Kilrathi Saga bad rap?

frostytheplebe

frostytheplebe

Seventh Part of the Seal
Maybe someone could explain this to me... It seems as though TKS has gotten one hell of a bad rep around here. I'd like to know why. I started out on WC3 when it was first released so I never got to play the other two wing commanders in all their glory. I played WC1 on SNES (which sucks compared to the original), and never got to fly a morningstar off of the Concordia... something I was dying to try. I purchased an original copy of WC2 but no matter what I did, it wouldn't work, and I was always getting errors in Dosbox. That Emulator just never worked properly for me. Finally I bought the deluxe edition, thinking I'd found a way around it, but by that time I was playing on Windows 98 and, surprise surprise, IT DIDN'T WORK EITHER! A few years later I tried again on my XP laptop and got it to play, but it had no sound, and the videos went too fast to know what was going on, still I got my wish, but was still unsatisfied. So finally I thought I'd bite the bullet and buy TKS. Not only did it work beautifully on my Vista machine, but I also got to try the "REAL" WC1. Since then I've kept the game, the movie, Armada, Academy, Privateer, and a CD i burned of WCATV in the same box, KS.

I am an avid fan of KS and will never part with my copy. So I was just wondering why it seems to get such a bad rep?
 
A number of reasons, I think. Its initial inflated price on places like eBay, the fact that while game-play sections are frame-limited in WC1/2, the story-line sections are not, among other things... I'm not quite sure, actually.

It is interesting that you could not get the original WC2 to work under Windows 98, I can't recall having any such problems. But as you are on Vista now, well, what little experience I have had with that particular version of Windows has not been positive.
 
Wedge009 said:
A number of reasons, I think. Its initial inflated price on places like eBay, the fact that while game-play sections are frame-limited in WC1/2, the story-line sections are not, among other things... I'm not quite sure, actually.
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Most likely because my family was cheap and by the time i got the game, the computer was a POS anyway...

Wedge009 said:
It is interesting that you could not get the original WC2 to work under Windows 98, I can't recall having any such problems. But as you are on Vista now, well, what little experience I have had with that particular version of Windows has not been positive.
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Oh I'm not denying that. I hate Vista, but until I either get a set of Windows XP discs, or Windows 7 finishes production, I'm stuck and for now, it does what I need it to do, with enough patches, it isnt too bad...:(
 
Vista's not bad after you spend a little time tweaking it. Though it eats a lot more resources than XP, in my experience it's been significantly stabler.

The Kilrathi Saga has bugs, but the full-screen cockpit-free view alone makes it worthwhile. The tiny peep show displays the original versions restricted you to were mainly for performance reasons, and now that that's not a problem the whole experience is improved.

If you haven't gotten around to The Secret Missions and SM2 yet, I should warn you that I haven't been able to get them to run in Vista (Special Operation 1 & 2 work fine).
 
Catnip said:
The Kilrathi Saga has bugs, but the full-screen cockpit-free view alone makes it worthwhile. The tiny peep show displays the original versions restricted you to were mainly for performance reasons, and now that that's not a problem the whole experience is improved.
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I'm not sure where you got that idea from - having large cockpits does not improve the game's performance in any way. Sprites still had to be drawn on the entire screen. So, the cockpits weren't there to speed the game up, they were there simply because they made the game better.
 
The 'Bad Rap' isn't exactly so bad, but it's definitely deserved. For the majority of people, The Kilrathi Saga version was not only inflated in price (200 dollars a copy on ebay often) but almost impossible to get working in WinXP. It was a lot easier on the pocketbook and a lot less headace for most to get the dos versions and use dosbox. There's also a handful of reasons for your game not working in dosbox correctly but I'm pretty sure they're all easy fixes.

There's also a handful of bugs the version introduced, along with it's extra features. The only real bonus is the added joystick support in WC3 which ahs rudder support etc. THe digitized music doesn not necessarily sound better than a MPU-401. It's not that the extra features are bad, just that they don't automatically make the collection great or worth more than the DOS versions.

If you are a collector it's a must buy I suppose, and it will work great if you are still running win98 or win95 but who is doing that these days?
 
I don't recall ever having problems with KSaga (at least WC1 and WC2 - not sure if I played WC3 during this time) on XP... come to think of it, it worked significantly better on XP, because in Windows 95, unless you very quickly clicked "cancel", it would install DirectX 2 on top of whatever DirectX version you had, while XP seemed to prevent this.

Anyway, by far the best thing about KSaga were the non-game-related features - the calendar, the expanded manual, and the nifty CD cover art. It was a wonderful package, and great value for money if you were able to get it at its normal price.
 
The dogfight won music bug and WC2 being choppy and more or less unplayable seem to be common bugs, other than that I liked it.
 
Catnip said:
If you haven't gotten around to The Secret Missions and SM2 yet, I should warn you that I haven't been able to get them to run in Vista (Special Operation 1 & 2 work fine).
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I know, and its pissed me off! I've played SM1, but I have never been able to play SM2 and its driving me crazy. I've played the SWC version and love flying with Jazz, but I never got to see what he's like in the original. I probably never will at this rate.
 
Quarto said:
Anyway, by far the best thing about KSaga were the non-game-related features - the calendar, the expanded manual, and the nifty CD cover art. It was a wonderful package, and great value for money if you were able to get it at its normal price.
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Aye, those are great.
 
AD said:
The 'Bad Rap' isn't exactly so bad, but it's definitely deserved. For the majority of people, The Kilrathi Saga version was not only inflated in price (200 dollars a copy on ebay often) but almost impossible to get working in WinXP. It was a lot easier on the pocketbook and a lot less headace for most to get the dos versions and use dosbox. There's also a handful of reasons for your game not working in dosbox correctly but I'm pretty sure they're all easy fixes.

There's also a handful of bugs the version introduced, along with it's extra features. The only real bonus is the added joystick support in WC3 which ahs rudder support etc. THe digitized music doesn not necessarily sound better than a MPU-401. It's not that the extra features are bad, just that they don't automatically make the collection great or worth more than the DOS versions.

If you are a collector it's a must buy I suppose, and it will work great if you are still running win98 or win95 but who is doing that these days?
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How much was it new? I got mine on ebay for $150 including shipping.
 
Quarto said:
Anyway, by far the best thing about KSaga were the non-game-related features - the calendar, the expanded manual, and the nifty CD cover art. It was a wonderful package, and great value for money if you were able to get it at its normal price.
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Have to agree with Q and Wedge here, the additional material included with KS was worth the cost of it alone. I still have all of those pieces of material in perfect condition (I don't think I've ever opened the calender for too long)

I believe it retailed for what you'd expect at the time $50-$60. I got it for Christmas the year it came out and can recall on IRC that most people's nick were XXXX-KS for months afterwards because everyone was replaying the series in Win95.
 
AD said:
If you are a collector it's a must buy I suppose, and it will work great if you are still running win98 or win95 but who is doing that these days?
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Well, most of the people I work with are running windows 2000... after 2 months of begging I finally got my machines upgraded to XP. But I think there are still a few Win 98 machines lurking around here... pathetic though it may be.
 
Quarto said:
I don't recall ever having problems with KSaga (at least WC1 and WC2 - not sure if I played WC3 during this time) on XP... come to think of it, it worked significantly better on XP, because in Windows 95, unless you very quickly clicked "cancel", it would install DirectX 2 on top of whatever DirectX version you had, while XP seemed to prevent this.

Anyway, by far the best thing about KSaga were the non-game-related features - the calendar, the expanded manual, and the nifty CD cover art. It was a wonderful package, and great value for money if you were able to get it at its normal price.
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There isn't as many issues with WC1 and 2. Mostly there's a few minor bugs, and the WC2 SO packs are hatcheted... they reuse the regular music because they didn't bother redoing it for the pack since they originally never intended to do them at all. There's some missing graphics for this reason too. But over all the KS version of WC2 will work fine on modern PCs.

Many users have shed many tears tring to get WC3 to run however. Just browse the tech support forum for a few minutes and read a few WC3 related threads and pay attention to the dates. It's only recently that people like Mincemeat and a few others have worked out a few solutions (that still don't work for everybody either).

This may or may not be an issue in Vista or windows 7 so it remains to be seen how well the games will run, but dosbox will still be there. So, just to play the games, 200 dollars for the game isn't worth it at all if you already have the dos versions. That doesn't mean it's not worth having in your collection. For someone like myself and obviously many others here the manuals are a great addition to the bookshelf. But considering you can usually get relatively cheap copys of the dos versions, the price difference doesn't necessarily justify the improvements for someone who just wants to complete their game collection so they can play the series again.

In my opinion things like full screen flying and digitized music in WC2 don't add anything at all since I don't turn off cockpits and I find the general midi sounds as good emulated in dosbox as the digital versions in the kilrathi saga version. Mind you, I don't know how my wavetable compares to some of the more generic soundcards or built-in soundcards others might have in their systems.
 
Funny but I was rather disappointed in the Kilrathi Saga manual when I finally got it. What angered me most was that errors in the old manuals had not been corrected (ok that maybe was intentional to preserve the "original" tone) and that there had been additional mistakes in the sense of wrong prints (stats from one fighter copied to the other etc). I though the quality was not very impressive.

The additional info was rather sparse and not so cool I hoped. But additional info is always welcome.

I guess I had too high expectations towards it after having searched for it for years and then having paid over 100 € for it. Had I bought it when I saw it for 50 DM on a shelf (used) I probably would have thought it was nice.
 
I'd say most of the bad rep has come from (as others have said) the few bugs in it that were never fixed and the overly-inflated price of the darned thing (Makes me wish I had picked up a copy the one time I saw it in stores (Passed on it because my family was still running a DOS computer that ran the old games just fine)).

EA should really redo the collection again, except do it in a "Remastered" kind of way.

For example, it would come with the original versions of WC1-3 at minimum (Including the SM and SO expansions on disc) (You could throw in 4, Prophecy and Secret Ops and just name the thing "The Wing Commander Series"), all adjusted to play on modern computer and bug free in Vista

In addition it would come with remakes of the included games. By this I mean remake the same game (i.e. WC1 would be exactly the same as the original but expanded to encompass all the missions in the SMs and the SWC SM 1.5 missions) but with modern graphics, speach (You could still customize your callsign though) and designed from the ground up for modern computers. For WC3, you could even use the audio clips from the original films for the audio for newly animated characters.

I think, in all honesty, that this would be a great way to regenerate interest in the series (Something that is desperately needed). Also this way you not only capture the interest of the fans (those who want the original games in their original glory (myself included)) and the interest of fans who want the same game but despise the original graphics and new people on the market.

What do you guys think? One thing is clear, we NEED the respark interest in the commercial field. It's been far too long since we had a new WC game to look forward to.
 
I'd be happier if you said "a full WC game" instead of "a proper WC game" because it still sounds a bit disrespectful towards Arena which is a fine game but I guess I'm being oversensitive.

Anyway, I totally agree (as probably the majority here), another new WC game would be awesome.
 
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