You Got Wing Commander in my System Shock! (February 19, 2006)

[Bandit LOAF]

The original disk version of System Shock included a number of mini-games you could collect during the game's cyberspace mode and then play whenever you had a quiet moment. These were small, simple games that loaded in the player's left VDU - versions of things like Pong and Tic-Tac-Toe. For the subsequent CD version of System Shock the designers went all out and included a major homage to Wing Commander: Wing 0, a tiny Wing Commander shooter.

Wing 0 features a 13-mission campaign complete with traditional Wing Commander plot elements: wingmen, speech, traitors, nav points, talking heads, familiar fighters, autopilot flybys, lasers, dogfights and so on... all done in a 148x139 corner screen!

Thanks to a saved game kindly provided by Shadowcat of the Through The Looking Glass forums, I was able to jump right into Wing 0 to break it down into its component parts. The result is a brand new article, available here, that treats it like we would any new game -- it provides mision layouts, endgames, wingman comms, controls and ships!

I've also put the saved game I used to access Wing 0 directly online here (500k) -- if you have the PC-CD version of System Shock, give it a try (and if you don't have the game, go buy it!).

Wing 0 was developed for System Shock CD by Sean Barrett. His biography says the following about the game:

"...for the CD game I outdid myself with a relatively complete Wing Commander minigame, Wing 0--written just before Wing 3 was released, it's both an homage and a parody, featuring, for example, one pacifistic wingman who refuses to fight (and strangely never gets attacked either, because he's actually a traitor!!!), a mission where you get something like 8 wingmen, and a final 'aww, what the heck, let's send you out by yourself to defeat their entire armada' mission."

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Original update published on February 19, 2006

 

[Jacob]

For those who don't have a copy of System Shock, the EB near my college had quite a few copies along with another old EA game, Space Hulk. So if you've got an EB near you, you might want to get over there ASAP. Best part is that they only cost 49 cents each!

Edit: I had forgotten to mention that these were brand-new, still in the wrapper. Perhaps it was just this EB that was trying to unload them, I don't know.