Initial reactions to WC3?

funny story:
cheers to you "Tigerhawk" staying in the apartment playing while they were out

Before i baught WC3 my friend lent it too me..however he gave me one disk at a time thinking it would take me a awhile to complete, i was so hooked. Anyone remember how WC3 worked, you played a mission worked and sweated to come back alive, ship all banged up, sparking and you pull into the hanger and before you could save... it asked you to put in disk two!....i didnt have disk two yet...well you bet i didnt dare turn off my pc and waste that perfect mission, you guessed it, called him up in the middle of the night, drove over and got the disk....
 
funny story:
cheers to you "Tigerhawk" staying in the apartment playing while they were out

Before i baught WC3 my friend lent it too me..however he gave me one disk at a time thinking it would take me a awhile to complete, i was so hooked. Anyone remember how WC3 worked, you played a mission worked and sweated to come back alive, ship all banged up, sparking and you pull into the hanger and before you could save... it asked you to put in disk two!....i didnt have disk two yet...well you bet i didnt dare turn off my pc and waste that perfect mission, you guessed it, called him up in the middle of the night, drove over and got the disk....

Heh, that's funny. At least you asked politely in the middle of the night instead of breaking into his house in the middle of the night! :D
 
Hah! Great stories.

I begged my mother to pre-order Wing Commander III for Christmas for me at the mall one day, when I saw the software store would give you a poster and a Making of CD... who knew it would be out for *Thanksgiving* :)? She put her money down--and wouldn't give me the poster! Took it home and wrapped it and I spent two months looking at the tube.

My best friend at the time got his copy the day it came out... but his computer at the time was a 386/33. Oh, I had to come over and see this amazing game, it's so great blah blah blah. In the time it took me to come over and see it he was still loading the first mission. :) (The video played for about three frames and then suffered a half a minute pause. But we were *enthralled*... and he refused to bring it over and install it on my 486. He did loan me Victory Streak, which seemed like cheating on my Christmas present... but I was glued to it for weeks.)

I remember barreling straight through the game Christmas day--getting torn away from the computer around the end of the Ariel series late that night.
 
WC3 seemed like the perfect progression for me at the time. I was just as amazed, no more, no less, as when I transitioned from WC1 to WC2. This was quite a feat as I had already come to expect absolute excellence from the WC universe. I was so excited, had anticipated for so long, finally got it home...

...and Connie's underwater? Are you fucking kidding me?

I remember being so conflicted for about 30 seconds. I was furious but impressed, repulsed but inevitably drawn in. I got a headache from playing so damn long and got yelled at by the rents for making too much noise in the middle of the night.

"But mom, I've only really played 5 missions. The load times are so long!"

"Don't give me that techno-crap. Shut that thing off or we take it right back to the store tomorrow."

The characters seemed good for me - of course I was excited about Mark Hamill, but everyone else faded into place and took a back seat to the story. I was super impressed with Hobbes' voice at the time, and remember thinking I'd follow Eisen anywhere. He was a smart choice - what other character type would Blair respect so much after what he had been through? It was totally believable...

... but don't think for a SECOND I wasn't secretly hoping to run into the Confederation somewhere out there in the void...
 
Did you mean Concordia?

[Blair and Tolwyn] got along swimingly in the addons, after Blair had been vindicated and Tolwyn admitted he was wrong.
That was one thing I missed in WC3. Tolwyn was actually a leader I could be devoted and loyal to after the events of WC2. Tolwyn does mention in passing on the Victory's bridge that he thought he'd achieved a certain level of mutual respect with Blair, and later on he expresses to Blair his satisfaction that the Victory and her crew were the right choice in protecting the Behemoth, but the almost-friendliness Tolwyn had about him in the Special Operations add-ons was definitely lost.
 
At times, I wonder if Tolwyn wouldn't have been scripted as "Admiral Asshole" in WC3 if they hadn't cast in that role an actor that has a tendency to portray assholish villain characters.

Anyway, I saw the ad for WC3 in my Armada box, and I was like "yes, gotta have it!". My system at the time was crap (which didn't stop me from trying to play WC3 anyway... ugh... 486/50, 8MB, and 1x CD drive, SB16, in an IDE [not EIDE] setup), so I splurged for a new system that, at the time, wasn't the absolute best, but was pretty decent (486/80, 16MB, 2x CD, and the SB16).

While waiting on everything to get in, I brought the box over to a friend's room on the other side of the barracks (in USN at the time). Now, he only had a 486/33, but he did have 16MB of RAM, and SCSI drives (which blew the doors off of IDE at the time, but was mucho expensive), so it fairly flew. He and I were like "fucking awesome".

My parts came in, and I put the system together...

And I couldn't run WC3 at all on it, it'd crash out with a EMM386 (remember that "fun"? :p ) error when trying to install.

For a WC system, it didn't do WC very well. Armada and earlier would run, but crash at random times. Later, I finally looked at the motherboard, and one of the capacitors had gotten zorched, damaging the board. :(

(I did actually get to play it good, but that was years later, on yet another machine. My mom's... :( )
 
Ah, the memories...

For a while, I didn't have a computer, but went over to a friend and watched him play WC1 and 2. It may sound boring, but I assure you I found it extremely exciting at the time. To find out the story together with him, help him out on a mission, shout at him "there's a kilrathi on your tail!" - it really was quite some fun. But not nearly as much fun as playing those games myself :D

Which I did as soon as I got my own PC. It was 1993, and we had to decide between a 386 and 486. That dumb jerk at the store told us to get the cheaper one; he probably knew that if we bought that, we'd have to get another one in about a year. Which of course we did a couple of weeks after Wing Commander III came out :D. In the weeks and months before that, I played WC1 and 2 for the first time on my own, and spend some time with Wing Commander Academy and Armada. I gut WC3 on the first day it was out, I remember calling the store after school and driving there to get it - even if I didn't have my new PC to play it yet! I read the Victory Streak, read some articles in magazines, looked at the poster and everything, and I got more excited by the day. And then, finally, it was my birthday and I got my Pentium. Guess what was the first thing installed on there? ;)

After reading some articles in magazines I already knew about the actors - and the desctruction of the concordia (which was spoilered in a screenshot the PC Games posted), so it didn't bother me. To this day I think that Mark Hamill is a much underrated actor, who did a tremendous job as Blair. Tom Wilson was a different Maniac, but I fell in love with this character almost right from the start. Even if Paladin's look changed considerably, I thought John Rhys-Davies was an excellent choise for the role. But I have to agree, the most memorable performance came from Malcolm McDowell. Yes, his Tolwyn is different, but at least in WC3 he's not really a bad guy either. He just is an arrogant, overconfident SOAB. And McDowell portrayed him perfectly.

But it wasn't just the main cast, the supporting roles were great too. I especially liked Cobra and Flash, who seemed like a younger version of Maniac (and could later be seen in "Hulk"). Flint and Rachel had some nice scenes too. I also liked Vagabond (remember seeing him a couple of years back on an episode of Stargate SG-1), and of course how could I forget Eisen? Only Vaquero... dunno, the character never really did anything for me.

The cast of WC4 was superb too. I escpecially liked Paulsen (there's a great scene with him if you stay on the carrier and don't leave with Eisen and Maniac) and Seether (I already knew Robert Russler from Babylon 5, but thought that he did a much better job on "The Price of Freedom". Of course, the role was much better, too). There were some great actors on the borderworld-side too, especially Sosa (?) and Hawk.

All in all, I think the cast of WC3 and 4 were great. I loved Hamill as Blair, Wilson as Maniac, Rhys-Davies as Paladin, and McDowell as Tolwyn. To this day, I consider Wing Commander III to be the best game of all times. True, 4 had the better story, but 3 was the best overall game, in my opinion. It had exciting missions, great graphics, phantastic performances and a thrilling plot. What's the saying... "They don't make them like that any more". Indeed... :(
 
I went from SNES Secret Missions to WC3. I traded in about five SNES games, at my local Babbages, to garner enough store credits to buy WC3, I even managed to get $15 for a copy of Wicked 18 that I had bought used!
So the only thing that really struck me was Angel having curly hair and subsequently dying quickly. Everything else was really well cast, acted, and directed, particularly considering the budget.

One thing I noticed, having watched a bunch of Mark Hamill's post Star Wars movies, is that Mark's performance improves, or suffers, depending on the caliber of the film's director. So in A New Hope his performance really was at Hayden Christensen levels of crap and then, in Empire and Jedi, he had better directors and his performance became much better. Likewise with Corvette Summer, terrible, and Slipstream, not too bad. His performance in WC3 was better than all of these, with the possible exception of Return Of The Jedi. So I took this as a sign that Chris Roberts was a great director, which is a view I still hold and I wish he would direct more films.
 
I think the thing with Hobbes is that Hobbes had an implanted personality. He was genuinely the cat you knew, but when he got 'switched on' the new personality took over. Atleast that's the way I understood it.
I recall the hidden personality was the real person and the Hobbes we knew was the fake created personality.

See Hobbes holomessage

At times, I wonder if Tolwyn wouldn't have been scripted as "Admiral Asshole" in WC3 if they hadn't cast in that role an actor that has a tendency to portray assholish villain characters.
Although he seems to get momentarily better is SOs, it's hard not to make him an asshole after whole WC2.
 
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Even with KS?
I have but on my current replay of WC1, I'm on SM1 and the Gwynhevar(sp?) mission is giving the usual headaches.
Still never played all the way though WC2, so I'm looking forward to it, but am trying not to let all this gaming distract me from coding my WC1 campaign editor

Even with KS. I downloaded the software from this site, but the computer doesn't like it and returns errors when I so much as move the mouse.
 
Might be something to do with the compatability mode you've set it to.
Shame though as Crusade is brilliant apart from all that Dralthi flying crap. In fact, flying a Dralthi made me appreciate the old Scimitar!!!!
 
Might be something to do with the compatability mode you've set it to.
Shame though as Crusade is brilliant apart from all that Dralthi flying crap. In fact, flying a Dralthi made me appreciate the old Scimitar!!!!

You mean you didn't appreciate it before?
 
Nope, I hated flying the Scim. Preferred a Hornet over it.
The Scim was always just too slow and cumbersome for my liking.
 
I always liked the manuverability of the Hornet. I know this should mean that I would favour the Rapier over the Raptor, but I do not. I guess the Raptor made up for it with armour and weapons :D
 
I always liked the manuverability of the Hornet. I know this should mean that I would favour the Rapier over the Raptor, but I do not. I guess the Raptor made up for it with armour and weapons :D

other than the weapons loadout, I wasn't a huge fan of the rapier. Shields didnt last, but the armor was terrible.
 
For me Hornet and Scimitar are about even; I slightly prefer Raptor to Rapier... except in asteroids and mines.
And that one Rapier mission is great (Kurasawa 1 I think).
 
His performance in WC3 was better than all of these, with the possible exception of Return Of The Jedi

You are forgetting his performance in the TV-series flash, and his best part of alltime "Cocknocker" in Jay&silent Bob strike back.
 
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