Nothing But A Rich Man's Game (August 30, 2012)

[Dundradal]

Here's something of a surprise, a positive review of a Wing Commander product from PC Format! They are impressed with the cast of actors, the improvements in technology and even the gameplay! But of course, this being PC Format that can't last forever. After getting the year wrong, they list 2654 instead of 2669, they toss in some subtle jabs throughout the review. Their biggest whine, along with countless other Wingnuts of the time, is slow loading times. Most of us can remember watching Blair run down the stairs and climb into his fighter and then waiting as the mission loaded. Depending on your system specs this could sometimes take a while. Check out the whole thing below!

Wing Commander 3 is a rich man's game. It's expensive to buy, needs an expensive machine to play an, as is the case with legitimately acquiring enormous wealth, it requires the patience of saint. It's the most ambitious game ever to grace a PC, with a budget of over $4 million, $2m of which went on Hollywood talent, the other $2m on programming skills. But it was all worth it.

​

Thanks to Pix for these great scans!

--
Original update published on August 30, 2012

 

[Ilanin]

Strangely, my first thought when I read the "patience of a saint" line didn't relate to loading times at all. I was thinking of the gameplay. Now, that's got to be at least in part because I didn't play WC3 until 2000 when even the oldest of computers had very little trouble loading the game near-instantly, but it's also reflective of how your priorities change a bit when you're playing for an audience. Playing the game to be recorded makes me very impatient - repetitive action is boring, so I always want to keep things moving.

Wing Commander III - especially on Nightmare (solution: don't Let's Play WCIII on Nightmare) - frustrates this desire enormously. In addition to the relatively stronger nature of ships compared to the amount of damage done by weapons compared to previous games, the additional difficulty has mostly been supplied by making the AI lean much more heavily on its afterburners, which, coupled with the narrow profile of most Kilrathi ships and the lack of a shield sphere effect, makes many enemies exceptionally difficult to hit most of the time, unless they're going head-to-head. And of course if you chase enemies and impatiently try and hunt them down you don't get to go head-to-head very often. An additional little tweak is the greatly increased number of missiles the cats will now throw at you, daring you to attempt to stay on an enemy's tail a bit long and end up with no armour left.

In short, WCIII tactics are all about being patient; and in many ways the more patient you are the more able you are to deal with Kilrathi quickly.

On the brighter side, when you finally get to jump in the Excalibur and are able to hit the enemy the relief is tremendous.

 

[centaurianmudpig]

Ah yes, the loading times. The first time I played WC3 was on a P90. Took something like 30-60 seconds to load the mission, IIRC. For the console generation, that's like waiting for Quake 4 to load on the 360. I suppose thats why they crammed the box full of extras, plenty of reading time.

 

[Dundradal]

Ah yes, the loading times. The first time I played WC3 was on a P90. Took something like 30-60 seconds to load the mission, IIRC. For the console generation, that's like waiting for Quake 4 to load on the 360. I suppose thats why they crammed the box full of extras, plenty of reading time.

You've never played Battlestations Pacific then. Its load times are horrendous on 360.

 

[Mace]

Wing 3 required a 486dx2, that was a common machine to purchase a year before the release of wing3, and it ran very good on those systems. I Had a lot more of an extended loading time on my first playthrough of wing2 on my 386sx that was a common machine where wing2 was already a year old, if you had to retry a mission the loading time would exceed 15 minutes with ease). PC format(the uk edition), also talked in this manner for strike commander and pacific strike. and wing commander 3 was just as expensive as any other game during it's release. Inferno was the most expensive game in those daysi ever bought, and I hated the game, despite PC format's positive review.