Is SWC harder than WC1?

Hyper_Eye

Hyper_Eye

Spaceman
I'm playing SWC on 3DO with the flight stick. I am on McAuliffe 3 and I cannot keep the Drayman alive to save my life. I am sending Paladin after my first target. Then I change targets and taunt the other two. I can get through the first encounter most of the time by keeping the fight away from the Drayman. It doesn't always work. Sometimes the enemy goes after it anyway and it sustains a bit of damage before the second encounter. On the second encounter it gets destroyed so fast. I don't know that I've even managed to kill one enemy during the second encounter before they kill the Drayman and take off. They don't seem to care about my taunts at all. The ace is really fast. I have to back off to replenish shields a lot. I can't even count how many attempts I have made at this so far.

I've watched people play this mission in WC1 on Youtube and it looks so much easier. Maybe they are just that much better than me. I can't say if I would find it easier as I haven't played WC1 in over 20 years. Does anyone that has played both have an opinion on this? Is SWC harder or do I just suck?
 
Well, selection bias may be working against you. No one is going to post YouTube videos of them sucking. They could try the mission ten times and fail the first nine of them, and they would only post the tenth, successful time.

That said, the difficulty of WC1 was strongly dependent, in the old days, on how fast your computer was (or today, on how fast you set DOSBox to run). I remember thinking I was an absolute god at Wing Commander playing it on my 386 (or was it even my 286? No, probably not that old). Then I get a 486 and then a Pentium and, well, the game didn't stay as easy. Essentially, I had truly had "superhuman" reflexes playing it on my slow computer, and subhuman reflexes playing it on too fast a computer. Whereas I imagine that the 3D0 only lets you play at the "right" speed.
 
I went down the losing path and headed to Brimstone. I got to Brimstone-3 and found it to be even harder. I reloaded my McAuliffe-3 save and gave it another shot. I finally managed to get through it. I killed all the fighters but the ace. Oh well. I was just glad to be through it. When I played Wing Commander on PC I played on a 486. I remember Brimstone but not Gimle. I think I probably had a hard time with this escort mission back then too.
 
Hyper_Eye said:
I went down the losing path and headed to Brimstone. I got to Brimstone-3 and found it to be even harder. I reloaded my McAuliffe-3 save and gave it another shot. I finally managed to get through it. I killed all the fighters but the ace. Oh well. I was just glad to be through it. When I played Wing Commander on PC I played on a 486. I remember Brimstone but not Gimle. I think I probably had a hard time with this escort mission back then too.
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I've never played the 3DO version, but when it comes to the PC version, I definitely remember failing McAuliffe 3 the first time round. On my first playthrough of the campaign, I actually only managed to get back onto the winning path at the very last opportunity. I don't think they were pulling punches, back then...
 
The 3DO version was harder for me largely in the fact that I had to use a gamepad to fly as opposed to any stick I've ever owned. A digital control pad (IE up, down, left, right control) was good for quick evasives since pressing a direction was near absolute. Was hell for trying to stay on target.
 
When I first played WC I always struggled with that mission. Especially with the Ace. Happy to hear you beat it. The losing path certainly does up the difficulty. I've not had the pleasure of playing the 3DO, though I do remember the SNES version being much more difficult for me than the PC version.
 
My experience with the SWC comes from the Classic Mac port, though that was many many years ago. I remember it being much harder then the SNES version (which was the only copy of WC1 I had at the time) but at least I had the Gravis Mousestick II, which helped. I don't have that luxury in sheepshaver. Of course in the SNES version you can shoot as rapidly as you can press the button. Also the Asteroid/Mine fields were extremely easy. Just move every time the one object spawns in your reticent.
 
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While we're on the topic, I'm curious; does anyone know what the differences were between the 3DO and Mac versions? I actually bought the Mac CD (twice -- I found a still-sealed (!) copy on Amazon for $20 a few months ago), but found it played too fast in Basilisk. I've been meaning to get back to it at some point, but I'd like to know how the experience differs between Mac and 3DO.
 
Over all the differences are pretty slight. I sometimes feel the 3do version looks a little better. And the music is being pumped through the quicktime synth. The console interface is intact, but you have the advantage of the keyboard's many buttons and shortcuts. And I think that's really it, using PC peripherals for a game like SWC is so much better then the 3do controller. But you need a real mac to get the best experiance of using an actual joystick. Otherwise the game runs really well in the latest build of Sheepshaver from the emaculation forums.
 
It does? I have tried Basilisk with a System 7 and Sheepshaver with System 9 and its way too fast, often corrupts colors and crashes. Plus, the music is crappy (though I might be missing some Quicktime Driver here).
I would be happy if you would share some tips on how you got it to run really well. Please ?:(
 
Are you using the windows version? That could be it...The windows version is really finicky relative to the OSX version. I've seen the color corruption though, especially in Basilisk.
 
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Yeah, I am on the windows version :) However, game would at least be playabl if it were not so goddamn fast... Sheepshaver does not allow for CPU throttling but programs like G3 throttle seem to crash it. What I do not understand is why it works with acceptable speed under Mac, that should be a platform-independent problem (I read up on how Sheepshaver works). Excluding of course, the fact that my machine might simply be too fast...
 
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SWC running too fast is an issue on the genuine hardware, too. I have to run with double frames on my PowerMac 7300 to have it be normal speed.
 
the problem with sheep shaver is that there hasn't been centralized development for over a decade. I believe OSX was the original focus. Random people have been doing small fixes here and there, but it's really spotty in a lot of areas.

Aside from making sure you are in large window mode (cmd-3), I guess you can go to get info on the app icon, go to the memory tab, and play with the settings there. You use to have to control how much memory an app used in the old OS.
 
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Already tried playing around with all the settings, including memory, window mode and using QuickDraw (which makes things minimally better). And yeah, the game is running to fast on my real MacOS 9 machine too :) The only thing I have not yet heard of is running with double frames, could you elaborate on what you mean by that?
 
Really? It runs fine on my beige G3. (which is why I find it odd that old powermac is too fast...) I would think limiting the memory would force it to run slow. what happens if you limit it to something like 300k max?
 
The game does not start unless you give it at least its preferred size of 4328K and as the readme notes, there is no music. And even on that memory level, it is too fast. It simply is not the memory, it is that extremly old programming style of not coding your game framerate-independent. For reference, the actually required size for proper SWC execution is around 6000K according to the readme.
 
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