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Mission scripters, please never do this. If I've bought into your plot, I'll understand that the plot-critical capship is important and scary, and I'll attack it. If my guns do some damage but not enough, I'll start using missiles - and if I find that they aren't working because I've reached...

Thank you very much. Attacking the fighters doesn't have to be a "correct" choice - I'm happy if, while I'm doing this, the simulation leads to its logical conclusion as the enemy bombers hammer the frigates on picket duty, allowing the enemy frigates to destroy my carrier. I'm not happy...

Yes. Also, Hunter's helmet and original name are "Dart". Bossman's personal name was also undecided for a while. Some of these may be found in the Wing Commander 1 Documents... PDF Page 109 "Wing Commander Wingman Pofiles", July 26, 1990: PDF Page 106 "Wing Commander SceneDirector...

Saga has some irritating aspects (unlikeable characters, repetitive waves, few enemy fighter types). However, all of those could have been minor. As others have said, the lack of player agency is a problem, and I would say it's the big one. Lack of agency is generally bad design, and it...

Comedy doesn't scale well. Classic adventure games, like the Space Quest series, demanded lots of content. Funny moments were funny because they were unusual, and they were unusual because the team created unique animations, sound effects and speech for them. As graphics and sound capabilities...

I'm not aware of any other Bhurak appearance. Every other Kilrathi ace appears multiple times, including in Venice if not already dead. The conversations imply that you should fear all surviving aces in Venice, so this is probably a bug, and may have been fixed in some versions. If you're...

My copy of the WC4 Playguide ends with a page advertising: The WCPedia scan of the WC4 Playguide ends just before this point. Does it appear in other people's copies? Being in the WC4 documentation, the advertisement should probably have mentioned that "The Darkening" was a space sim...

Yes. You should find that the "TRANSFER.EXE" and "TRANS2.EXE" programs are already present, and the Secret Missions reference cards (provided in PDF) explain how to use them. Also, you'll need WCSAV to save your wingmen from the dreaded buffer overflow bug. What GOG didn't do was provide a...

Thank you for the correction. If you do the instinctive thing and hold your breath, yes, you'll rupture your lungs. As long as you avoid that, you'll get 5 to 10 seconds of consciousnous, and after 30 seconds can probably be resuscitated without ill effects. Here, courtesy of TVTropes, is...

There was an infamous overflow bug that could kill Spirit or Angel, but it's caused by errors in the transfer utilities, not WC.EXE itself. WCSAV can fix it. All pilots can have more than 255 kills. The screenshots below didn't involve shooting down every opponent in the game, but they're...

What is your DOSBox Cycles setting? The default of 3,000 is too slow. The CIC's own tech support suggests 4,000. I normally play at 6,000. The GOG version defaults to 8,000. While WC1 goes berserk and unplayable at high cycles, WC2 has a frame limiter during flight. However, some cutscenes will...

Are you trying to bait trolls into complaining that the WC2 Drakhri is not a Dralthi? Then you'll point out that the Academy box indeed says "THREAT: DRALTHI", even if none feature in the game. Incidentally, I thought the box also said "MK VI", but the Star*Soldier gloss says "MK VII". The...

Backwards compatibility a difficult compromise. Windows maintained it for a long time, and appeared succeed until Windows XP. By then it had layer after layer of kludges, just so that older applications would go on functioning. Then we all got broadband Internet connections, and found that...

As for Prophecy, some people have persuaded it to run in WINE. See Play Prophecy, Standoff on Mac or Linux. Once again, you'll probably need a disk image, which WINE can mount. While I haven't tried Prophecy, in general I've found 3D games in WINE to be frustrating. They'll often work...

You definitely can run the DOS versions of WC3 and WC4 on your Mac, via DOSBox. You just need to convert the CDs to disk image files, then mount those in DOSBox. 1. Convert CDs to disk images For any other readers with an optical drive in their Mac, the built in application called "Disk...

Yes, on the programming side Adlib music synthesis was really nice, given the right libraries. You could start a tune playing and it would keep going, and even repeat, all on its own. This meant your program could spend all its precious CPU cycles for graphics and simulation. I've even seen...

I notice that the missile launch and explosion sounds are better on the MT-32. These always seemed to be a weak point in WC2 on sound blaster - if it could do digitised speech, why not digitised explosions? I can also hazard a guess - WC2 didn't seem to have a have the ability to mix digitised...

I've never noticed the debriefing change depending on my damage. Usually it's all about the mission objective. For example, in Gateway Sigma Wing, an escort mission, "Flew Poorly" clearly means that the transport being escorted was destroyed. The woolly case is generally patrols. Indeed...

Apart from Star*Soldier itself, there are the "Star*Soldier Gloss" news posts, where the writers explain some of the references. https://www.wcnews.com/news/search?sortorder_o=0&title=Star*Soldier%20Gloss Here are the posts relating to the timeline. Pages 42 and 43 are the most relevant to the...

According to Pix's Origin Adventures, OriginFX modules were provided with Ultima VII (mentioned in the post) and Strike Commander (mentioned in the comments). However, the Ultima VII one just added the opening and ending sequences, and no one seems to have made Strike Commander actually work...