Anyone who played PC games in the first half of the 1990s knows, remembers and loves the Wing Commander series, made by Origin Systems and specifically game designer Chris Roberts. Origin Systems is also famous for perhaps the most beloved RPGs of all computerdom, the long-running Ultima series that bit the dust so hard at the end, and of course the instant-classic Crusader: No Remorse. But it is for Wing Commander that they are perhaps best known for - because the games sold like crazy, because the series ended well (unlike Ultima), because of the incredible cinema in games III and IV which featured freaking Mark Hamill (!), Malcolm McDowell (!!) and Ginger Lynn Allen (!!!) - to name but three - appearing as characters. Those are some of the few games that actually deserves their own IMDB page. This half of the review will focus on I, II and Privateer. Lastly, as an aside, I won't be reviewing Privateer 2: The Darkening now or later, because I never owned or played it. So here we go! The premise of the whole series is simple but exciting: humans have expanded into space, have encountered other species who don't necessarily want us in space, and have gone to war. The first game - Wing Commander from 1990 - takes place in 2654 and pits the Terran Confederation (us) against the giant humanoid tigers known as the Kilrathi (them). You play as a nameless pilot with blue hair who flies for the Terran Conderation aboard the carrier TCS Tiger's Claw, and the bulk of the game is done in the cockpit of one of several planes. The planes vary from the usual lightly-armed-but-very-fast to the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none to the monster-gunner-slow-as-hell ... any fan of flying games will recognize the stereotypes present here. At the beginning, you choose a callsign - it's fun to go with something totally unheroic, and watch as people call you, in all seriousness, "Booger" or whatever - and get to work; in a pattern that remains consistent for the rest of the series, you'll often watch a short film regarding the success or failure of your mission, explore the limited expanse of the ship you're on, interacting with the few characters there are, then flying a mission. Sounds simple, right? Right... and wrong. Buried within these few steps is an incredible richness of detail. The characters are three-dimensional and really grow on you; they have feelings, emotions and loyalties of their own, will respond to your dialog choices in markedly different ways, and will go their own way throughout the game. The characterizations alone make you believe you're in a fully alive game world, and no one who has ever played this game will forget Angel, Maniac, Iceman, Paladin, Spirit ... they are all fully formed characters. Second, within the limited space of the ship you're stationed to is a really, really rich graphical and auditory experience. The graphics are beautiful, sharp, with tons of little details. You will be fully immersed, trust me. And the sound was so famously good, it caused my dad and I to go out and buy the first Soundblaster board - back when they were expensive, very expen$ive - to hear them. There may be few things to do during your downtime, but those few things are rendered wonderfully well. However, Wing Commander I is really, at heart, a war game in space; so while the story is good and the characters deep, the real core of the game is the fighting. Which brings me to the actual flying of missions, the heart of the game. Wing Commander I-IV and Privateer use a first-person cockpit view, where you can view the basic radar, armament controls, etc., along with some part of the space immediately in front of you with a reticle in the middle. You can switch to other views, but I never remember having a reason to do so except to admire whatever new ship I was flying in. The games were best played via a combo of keyboard and joystick - I never had any luck at all with the mouse or keyboard when controlling the ship - and were easily mastered, very intuitive. The in-flight graphics were very impressive, excellent for their time, and featured mini talking portraits of your wingmen on the com screen (amazing at the time). And if you died, there was a really memorable and vivid depiction of your death. The bulk of the game plays out in the cockpit, and that's where most of the fun and excitement occur too. The explosions of enemy ships are glorious to behold, and I'm sure many a kid was steered into the Air Force after years of playing these games. You had some limited control of your armament, you had some control over your wingman (hence Wing Commander) - usually basic stuff like "Follow me" or "Form on my wing" and the invaluable "Attack my enemy!" - and, astounding to my ten-year old eyes at the time, as your ship was battered by enemy fire you actually saw the accrued damage in your cockpit, as one viewscreen after another stopped working, panels burst open leaving exposed wires, scorch marks appeared, cracks showed up in your cockpit, etc. It's important to note that Wing Commander featured a win/lose plot tree - every few missions would be a Big Plot Mission - win it, and the Kilrathi would suffer a major setback while the Terran Confederacy advanced into new systems; lose it, and not only do the Kilrathi enter our turf, but the characters begin reacting to you with less than joy in their hearts. There are a few famously difficult missions ("Kurosawa 2" will strike instant fear in the hearts of those who have played), and it was very challenging to stay on the winning path. The first time I played I actually ended up on the losing path, and was mad at myself for days. You can also be promoted - fairly rapidly - an earn medals for your good combat skills. Wing Commander 2: Vengeance of the Kilrathi came out in 1991, the year after the first game, and stepped everything up a notch. Your carrier from WC1, the aforementioned Tiger's Claw, is destroyed right in the opening by stealth fighters - but your character is the only one who sees the fighters, and so no one believes they exist... and your poor character is believed to be a coward who allowed the death of thousands. Ugh. WC2 placed a lot more emphasis on story and character than the first game, and therefore a little less emphasis on the actual flying. In this game, you can name your characters as well as provide whatever callsign you want (I remember fighting with my sister over whether to call him "Nighthawk" or "Goober" ... one guess as to who nominated which one); and you're slightly less responsible for your wingmen, as they now are smart enough to eject if their ships are destroyed - in the first game, they simply died. The bulk of this game takes place in 2665, and deals with your character recovering his reputation as a heroic fighter, as well as battling pompous officials and wooing your love interest. It's a soap opera with a LOT of space battles. Some of the series' most memorable characters appear here: Shadow (her part is brief, but memorable), Hobbes the Kilrathi defector (a GREAT character!), Doomsday, Spirit, Angel and ... of course ... Jazz, who has a major part to play. Another rich cast, each character fleshed out in pieces as the game progresses, lends a huge amount of credulity to the game world. The graphics and sound are both upgraded as much as a year's improvement in hardware could provide, and the enemy AI is noticeably better - when injured, the enemy pilots will now mercilessly stalk you until you're dead. It was a big improvement in every way. In between WC2 and WC3 came Wing Commander: Privateer. I'm going to admit that I played this game until my Logitech joystick broke (!) and I had to replace it at the next computer show. The premise is simple: you are Nameless Pilot with Brown Hair (although I just read that an early Origin press release apparently named him Grayson Burrows, I don't remember him ever being called that in the game), a "privateer" pilot who flies missions for money only - not for loyalty or love or patriotism. Just cold, hard cash money. In an unusual move, the player can be a plain mercenary (run only legal merchandise), a pirate (run contraband like drugs, slaves and the like) or some combination of the two. You're not forced into being a "good" character, which was a refreshing change. You can be as immoral and despicable as you want - and frankly, it was fun AND lucrative to be a pirate. The game's Big Plot involves a space battle waking up an ancient alien technology, and it begins attacking both the Terran Confederacy AND the Kilrathi, and anything else that gets in the way. You eventually get the nod to go and take care of it - for money, of course, and to bring back whatever technology you can salvage. I much preferred the open-ended sandbox gameplay to the fairly linear main plot, but it wasn't bad. I remember the last boss being hard as hell, though. Unlike the other Wing Commander games, in Privateer you used money to upgrade the hell out of your ship, and eventually to buy new ships altogether. This was a big attraction - no more being demoted or waiting for the authorities to iron out prototypes! Now YOU had the power to control what ship you flew in. This was thoroughly awesome. You also bought your own weapons, nav system, torpedoes, everything. The graphics and sound were truly superior for their era. Here are a few quick screen shots, thanks to MobyGames: The hanger bay. New Constantinople. Oxford. Cockpit view. I remember each and every place you can go with vivid clarity. The big allure was that finally you had access to an entire system of the Wing Commander universe, could choose whatever you wanted to do, could fly your OWN ship, etc. Just like in real life, things were best when you had NO BOSS - Privateer equaled freedom back in 1993. Finally, Privateer has been remade by fans several times. My personal favorite is Privateer Gemini Gold but a quick trip to the Wikipedia entry for the game will provide links to the others. So that is my look back at three games from the Wing Commander universe - Wing Commander I, II and Privateer - that completely captured my early adolescence and cost me untold hours of joy and suffering. Next, I'll review the most famous and well-known of the series: Wing Commander III and IV!