Me and my friend, both poor HS kids at the time pooled money to buy this game, played it over the weekend and returned it :P
It was a great game and we felt so clever for "beating the system" but we didn't even leave the store with the money as we immediately spent it on Warcraft 2 which we kept and played forever.
Remember when you could 'rent' games? I remember renting games all the time and then copying the discs so I could play them after I returned them when I couldn't afford a certain game.
I'm convinced if renting games wasn't a thing, I may have never discovered my love for gaming. I owned maybe less than a dozen total physical games in the 4th gen 16-bit era, but was able to play 4-5x more than that thanks to being able to rent them. Its the only reason I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways as a kid, so that I could rent a couple genesis/snes titles each weekend.
While it is true I couldn't afford the games I played as a teen, I'm confident I would have pirated them anyway. It had less to do with the game, and more about the conquest. When you discovered that a certain game had a keygen or was cracked, and you could get it for free, there was a certain rush of endorphins that would occur. Many of these games went mostly unplayed in my collection while I moved on to see what else I could get (if I recall, I did most of my searching on IRC and the games were downloaded via DCC, but my memory is getting fuzzy on the details). What nostalgia... that was back when piracy went mostly unpoliced as only the uber nerds were doing it or knew how (just remembering we called pirated software "warez" back then).
Pretty sure my local Blockbuster never allowed "renting" PC games.
Even then, CD writers in the early days could be of dubious quality. I remember letting a friend borrow my prized copy of Starcraft so that he could clone it through his CD writer, and when it emerged from the disc tray, it was scratched to hell and back. I still have no idea how a the disc laser could do that.
I don't think Blockbuster ever did PC game rentals. It was smaller independent places and I don't remember ever seeing them after CD-ROMs became a common thing. I remember it being a thing around the time the sun was setting on 5.25" floppies and rising on 3.5".
For us we had a little store in a strip shopping center on the corner called "Floppy Joe's". When you rented the game it came with the full box it came in, disks and instruction manuals. We'd goto the library and xerox the manual for the copy protection questions then copy the game contents onto a repurposed AOL floppy disk. I remember my dad being so pissed when AOL switched to read-only disks. After we did that we'd return the rental game. It's not surprising that business model went away. It was just the thinnest possible veil over piracy.
I still have really fond memories of Floppy Joe's though. I remember going in once and seeing two people playing Doom multiplayer. It blew my mind. I had no idea such a thing was possible. I kept trying to tell one of the guys about IDDQD so he could beat his friend. He was being really sweet and patient to what, in retrospect, was probably a super annoying nerd kid bothering him while he was trying play.
Floppy Joes, at least in my experience, wasn’t a “rental”, it was “pay $100 for this PC game, return it within 48 hours, get a full refund minus a $10 restocking fee.” It was the same system in the three locations I visited in the 90s. They were also inevitably next door to Kinkos and the manuals were usually already manhandled in a way that made photocopying them very easy.
It wasn't the laser, it was the tray; if any dirt got stuck to the tray in just the right way, the CD could be scratched to hell and back quite easily.
Some CDROMs also could have the "wait until spun down before dropping down" mechanism not work, and you could hear it spinning in the tray.
Lol your friend ruined the disc by not handling it correctly. Trust me, I did the same thing with my friends 4 disc copy of diable 2. I remember while waiting for the discs to burn I was playing with the old one. I had it in the case and I was spinning it like it would in the drive.
I ruined his copy. He cried and told his mum. I lied and said it came out of the burner like that.
Poor bastard. I stole his cd key and got it banned online for playing with cheats.
Kind of.... My local video rental place back in the day stocked just about every release for all the major consoles though. You weren't limited in scope in the same way GamePass will limit you to only GamePass supported Xbox/PC games.
I don't think there is a modern service equivalent to peak video-store era game rentals, at least none spring to mind right now.
ehh having to use it on a machine that has ms store enabled and run their fat client to download 50s of gb games is quite different in many ways. while months at a time for a game is nice it feels more as a data collection spigot and loss leader for onboarding users, vs a fun weekend rental
WC in the general series were all great, but the first game (edit, first space sim I played I mean) where you had to grind that I ever played was Privateer and that was the greatest for a 12 year old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer
I remember playing the hell out of 3 when it came out, but for some reason we were disappointed with 4. If I remember right, when this came out, we had built a huge IPX network in a three story office building, and after business hours would smoke weed and play Descent, Dark Forces, and Hexen all night. Good times for sure!
Privateer was just utterly amazing to 12-year-old me. After years of playing Wing Commander games on rails, it felt incredible to finally be free to see the open universe and the perspective of the ordinary citizens. My only disappointment with it was that it only had some of the military and Kilrathi ships from the main games.
Such a good experience, hard to imagine replicating it these days - both because modern games are different, and because you only get to be 12 once.
Freelancer was pretty cool but the (pretty short IIRC) single player story felt like a prelude and when it finished there was nothing meaningful left to do.
I always suspected that the game was developed with a multiplayer first approach and the single player mode seemed like an addon. Which was a pity I would have liked to explored this universe more.
Freelancer shared a lot of the same hype cycle as Star Citizen has had (and used a lot of very similar rhetoric from Chris Roberts). I know I didn't buy into Star Citizen's hype because I certainly remembered Freelancer. Ambitions versus practical reality versus available budgets.
Decades after Wing Commander, Chris Roberts went on to launch a crowdfunded space simulation game called Star Citizen in 2010. It is still in early buggy unpolished alpha state after all these years, despite (or because?!) raising more then half a billion dollars. Too bad.
That’s uncharitable. It has raised that half billion dollars continuously over the years since it launched, and spends it on development. They’re up to something like 500 developers, mostly artists, level designers, and the like. (They have <100 programmers, last I heard.)
The game is incredibly ambitious in terms of both content and technology. The game is playable, if very buggy, and release an updated alpha version every quarter (except recently, due problems with introducing global persistence). Funding has steadily increased as those alphas have become steadily more capable.
It’s an open question whether the game will ever meet its lofty goals. But it’s disingenuous to imply that the game isn’t making progress.
I like the Wing Commander series better than Star Wars, and Blair in WC4 was Mark Hamill's greatest role as far as I'm concerned.
Wing Commander is space without the opera. It's humanistic and free of woo. There are no supernaturally gifted gurus wielding magic. The good guys do not seem predestined to win. Everyone in this big cosmic drama is just an ordinary person (or other sentient being) muddling through familiar problems.
Seems like this reviewer wanted the movie parts to be more wacky and fun. Given that the premise is essentially (spoilers) space Nazis attempting a coup, I'm not sure how this would have made sense. If you want wacky fun, there are plenty of other space movies that will oblige you.
I distinctly remember that Wing Commander had "good guys" not winning paths. My second most frustrating experience in that game was intentionally choosing that path and managing to succeed on the final mission after umpteen tries (you have a crappy ship and overwhelming odds), only to have the landing autopilot fly me into the side of the Tiger's Claw. RIP.
The most frustrating part was getting halfway through the campaign, only to discover that disk 10 was corrupt. I had to send away for a new one, which was a bit of a process because companies at the time were loathe to give additional physical media to avoid piracy. It took about 3 months to finally get the new disk.
Lol. I had the corrupt CD problem during my play through of "The Longest Journey". I appreciated the irony, as it added several months to the experience.
I played through original WC in the early 2000's, trying to win all missions. I got stuck on one that you really were meant to lose(escort, large numbers of attackers meant you had to execute with speedrun precision to have a chance) and stopped there. Later I looked more carefully at the walkthroughs and learned that the campaign progresses along the win path if you win most of the missions in the sector - you don't have to get 100% of them.
I always admired the series for its world-building sensibilities. It's simple stuff - Star Raiders had the essence of the gameplay in 1979 - but injected with a lot of atmosphere.
Even if you "win" that mission, you get the losing cutscene and the commander chews you out for not meeting your objectives even when you did and are put on the losing path - at least that's what happened in my copy of the game, so it wouldn't have been worth the effort.
I distinctly remember this in wc3 (the first one I played), because for a long time I thought the game was broken. I found out losing a mission didn't make you lose completely (a rare concept at the time) but didn't realize the next one would be harder. So I just got stuck there for months. Note that I was probably 9 years old at the time.
Mark Hamill was fantastic in both WC3 and 4. Both games had other stellar actors as well—John Rhys-Jones, Malcolm Dowell, etc. At times, the acting rivaled that found in a mainstream move.
On an aside: Star Wars: Jedi Knight (first game) also had acting that rivaled that of the original Star Wars movies. In comparison, Jedi Knight 2 (released in the early 2000s) had blocky 3D cutscenes, similar to other games of the time. What a bummer.
> On an aside: Star Wars: Jedi Knight (first game)
Second game! It was Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. The first one (Dark Forces) had charming 2d animated cutscenes. The second (Jedi Knight) had live-action video cutscenes.
> also had acting that rivaled that of the original Star Wars movies.
I remembered really liking them, but on revisiting the game a couple years back... well, if you haven't seen them in a while, give them another look.
> In comparison, Jedi Knight 2 (released in the early 2000s) had blocky 3D cutscenes, similar to other games of the time. What a bummer.
I agree. I enjoyed WC4 even though it went a bit overboard with fmv but the story held up and both Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell were amazing. The senate scene at the end when Tolwyn breaks is just great.
Gameplay and story wise I really think WC2 is by far the best in the series. The camaraderie between characters is just beautifully portrayed, and so many moments of betrayal, death, and tragedy were very emotional.
I remember the early previews of sc2 had the same type of interactive movie interaction as wc4 - being able to select a conversation option from either the top or bottom of the screen. They eventually scaled back a bit, but the wings of liberty campaign structure was definitely influenced by wc4
The main thing I remember about Wing Commander 4 was it came on quite a few CDs. Something like 6? All due to the video.
I remember thinking it would make much more sense on a DVD, but I’m guessing nowhere near enough people had DVD drives at the time and it would have destroyed sales.
Interestingly enough, they actually did release a version on DVD with full MPEG-2 video (more info here: https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/13753), but it was an extremely special edition that I think only worked with hardware MPEG-2 decoders. Nowadays, you can play this version with software decoding using some community hacks, but the GOG.com version has the high quality video and has done all the work for you.
EDIT: I was partially wrong. After reading the article, there was a version that was essentially all of the CDs' data on one DVD, but that was replaced with the version I mentioned.
I had that 2nd DVD (have? will have to dig around in the shed). I played the daylights out of the earlier Wing Commander games but IV was...underwhelming despite all the hullabaloo about it being some kind of major breakthrough in interactive fiction.
It probably came bundled with a creative DVD set that included an MPEG decoding card and required some kind of video passthrough.
I remember feeling betrayed that Luke Skywalker had joined another sci fi franchise. Enjoyed the first WC until X-Wing came and blew it out of the water.
For my part, I just don't get the point of writing this.
Within the part of the article that's actually about the game, the author does basically nothing but scoff at things like the "workmanlike", "not ... subtle", "primary colors" nature of the story, or the "cheap, sparse, painfully plastic-looking sets", or how the characters use the callsign rather than the full real name of a fallen soldier during a funeral. There is almost nothing there about the story itself or its characters.
I played this game a lot as a teen, and I thought the story had a lot of deeply sympathetic characters and emotionally resonant themes. It felt great to be the protagonist who uncovers fascist treachery at the top and averts a war. It felt great to do that with a team of comrades who shared your values and vigorously debated tactics. None of that gets a single word in this review.
Of course not everyone is going to agree about what's a good movie, but I thought it deserved better than a collection of nitpicks that doesn't engage with the story at all. It seems like the critic just wanted the game/movie to be in a different genre, something more sophisticated or "subtle" with more "shades of gray"? But what's the point of that? It seems like criticizing Saving Private Ryan for not being Apocalypse Now or Starship Troopers. Okay, it's not the type of movie you wanted to see, I guess? But isn't it a little cliche, in itself, to reflexively disdain everything that is straightforward rather than meta, ironic, deconstructive, and self-referential?
You probably haven't been reading The Digital Antiquarian over the past five years.
The site is an enormous dissertation on the art of interactivity. You could call it an attempt to put every major development in narrative gaming into context for their era.
Jimmy Maher went all the way back to the early Plato-era mainframe games. He's covering everything from Adventure to Zork.
[I'm joking, those two games happened almost at the same time.]
But for "the point of writing this", that's why. It's a history of all the major games and being included in it is a pretty serious endorsement of Wing Commander IV's cultural value.
In the context of the history of interactivity Wing Commander IV doesn't do that well. They spent a ton of money to make a game that's arguably less interactive than the earlier games in the series. That was how the 90s went. More and more money spent on bad full-motion video, fewer and fewer actual game choices.
It's hard not to snark on the production values when they spent $12 million to make it. Again, it's a historical account... videogame budgets for absolute classics six years earlier were like $100k if you were lucky.
It doesn't matter if it's a fun and enjoyable game. It's part of the fall of adventure gaming. That's the story.
The author basically dislikes all the trends of 90's gaming, but he had already run through the old stuff at this point.
Anyway, he does have a point in that as a piece of interactive narrative, it's more expensive, and adding a lot of production has its own charm, but it's also a step back from the very best Infocom adventure games when you're looking at the kind of play experience it presents, which is basically a CYOA book - the only experimenting to do is to choose option A over option B. This isn't necessarily wrong, even - visual novels have made a real art of that - but it's about the craft behind that kind of narrative, and not the direct engagement with technology.
One respect in which I differ from Maher's view is that I don't really see the direct engagement as important. In most instances games are performing cartooning in their use of technology, and so adding more legible "player verbs" and "simulation elements" isn't necessarily adding that much to the message. Sometimes all you need to do to make a game narrative stick is to hide a major branch within a subtle decision, or force a replay to allow a different option to appear.
Agreed. WC4 may not have been Chris Roberts' best work, but this review certainly wasn't Jimmy Maher's best.
It would be just as big a mistake to blow off the whole Wing Commander franchise based on this review, as it would be to dismiss filfre.net as a collection of jeremiads about obsolete games. They are both great works in reality, and both have a lot more to offer than meets the eye in this instance.
The review is pretty long and has numerous complaints... pretty much none of which were seen as problems as the time.
There are a lot of perspectives from which to judge a work from the past, especially a video game, where so, so much has changed since then. But this review doesn't seem to have a coherent perspective, other than the reviewer just personally didn't like it. (That's fine, BTW, we all have our opinions, but that doesn't make a review.)
Was too much money spent on the game? Or were the production values too low? The review paradoxically complains about both. There's a half-hearted attempt to resolve that by suggesting some kind of uncanny valley problem, but no one ever thought that at the time... it's the authors now personal valley, apparently. (Perhaps the author is mixing in some modern expectations about video game production values into this, which makes no sense, of course).
Also, I wonder if the reviewer is really considering the medium as it was. This game was designed to be played on 14-15" lo-res CRTs and play video off low-speed CD-ROM drives. It's pure nonsense to compare this even to movies of the day. The set detail had to be simple, to register at all. Even if you were so up-to-date you had a DVD drive and could play the higher-quality version of the cuts scenes, does it really make sense to complain the sets designed for that medium looked "plastic"? They looked great back then.
There are many complaints about the writing of the cutscenes. I won't defend it as great art, but... it's a sci-fi adventure. There are supposed to be campy, punchy lines. This isn't the place for the deep treatment of serious themes or subtle character development, or nuanced story-telling. It's just baffling to me to judge this game because of what it was never meant to be, could never have been, and definitely never should have been.
(From my perspective, WC IV was somewhat worse than III... it was too expensive, too short, and really needed a more powerful PC than I had at the time, so it didn't play that great. I think I remember there was one mission that was way too hard too, though maybe I wasn't approaching it the right way.)
