It seems like a long time since I started a new game. Ultima 7 took a while but I continue alternating between Ultimas and Wing Commanders with the first spin-off game from the Wing Comander series.
Wing Commander Academy was an attempt to fill the gap between SO2 and Wing Commander 3. Its basically an engine to design your own wing commander missions.
All in all, that doesn’t sound too promising to me I have to say. The wing commander missions can be repetitive at the best of times. With no story to drive you forward it could be a little dull but I give it a go.
The intro is brief to say the least, we get a scrolling backdrop, a ship blows up another ship and the logo appears.
This dumps me straight into the options screen which shows the inside of a simulator. There isn’t much to do here other than create a mission or quit to dos.
The mission creation screen is full of buttons but fairly straightforward to use. I can create nav points and place objects or ships around it.
There are a couple of new ships to fly, a new wingman, some new weapons (including leech missiles which drain shields).
Theres also a gauntlet mode where you get 15 levels (each in 3 waves) of increasing difficulty.
Apart from the new ships which aren’t all that exciting there isn’t really anything new here. The engine is all but identical to WC2. Some of the planets rotate and the suns move a bit. The new ships are kind of interesting but ultimately this game seems pretty pointless. There just aren’t enough options available to make designing a mission all that interesting and we’ve already had 6 games out of this engine anyway which feature just about every mission you could conceive of.
Since there isn’t a way to win the game as such I figured I could call this one done as soon as I got bored with it, which was within about 15 minutes. It has to be the most pointless game Origin have ever released. Why they didn’t just add a short campaign of some description I’ll never know. At least the WC2 engine got put to better use with Privateer later the same year.
Years after this game there was a Wing Commander Academy cartoon series. I downloaded it from wcnews.com and worked my way through them a few weeks back – they even have the cast from WC3 & 4 doing the voices! Its not exactly intellectual as its obviously aimed at a young audience but its a lot more fun than the game was.
Next: Shadowcaster Ultima Underworld 2
If you plan to play Shadowcaster next, I recommend you play the CD version if you can. It has a few more levels (which btw are the most interesting ones), and some cutscenes.
The game is a bit tricky to make it work well with dosbox.
The floppie one is easy, dosbox runs it without problem. The CD one you have to make an image of the CD and then mount that image inside dosbox using imgmount (loading the cue file so it loads all the sound tracks).
Unfortunately I only own the floppy version and I can’t find the full CD one on the web to download anywhere. You are probably right though so I’ve bought a CD-only copy at a slightly silly price off ebay. I’ll swap to Underworld 2 next while I’m waiting for it to arrive from the USA.
well, If you want to try it before you get it, or if you don’t want to rip it yourself so you can play:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1AH520G0
password: http://snesorama.us
Wing Commander Academy is such a missed opportunity. If they would have given you a few more options and types of ships and maybe a way to insert your own story with a few built in talking heads you could have created your own campaigns to share with friends.
As it stands it feels like a bonus mode that was excised from Wing Commander 2 and probably should have just been included with that game.