Wing Commander 2 Vengeance of the Kilrathi and the Speech Accessory Pack
By Marcus L Rowland
Produced by Chris Roberts
Published by Origin
UK distributor Mindscape
Systems IBM PC
PC graphics EGA. VGA. MCGA
Supports Roland, Adlib and Sound Blaster sound boards; joystick, mouse and keyboard
Wing Commander 2 is the long awaited sequel to Wing Commander and its two secret mission disks. For anyone who has been on Mars for the past two years, WC is a huge space fighter combat game, based on a long war between the Terran Confeder ation and the Kilrathi Empire, with the outcome of each combat deter mining the next step of a complex cinematic plot. WC2 improves the improves the graphics considerably, and gets rid of a lot of bugs, but unfortunately there are several prices to be paid for the improvements.
The game begins 10 years after Wing Commander ends. The TCS Tigers Claw has been destroyed in a surprise attack by Kilrathi stealth fighters. Only our hero has seen the stealth fighters, since the Kilrathi de stroyed the production facility to stop it falling into rebel hands, and he's generally considered to be the coward who let the Kilrathi destroy the car rier. Now the stealth fighters are starting to appear again, and proving that they exist is a major goal in the game.
For new players the game begins with a long cinematic sequence ex plaining this background, making effective use of speech synthesis (Sound Blaster only) and 256-colour low-resolution VGA/MCGA graphics, but spoiled by sluggish ani- mation (on my 16MHz 386). Characters have slow lip movements that are horribly unconvincing, and move at a stately pace, with little jerks as the screen updates. I've seen much faster animation in other programs, and this aspect is extremely disap pointing.
The introduction leads to entry of name and call sign, with an option to load characters from the earlier game.
This option wouldn't work when I tried it. Next comes a view of a utili tarian chamber containing a computer, airlock entrance, and two other doors, a replacement for the barracks in Wing Commander. There's no mirror to check your me dals, and no access to a flight trainer.
Loading Options
The computer can save and load up to eight missions, showing the number of missions flown and the number of kills for each saved game. A nice feature is an option to add a note describing saved games, but this is unfortunately limited to thirty or so letters in a peculiarly unreadable typeface. The current game is saved automatically after each mission, with saved games giving an option to go back to earlier stages.
Plot continuity deals with the character's life and other events, and is much more diverse than the ship's bar in Wing Commander. So far I’ve seen a murder, a secret intelligence debriefing, a poker game, and en counters in barracks and bars. An implausible number of survivors from the Tiger’s Claw appear. These sequences aren’t interactive. So far none of them have used speech syn thesis, even with the accessory pack added. All are infuriatingly slow.
The missions door leads to com bat missions. Typically these begin with a briefing, but it isn’t always the formal briefing seen in Wing Com mander; sometimes it's just a casual conversation on the flight deck. Sometimes the ‘briefing’ continues after take-off, adding more narrative sequences such as conversations with bases and wingmen.
Combat is fast and furious, and I’d guess that most of Origin’s pro gramming expertise has gone into making it smooth and flicker-free, and improving detailing at all ranges. The flight behaviour of craft remains as implausible as ever, they can make impossibly sharp manoeuvres, shed speed instantly, and stay inclose con tact with the enemy when they should really be flashing apart at 2000kps.
All the combat graphics are en hanced; all the new craft have bigger cockpit canopies, giving a greatly im proved view of the action, and the controls look much more real, some times confusingly so. Missiles and energy weapons are more detailed, again a little implausibly; I wouldn’t expect to be able to see a missile zipping by at 1500kps, let alone count the rivets on it. With the speech acces sory added wingmen reply to their orders, and the Kilrathi snarl their threats and battle cries. There isn’t any noticeable speed penalty with speech, and intercom video (a fre quent cause of problems in Wing Commander) doesn’t seem to slow the game at all. Controls are un changed, with extra features added as needed.
In the Soup
Military hardware has changed considerably in ten years. The only familiar Terran fighter is an upgraded Rapier; particle cannon replace neu tron guns for added range, and chaff pods improve missile defence. This isn’t the sweet killer it was, since the Kilrathi have souped up their own craft considerably. Three other fight ers and a bomber are available at different stages.
The Ferret is a small light patrol fighter, intended for anti-piracy and anti-smuggling operations, armed with two mass drivers. It has a huge bubble canopy, and omits some of the instruments found in other ships. This is roughly equivalent to a fast basic trainer - a lot of fun to fly, but a death trap if the big bad guys are en countered.
The Epee is a little larger and slower, and adds missiles and an im proved tracking system that makes deflection shooting easier. Armour is worse than the Ferret.
The Sabre is the largest fighter, carrying four guns, eight missiles, a rear turret, and chaff pods. I’ve yet to try one, so I can’t say how they be have, but the specification looks good; loads of armour, improved tracking, and reasonable manoeuvra bility and speed.
The Broadsword is a huge jump-capable bomber with three turrets, torpedoes, missiles, and lots of guns. It’s a pig to fly in combat, with rotten manoeuvrability and speed, but it’s the only craft that can take out capital ships, since both sides now use phase shields that block normal fighter wea pons completely.
The advertising for this game makes frequent references to the tur rets; when they’re used the ship flies under automatic pilot, avoiding colli sions. 1 didn’t like this feature at all; without the complexities of flying the ship, taking pot-shots from a turret soon becomes very boring. There also seems to be a bug which makes all the turrets fire continuously if you press the joystick button while the game is paused. I’d be happier if the turrets were fully automated, with ‘ friend or foe’ systems to aim them, or used some sort of split screen aiming (little TV sets in the cockpit?) to tell the pilot when to press the button. I’ll be interested to see how well the Broad sword fares against a capital ship, but so far I haven’t encountered one. The turrets would be most useful on the run-up to a shipping strike, which is the one moment when you don’t want to go onto autopilot, so 1 have grave doubts about their usefulness.
There are some new ways to damage your fighter, the deadliest being loss of radar; when that happens you suddenly realize how hard it is to cover a 360-degree 3D field of view by eye alone.
One major bug of Wing Commander is even worse in the new game; joystick control of afterburners is implemented very poorly, even on the 33MHz machine 1 tried when pre viewing the game, and rarely works if there’s more than one enemy fighter in a combat.
A nice feature is a ‘replay mission’ option, used if your character is killed or ejects. This lets you bypass the funeral or reprimand that would nor mally follow, and go suaight back to the start of the mission after the briefing.
Overall I’m very impressed with the combat sections of this game, but disappointed by the narrative pas sages. Origin says that these sequences were created using Autodesk Animator; I’ve run Autodesk on my computer, and the results were much faster, even with higher resolution.
There are long delays while the computer seems to meditate before loading the next sequence; this is most notable if a pilot is killed, be cause there’s an interminable pause before the cockpit interior is shown. Somewhere this part of the pro gramming has gone badly wrong. Even so, the faults can be lived with, and shouldn’t disguise the fact that the core of this game is an extremely playable simulation. The snag is that many PCs will be unable to run it.
Wing Commander 2 is extraor dinarily big, even compared with its predecessor. In all 1 loaded 19 720k disks and spent several hours tinker ing with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files before everything worked properly. Take a careful look at the sidebar text and the game box before you buy; everything shown is the minimum needed, and the game performs much better with more memory and faster processors.
Well Spoken
The speech accessory pack is a must, if you have the right hardware; it’s excellent, and seems to impose no penalties apart from disk space. Some of the accents are unbelievable, espe cially those of the Kilrathi. As yet there aren’t versions of this pack for other speech products, such as Covox cards. Special operations packs are mentioned in the documentation but not yet available. There is no indica tion of size, however. I’ve got 10-15Mb of hard disk space with a ‘reserved for Special Operations’ file on it.
After this I think that I’ll probably leave Strike Commander until 1 get a new computer; a Cray should be about right....
Installation Notes
MSDOS 5 is recommended because MSDOS 4 consumes too much RAM. Hard disk requirements: 12Mb with files com- pres.sed to minimize space. 15Mb with files expanded to minimize delays, add 5Mb for speech synthesis (Sound Blaster only). Add-on missions may eventually need more megabytes. There is no copy protection.
Installation takes at least an hour for the game. Speech instal lation takes about 15 minutes. De-fragmenting the hard disk is strongly recommended after either installation. For unknown reasoas the game seemed to work much better with VGA memor>' upgraded to 512k.
