I’ve a couple more PC Format scans for today from the March 1993 edition. First is this review of the Origin FX screensaver:-
Origin FX Review – PC Format
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PC Format – November 1992 Scans
I’ve started sorting through all those magazines that arrived yesterday trying to decide what to keep, sell or throw away. I’m expecting roughly equal amounts of each but I’m sure I’ll be getting my £20’s worth no matter what + there should be masses of relevant articles for the blog when I get my act together.
I’ll go in chronological order and start the ball rolling with 3 articles from the November 1992 PC Format:-
The most interesting of the 3 announces Origin’s sale to EA which had just gone through at this time. I hadn’t heard that they had approached Mindscape before EA but they were minnows by comparison so it wouldn’t have been the right option. Despite the largely justifiable opinion that EA were ultimately responsible for killing off Origin, it was a great deal for both parties at the time and this is well evidenced by Origin’s games catalog in the mid 90’s. Origin could hardly have made a game as ludicrously expensive as Wing Commander 4 without a company that size backing them up.
I can’t help but notice that Ultima Underworld is described in the article as the best PC game of all time which has made me warm to PC Format already. This is just as well as I now have stacks of them. It’s a pity I don’t have the older issue with the review, although I should have the Underworld 2 review with any luck.
There is a very brief preview of Strike Commander which was expected to be out in 1992 at the time (it didn’t make it). It shares a page with a preview of one of my all time favourites X-Wing. Given what has happened to the Star Wars franchise since, it’s curious to see that Lucasarts held off making X-Wing until the technology had reached a point to do it justice. If only George Lucas had as much respect for the series.
Finally, there is this short review of Wing Commander 2 – Special Operations 2.
Richard Garriott : Man On A Mission
It’s a pleasant Sunday morning here in the UK but I’m stuck in the house waiting for a guy to deliver a van full of 90’s PC gaming magazines. This gives me chance to write another post and I was fortunate enough to see Richard Garriott : Man On A Mission earlier in the week which I thought deserved a brief review.
The film was directed by Mike Woolf and has been around since 2010 but only seen wider releases relatively recently. It’s easily available in the US on numerous download services but getting to watch it over here in the UK is a lot more tricky.
The movie deals with Garriott, his family’s history and how he has dedicated a large part of his life to achieving his aim to get into space via private space travel since being denied the chance to become an astronaut at an early age due to less than perfect sight. Aside from the $20 million he paid for his ticket, he has been investing in space right from the beginning of his career in gaming in order to achieve this.
From the perspective of the blog, I have to give particular notice to the start of the documentary which tells Garriott’s all too familiar beginnings in the gaming industry but he also shows off his copy of Akalabeth and runs it on his original Apple II. The collector in me can’t help geeking out over artifacts like this. There was little to no mention of Origin however and the majority of the film is taken up with his training and the trip itself.
It may not offer the history of Origin but if you ever wanted to know what is involved in getting into space you could do a lot worse than watching this. The training process is covered in some detail with the largest part surprisingly being 4-5 hours a day of Russian language training. The history of space travel is also covered including some Garriott family history with his father being an astronaut himself.
The trip into space itself is a smaller part of the film than I would have expected but it did rely solely on Garriott’s “home movie” footage shot while he was up there. I didn’t get as much of an idea of what he spent his time doing as I might have liked during his week on the space station but it did give some insight into the working life of an astronaut.
Some time back I saw the IMAX 3D film Space Station 3D. For anyone who has seen that, huge swathes of this story will be extremely familiar since it is describing all the same things. Man On A Mission is a much more personal journey though and Garriott’s childlike enthusiasm shines throughout. I already knew nearly all of the information contained in this film but it certainly shows the personality of the man himself far better than anything else I’ve seen or read previously. For anyone interested in the history of Origin, this alone makes it more than worthwhile to track down.
As for the film on its own merits, it is a lot better than I had hoped. I’ve seen it described as the worlds most expensive home movie or a vanity project. Neither of these are fair criticism. This is a valid professional documentary on an interesting subject and Garriott hardly comes across as an ego-maniac, quite the opposite in fact. It’s an intimate story of one mans obsession and what he was prepared to do to achieve it. It’s inspirational not so much because he managed to achieve it but because he carried that dream over 30 years without any dampening of enthusiasm. I can’t say it’s necessarily worth seeing on the large screen (although you could do a lot worse) but it’s worth tracking down a copy when it surfaces on DVD for anyone who wants to know more about either the man himself or space travel.
A $20 million trip to space is a little out of my reach but my £20 worth of old magazines turned up before I finished writing this. They are in a big heap by the front door at the moment while I figure out what I’m going to do with them all. I reckon if I was to read this lot cover to cover and play all the demos I’d need to dedicate about 30 years to it myself:-
Trinkets
Updates have been thin on the ground here for the last few days. After a long anxious wait on Friday, I’m glad to say I do still have a job which should have left me with plenty of time for blogging but this seems to have worked the other way around. 10 months of being under threat of redundancy tends to put your life on hold and I have a stack of things to sort out having come safely through the other side.
One of the easier tasks on the list was sorting out a new mobile phone contract. A new phone should mean I can get some half decent photo’s from here on out. So by way of a trial run, I thought I would find something Origin related and photogenic. The first thing that sprung to mind were trinkets.
Origin were famous for including trinkets with their games in the mid 80’s. These were basically useless little items put in the box for gimmick/novelty value or to add some extra atmosphere. They weren’t unique in this with Infocom also being a prime exponent. Combined with the wealth of documentation, cloth maps, etc, it made buying any of these games quite a different experience in my eyes. The practice is still kept alive through special editions at least, but this usually comes with a serious price tag.
There is plenty on the web about the various Ultima trinkets already but there are four other Origin games which got their own little extras. In no particular order these were:-
Autoduel
In what is potentially one of the most useful trinkets ever included in a game, Autoduel came with a toolkit with a screwdriver with 4 different ends, an adjustable spanner and a miniature hammer all in a little plastic pouch. This is definitely one of my favourites even if it does look like something you might find in an expensive Christmas cracker.
2400AD
2400 AD came with not one but three little lead figures. These any tiny and proved the greatest challenge for my new camera.
Ogre
Included with Ogre was a radiation badge and stickers (in a top secret envelope). The principle behind these is that you stick a dot to the badge, walk around a dangerous area with it in view and if it changes colour you know you have taken a certain dose of radiation and need to get out of there. I’ve heard rumours that the dots included with this are the real deal but I don’t expect I’ll ever get the opportunity to try them out.
Moebius
Last but not least is Moebius which came with a nifty bandanna if you fancied dressing the part while playing the game. This is one step behind another game I have on my shelves (Life And Death) which came with a surgeon’s mask and rubber gloves.
Outside of the Ultima series, Origin stopped including trinkets after these early titles which is something of a shame but they kept their standards of documentation and packaging up which is what I really miss when buying a modern game. It’s hard to make a good case for why these sorts of trinkets should ever have been included but they are one of the things that make collecting old games so much fun.
Wing Commander 3 PS1 – Part 2
The differences to the PC version quickly dried up as I got further into Wing Commander 3 on the PS1 with no different movie edits and only one or two additional news report each on CD’s 2,3 & 4. The news bulletin on CD #3 had actually been used in the background of an earlier scene when Rollins was commenting about how badly the war was going.
The most famous change on the PS1 is the addition of the scene in the locker room where Hobbes explains his motives. This bit of exposition really should have been in the PC original although it’s not a plot development I was keen on with or without it.
Something I failed to mention before is the lack of an option to turn the cockpit on and off in this port, with the only option being a cockpitless HUD. This is something of a loss depending on your point of view. I know most players just turned it straight off on the PC but I always left it on myself. It worked far better in Prophecy with the full 3D ship interior but in 2D still added atmosphere and gave each ship some character.
Other than that this was a clone of the PC version all the way to the planet missions. I’d been wondering how the PS1 would deal with these when I got that far. In essence it didn’t, and they were removed from the game and replaced with FMV instead. This makes some of these later missions extremely anti-climactic as the interesting part was planetside and there isn’t always a whole lot of mission left after it’s been removed.
The fact that the FMV was done after the fact is made clear by the use of speech samples from the game in relatively low sound quality. Also, I mysteriously gain a wingman on at least one of them which is a major continuity problem. I honestly would have thought the PS1 could have coped with the planetside missions in some form. I can understand the 3DO having to use FMV but this seems like a copout. Having said that, the new FMV is pretty cool and from the point of view of a PC gamer looking for something different, they were my favourite thing in the whole port.
With no trench run, the final mission ends with the fight above Kilrah which is a slight anticlimax although the final WC3 mission was never quite up to the standards of the real trench run in X-Wing. Thrakhath gives a lengthy speech at the start which I don’t remember hearing before. I never actually finished the fight with him before I was taken straight into the final FMV’s, presumably due to an emulation bug.
Out of all the console port’s I’ve played, this is the one where the gameplay suffered the most from d-pad controls. I’d often find the controls unresponsive and the speed of turn in each direction was rarely consistent. I’m definitely blaming the emulator rather than the port for this. There were numerous issues including instability, sticking sound, missing notes, incorrect fonts, movies skipping, etc.. and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d have been a lot better off picking up an old PS1 or PS2 and using the real hardware. They are practically being given away these days so I’ll be keeping my eyes open for one before I take on the PS1 version of WC4.
With the dubious controls, I found the gameplay lacking and this has been my least favourite of the Wing Commander ports to play so far because of it. WC3’s plot drifts around for most of the first 2 CD’s not getting going until Tolwyn shows up. From here on it kicks into gear building up to the big finish and I couldn’t not enjoy these later sections but it was frustrating at times getting that far. The battles with aces were especially tough with endless chases where I couldn’t get any clean shots in. The only tactic I found was stopping dead and being quicker at outshooting them when they steered toward me. To avoid too much of this sort of thing, I ended up dropping the difficulty level in later missions which certainly raised the fun factor but it’s not how I would have liked to be playing this.
With my setup this is one port that would have been best left alone until I had the right hardware. I don’t feel like the emulation worked well enough for me to even be able to offer any clear opinion now I’ve finished the game. However with the option for analog control it looks like the 3DO version has to be the console port of choice provided I ever get hold of a CH flightstick and can play it properly.
I’ll probably have a go at FM Towns Ultima 3 next to finish off the trilogy. On an unrelated side note, I just did a deal for the motherlode of 90’s PC gaming magazines complete with cover CD’s and floppy disks. Not sure where on Earth I’ll put them all but they were an absolute steal so I wasn’t going to worry about little details like that. I can’t say how many magazines there are but there are just shy of 600 cover CD’s which gives an idea. It’s a reasonable bet that there will be plenty of scanned articles appearing on here in due course.