Wing Commander Prophecy OEM

Kevin Caccamo

Rear Admiral
WC Prophecy OEM was the first Wing Commander game I've ever played.. It came in a pack of games and 3D demos that were included with the Real 3D Starfighter AGP video card drivers. It was my favourite game out of the games in the pack. Unfortunately, though, the CD that I have for WCP OEM is in poor condition; I can't install it because the music.tre file on the CD is damaged... I have the final version of WCP now, but I thought it would be cool to talk about some of the differences of WCP OEM vs. final version.

WCP OEM only included the missions from H'rekkah 1 to G'wriss 3a/b, and most of the simulator missions except for the Alien Gauntlet missions. After completing G'wriss 3a or 3b, the game would display the advertisement from the WCP demo.

During H'rekkah 3a at Nav point 3 (I think) where you encounter the first Manta, the game shows you a short flyby cutscene before it cuts back to the game. I don't think this was in the final version of WCP; if it is, it doesn't seem to work for me.

The simulator missions also used different music tracks; "Prophecy" was used for missions 1 and 2, "Galactic Hives" was used for missions 3 and 4, "Ahead" was used for missions 5 and 6, and "Tones from the sphere" was used for missions 7 and 8.

That's all I can remember.
 
That's cool... I didn't know they had put out an extended demo of sorts...

I do however being really annoyed by this type of extended demo... I remember going to a store more than once and there being a rack of games on CD that I wanted to try only to realize that I basically had to *pay* for a small part of the game... I remember specifically Deus Ex being one of the titles but there were others too. And often it was several years after the original release as well, where you *should* have been able to pick up the full game for nearly the same price.
 
I remember something similarly annoying.
When I bought a new graphics card in 1996 or so I saw that it came with two games! I remember being quite excited, one of the games being "scorched planet" and the other one being "Need for Speed" (don't remember which one). I liked both games, but when I finally got another PC some years later I noticed that they didn't run anymore, they were somehow branded to only run on a system with the graphics card they were bundled with.
 
I remember the ca. 5 seconds fly-by camera scene of the Manta heavy fighter the first time you encounter it, in the full version WCP.
 
WC Prophecy OEM was the first Wing Commander game I've ever played.. It came in a pack of games and 3D demos that were included with the Real 3D Starfighter AGP video card drivers. It was my favourite game out of the games in the pack. Unfortunately, though, the CD that I have for WCP OEM is in poor condition; I can't install it because the music.tre file on the CD is damaged... I have the final version of WCP now, but I thought it would be cool to talk about some of the differences of WCP OEM vs. final version.

WCP OEM only included the missions from H'rekkah 1 to G'wriss 3a/b, and most of the simulator missions except for the Alien Gauntlet missions. After completing G'wriss 3a or 3b, the game would display the advertisement from the WCP demo.

During H'rekkah 3a at Nav point 3 (I think) where you encounter the first Manta, the game shows you a short flyby cutscene before it cuts back to the game. I don't think this was in the final version of WCP; if it is, it doesn't seem to work for me.

The simulator missions also used different music tracks; "Prophecy" was used for missions 1 and 2, "Galactic Hives" was used for missions 3 and 4, "Ahead" was used for missions 5 and 6, and "Tones from the sphere" was used for missions 7 and 8.

That's all I can remember.

Do you have a picture of the disc? And you're sure it has both H'rekkah and Gwriss? The actual WCP demo had several (four with losing path version) missions that fit into G'Wriss and aren't in the actual Prophecy game.
 
WCP OEM had all of the missions that are on WCP CD 1, but instead of asking for WCP CD 2, it would display the advertisement from the WCP demo at the end.

Here's a picture of the slot that had the WCP OEM CD in it:
WCPStarfighter1.png


There were other demos in the Starfighter demo pack as well. These demos were spread out across 3 CDs. The CDs looked a bit like this... One of the CDs (CD 3) had WCP OEM on it.
WCPStarfighter2.png

Unfortunately, I lost disk 3, so I was unable to get a scan of it.
 
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