Category Archives: Books

Wing Commander 3 Authorised Combat Guide

Posted on by
Reply

This was published by Brady in 1995 and is now available to download with all the others on here. I’ve already looked at one Wing Commander 3 guide which pretty much covered everything and this begs the question why we needed another? I’m assuming that the reason is that this book also covers the 3DO version of WC3. It doesn’t just restrict itself to the 3DO though and covers the PC version as well.

It starts in the same way as the WC4 guide I looked at recently with a series of stills from the movies with a plot description by each, followed by some very short interviews with a few of the cast. The interviews are the sort of thing that came with every interactive movie back at the time with a list of credits and a lot of talk about this being the beginning of a new medium.

The book then moves onto a whole chapter on what is going to be in the book. This sets a precedent for unnecessary detail which continues on as the next chapter goes on to describe all the controls in the game. The manuals had this covered and it really isn’t needed here. It intersperses it with some ship descriptions and tactics before going onto describe the 3DO controls in the same detail.

Most of the pages are taken up with the mission descriptions. These have notes from a Colonel Hart who gives tips and advice. These add a little entertainment value but not enough to make it worth reading through all these missions unless you are struggling to complete them. There are two lists of opposition on each mission as the 3DO version tended to have fewer enemies that flew better. The final chapter tells you how to cheat on the 3DO, with all sorts of options for skipping missions and watching cinematics built into the game.

Unless you really want to know the details of the 3DO missions there is little reason to bother with this book. I’d rather have seen a 2nd edition of the official guide as the authorised combat guide doesn’t have much extra to offer in its own right but misses out a reasonable amount.

Ultima 3 NES Guide

Posted on by
1


This was published in 1989 by FCI and is a translation from the Japanese original. There were equivalent books for later Ultima games released in Japan but these never got a translation unfortunately. I’m limiting myself to Western releases so you won’t be seeing any of the others on this blog. This book wasn’t the easiest to scan in as the print tends to go right to the spine but it’s not come out too badly and is now in the downloads.

The Ultima series was huge in Japan leading to all sorts of spin-offs and merchandise. These included a series of Manga’s (link) which only have a passing resemblance to the Ultima I know. The U3 guide starts with a Manga of its own telling the story so far. I never quite imagined most of the characters looking like this. There was a severe clothing shortage in early Sosaria it seems, but it’s well drawn and moderately faithful to the series.

We then get onto the stuff that is going to help you beat the game. This is all presented in an equally colourful manner, starting with general advice on party creation, weapon stats, items in the game and the like. I’ve never actually played U3 on the NES apart from starting it up for a quick look. It’s clearly branched away from the original game in some ways looking at these but remains fairly true apart from some name changes.

There is a full bestiary with pictures of all the denizens of Britannia. They are presented in a very cartoonish manner and look a little ridiculous. Give me Denis Loubet’s drawings over these any time.

After a map of the realm on the middle pages, the book moves onto maps and guides to each town. These are accompanied with a few hints of what to do. This guide never actually gives a straight walkthrough although it does give more explicit instructions than the original Ultima 3 cluebook did. There were clear changes in gameplay in the NES version such as giving flowers to Sherry to get a compass heart. At the end of the book is a two page map of Exodus castle but you are left to figure out what to do on your own

This guide presents a very cartoonish version of Ultima and I prefer the regular U3 cluebook without a doubt. There is more information in this and it’s certainly colourful but it’s a long way from anything Origin would have turned out themselves. The tagline of “Not just kid stuff” on the cover strikes me as a little ironic but it still has to be worth a look just for the comic at the start.

Official Guide To Wings Of Glory

Posted on by
2


This was published by Origin/Brady in 1995. It came with a a flight recorder disk and I’ve added a disk image of this + a pdf of the guide to the downloads.

It starts out with the usual stats, plane descriptions, general tips and the like. It’s a nice touch that rather than just describing the maneuvers, you can load up the recordings from the included floppy and watch them being done. This section would probably be most helpful if you intended to play the game on full realism when you will need to know all these moves. I certainly wasn’t aware of using many of them when I played the game myself.

The largest portion of the book is for the mission descriptions which are accompanied by a written storyline of what goes on between the missions. It’s done in the same sort of style as the Wing Commander 1 & 2 guide and turns a series of dry mission write-ups into a reasonably entertaining mini-novel. At the end it even goes on to tell you what happened to all the various characters from the game after the war ended. I can’t say that I became too attached to the characters in the game. They do come across more strongly in the novel though. It might have been good to have been reading through this at the same time as playing the game.

There are about 20 pages of interviews to conclude the book with most of the developers. Wings Of Glory was apparently the idea of Warren Spector who decided that it was a waste having a great engine like Strike Commander with a full virtual cockpit when all the planes were always out of sight or zoomed past so fast you couldn’t see them. He was more interested in the close-up slower-paced dogfighting of WW1 and I agree with him on this entirely having played both games. Apparently, Wings Of Glory was supposed to be finished quickly and cheaply since it was using the Strike Commander engine except they ended up converting the engine to 32 bit in order to get enough speed out of it.

It appears that a huge amount of WW1 research went into the game and there is a list of references at the end of the book. This ranges from pilot autobiography’s through air combat history books, movies and even other games such as Red Baron. If you wanted to track down everything on this list it would keep you seriously busy.

Wings Of Glory was a game I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would and the same can be said of this guide. It was a lot more fun than the WC4 guide I read last. Next, I’ll be having a look at the NES Ultima 3 Guide which I picked up earlier this week.

Official Guide To Wing Commander 4

Posted on by
Reply


This was published by Origin in 1996 and is now in the downloads. It starts off with the first 48 pages in colour before dropping off to black and white for the rest of the book. The colour pages are for the most part, a load of images from the movie sections of the game with a brief caption underneath detailing the story. I’m not sure what purpose these are supposed to serve and it’s almost wasted pages as far as I’m concerned. I suppose the pictures are better quality than the original release of the game but anyone who owns the DVD version of the game would be better off watching that. There are full colour images of all the ships from the game with specs after this. These are the full detail ship models from the movie portions of the game and are a better use of the pages as you never got to see them in this much detail in the game.
After this is a brief history of the story so far. This goes through each game and mission pack, and surprisingly each of the novels to that point is also mentioned.
The third section gets into the mechanics of the game. This is more or less than same thing as the WC3 guide although it’s interesting that a lot of it got simplified down for WC4 with the morale system all but removed with only 3 characters affected by your choices. This section also has backgrounds of all the pilots including the more minor characters that you never actually meet outside of a cockpit and are all based on people who worked on the game.
Most of the second half of the book is devoted to the mission details themselves, with rundowns of every mission in the game and how the branching works + a few hints and tips. I only skimmed over this section as there didn’t seem to be much of interest for anyone who has already played all these missions.
The final section is a short series of interviews with a few of the developers. There isn’t a whole lot in here that stood out either. You definitely get the message that they were concentrating on gameplay for this having being bogged down with technicalities in WC3.
I didn’t get a lot out of reading this guide. There is nothing wrong with it as such but a lot of the tactics are straight out of the WC3 guide and I already knew the mission structure fairly well.
The one thing I did learn is that there is an alternate ending if you sympathise with Hawks point of view and blow up the superbase when trying to get to Earth. It doesn’t actually tell me what this ending is but implies that my choice of career would be different. I’ve never made that choice when playing the game but I must have seen this other ending at some point when watching the VOB’s on the DVD version. I don’t remember it at all so I’ll have to dig out the DVD and have a look.

Avatar Adventures

Posted on by
5


This was published in 1992 by Prima. I’ve had an extremely long standing request to scan this in that must go back several years. It may have taken a while but I got there in the end and it’s now in with all the others.

Avatar Adventures covers Ultima’s 4 through 6 with full solutions for each of them. Origin isn’t exactly short on guides to these games as we’d already seen them in the Quest For Clues books, the Official Guide to Ultima, and the 3 separate cluebooks for each game. What makes this one different are the lengthy novelisations of each of the games.

These are presented as being the Avatar’s journals, with occasional notes by the editors. The narrative is extremely faithful to the games with plenty of the dialog being taken straight from them. Some of this is embellished but the events and places are close enough for the novel to be a walkthrough of sorts. It does skip a few sections to keep things entertaining. For instance, the dungeons in Ultima 4, with the exception of the abyss are missing as those journal entries have supposedly been lost. Some events also occur out-of-order by luckily stumbling across things before being told about them. This saves some of the travelling backwards and forwards that anyone who has played the game will remember.

I’d have been skeptical before reading this for the first time a few years back, that anyone would be able to turn a game like Ultima 4 into a novel with any success whatsoever. The reality is, that it’s actually among the more enjoyable game adaptations that I’ve read. The more abstract and open world of Ultima 4 allowed for enough interpretation to make the adaptation not just feel like a poor alternative to playing the game as so often happens. It has the room to build upon what is already in the game and improve on it.

The other two games had much larger conversations so there is more skipped. Their stories remain just as true to the source though while taking a very optimised route through the game. With the size of Ultima 5, it’s novel is easily the largest of the trilogy and takes some time to read through even if this is the shortest route. There is far less skipped than I would have expected in anything that remained entertaining to read in its own right.

Obviously there are limitations with being so faithful and reading this might not be as much fun for anyone who hasn’t played the games. This isn’t especially relevant since that isn’t the target audience and as an Ultima veteran, this was a great way to relive some of my favourite games without spending anywhere near as long as replaying them would have taken. The embellishments such as having Jaana as a half-hearted romantic interest never struck me as out of place and are the sort of thing that might have been in the game had their been more interaction with party members.

The text is interspersed with some nicely done black and white drawings to illustrate them which are, as far as I know, unique to this book. There are also the early stages of Ultima 7 and Underworld in the appendices. These were covered in full in More Avatar Adventures which I’ll get onto at a later date.

The novels justify the price of the book on their own but a bonus at the end is a long interview with Richard Garriott. This treads very familiar ground for anyone who has read some of RG’s other interviews and is almost a condensed version of the official book of Ultima. The later stages are more interesting when he moves onto Ultima 7 and where he saw the series heading afterwards.

This was one of the most enjoyable of the books that I’ve read for the blog. I’m certain that a large portion of this was nostalgia for the games, but its authors did a great job adapting all these games into a workable story. I’m looking forward to More Avatar Adventures now but I’ll probably save it until I’ve read a few of the others that are on the list.