Your first Wing Commander experience?

It was probably 1992, I new nothing about computers or games... Most friends who had computers had MSX machines. One or two actually had a PC... Then my father bought a used 386SX25 with 4MB RAM and 127MB hard disk... It had DOS 5, Win 3.1 and a few games installed. among these there was a little jewel called Wing Commander. The game was probably pirated, for there were no publishers in brazil, and no internet to order stuff. A few computer stores had some imported games, but they were few and absurdly expensive. I didn't even have the disks , just the game installed in the hd. I guessed some of the copy protection questions and was good to go.

I had to learn all commands by trial and error. I didn't know about the autopilot, so I simply flew all the distance between navpoints... I had no joystick or soundboard, of course. I played the damn thing insanelly, non stop, I almost falied at school because of it.

One rich kid at school told me about WC2, and then, in early 1995, my father finally got an used 486 DX2 66MHz (this time without games) and a multimedia kit. The kit had WC2 bundled with it! and I some friend copied Privateer for me. And then I found a store that had WC3 and spent the entire moth allowance on it.

in 1997 I got me a new Pentium 233MMX and went out to find WCP and WC4, wich wouldn't run on the crappy 486. EA had arived in brazil already, so it was easy to find WCP, but WC4 was still imported. I luckily found one box forgotten in an old store... and it was very cheap too. :)

BTW, you should play system shock... one of the 5 best games ever.
 
Wing Commander - Another second try

I nearly rejected Wing Commander when it came out at the time. Actually, I did'nt even bother to look at it, because of a fatal misunderstanding: Back in the early 80s when C64s were the rage, I traded a lot of games with friends and quickly found out that I'm deeply into simulation games. Those were the Days of Elite and Mercenary, Tracker and Rescue on Fractalus - when computers didn't have HDD's and needed to be booted into OS and game environment via tape drive or 5.25" floppies. So loading games took a long time - which was bad, because games got bigger and bigger; spanned several floppies, and a severe gameplay vs. floppy shuffling ratio was discussed for each game.
Around that time (when Bard's Tale already was on 5! floppies) I heard about a game called Wing Commander that came on 10 (!!!) floppies. A week later I heard a guy in school talk about that he'd tried it, waiting nearly an hour to load it and then finding out that it's a pretty crappy flight simulator; nothing to compare with Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. That turned me off.

For ten years.

In 1995, the story slowly untangled: I ran into a copy of Privateer and liked it thoroughly, started to explore and found out that there was a whole line of other games, older and more recent, that all looked great. But nothing about a poor flight simulator - which, after some more research, turned out to be a classic doppelganger: There really was a game for the C64 called Wing Commander, but released by Mastertronic - and it really was a flight sim, and it really sucked.

Since then I've bought and played every other game in the series that I could lay hands on (keeping a range of old PCs just for that; well, and some other games), and I'm living happily ever after.
 
Alright, let's see here. We had just got our first computer ever for Christmas and we then headed to Arkansas to be with some of my mom's family for the holidays. While there we needed to run to wal-mart to pick some things up. I had a few dollars that I had got as Christmas money and as of yet we hadn't got any games for our pc so I thought I'd look around. I looked but didn't have anything picked out and then my dad comes over with this box in his hand and says, "This looks pretty neat." (Which is really incredible because my dad has never played video games ever! To this day, he has no interest in them whatsoever.) Anyways, so I bought Wing Commander 1 and never ever looked back! :) What an awesome game!
 
A family friend used to always have WC1 on their old 386 when I was little, so soon after I got my first bank card (I was 11), I picked up the EA classics Wing Commander 2 at a Computer city (now closed down) and Privateer at a Zellers clearance. When I was done, I had about 3 dollars left in my account balance from what I had accumulated from my $20 a month allowance
 
I'd like to mention that I still have the original edition WC disks... It came on just three 5"1/4 disks :)
 
My story is close to the original poster :)
I was teenager with an Ataris STe at this time when I saw in a video game magazine the Wing Commander review and I was in awe :eek: (I still have in mind that kilrathi image). Since then I did all I could to buy a PC. (i was fond of space sims since star raiders on 2600, last starfighter on atari 8 bit, elite, sundog, star wars arcade game and the like).
Could buy a second hand 386 dx 20 from a friend. I was student, and all pc stuff was damn expensive at this time and of course sold all my atari st stuff. I enjoyed every seconds of my WC moments afterthat :) I'm 35 now, and I like this Privateer remake by the way ! (very good work guys).
 
When I was about 9 I started going over to a neighbor of my parents's house...he being a computer geek and engineer in a paper mill had TONS of money for LOTS of computer stuff. I was introduced WC1 back then on his 386sx-16 with 4megs of ram...beast of a machine...ive played every single version of wing commander except for prophacy(wing commander Privateer II made me second guess buying another wing commander game). My favoriate of all times was and will still be Wing Commander Privateer. Just recently I found a copy of the game on 3.5" disks and took scrap pieces of computer parts and bought a sound blaster 16 card and built an old P60 machine to run it on. That was the whole reason for building this machine..to run one game...Wing commander privateer. I was in bliss...I am currently downloading this remake and can't wait to play it! Ok im off...I would like EA to develop wing commander Privateer Online...kinda like EVE online just 100x better just because its the wing commander universe!
 
My first time...I got WC1 on a combined CD with Ultima 6 when I was...<thinks> 9. It was a 386, with a 2x CD-ROM. The tip of high-tech back then.

I distinctly remember sucking, horribly, at it. It took years for me and my brother to actually win at the damn thing. But, we were hooked.

So we got WC2 with the SO missions, the WC2 Deluxe Edition, soon after. My brother managed to finish it. Not me.

Then, Privateer. First game for a new 486, on 7 disks. Huge for the time, and it was a bitch to get running even in DOS. But it did run, eventually, and it was good. Didn't find out about RF til years later.

After that, excitement when WC3 came out.

WC4 I must admit ignoring, something I regret. Can't find it these days, and don't like EBay.

Prophecy never sparked my interest, and still hasn't.

Privateer 2, in my humble opinion, was not Wing Commander. Prophecy and Secret Ops hardly felt like WC, either.

So, here we are.

My favorite game: Priv 1. When it works. <shakes fist> Which is why I adore the Remake.

Priv 2, Prophecy, and Secret Ops, however, land in the trash. Among the rest, though...not played WC4. In the Kilrathi Saga, WC1 was probably my most favorite, followed by WC2.
 
I still don't understand why people trash Priv 2...such a beautiful game. So what if it perhaps got a bad label as Privateer 2, the game itself was great fun. Oh well...

*moves off muttering to self.
 
WC1, WC2, Armada, Privateer, WC3, Priv2, WC4, WC5. Or whatever the order of release was.

All the way back on the 386/33 and WC1. 486/66 and Privateer - over 2 hours playing with Memmaker to squeeze enough juice out of the 8MB RAM.

I feel old now, too. ;)
 
I actually liked Privateer 2 as well. There was something about the British atmosphere that lended a bit of class to the voice acting, plus it was downright weird. I am really glad that they did not try and tie the Wing Commander license to it, as it was a decent stand-alone game.
 
The remake is pretty darned awesome. I must tip my hat to the developers of that game. I tell you what would be really cool is if somehow a remake of Wing 3 and 4 using the Secret Ops engine, complete with all the FMV. I doubt it would be legal though.
 
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