Thanks to UK customs, I’m being made to wait for the VFX-1. I don’t think I’ve been this keen to get hold of a piece of hardware since my first 3D card but an extra week won’t kill me. In it’s absence, I’ll squeeze in another game in the shape of Wing Commander for the Sega CD. This was developed by Game Arts and released in 1994. Once again I’ve got two versions although this time the Western Sega CD release beats the Japanese Mega CD equivalent hands down in terms of packaging. It comes in a much larger case with a substantial manual containing a rearranged version of Claw Marks. The Japanese manual does have some of its own art but there is only so much room on a CD Case insert.

The first thing anyone is going to notice when playing this is that all the music has been changed. The Fat Man’s original score was one of the best things in Wing Commander so this isn’t a change for the better. Having said that most of the new music is quite good and while a little over-dramatic does fit in with the space opera theme of the game. The exception is the music in the bar which is truly horrible and must be used to keep pilots from spending too much time in there. I’d speculate that there may have been licensing issues with the original score being done by a contractor as I can’t think of another reason to replace it.

Graphically the game is not bad at all when walking around the ship. It’s extremely faithful to the original but with a reduced resolution and palette making it look grainy at times. Some of the artwork is actually more detailed than on the PC though which largely makes up for it. The obvious difference to any other version I’ve ever played is that this has full speech throughout the game. This is completely different to the Super Wing Commander speech (thank God!), and is arguably better than some of Origin’s efforts. This doesn’t mean you should expect good acting though. If you think of the speech in WC2 on the PC, you won’t be far off. It’s also similar to WC2 in being loaded in relatively short bursts with very apparent gaps.

Unlike on the SNES, the savegames actually work via the bunks. There are fewer of them but it’s nice to be able to save if you plan on playing the losing path or retrying missions. Stepping into the next room, the briefings are exactly the same as on the PC except fully voiced. I wouldn’t go as far as saying the speech is an improvement but it does offer a fresh view on dialogue for a game I’ve played far too many times over the years. The launching sequence is there in full. It’s not quite as smooth as on the SNES but is more like how it ran on the PC.

For all the speech, the area where this game is going to live or die is in the space combat. The original Megadrive controller only had 3 buttons but there is an option to use the 6 button variety. This is extremely welcome but due to the underlying 3 button support, it is still more awkward than it’s SNES equivalent. For instance it’s impossible to start firing while afterburning as this button combination fires your missiles. It’s complicated by the different layout of my gamepad but after some trial and error, I come up with a config that works for me and the game controls reasonably well. My only real problems are with cycling and locking targets which require tricky button combinations.

In terms of flight dynamics, this is a very different beast to the SNES. It’s perhaps a little slow but everything feels right so it isn’t something that has bothered me yet. The little touches like gun fire being deflected when steering out of an afterburn are present. There are also the bigger touches like ships not getting stuck at a certain distance and different parts of my screens not steering at different speeds. This plays exactly how it should and puts the SNES version to shame in all honesty. I’m concerned that there could be some major slowdown in the later missions but I’ll have to wait and see.

There doesn’t appear to have been any tweaking to the difficulty level to allow for the console controls. If I’d played this before any of the other console versions, this could have been a major culture shock with d-pad steering taking some acclimatising to. As it stands I don’t think I’ll have any problems, but if I had to play the much harder Secret Missions I might not have felt the same.

All the speech is carried forward into the cockpit and I get to hear my wingmen in WC1 for the first time ever. Plenty of digital sound fx have been added also and it does all help to make things that little bit more cinematic. I think the speech here adds more than it does inbetween the missions as the bad acting is less apparent, and I don’t want to stop to read text during a firefight. Speaking of bad acting, when I get back to the Claw the guy playing Maniac sounds like he should be voicing Pokemon cartoons. I may have to avoid talking to him for the rest of the game as in combination with the bar music, it could lead to brain hemorrhaging.

That aside, I’m liking this more than the SNES port and it’s almost up there with the PC. If it just had the original sound track and joystick control I might even put this as the best version. It’s early days though and I’ve only played 3 missions. Progress is slower than usual with CD loading and waiting for the characters to speak, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I play through the rest of this in a lengthy session tonight. I’m getting quite into these various ports, any excuse to play more Wing Commander and Ultima.

Along which lines, I’ve officially given in on the notion of not spending money on gaming for a couple of months. A combination of the time of year and general state of the economy has led to people selling all sorts of things I want to buy. Copies of WC3 & 4 for PS1 are on the way as well as CD32 Wing Commander 1 and 3DO WC3. I now own a 3DO, although I could still do with a CH flightstick for Wing Commander games. I found one at a decent price on tradera but not being Swedish I’m not allowed to buy it – in the unlikely event anyone Swedish happens to fancy helping me out please drop me a line. Failing that I’m sure another will crop up sooner or later.

I picked up where I left off and managed to play through the rest of this quite quickly. After all the teething troubles with the controls, they came fairly naturally at the second attempt and I stopped having to think so much about what I was doing. Basically they are fine after having had a little time to learn them.

I started noticing a few differences to the PC game once I got going. I don’t expect mass drivers to fire green blobs for instance. Also the enemies never use taunts unless provoked (except aces) and only respond with “This time it will be different” every time, which is a little lame. It could be a case of Nintendo censorship but at least the between mission dialogue was left intact if that is the case. I’m sure the missions are slightly easier than on the PC with fewer waves of enemies, but it’s harder to aim so it balanced out and felt about right.

The game uses a password system every few missions rather than save games potentially leading to lengthy game sessions if you don’t want to lose progress. Provided you don’t switch off the SNES, you can replay any given mission from the start as many times as you like if you die. None of this comes into play on an emulator of course.

One major omission is the cutscenes that appeared throughout the PC original. The text is all there, but in terms of gfx the SNES only gets a slow zoom on a rather dull looking blue-green planet and it’s less than impressive. These scenes aren’t the reward for progress that they were on the PC.

I did notice that the game started to chug in the later missions where more was happening, especially if the Tiger’s Claw was involved in the battle. Apart from slowdown, the engine doesn’t update the 3D aspects of some objects all the time and instead slides them around in a 2D plane. In asteroid fields this means that when I steer the ship some objects will appear to stay where they are on the screen and then catch the rest up a second later. This applied to missiles in all situations which are just little circles that float around on the screen never getting nearer or further away.

Another issue is that when a lot was going on the game wouldn’t let me fire my guns, presumably due to an object count limit. I’ve encountered this on the PC so it’s not surprising to see it here as well but it was more pronounced.

All of these are minor things and didn’t take away from the core of the game. The only real showstopper was that some ships 3D positioning stopped updating for long periods of time. They would get a certain distance away from me and then it would seem like our ships had been attached by a giant invisible pole. I could afterburn toward them and even turn around and fly the other way and they would always remain the exact same distance away. The game would then suddenly decide to update distances again and they would fly past me in moments before locking out at exactly the same distance again. This was especially bad in the penultimate mission where two ships were simply impossible to kill at the final nav point. They hovered slightly out of range and I couldn’t close in on them long enough to get more than a shot off. I ended up having to eject just to get past this.

The final mission behaved itself though and I’d soon destroyed the starbase taking out a lot fewer fighters on the way than I remember from playing the game before. The ending scene has a bit of a flyby and then the good old flag planting animation which I didn’t expect would have made it to the SNES.

Aside from the one bug, I enjoyed playing through this again. As far as I’m concerned the main Wing Commmander series kept on improving with every game (with the possible exception of Prophecy), making this my least favourite in the series but it’s still a fun shooter even if it’s lacking the cinematic elements that would come later. I don’t know if this SNES port would have won me over to Wing Commander in the way the PC game did, but it’s very faithful to the original and not a bad alternative if it’s all you’ve got. It’s hard not to feel that the SNES wasn’t quite up to the job, but it comes very close. I would like to think the few issues were fixed with SNES Secret Missions as I’ve got that lined up to try fairly soon.

Before I get to that, I’m going to have a look at the PC-98 version of Ultima 4 assuming I can get it running. I’ll be uploading a couple more scans also tonight including the Tie Fighter Collectors CD guide which should complete the set for the X-Wing series.

Wing Commander isn’t a game that would strike me as a natural to make the leap to consoles but despite this it got released on both of the major 16 bit systems in the early 90’s. The Megadrive/Genesis didn’t see it until the Sega CD add-on was released but the SNES got a port in 1992.

I’ve got two versions of this, with the one on the right being the Japanese release. I do like the artwork on this although I don’t recall any red fighters in the game. It also has some art in the manual which I’ve not seen elsewhere. The manuals are seriously cut down from the PC version with no blueprints or Claw Marks magazine.  Assuming they aren’t already available on replacementdocs, I’ll scan both of these in eventually.

I’ve been meaning to play this for a while with the initial idea being to play it on one of my handhelds. Unfortunately it refused to run correctly on both my PSP and Pandora using the SNES emulators. I was only seeing a letter or two of the Wing Commander logo when it zoomed in and space flight was equally strange. There would have been the option to use EA Replay on the PSP either but I don’t actually own it, so in the end I’ve opted to play it via my PC. This does at least mean that I can grab some screenshots along the way.

On starting up the game, everything looks more or less exactly as it should and first impressions are good. The music is straight from the PC version. The SNES rendition can’t compete with the MT-32 but it’s not a bad alternative for adlib which is what most of us probably played the PC game with at the time.

The conversations are straight out of the original word for word, and other than looking a little odd due to the more limited palette all the characters are the same old faces. Elsewhere the storage limitations of the cartridge are evident, such as the briefing room where the sitting/standing animation has gone. This is no great loss and is compensated for by the launching sequence which is there in full detail and running smoother than the PC ever managed, thanks to the SNES’s gfx capabilities.

Similarly the game looks better than I expected on launching. It’s when I start trying to play it that I began to run into problems. The first obvious issue is the lack of a keyboard to enter commands. This has to be substituted with button combinations which are going to take some getting used to.

The system they’ve gone for is sort of intuitive with a modifier button held down in combination with the others to cycle guns and switch screen displays. This is done about as well as would be possible with one button dealing with the left screen, one with guns, another missiles, etc. but it still feels cumbersome when trying to do anything during combat. With enough practice I should speed up however.

The major issue is the lack of analogue controls. I did originally play WC2 on keyboard back in the day, but it was the game that persuaded me to buy a joystick so it was short-lived. I find it quite difficult to aim when I’m jumping around in large steps although I did get the impression that the enemy ships were less maneuverable to compensate. I wish this had been on the N64 instead but I’ll probably get the hang of using a d-pad eventually. It just doesn’t feel like Wing Commander if you aren’t using a joystick though.

Graphically, the game looks great. There is perhaps a little less detail than the PC but it moves more smoothly if anything and the differences are quite small. A few cracks start to appear once you get playing the game though. The 3D effect doesn’t quite work and objects appear to stay exactly the same size for ages and then suddenly grow just when you are about to hit them. In the asteroid field, the asteroids appear to slide around in independent rectangular blocks in a way that is impossible to describe. The impression is that there are a lot of tricks going on in the background to make the SNES able to play this game but it’s at some expense to the 3D realism.

Having perhaps more impact on the gameplay, the radar in the center of the screen just doesn’t behave correctly. The blips jump around between quadrants rather than smoothly moving around and I found it difficult to judge where anything was.

All of this could have been better on the real hardware of course, but I’m almost entirely biased toward home computers of one sort or another and not counting portables the only console I own is a Vectrex (which is kind of portable in a 1980’s way).

Considering how much Wing Commander I’ve played, you would not believe how difficult I found the first mission taking numerous attempts before I got through to the end and I barely made it back alive even then. Playing this has been almost like having to learn the game again.

That one mission is as far as I’ve got for now. I’m just about mastering the controls and expect I should plough through the game fairly quickly. I definitely prefer the PC original but I’ll reckon I’ll enjoy playing this port and there may be a surprise or two along the way. I’m not going to blog my way through the whole thing as I expect it’s going to be 99% the same but will give my final impressions if I make it to the end.