Dean's World

I still have all the Wing Commander games, although I haven't played them in years. They were fun. I agree that there could be some pretty good modern sequels, with pretty graphics. The game itself is quite simplistic, but that is in itself part of the charm.

I remember Wing Commander 3 (IIRC) was the first game I ever saw on PC with *speech* in it. Amazing! Astounding! Today it's so ho-hum ;)

All you need to see if you want to know just how far you can go with updating a classic game and still keep most of the original spirit, you only have to look at the Legend of Zelda series. We recently bought the 20 year old 1980s version to play on the Wii and it's amazing. Yes, lame by modern standards but they've preserved almost all the major elements through the various iterations over the decades (there's a new Legend of Zelda every few years). Most impressive.

Kevin...

Kevin?

Kevin, settle down.

Calm down. Have some warm milk.

It's only a video game, Kevin.

I know, I know, you don't like what they did with it, because you feel it sullies your memories of the old game.

But that's not true! Nothing they do can take your memories from you. You can just ignore the new stuff. Heck, you can keep playing the old game!

If you don't like the new stuff, just ignore it, OK? Trust me, I've talked many a friend through this when the comic company retconned their favorite characters, and they got upset because "It ruined those old classic stories!" No it didn't. Those stories were all still there, ready to be read again at any time. And if you didn't like the new stories, you just didn't read them. After all, when you come right down to it, it's not your life, it's only a funny book!

Or in this case, a video game.

Trust me, you'll get through this. We'll be here to help.

Would you like some cookies with that milk?

Kevin, do you honestly think console games haven't evolved to having character development and plot? They're getting there very, very rapidly.

Dean,
They're not gonna add a story to this one, it doesn't look like. Just head to head. Which could be a lot of fun...

Andrew,

Thank you!

Dean,

Are some games leaning toward character and plot on the console? Yes. But it's not their bread and butter. Wing Commander was all about that from day one. This new "game" doesn't have any of that. It's a straight head-to-head shooter. It doesn't carry on the spirit of the franchise in the least. That's a frickin' insult.

Jeffery,

I think the Freespace games really picked up the torch from Wing Commander. They're both great games and fun to this day. I cannot speak highly enough about them.

I'm cool with head-to-head combat. I have to, I'm a huge FPS nut! But when someone talks about a Wing Commander game there's a level of storytelling I expect. It's not Oscar-worthy, to be sure, but it's the driving force within the game. Dammit, I like Christopher Blair! I think Hobbes is the best wingman out there. Angel and Spirit were smokin' hotties but Blair got the better deal with Sosa. Dropping a mine on the flight deck to see if it's off is genius.

These are story moments. Character moments. That is what Wing Commander is about.

I would have been cool, geeked even, if the kind of gameplay EA is talking about was a feature in a new Wing Commander game. That would be perfectly cool.

But this new thing ain't Wing Commander.

Funny thing, I used to hang out on the Wing Commander boards as a wee lad. (Stopped when the franchise started to suck and had to go to college.)

Me, I'm just pissed that no one gave Homeworld this kind of treatment.

Thief:
Don't even get me started on HW. I used to be a hard-core modder of that game, and was very excited when Cataclysm came out. I actually couldn't play HW:2 because the UI was so much worse than HW:C...

The guys who did HW:C went on to do a game called "Sword of the Stars". Which sucked so hard that it's not even worth the US$20 in the bargin bin...

Mmm, lots of gaming goodness mentioned since I first posted in this thread.

As someone who owned every single Wing Commander game -- plus spinoffs and tech spinoffs like Privateer, Wings of Glory, and Strike Commander -- it seems to me that the XBOX Live title is closest to WC Armada and WC Academy, which were more or less drop-in-and-shoot games, with Armada being the first WC game with multiplayer, which made it a lot of fun as an extension (but not continuation) of the WC universe. Be that as it may, I stand by what I said in the first comment: Arena looks like it's deathmatch only to appeal to the FPS crowd, and that's a pity. (Even the name Arena evokes Quake III Arena and not Wing Commander!)

(An aside here: for those of you who don't have a 360, you should know that Live-only titles don't have much depth but they do offer fun. So, criticism of this game doesn't necessarily mean that console games lack story.)

I want to highlight what some others have said here about Wing Commander and add to it. For gamers, Wing Commander should always be regarded as important for leading the push towards digital sound in games which we now take for granted. The first game was THE reason many PC users started buying sound cards, and the second game, with its speech pack, won over many stragglers and created the new industry standard for speech that most of us have benefited from.

The big problem in the development of the WC series, unfortunately, is that designer Chris Roberts went from giving the player a space opera worthy of their Star Wars fantasies to actually giving them Star Wars when they brought Mark Hamil onboard for WC3. By changing the series into an homage to Lucas and having that game end with the utter defeat of the bad guys, the strongest element WC had going for it -- the story -- took a nosedive. WC4 was at times pretty brilliant -- the core plot rivaled some of the best "Galactica" arcs -- but the lack of a real villain helped to make the next game, Prophecy a lame installment. And don't get me started on the movie...

As Kevin D noted, Freespace is indeed a worthy inheritor of the top spacesim mantle, though that title was probably too associated with Descent in the minds of many gamers to be as popular as it deserved to be. The X-Wing series of games were at times godawful-hard to play but also deserve a mention here. Tie Fighter in particular may be one of the best space sims ever made -- it was so good to be bad! Alas, the X-Wing games which came after Tie Fighter failed to really advance the series. Even the multiplayer "innovation" Lucasarts gave us was pretty boring. Ironically, these games took Wing Commander's place even though Chris Roberts and company had worked on games like Starlancer and Freelancer which were supposed to be the natural successors to WC but never really caught on. Freelancer in particular showed the nefarious influence of first-person shooters by moving to a WASD+mouse control scheme that was easy to use but still "felt" wrong. Oh, lastly, though it was a very "European" game, Independence War was pretty good as a simulation of a small spacecraft about the size of Serenity from "Firefly." That game was fun.

Since people are on the subject of conversions, does anyone know if there's a "Galactica" conversion of Homeworld?