It's gotten to the point where I've run out of things to complain about. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's been fantastic for my blood pressure (not that I've actually got problems with my blood pressure or anything). With that in mind, whenever I think about "Stealing Drugs" anymore, all I really think about is my past... or my childhood if you will. I don't really see it as a problem, but then again it's my blog. I suppose if you don't like it, you'd stop reading, wouldn't you. You probably already have.
I touched briefly on my tepid obsessions when I get involved in some game series, or other IP. Wing Commander was a fantastic example of this. Final Fantasy was another, completely unintended one.
I've spent hundreds on making sure that I obtain every last copy of a series of games, so as not to feel like I was missing out on something. Not that it mattered much, because I would have no intention on playing the game later on. My PS2 game collection was almost 100 games at one point, more than 60 of them were unopened. It was quite embarrassing, actually.
If you look thru my collection, you may still find one unopened for posterity.
The problem remains that some games cross platforms. The Resident Evil series is such a perfect example of this. Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, and Resident Evil 3 all saw their first releases on the Playstation, but the original was also released on the Sega Saturn, PC, and the Nintendo DS. It was also remade for the Gamecube. Then re-released for the Playstation. Twice. For crazy people like me, who can't stand not to have every version of something, that's 5 different versions of a game to purchase.
I won't bore you with the details, but this is not an isolated story. A good portion of the games are this way.
Wing Commander was this was, as well. And for some reason, I just have to have all the different versions.
Or, at least, it used to be that way.
I met Gina, and things changed. I imagine that there has to be some sort of psychological void that buying all the different versions of a game had filled. I still have yet to figure out what that is.
Or maybe I'm just growing up.
Yeah, right.
31 March 2008
30 March 2008
Accidental Childhood Tangent
I must have been 14 or 15 years old when I rented a copy of Wing Commander III: The Heart of the Tiger for the Playstation. I know that's not very "hardcore PC gamer" of me, but at the time, outside of downloading the occasional rom, piracy was something way over my head. (Also, please remember that this was a time when CD burners were 800 bucks, not something I could afford after having spent 1200 bucks on the compaq (yeah, I paid for it) computer sitting in my room.
I actually rented the game because nothing else in the "Playstation" section caught my eye, and this being the year after we received the Psx for Christmas, the bombardment of the "URNote" campaign drove us in to a fervor, as the appeal of the games we were given during Christmas "Battle Arena Toshinden" and "Warhawk" had slowly wore away after completing them more than our share of times (I still have both, in case you were wondering).
We used to make the short walk down to the SuperAmerica (where one could rent games and movies) because it was only about a block away from where we lived. Interestingly enough, it's about two blocks away now. The prices were right (free) and the walk wasn't punishing like the one to the Blockbuster, which wasn't so bad, as long as you were willing to almost get run over in the predeveloped Apple Valley south.
A note about the prices being free: My dad was working for SuperAmerica at the time (not in that store), and we were in good with the manager of that store. The terminals had a cute flaw that allowed you to back out of the fee processing for the title when you scanned it in, leaving it in the checkout list, but removing the price from the transaction. SuperAmerica later put a stop to this, but I was invited by Rich to spend a few minutes looking for another flaw (during my already budding career as a computer whiz). I did in fact find another flaw that if you scanned the one you want to rent as a check in and pull up the account, scanning other titles would add them to the account. All this fun free renting ended when Heath (a friend of my half-brothers when he worked at that store) helped his friend out with free rentals in front of a district manager.
When I was about twelve, I lost 40 some hours of my life to Final Fantasy III (or 6 if you're going to be anal about it, but we're not in Japan, jerk), and lifetime, more than a hundred hours. From then on, I was careful not to rent any RPGs, as they were detrimental to my social life (or what there was of one) and caused largish late fees. This, and a lack of interest in sports titles (with racing as an exception) forced me to look at a game whose cover design was just slightly far enough on the cheese-o-meter that I would have skipped it without a second thought on any other day.
The second appeal was Mark Hamill. Mark God Damned Hamill. You know him as Luke Skywalker. I know him from the endless amount of B-movie tripe that the Sci-Fi channel used to buy up and throw out on Sundays for godless people like me who had no ambitions for an organized religion to fit in with. And I know him as Luke Skywalker. And was that the guy from A Clockwork Orange? And the fat guy from Indian Jones? I would have jumped at it if it weren't from the damned lion on the front cover. See what I mean:
When I got it home and popped the disc in sometime after dinner. My excitement was waning as the introductory movie cropped up. One of the things I appreciate today is that they made no attempt to tell you what the hell was going on. You just had to figure it out for yourself, or the play the old games. Or in some cases both (there were gaps between games, that could be explained by expansion packs and semi sequels that didn't see large releases). The movie they play you before you even hit the goddamned start button is something like 12 minutes long. Oh, and there were real people in it (a hallmark of the generation).
Here it is for your enjoyment:
Wasn't the soundtrack fantastic? All in all, the midi soundtrack does nothing to impress, but the fact is that if they had spent 100 thousand dollars in getting a real orchestra to play this music for them, it would have been quite incredible. But you take what you can get.
The acting... seems off doesn't it?
That's because the entire game was shot with a green screen background. It wasn't the first "interactive movie" game, but Wing Commander III has the pleasure of being one of the few successful interactive movie games.
The actual space combat gameplay was relatively tame. You "fly" from waypoint to waypoint and shoot bad guys. An interesting thing about this game: the controls were heavy. Usually, if you port a title like this, you cut some of the controls out, or automate some of the features to reduce the amount of complex button commands. They didn't do anything of the sort here. If you wanted to play this game, you'd better damned well learn how to use the controller.
Tell me if they make sense to you (from wcnews.com)
Wing Commander 3 Playstation
Thanks to Kristofer Bengtsson for supplying these controls.
Action Button combination
Afterburner L2 + R2
Fire guns Circle
Fire missile Square
Accelerate Triangle
Decelerate X
Full stop X + L1 + L2
Cycle weapons L1 + Square
Cycle guns L1 + Circle
Cycle targets L1 + X
Lock targets L1 + Triangle
Autopilot L1 + L2 + R1 + R2
Comms select Select + Left/Right
Nav Map Select + L2
Eject L1 + L2 + R1 + R2 + Select + Start
Cloak L1 + R2
What? You mean you have to press all 4 top buttons to get autopilot? What if I just fly my ship directly to the way point that's something like 200,000 kilometers away? Well, at the maximum non-afterburner speed of the fastest ship of 520 kps. Due to the fact that the distances were to scale, this would take you approximately 6.5 minutes to complete. Really? Fly 9 and a half minutes? The slowest ship without afterburner traveled at a sluggish 320 kps and Guess what... I did it the first time. And you know what happens when you get to the way point? You can fly right by it. Nothing happens until you hit autopilot. And thank god, because if I hadn't known that, I would have stopped playing if each mission took more that 45 minutes to fly.
Combat itself was a hodgepodge of interesting and uninteresting ideas. Like most space simulators, distance really has no meaning except your relation to the target and the dogfighting itself is more like you turning the whole of the universe around your ship while trying to align your targeting reticle with the enemy ship. The morale of your wingmen and of your enemies had an effect on their ability to combat each other, and the weapons had a nice strategic finesse to their usage. This is not the reason to play the game.
No, the most interesting thing is the acting, and the story. And the characters... including Tom Wilson (you know him as Biff from Back to the Future).
Here he is in an annoying interview about Wing Commander 4.
I couldn't remove myself from my seat, it was nonstop excitement. I wanted to know what happened to the characters. To the Confederation. The cast had some superb actors, and some sometimes superb acting.
This spawned an unhealthy obsession with the books and the other games, including Wing Commander IV and Prophecy (the final official retail game of the series).
The sequel to III ended up with a budget of 8 million dollars (unheard of in 1996), over runs pushed the budgets to 10 million, making it the most expensive computer game of all time until 1999's Shenmue crushed the costs with a 20 million dollar budget.
Today, I look back at the games with a light hearted disposition. I know that if I ever play them again, I will have to play the whole series, but I remember it all fondly, so I can choose not to.
I think, however, that everyone who has ever finished Wing Commander 3 has been mentally conditioned to like the Wing Commander movie, no matter how atrocious you acknowledge it to be. I'll tell you more about it...
When my head stops throbbing.
I actually rented the game because nothing else in the "Playstation" section caught my eye, and this being the year after we received the Psx for Christmas, the bombardment of the "URNote" campaign drove us in to a fervor, as the appeal of the games we were given during Christmas "Battle Arena Toshinden" and "Warhawk" had slowly wore away after completing them more than our share of times (I still have both, in case you were wondering).
We used to make the short walk down to the SuperAmerica (where one could rent games and movies) because it was only about a block away from where we lived. Interestingly enough, it's about two blocks away now. The prices were right (free) and the walk wasn't punishing like the one to the Blockbuster, which wasn't so bad, as long as you were willing to almost get run over in the predeveloped Apple Valley south.
A note about the prices being free: My dad was working for SuperAmerica at the time (not in that store), and we were in good with the manager of that store. The terminals had a cute flaw that allowed you to back out of the fee processing for the title when you scanned it in, leaving it in the checkout list, but removing the price from the transaction. SuperAmerica later put a stop to this, but I was invited by Rich to spend a few minutes looking for another flaw (during my already budding career as a computer whiz). I did in fact find another flaw that if you scanned the one you want to rent as a check in and pull up the account, scanning other titles would add them to the account. All this fun free renting ended when Heath (a friend of my half-brothers when he worked at that store) helped his friend out with free rentals in front of a district manager.
When I was about twelve, I lost 40 some hours of my life to Final Fantasy III (or 6 if you're going to be anal about it, but we're not in Japan, jerk), and lifetime, more than a hundred hours. From then on, I was careful not to rent any RPGs, as they were detrimental to my social life (or what there was of one) and caused largish late fees. This, and a lack of interest in sports titles (with racing as an exception) forced me to look at a game whose cover design was just slightly far enough on the cheese-o-meter that I would have skipped it without a second thought on any other day.
The second appeal was Mark Hamill. Mark God Damned Hamill. You know him as Luke Skywalker. I know him from the endless amount of B-movie tripe that the Sci-Fi channel used to buy up and throw out on Sundays for godless people like me who had no ambitions for an organized religion to fit in with. And I know him as Luke Skywalker. And was that the guy from A Clockwork Orange? And the fat guy from Indian Jones? I would have jumped at it if it weren't from the damned lion on the front cover. See what I mean:
When I got it home and popped the disc in sometime after dinner. My excitement was waning as the introductory movie cropped up. One of the things I appreciate today is that they made no attempt to tell you what the hell was going on. You just had to figure it out for yourself, or the play the old games. Or in some cases both (there were gaps between games, that could be explained by expansion packs and semi sequels that didn't see large releases). The movie they play you before you even hit the goddamned start button is something like 12 minutes long. Oh, and there were real people in it (a hallmark of the generation).
Here it is for your enjoyment:
Wasn't the soundtrack fantastic? All in all, the midi soundtrack does nothing to impress, but the fact is that if they had spent 100 thousand dollars in getting a real orchestra to play this music for them, it would have been quite incredible. But you take what you can get.
The acting... seems off doesn't it?
That's because the entire game was shot with a green screen background. It wasn't the first "interactive movie" game, but Wing Commander III has the pleasure of being one of the few successful interactive movie games.
The actual space combat gameplay was relatively tame. You "fly" from waypoint to waypoint and shoot bad guys. An interesting thing about this game: the controls were heavy. Usually, if you port a title like this, you cut some of the controls out, or automate some of the features to reduce the amount of complex button commands. They didn't do anything of the sort here. If you wanted to play this game, you'd better damned well learn how to use the controller.
Tell me if they make sense to you (from wcnews.com)
Wing Commander 3 Playstation
Thanks to Kristofer Bengtsson for supplying these controls.
Action Button combination
Afterburner L2 + R2
Fire guns Circle
Fire missile Square
Accelerate Triangle
Decelerate X
Full stop X + L1 + L2
Cycle weapons L1 + Square
Cycle guns L1 + Circle
Cycle targets L1 + X
Lock targets L1 + Triangle
Autopilot L1 + L2 + R1 + R2
Comms select Select + Left/Right
Nav Map Select + L2
Eject L1 + L2 + R1 + R2 + Select + Start
Cloak L1 + R2
What? You mean you have to press all 4 top buttons to get autopilot? What if I just fly my ship directly to the way point that's something like 200,000 kilometers away? Well, at the maximum non-afterburner speed of the fastest ship of 520 kps. Due to the fact that the distances were to scale, this would take you approximately 6.5 minutes to complete. Really? Fly 9 and a half minutes? The slowest ship without afterburner traveled at a sluggish 320 kps and Guess what... I did it the first time. And you know what happens when you get to the way point? You can fly right by it. Nothing happens until you hit autopilot. And thank god, because if I hadn't known that, I would have stopped playing if each mission took more that 45 minutes to fly.
Combat itself was a hodgepodge of interesting and uninteresting ideas. Like most space simulators, distance really has no meaning except your relation to the target and the dogfighting itself is more like you turning the whole of the universe around your ship while trying to align your targeting reticle with the enemy ship. The morale of your wingmen and of your enemies had an effect on their ability to combat each other, and the weapons had a nice strategic finesse to their usage. This is not the reason to play the game.
No, the most interesting thing is the acting, and the story. And the characters... including Tom Wilson (you know him as Biff from Back to the Future).
Here he is in an annoying interview about Wing Commander 4.
I couldn't remove myself from my seat, it was nonstop excitement. I wanted to know what happened to the characters. To the Confederation. The cast had some superb actors, and some sometimes superb acting.
This spawned an unhealthy obsession with the books and the other games, including Wing Commander IV and Prophecy (the final official retail game of the series).
The sequel to III ended up with a budget of 8 million dollars (unheard of in 1996), over runs pushed the budgets to 10 million, making it the most expensive computer game of all time until 1999's Shenmue crushed the costs with a 20 million dollar budget.
Today, I look back at the games with a light hearted disposition. I know that if I ever play them again, I will have to play the whole series, but I remember it all fondly, so I can choose not to.
I think, however, that everyone who has ever finished Wing Commander 3 has been mentally conditioned to like the Wing Commander movie, no matter how atrocious you acknowledge it to be. I'll tell you more about it...
When my head stops throbbing.
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