I managed to play through the rest of Secret Missions a couple of nights back with some difficulty as it did throw a lot of enemy ships at me. There isn’t a whole lot to say about it as it remained very faithful to the PC original. I did notice that the ships where taking fewer hits than I would normally expect before blowing up. This was especially apparent as soon after I got to fly the more powerful fighters. This tweak was just as well as the game still wasn’t easy to finish. I did get occasional help such as the Gwenhyver above didn’t shoot back at me at all and I could just park up next to it and hold down fire.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for Nintendo censorship after being tipped off by Loaf. I’d noticed the odd change along the way in the dialog but nothing too obvious and I no doubt missed all sorts of little things. I did see that the pilots do seem to be eating more in the bar although they do still have drinks (if not necessarily alcoholic). They still get out their sidearms and start polishing them at regular intervals however. Nintendo’s censorship is often bizarre but there is nothing in here that affected the game.

As for the gameplay, some of the bugs from WC1 started to creep in with the penultimate mission being the worst offender again and I had to eject to get through it for the same reasons. On the whole I had less problems though. I could use the cowardly approach of afterburning away from a nav point which never seemed to work in WC1 as the opposition ships never got any further away.

Not being able to order my wingmen around was a definite problem. If I wanted to concentrate on a capship and then run away, it meant I was always taking it out single-handed. In the final mission the Sivar took no end of hits to destroy and even though I’d already taken out the fighter cover, my wingman just sat back watching me struggle.

I did eventually manage to get enough hits in to blow it up though. The ending sequence is almost straight out of the PC version showing the “apology” by the Kilrathi  – I’m told that there are two ending sequences depending on which difficulty you play the game on. This does make me wonder what the other one was.

At the end of the credits, I was told to now go and play the game on Ace, which took me by surprise. At first I thought, I must have played the game in rookie by mistake. This started me wondering just how hard the game was if that was rookie mode and if I really wanted to try to play through it all again. However, I went back and set the game in Rookie mode and the first ships I had to fight died in a single hit. This is definitely not how I played the game so the message must be a glitch.

Having tried it, the rookie mode looks so easy that I think I will go back and play the game again to see the other ending. Last night was the work Xmas do and I’m not up to moving around much today. I need something unchallenging to pass a couple of hours so it should fit the bill nicely.