace Combat 7 is a weaker game than the Holy Trinity of 04: Shattered Skies, 5: The Unsung War, and Zero: The Belkan War, which sorely need multiplatform remasters.
I was wondering just the other day when we'd see a sequel to the Wing Commander retrospective, and lo and behold, here it is! Thanks! your retrospectives are really informative and interesting!
May I live to see a Strike Commander retrospective one day. :)
About "the sci-fi last resort things", in original Macross anime, humanity is overwhelmed by sudden alien invasion, immediately starting to loose, trying to use repaired alien super ship, it's brokes down and then they trying to use ship's teleportation device and it's makes the whole situation so much worse. And this is only the begging of the series!
And then it culminates with... nah, I'm not gonna spoil that tragedy.
Either way, Macross is one surprisingly gripping expanded storyline (at least, excluding II and Delta), and it really sucked that we got Robotech back in the day instead.
We did it! I know it was hard work making this. But it was harder work waiting for it 😊
I was just thinking about you and your videos the other day. Glad to see this.
Sabre and Rapier are good examples of why you don't want all your guns active all the time, per se. I had... a very different experience, particularly with the former.
Meanwhile, the Broadsword was my bane, as a mobility focused pilot who def afterburner slid a lot. Thank God for the Crossbow in the expac.
Wellcome back, Wing commander!
We need something like this in a remake.
Said by the man himself. Peter Cullen.
Finally! Welcome back!
Yessss! This is a nice surprise this morning. Let’s go!
First boxed PC game I owned, 4 floppy disks, ahh the nostalgia :) And yeah, didn't have a SoundBlaster so I played with farts for explosions and no music or dialogue xD Also played with keyboard input and the biggest hurdle was that you had to stop turning to shoot as keyboard wouldn't accept multiple keys pressed at the same time, the final bossfight was really annoying because of that.
Also regarding flak I've found that rolling through the attack run seems to mitigate some of the damage. But since so many years have passed can't tell if it was true or just confirmation bias on my part.
Daumn i were just thinking about you. Gonna watch it right away!
Still have Wing Commander II, even the Voice Pack. I had a top notch PC at that time, with CH Joystick, and Sound Blaster Card. And I still remember what I had to do to assign the IRQs for that and how to tweak DOS to get the games running smooth. I'm waiting for your take on WingCommander : Privateer.
I've been waiting for this!! super happy to see this video out and just wanna say before even watching it thanks for these amazing videos!!
My only experience with Wing Commander was the SNES version then WC 3 for PS1 but i still love it to this day
I love your videos. I’m hoping you do a deep dive on WC3/4/prophecy and videos for Tie Fighter/XWvsTF/XWA. Top-notch coverage with the videos you have made up to this point.
Really hope he sings lots of praises for TIE Fighter. Will expect him to take justifiable potshots against the multiplayer-centric XWvsTF and the obvious beta (even with the Upgrade mod) that is X-Wing Alliance, as an aside.
Say, where's Wing Commander: Privateer?
Baby, wake up, a new Space Cadet Rewind video just dropped
1:00:50 - Remember this for the WC3 retrospective.
Oh, definitely
It's funny how I never played WC3 at all back in the day, despite getting WC4 eventually and enjoying it very much, so I'm looking forward to that video.
@@bluespaceman7937 I had trouble running it so I had to play it on Playstation. Interestingly, the PS1 version has an extra scene in it.
Taking me right back to junior high. I loved this game.
When I first played WC2, decades ago, I actually did not realize that there were story-related interludes behind one of the airlocks. I thought that the entire narrative was conveyed through the missions, pre-mission conversations, and in-mission cutscenes. That I still had no problems following the story and didn’t even notice that part of it was missing just reinforced how extraneous the airlock segments were.
20:50. Re: the Ferret. I was pleasantly surprised by how capable it was. Certainly, it was way better than the Hornet and Scimitar from the first game. For one thing, its “Gatling mass drivers” fired extremely rapidly and didn’t take long to recharge. It could pump out such a stream of projectiles that even heavy fighters like the Jalkehi could be easily downed with a well placed volley. In fact, I found the Ferret more deadly against Jalkehi than Sartha and Drakhri just because of how easily you could hit the heavier ship. Flying a Super Ferret against heavy fighters, in Special Operations, didn’t feel nearly as onerous as flying a Hornet against a Gratha, in Secret Missions. The Ferret was at least a glass cannon. Can’t take hits but can really dish out the damage.
A later game using the same engine as WC2, Wing Commander Academy, allowed you to select any Terran ship from WC2 and fly it against increasingly powerful waves of enemies. One of my highest scores in that game was in a Ferret, surpassed only by my performance in a Broadsword. I think a large part of what made those ships so effective was the increased rate of fire of mass drivers.
My introduction to the world of flight sims was with elite dangerous and I got REALLY into it and bought a good HOTAS that cost ~$200usd and a VR headset. I got absolutely addicted and put over 3k hours into the game. The peripherals for games like this are an absolute gamechanger but there is definitely a learning curve lol
I'm pretty sure the huge joystick dead zone which affects WC1, WC2 and Privateer is a problem related to dosbox or modern hardware. I do not remember the controls being so laggy and imprecise when I originally played it back in the day. Maybe someone with original hardware could confirm. The main problem I remember back then was cheap joysticks drifting and needing to be recalibrated often.
It's funny you mention the joysticks. I used a Logitech Extreme 3D for most of my life, still love it.
Logitech Xtreme 3D will outlive the sun.
@@tetsatou2815 I've only ever needed a replacement twice over like, 2 decades, and I do a LOT of flight sims on the couch with my husband on laptop. Trusty little thing, beat the game above with it!
i get the HOTAS love though, needed one for Star Wars Squadrons. Some games just call for it.