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Neat. The ship dealer storyboards seem to show five distinct vessels. There's a shiny new Tarsus at the left, for the one person on the planet who regretted selling theirs. The prongs at the lower center look like the ship in the "New Chicago" hangar storyboard, which in turn looks like a...

For the good of future mods, and original new games for that matter, can we please see an end to this game design anti-pattern? Briefing. Interaction. Do the tasks described in the briefing. Surprise! Surprise delivered by unskippable conversation. Interaction. React to the surprise. On...

Here's what Star*Soldier commits to: There is a "VN Day" to celebrate the end of the war (p3:"I’m outraged by the current move to ignore VN Day in favor of Confederation Day.") The war involved entering Nephilim "fluid space", with a risk of being trapped there and destroyed (p23: "When the...

In the DOS version the hand may disappear altogether if it doesn't have enough free memory. The comm faces and cockpit damage vanish too, as you describe happening on the Amiga . With even less memory, all explosions (including those on the surface of damaged capital ships) are replaced with a...

Having become curious about those tiny scratches, I looked at the DOS files in HCL's viewer, 'wcnav'. The file 'scramble.vga' contains the damage graphics. It includes two 'shattered glass' pictures, at locations 300,137 and 300,444. So, they were included but never used in the DOS version...

Does that imply that you would simply swap to a 'Secret Missions' data disk and run it with the existing WC1 Amiga executable? If so, is there any potential for adapting the data files from the DOS version? Does the Amiga version still contain files like Briefing.000, Module.000, etc.? If...

You may already know this, but you can press 'd' for a damage report. This lists each component, giving it state as Light / Moderate / Heavy / Destroyed Here are all the systems that may be damaged. Ion drive - Reduces your top speed. Power plant - Your weapon energy and shields regenerate...

For completeness, the BBC Micros were a subset of the machines made by Acorn Computers. In order of manufacture, they were the Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Acorn Archimedes. If anything, the Archimedes deserved success more than the Amiga... and received less. However, its most...

Is there anything in the in-game statistics or fiction to suggest that Flash-Paks are faster than torpedoes? The fact that they don't become the dominant anti-capital-ship weapon suggests one of: They're much more expensive than torpedoes, In some way they're less effective than torpedoes, or...

Yes, the most logical way to notate the overture is in B flat major (two flats). As Farbourne says, this is equivalent to A sharp major, but B flat major is easier to read and play. I recommend looking at the MIDI version; even with its help, there's plenty of work to do. I understand it was...

For a while, all interpreters / emulators were banned from the iTunes App Store. This meant no Flash, no Java, no .NET, etc. Curiously, Flight of the Amazon Queen (which used ScummVM) was accepted in 2009. This policy changed in 2010, with restrictions. See this document about Flash, for...

Yes, you press F8 and get a message saying "Missile Camera Enabled". Fire a missile and the camera follows it. Press F8 again to switch the missile camera off. The demo is a remarkable achievement in in-engine cinematics. It's a bit sad, really, that both the WC1 and WC2 demos have such...

Spinning Space Stations Yes, I should have acknowledged real-world plans for mushroom-shaped space stations using centripetal force to simulate gravity, like Wernher von Braun's 1946 design. For fixing them in the our imagination, we should also acknowledge Chesley Bonestell. 21st century...

While this is a fun game to play, many WC designs seem simply logical (for visual media, not for real spacecraft). - Need a threatening thing that flies? Model it on a predatory bird. It worked for the Klingons, and it can work for you. More generally, any spaceship that looks like an...

Creative aliens Thanks for clarifying that, since it's left me wondering for 15 years. Aliens are tough in any medium; they need to be accessible to newcomers, without becoming stereotypes. I used to complain about insufficiently creative aliens, until I played Master of Orion 3. The aliens...

SWC Secret Missions 1.5 Sadly, there are no Firekkans in SWC - instead of Secret Missions 2, it has "Secret Missions 1.5". The SM1.5 missions cover most SM2 plot points and add some foreshadowing about stealth technology, but lack the new aliens. SWC was made during the move towards live...

Yes, I definitely would have played a Wing Commander with a female lead. However, I always find it odd when people ask the question. The whole point of most computer games is to be something we're not - whether it's a 27th-century fighter pilot, a spellcasting elf, or an MIT physics PhD with a...

Thanks for linking to that; it explains a lot about both WC1 and the later games. On the other hand, I'm happy that they discarded this feature. It's also amusing, considering that WC1 was ultimately noteworthy for its moving hand and joystick. Oh, and Chris Roberts invented Enviro-Bear...

I agree that Wing Commander I was a magnificent game, and some of its best features were never repeated... but that alone isn't reason to hate the sequels. It's easy to assume Chris Roberts wanted to make our favorite game, and executive meddling dictated otherwise... but take a look at the...

Epic I imagine LucasArts would eventually have made X-Wing, even in a world without Wing Commander. On the other hand, without the perceived need to compete with WC1, they'd probably have reused the bitmap engine from Battlehawks 1942 and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. As previously noted...