Category Archives: Books

Wing Commander Armada Playtesters Guide

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I got my replacement Kryoflux board last week and have been playing around with that in my spare time in the last week, but my first lot of books arrived today which has prompted me back into action again. The first of these is the Wing Commander Armada Playtesters Guide.

In all honesty, I was a little surprised to see that this game warranted a guide book when I found it on Amazon. It would be unfair to dismiss Armada as filler before Wing Commander 3, but it did come fairly close and was certainly not one of Origin’s best efforts. It’s a game I bought when it came out and while it did provide a brief amount of fun with the excellent 3D engine and split screen combat, the novelty wore off very quickly and it was soon forgotten.

It’s fair to say then, that my hopes for the guidebook were not high before I started. It’s 96 pages long and if you think it would be a difficult job to fill all those pages you would be right. The book goes into highly unnecessary details right from the start with 20 pages describing each of the ship types. It does give some details on tactics to use with and against each ship and these could possibly be helpful but it’s all obvious stuff in all honesty.

The next section is worse with several pages on how ships take damage, including needless descriptions of what shields and armour are. There are tables of how much damage each type of weapon does and the like which may possibly be useful I suppose but I’m not convinced. The book then moves through sections on tactics to use both in combat and in the tactical section of the game, maps of all the sectors in campaign mode and finally some quick combat advice for winning fights in a hurry.

All the strategy advice in the book is heavy on text and you would have to read the whole thing to get the useful nuggets out of it. Every angle is certainly covered from what to do in each section of the game, and on different sizes of map. Playing against the computer, I can’t imagine anyone needing help in all honesty but I could see some of the advice possibly helping out against human opponents. The game wasn’t half as much fun as you would expect against a human opponent though so I certainly didn’t play it enough for it to get that competitive.

This isn’t a badly constructed guide by any means and contains all the information you could ever need to make you more competitive when playing the game. The problem is that Armada wasn’t a complex enough game to justify all these pages and that makes this book largely pointless as far as I can see.

There was a brief section at the very end about the playtesters for the game. I include scans of these below for anyone interested.

Wing Commander 1 & 2 : The Ultimate Strategy Guide

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The first book 2 books, I’ve looked at in the last 2 days didn’t take much reading. This is an entirely different kettle of fish with the book reading as a novel almost from start to finish. It’s spread out over 300 pages with the first 220 pages covering Wing Commander 1, Secret Missions 1 & 2 + Wing Commander 2 and the remainder of the book being dedicated to interviews and the story of how the game was devloped.

It was published in 1992 by Prima and written by Mike Harrison. The name may not be immediately familiar but he is described on the back cover as the person who wrote the Claw Marks manual in Wing Commander making him an excellent choice for this. In the book itself two other people are credited with that manual so I guess he must have contributed and/or managed rather being the primary author.

The book is written from the viewpoint of Lt. Colonel Carl T. LaFong, a 73 year old retired Conferderation pilot who flew all these missions in real life before a guy called Tristan Roberts decided to base his next bionetic holo-vid on his experiences. It starts off with 50 pages or so with Lafong’s life in the Academy before joining the Tiger’s Claw. It reads quite well as a novel but also introduces basic tactics that you may want to use in the game. Lafong is in the same class as Maniac and to a large extent, the storyline throughout the book concentrates on his relationship with Maniac. Maniac starts out brash and unorthadox before gradually maturing and attempting to conform before breaking down altogether. It’s curious that Maniac is seen as such an important character as he played a very minor role in all these games, before becoming the irreverent sidekick in WC4.

After the academy it gets to the missions proper. Each mission has 1 or 2 pages describing what occured, still written as a novel with a map of the mission and a little side box containing notes. It’s at this point that the book flounders if you are attempting to read it as a novel. If you can imagine trying to describe each mission in detail, over and over you will soon run out of ideas and it inevitably becomes extremely repetitive. However, if you are just reading it as a one off to get help on a particular mission, it works reasonably well, although I’m not sure that there is much more benefit from reading the text in most cases. It does give some tactical advice at times but Wing Commander isn’t the most tactical of games. After the end of Wing Commander I, the author admits as much in a side panel and for the remainder of the book, the mission descriptions are briefer and always on a single page, with less story.

After each series of missions in a system, there are a couple more pages of storyline, which are far more entertaining than the missions themselves. I found myself skimming the mission reports and concentrating on these. Wing Commander I did of course feature a branching storyline. The guide gets around this by saying that these missions did occur but were either flown by pilots on other ships or other pilots on the Tiger’s Claw and presents their reports for the missions. These storyline segments also drop off in frequency after WC1 and it makes the rest of the games feel rushed by comparison, although there is still plenty there if you just want a mission guide. For Wing Commander 2’s non-winning path missions, however all you get is a few pages with maps of what enemies to expect with no text whatsoever.

The storyline of the book doesn’t always follow the winning path for WC1 and keeps a middle line of success and failure. This helps the narrative as you can’t have a hero who never fails. As a sample of the content, I’ve attached the pages from the final part of the Vega campagin below:-

This format comprises the vast majority of the book. The more interesting part of the book though, comprises of an interview with Chris Roberts and then a longer section on the making of Wing Commander. I’ve attached scans of these in full below:-

Chris Roberts Interview & Making Of Wing Commander

This lengthy section tells you everything you could want to know about how Wing Commander came about, and gives some insight into working for Origin in the early 90’s. When I read this the first time I was  particularly intrigued by the lip-synching in Wing Commander. I wonder how many people even noticed this. It does show the effort for extra detail that goes into a game although if this sort of thing gets through, I can see why a producer would have to step in at some point and just decide to stop adding things and publish the game. It’s also interesting that for a large part of the development of such a cutting-edge product it was a very small team actually working on it.

All in all, this is a decent read for a strategy guide. I can’t imagine many people would actually need a guide to get through Wing Commander so it’s just as well it has more to offer than a straight walkthrough. The interview sections at the end would be reason enough to buy this at todays prices. Since I’m putting it up for free, it’s certainly worth reading through the scans above if you have any interest in Wing Commander.

I’m quite enjoying reading through these books but my hardware has arrived quicker than expected so it should be back to Longbow 2 next, provided I can get everything working correctly.

Quest For Clues

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I’m going to attempt to write up a book a day while I wait for stuff to arrive in the post. I don’t have a lot of time today so it’s another quick one, Quest for Clues.

This was published in 1988 by Origin and was edited by Shay Addams who would go on to write the official book of Ultima. It’s an over-sized cardback and contains a considerable number of pages so there is a lot for your money here. In fact the blurb on the back goes on to say that the solutions contained in the book would be worth $175 if bought individually rather than the $25 this cost to buy at the time. The idea of buying an individual game solution seems strange now but with no internet, plenty of people used this sort of service back in the 80’s. I remember using an 0898 automatic phone service when I was playing Alone in The Dark 2 which must have ended up costing me half the price of the game by the time I finished it.

The book is a collection of solutions for a wide variety of RPG and adventure games from the era, all of which have been written and contributed by members of the Questbusters Guild. This “guild” was a group of gamers who would write in with a walkthrough for a game which the guild could then publish. In return they received a copy of any game of their choice. Given how expensive games used to be, this strikes me as a pretty good deal.

The introduction to the book is the most interesting part and I attach scans of it in full below (with clickable thumbnails of a sort). I’ll be scanning in selected sections of these books on my way through if they aren’t available on replacementdocs. I won’t make any great effort to tidy the scans up but they will be more than adequate to read the content.

This introduction tells the story of the birth of adventure games, including interviews with developers of several of the industries founding games. There is nothing ground-breaking here, but I always enjoy reading about this sort of thing anyway. After this it’s straight into the solutions. These are straight forward walkthroughs, usually with a basic map at the end. The only slightly unusual feature is that some words are shown in code and you have to decrypt them with a key printed at the back of the book. The code is so simple that you can usually see straight through it, but I suppose the idea is to stop you from inadvertently reading a solution to something. With the rest of the sentence in plain English , I’m not convinced that this would be very effective but it’s better than nothing.

As a sample, I’ve included the solution for Autoduel below. Each game usually has a black and white picture on the title page, with a little bit of an introducion and an opinion on the game. Some familiar art from Ultima manuals also makes it’s way into the book.

There are 50 solutions contained in the book making it a very useful resource for anyone who likes to play old RPG’s and adventure games. Finding decent solutions for some of these games on the internet these days would be tricky as they are too old/obscure to have FAQ’s on the usual sites. I’ve certainly found it extremely useful at times with games like Moebius.

I’m not sure how Origin ended up publishing this as it isn’t obviously linked to to them. It does contain solutions to several of their games but no more so than Sierra or any other publisher. They went on to publish 5 more titles in this series (with a slight name change after the first 4), all following the same format. I’ve found all of them extremely useful over the years. If I’m struggling in an old RPG/adventure game, you can more or less guarantee that the answer is in one of them, but unless you play a lot of old games there isn’t any reason to go out and buy this. The solutions are simplistic and while enough to get you through the game, they don’t tell you how to score maximum points, or mention hidden areas and alternative paths. This is probably a book for Origin collectors or avid oldskool gamers only.

I’ll move onto something considerably more substantial tomorrow with the Wing Commander 1 & 2 Strategy Guide, including a full scan of the Chris Roberts interview.

Ultima 3 Cluebook

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I’ve started putting a Windows 98 gaming PC together. I’ve already got the base PC up and running but there are a few drivers I need to locate and some hardware I’m waiting for in the post. The PC is an old Athlon which should run at 2 Ghz if I remember right but refuses to run stably unless I underclock it to 1.2 GHz. That’s still more than fast enough for Windows 98 gaming so I won’t worry too much about tracking the problem down. I’ve bought a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 off Ebay for around £4 which will give me native Glide support for both Dos and Windows games + an AWE 64 from the same person. Finally, I’ve bought a Thrustmaster Top Gun joystick for the grand price of £3.50 which I’m seriously pleased with. It’s an old style 15-pin joystick so it will work with DOS games as well when it’s plugged into the AWE64. It’s going to be a while before all this stuff arrives but it looks like I’ll have managed to get this PC up and running for £15 + a bit of time which makes me wonder why I didn’t do this ages ago. I’ve got quite a few games I’m looking forward to playing on it but it will be Longbow 2 first.

I’ve still not had any luck with my Kryoflux and have had to arrange for a replacement. It’s just my luck to get a faulty board and seemingly impossible given that the board had been tested twice before I got it. I hope the next one works for me. It leaves me time to do something else on here and I’ve decided to start working my way through all of Origin’s various books and cluebooks that I own and reviewing them. This is something that I talked about doing right back in the early posts of this blog but never got around to.

I’ve amassed a fairly large number of Origin’s books over the years. I wouldn’t say that they are something that I’ve ever actively collected, with the exception of the Ultima cluebooks. It’s more a case of picking them up whenever I happen to see one. I’ve just been on a shopping spree on Amazon and abebooks picking up near enough all the ones I don’t own though. None of them were more than a couple of pounds although I don’t expect them to be in mint condition or anything. There may be others but the only one I know I’m missing is the System Shock clue book. There is no way I’m paying over $100 although being realistic it’s never going to be cheap. The main purchase was all the Wing Commander novels which I’ll be interested to read. I’ve even heard that the novel of the Wing Commander movie was actually quite good but I’m not sure if I believe it.

Obviously the books vary from basic game guides, through to full blown novels so I will have a lot more to say about some than others. Quite a few of the clue books are interesting in their own right with back stories and developer interviews. Others are very simple and there won’t be much I can say about them but it gives me an excuse to read through them all. There are plenty to be going on with and I’m realising about now that I could keep this blog going for years……

I’m not going to continue in any order but I’ll start right back with the first of Origin’s clue books, Ultima 3.

The first thing that strikes me about this is the textured card cover. It’s similar to the covers for the magic books that came with Ultima 3 so it all fits in well as a package. The book starts with a brief introduction, stating that the book is the result of couriers being sent out to gather knowledge of the realm. It also mentions Shamino returning as a “pitiful figure” who’s “mind no longer controls his voice”. He obviously made a full recovery by Ultima 4 although I don’t think he even is in any of the games before this mention (other than owning a castle in Ultima 1 anyway). Ultima never was too strong on continuity, especially with the first trilogy.

The book is essentially a collection of maps. The maps are a truly basic affair and are printed in ASCII, presumably straight from the code of the game. Having said that, they are a perfect representation of what is in the game so they do their job. On the opposite page from each map is a brief text description of the town/dungeon written by some names that will be immediately familiar to players of later Ultima’s such as Iolo, Shamino, Dupre, Sentri, etc… The text for the most part amounts to little more than some fairly clear hints on what there is to do in each area. Iolo’s section is written in verse but other than that they all have a similar style to them.

The section on Ambrosia is interesting. It says that the continent was once inhabited by a strange and sensitive people who developed the power to alters one’s physical self before being enveloped by a whirlpool. It at least provides a little backstory which I don’t remember getting in the game itself. The book ends with a brief message from Lord British wishing you luck on your quest.

There isn’t a whole lot to write about with this. You can read through it in 5 minutes. It’s as noteworthy for what it doesn’t contain as anything else. There is no guidance on weapons, armour, enemy stats, character generation, or even what to do to beat the game. It really is just a guide to the realm and you have to work everything else out for yourself. I quite like this actually and it shows one of the differences between games now and then. There isn’t any advertising blurb on the back of the book saying what it contains either. It’s so much in character with the game that using it almost doesn’t feel like cheating but it certainly would (and did in my case) help you through the game if you don’t feel inclined to map every dungeon. It’s very short on extra story but still worth a quick flick through for any Ultima fan. It’s available on www.replacementdocs.com for anyone interested.