No Mercy For Wing Commander IV, Colonel (July 26, 2012)

[Dundradal]

The British gaming press of the 1990s continues to hammer Wing Commander. It's difficult to call this a "review" so much as an angry rant. The UK edition of PC Gamer "reviewed" Wing Commander IV in March 1996 and didn't have a whole lot of positive things to say. They do mention giving Wing Commander III a high score, its successor does not enjoy a similar fate. They appear to be very upset that they were promised the world and all they got was Wing Commander IV. The reviewer does have a nice word at the end though.

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Thanks again to Pix for allowing us to post these scans.

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Original update published on July 26, 2012

 

[Farbourne]

Wow. Pretty harsh. I can't quite figure out what their problem is... really. The bit about WC copying LucasArts is especially silly. I like the X-Wing/TIE fighter games as much as the next person, but they were pretty consistently chasing Origin through the entire 90's when it came to making good space sims, not the other way around.

 

[Red Baron]

Was Wing Commander really that unpopular in the UK back then or did british reviewers just enjoy their semantic skills that much?
Seriously i like a little sarkasm here and there, but i'd feel ripped off if i paid for a magazine with that kind of writing style. If a game's bad, write a one-page review of the whys and be done with it, but three pages full of rantings for a "mediocre" game are just attentionwhoring. Am i supposed to not enjoy the game because the reviewer doesn't like Mark Hamill's face?
The only good side i see is that here i definately don't have that creepy feeling of, let's call it "lobbyism" i have when reading professional reviews nowadays.

 

[Pix]

Was Wing Commander really that unpopular in the UK back then or did british reviewers just enjoy their semantic skills that much?

Most of the WC4 reviews I've scanned in are like this. PC games magazines were near enough all written like that over here by the mid-90's and WC4 with it's huge budget appears to have been an easy target. I did find one reviewer that gave it a decent score but I had to look through a lot of magazines.

Wing Commander was a long way from unpopular in the UK. Speaking for myself, I loved WC4 from the moment I played it back in 96 as did everyone else I knew. There was at least one person who agreed with PC Gamer. This letter from a self-proclaimed WC Nut was in the April 1996 edition:-



The UK sales charts, on the other hand, suggest the public knew better than to take these sorts of reviews too seriously:-

 

[Delance]

Wing Commander IV is the price of freedom.

 

[Ilanin]

PC Zone, which was the highest-circulation UK PC gaming mag at the time, gave it a mid-80s score. PC games magazines in general universally hated the interactive movie format and anything that might have had something approaching that was marked down, since most reviewers seemed to regard story as entirely incidental to the review of an action game - but the far bigger problem is that the Wing Commander flight engines required a fair amount of effort to learn, because if you don't understand the correct use of afterburners (and it varies between games, between fighters, and between enemies), you're not going to enjoy playing it. Reviewers spend maybe a week with a game and write about first impressions. A reviewer is almost never going to prefer any of the Wing Commander games to TIE Fighter because Lawrence Holland's engines are much more accessible. TIE Fighter, being laughably easy until you get into the expansion packs, has an additional advantage in that it will make reviewers think they're actually good at the game, which always helps...

 

[Red Baron]

How much did you use to pay for an issue? I know the British press has its own... style, but if i buy a special interest magazine, i expect at least an attempt at objective journalism. Especially when my buying decisions depend on it.
Here it's just simple adjectives like "dull" and "boring" and a lot of clever remarks, and when i'm finished reading i know the reviewer didn't enjoy it and had a copy of the Oxford dictionary, but not much more. A hardware section that goes a little more into detail than "Paupers with 486 PCs will have to make do with VGA which looks like this" would be nice too. Does the percentage even have a semi-scientific background beyond "it's better than that 65% game i reviewed last week but worse than that 67% game two months ago"?
Maybe i'm spoiled with magazines that tested on different hardware systems and explained their rating system (which i admittedly didn't place too much trust in either, but at least they tried), but this review really looks just like the average internet rant nowadays, just with a more sophisticated English.
I'm not complaining about the 66% rating but how it's explained. In the end it's always a matter of taste, but a review should include enough details for me to decide if i, with my very special interests, could enjoy that game.

 

[Pix]

How much did you use to pay for an issue?.

If I'd bought it back then it would have been £4.99. Thankfully I didn't and it cost me a few pence at most as part of a vanload of old magazines. I was a PC Zone subscriber back in the day, which was far better than this on the whole but hardly immune from dodgy reviews. I still hold a grudge that they persuaded me a powerVR card was a better bet than a 3dfx...

 

[Flashpoint]

This really is nothing to do with the British press loving or hating wing commander.
This is about the reviewer and some standards he has that differ from your average game reviewer.
Richard Longhurst previously worked for a publication called Amiga Power (the legend that it was).
Amiga Power (or AP as I will refer to it from this point hence) didn't agree with a lot of the practices of typical games magazines.
They didn't agree with the common practises of reviewing half finished games, giving favourable reviews to publishers in return for 'Exclusives!', using only half the percentage scale (the portion above 50%), so an average game could score 75% in other magazines when in truth it should be 50%. Indeed, they often gave very low scores for things like Rise of the Robots and 2% for some really bad sports game. Anyway, I digress.
The point is that one of those standards was that if you are trying to be something, you should be judged by the same standards as that thing you are trying to be.
As mind-blowing as WC4's plot and video were to us (me included), it was mindblowing because it was an amazing thing for a game. As much as I might not like to admit it, he's right that the plot and dialogue are not great by movie standards.
Clearly after being upset by this, it has coloured his views on the rest of the game, which is unfortunate but quite normal.

So this review is more about not meeting this reviewers unusual standards, than it is about anything else.
I'd not be too concerned about it

 

[Pedro]

PC Zone, which was the highest-circulation UK PC gaming mag at the time, gave it a mid-80s score.

Thankfully that is the magazine I read as a child. Very thankfully as Wing IV was probably my largest influence in deciding my career path. As I recall it wasn't just the review score, it's been years since I read it but I seem to recall that the article was quite enthusiastic in tone, despite the odd criticism. I'd be keen to see that review again actually, if anyone has it?


To the above poster: I wouldn't say that the plot and dialogue were particularly stunning, no, but also not that far off a movie such as Star Wars, and like the Star Wars movies it was much more a matter of the experience. For me (although WingIV was my first Wing Commander) The Price of Freedom was the first time I had ever been so immersed in a video game universe.

 

[Mace]

"Paupers with 486 PCs will have to make do with VGA which looks like this".

Back in those days systems were more tunable, and it was the ability to fine-tune hardware by diving into configurations, multiboots, etc. that set the pace for me and my current entire professional career in IT. Also there were lots and lots of underperforming pieces of hardware back in the day(videocards from manufactors as oak technology that where sold as SVGA but could not handle higher resulotions then 320x200 and had weird issues running mode7, motherboards failing on lots of tests but still on the market because they simply turned features off that caused stability issues)

I rebuilded my system up to spec to easily run WC3 with money I made from flipping burgers at 17, ended up with a high-end 486DX(80Mhz IBM chip) machine with 8MB of Ram(combined 30- and 72pins SIMM), a double speed CD-rom player, a 2Mb VLB videocard, and a gravis ultrasound(plugged into a true surround set). Two years later it still could easily run WC4 in SVGA with all options on during flight, handle the highcolor option for the movies, was optimal during the speed tests, no delays or clutter whatsover the reviewers mentioned.. I had seen this on other 486 systems with ISA cards or a messy config file that you could resolve by avoiding it and using a bootdisk.

And yes, TIE fighter was a bit more spec-friendly, and a great game(And no, the expansion with the missile boat was the easiest and most laughable game I flew since epic). A friend of mine was a fanatic lucasarts sim fan, but boy did he love the epic sequences in wing commander 3 and 4, and the true orchestral music, and the acting is fantastic if you compare it to games as Megarace, Mantis, or plumbers don't wear tights..

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Wing Commander was a long way from unpopular in the UK. Speaking for myself, I loved WC4 from the moment I played it back in 96 as did everyone else I knew. There was at least one person who agreed with PC Gamer. This letter from a self-proclaimed WC Nut was in the April 1996 edition:-

Haha that is surprising! The funny thing is his thinking there wouldn't be a Wing Commander V... because I remember that thought being such a common thought after both Wing Commander III and IV were released. In retrospect, these were among the best selling PC games of all time... OF COURSE there was going to be another one (and there was a matter of months before sequels were announced... it's amazing to go back and see SO MUCH 'Wing Commander Aces Club' fiction written in that brief period of time when they thought there'd be no sequel to WC3...)

I still hold a grudge that they persuaded me a powerVR card was a better bet than a 3dfx...

I had completely forgotten about PowerVR! With good reason, I suppose.

This really is nothing to do with the British press loving or hating wing commander.
This is about the reviewer and some standards he has that differ from your average game reviewer.

No, the British press' general dislike of Wing Commander was an running theme in the 1990s. I remember it perplexing both British WingNuts and the public relations folks at Origin at the time (you'll find it mentioned occasionally in Point of Origin.)

I'm inclined to think it has something to do with thinking of Wing Commander as the 'big American blockbuster' of video games that you were sort of required to protest on artistic grounds, much as you might act scornfully about a McDonalds or a Starbucks opening in your town (regardless of how many cheeseburgers or expensive coffees you are going to enjoy.) It may also be that these magazines had something against the hometown boy who left the much more closely knit British game development community to go off and make these games (the review above actually touches on this...)

Two years later it still could easily run WC4 in SVGA with all options on during flight, handle the highcolor option for the movies, was optimal during the speed tests, no delays or clutter whatsover the reviewers mentioned..

My memory is that Wing Commander 4 actually ran noticeably better on the same 486 that I played Wing Commander 3 on (a DX2.) It's possible that they discarded the lowest end systems in order to optimize for the mid range stuff, though...

 

[Flashpoint]

To the above poster: I wouldn't say that the plot and dialogue were particularly stunning, no, but also not that far off a movie such as Star Wars, and like the Star Wars movies it was much more a matter of the experience. For me (although WingIV was my first Wing Commander) The Price of Freedom was the first time I had ever been so immersed in a video game universe.

I started at WC1 on the amiga and each game onwards was more and more immersive. For a game (and of their time) they were stunningly good compared to their contemporaries and I too was utterly consumed by them.
I guess loving the game as well as the universe makes a big difference in how you percieve the video (for me anyhow), because while I still really enjoy them as games, I actually find both WC3 and WC4 quite boring when I watch queeg's videos (No disrespect to Queeg there. It was a way cool thing that he did).
The truth is that if you judge the cutscenes by movie standards, they aren't all that brilliant at all.
I think a big reason for this is because of the interactive nature, so it is hard for someone to really tell a movie quality story because they have limited control over the plot. Not realising this is something I'd criticise the reviewer for, as its impact is huge.

Having said all of that, it occurs to me that unless you're an established fan of the universe, rather than just the games (if that makes sense), I guess it would be harder to be immersed in any story and it would be easier to then find the criticisms (which given his short summing up of the previous Wing Commanders, I am assuming he is not a Wingnut at all).

For my own part, I personally thought WC4 was better than WC3 from a cutscene point of view, but that WC3 was better when actually dogfighting.

 

[-danr-]

I am almost *certain* that a copy of WCIV I used to own on the 'EA Classics' label quoted PC gamer on the front of the box!

'WCIV is even more impressive than it's pre-decessor, PC Gamer rated 90%'...

 

[AD]

I am almost *certain* that a copy of WCIV I used to own on the 'EA Classics' label quoted PC gamer on the front of the box!
'WCIV is even more impressive than it's pre-decessor, PC Gamer rated 90%'...

Keep in mind that PC Gamer, and PC Gamer UK are distinct publications ... or at least they were.

 

[Richard Longhurst]

Well this is a blast (titter) from the past and no mistake. Thank you for posting the review and commenting on it. For reasons best known to myself, I was Goggling to try to find if someone had scanned an edition of PC Gamer with my review of Hudson FBI and then happen-chanced upon this thread.

It's brought back many happy memories of that time. In 1996 my day job was editor of .net, a magazine about the Internet ("Look! Web sites! Usenet!"). Before that I had been staff writer and games editor on PC Format magazine for 3 years so had played a lot of PC games, Wing Commanders, Strike Commander, Privateer and LucasArts games included.

As I alluded at the end of that review, I was hugely fortunate to be one of a handful of UK journalists to be taken by EA/Origin to the film set of Wing Commander III in Van Nuys, LA (not quite Hollywood). I remember meeting Mark Hamill in his trailer - he was watching Dark Knight cartoons, he voiced The Joker. He was very friendly and signed 3 Star Wars comics I had bought for me and my 2 sons: "To a Jedi of the Future..." Wonderful.

Then we flew to Austin to meet Chris Roberts and the programming team. After work we went to "a bar" for "a drink" and I found myself in my first lap-dancing club, age 23 (ish). Yikes.

That was the trip that led to this Wing Commander 3 preview in PC Format in July 1994:
http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wing-commander-3-preview-pc-format/

The quote at the end of that Wing Commander 3 preview is the one I repeated at the end of the Wing Commander 4 review in PC Gamer.

I'm not and wasn't a Wingnut but I had a lot of fun playing the Wing Commander games over the years - really enjoyed them and have some shrink-wrapped editions in my attic.

Time has obviously dulled the memories but I think my objection was that even though the flying-and-shooting bits looked amazing they weren't as good *to play* as TIE Fighter. I don't think I'll ever convince you WingNuts of that, but it's one opinion among many. ;-)

The film bits, meanwhile, weren't as good as they were cracked up to be, despite the big (for its time) budget.

While Richard Garriott's comment didn't come true in the sense that a script would be for linear and interactive usage, it did in the sense that the quality of acting, direction and photography in videogames is now as good as you can see in film. The Telegraph has categories for best script, director and acting in its videogame awards: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/9759402/Telegraph-video-game-awards-2012.html

I don't think LucasArts were chasing Origin. Lawrence Holland had already had success with flight sims like Battlehawks and Their Finest Hour before WC I was released. Then they had Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, so it was a natural progression to make fly-and-shoot games in the Star Wars universe.

As for the score - yes, 50% was a strict average for PC Gamer UK edition. PC Gamer US was a totally independent beast even though it was published by the US division of the same company.

And check out that price tag - £60 in 1996 money!
Anyway, enough ramblings... thank you for prompting the memories albeit 6 months after you finished this thread.

But then, you know what they say about eternal vigilance...

Richard

 

[Pix]

Despite them both being space sims, I always saw X-Wing and Wing Commander being very different games myself and not entirely in direct competition with each other. I'd actually agree about the gameplay to a degree but Wing Commander offered immediate action and a more immersive experience with the cinematics and branching missions. I played them both to death at the time and would struggle to pick a favourite between them.

Anyway, to show I don't hold a grudge over a slightly uncomplimentary WC4 review from nearly 20 years back here's a scan of your Hopkins FBI review:-

 

[ChrisReid]

You're amazing, Pix!

 

[Richard Longhurst]

That is brilliant, thank you so much Pix. Much much appreciated.

Richard