Wing Commander's a Computer Eater (April 22, 2011)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
PC Games Hardware has posted an article titled "From Wing Commander to Crysis, The biggest hardware devourers of their times." The piece is more of a photo collage with captions about the couple most demanding games of each year of the last two decades. Wing Commander 1 & 3 make the list, and they're in good company with Strike Commander and some Ultima games. Check out the full gallery here.









--
Original update published on April 22, 2011
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Nice excuse for a flash-back and also nice that these three games made the list. However, the caption for Strike Commander... it's incorrect of them to say it was based on WC2 since, as far as I know, Strike Commander was the first to show off the RealSpace engine - the introduction in the game's manual explains how much effort they went into making it.

Just a small nit-pick.
 
What I find really ironic is that Strike Commander is listed as being hardware demanding but it had problems with machines that had more than 16 Mb of RAM. At least in it's initial release.
 
What I find really ironic is that Strike Commander is listed as being hardware demanding but it had problems with machines that had more than 16 Mb of RAM. At least in it's initial release.

Well, very few people had that amount of RAM at the release, but it brought a high-end 486 to it's knees when in a dogfight.
 
Nice excuse for a flash-back and also nice that these three games made the list. However, the caption for Strike Commander... it's incorrect of them to say it was based on WC2 since, as far as I know, Strike Commander was the first to show off the RealSpace engine - the introduction in the game's manual explains how much effort they went into making it.

The sentiment is nice, but it's a pretty poorly written article. The subheading, first paragraph and second paragraph all say the same thing on the first page, and there's a variety of typos and incorrect information throughout the captions.

"1990: Wing Commander (Sometimes it even paid off to upgrade the EMS memory for Wing Commander)"

Does the game use your EMS or not? (It does, so why the "sometimes"?) Also, what does "upgrading EMS memory" even mean? You could get more RAM, and then make sure that it was enabled as EMS, but nobody called that upgrading the EMS.

"1994: Wing Commander 3 (The third part of the Wing Commander series was quite demanding like Origin’s Strike Commander of Ultima game series)."

Every other caption is "this game was demanding." Well, duh, it's on the list of most demanding games. What made it demanding? It required 8 megs of RAM and a CD-ROM in 1994. Its prequel game shipped with a warning and discounted computer hardware offer. It featured hours of live action FMV and mission load times could reach 15 minutes, even if you had the recommended amount of RAM. There's so much you could write, about every game, that's just not there. Plus the typo, "Strike Commander of Ultima game series."

What I find really ironic is that Strike Commander is listed as being hardware demanding but it had problems with machines that had more than 16 Mb of RAM. At least in it's initial release.

That's not really ironic... since it was still an incredibly demanding game. The fact that it wanted 8 or 16 megs at a time when 4 megs was common is the key part. Privateer also had the bug (at 32 megs).
 
Back
Top