Together Retro: Wing Commander

[Gunstar Green]

You don't have to beat Kurosawa to get the best ending. If you fail Kurosawa and beat Rostov, you still get the best ending. You don't actually even have to win any of the Venice missions to emerge victorious. Just beat all the Rostov missions and you win.

Yeah I know that. But it makes you take a detour to Rostov instead of heading straight to Venice.

One tip, you don't have to complete objectives in order. Sometimes you can avoid an ambush or asteroid field by visiting checkpoints out of order.

Indeed, this is an important one. I'd also like to add that a lot of missions don't require you to kill everything and sometimes missions have objectives that aren't crucial to success (though if you're trying to earn all of the medals you can you have to complete everything). If your mission is simply to patrol a bunch of way points and you find yourself shot to hell near the end of a mission and there are a bunch of enemies at the last point, just tag it and after burner the hell out of there.

Also you can eject, fail the mission and move on in most cases if you're not concerned with going through the game entirely on the "winning" path the whole time.

You're telling me. They were next to useless on the SNES, but as I was playing the McAuliffe scenario today, Paladin took out the Ralari while I was busy with the Krants. Now that's dedication!

Paladin, Bossman and the ace pilot Iceman are probably my favorites. You've got to be careful with some of them like Maniac who just charge at the enemies with reckless abandon if you don't want to get anybody killed. Sometimes they manage to eject and survive but if they die, they're dead for good. I often order them back to the Claw if they're beaten up too badly.

This is something that later games did away with since they became more story-driven and thus it required the wingmen to stay alive unless it was part of the script for them to die, thus they always ejected. The first game is also the only one where you increase in rank and earn medals. I always enjoyed that feature since it really puts you in the shoes of your character.

[ExedExes]

Progress --

In the Dakota system after having trouble with the Jalthi attacking the Exeter. Now I see I gotta do the same kinda defense against a less armored Drayman next. Joy.

[Gunstar Green]

If that's one of them that pits you against an ace then all I can say is good luck. Try to scare-off the ace pilot by dealing a lot of damage or kill him outright. Don't let him lure you away from the Exeter too much or he'll just lead you on a wild goose chase while his buddies take it apart. In general don't get greedy on the escort missions, if somebody wants to run, let them run. The aces are a lot bigger cowards than the normal pilots, it takes a much smaller damage percentage to send them packing.

If you want you can target the Exeter and tell your wingman to defend it. It helps sometimes but of course the AI can't be completely trusted. It will at least keep him from running off to chase one of them instead of staying back to keep fighters off of the ship.

The escort missions are by far the hardest (Wing Commander probably being one of the annoying escort mission trope codifiers), with Kurosawa 2 being the hardest one of those in the original game. None of them are unbeatable though. Things get really nuts in the expansions with the Tiger's Claw itself frequently coming under attack.

One of the things I liked about Wing Commander 2 is you couldn't take down capital ships with your normal guns, you needed torpedoes. It made the assault missions harder and the escort missions easier.

[Hatta]

This is where taunting actually comes in handy. As soon as you see an enemy firing on a friendly, use your radio and taunt them. Most of the time they'll break and chase you.

[ExedExes]

For that Exeter mission, I got extremely lucky. After coming out of autopilot, afterburner-ed ahead to pick off the first Jalthi with the Spiculum IR and full guns, Angel got one and I was able to concentrate on the last one before it destroyed the Exeter. Bhurak Starkiller had gotten away from me earlier, but I managed to shoot down the ace that pilots a Dralthi. I understand there's another ace in the Dakota missions.

[TheBrick]

Is the SNES version one of those games where you NEED the start to get into the game? Cause my controller's does not work, but I have the game lying around somewhere.

[ExedExes]

Is the SNES version one of those games where you NEED the start to get into the game? Cause my controller's does not work, but I have the game lying around somewhere.

If I recall correctly, you do.

[NebachadnezzaR]

I'm not a huge fan of dos games from the early 90's, but I decided to give this one a try. Downloaded the GoG version and right away there was something odd with it. In the "menus" (that is, inside the Claw) the mouse is slow as hell, takes forever to get from one side of the screen to the other, but in the game itself is so sensitive I couldn't hit anyone before being destroyed. I tried to mess with the sensitivity options in the gog setup, but to no avail, when I saw someone in their forums mentioning that the game plays much better with the keyboard.

I tried that and, sure enough, I was finally able to shoot down a handful of enemies, before being obliterated by the freaking meteor storm you guys mentioned earlier in the thread.

Right now I think I'm still deciding if I like the game or not. On one hand I can see that the game was made with much passion and attention to detail (loved the manual, for example) and I can see the appeal and fun in it, but on the other hand the graphics don't do anything for me, to the point of making the game almost unplayable (reminds me of an old thread here, something like "how far back can you go and still have fun?"), and the controls just make it that much worse. To top it off, all the simulator aspects that you guys talk about, like radioing enemies and allies, landing and ejecting, it really puts me off.

Don't want to sound like a whiner, but honestly right now I don't know whether I should really try to get into the game, or just quit before wasting too much time.

By the way, how are you guys playing, control-wise?

[Gunstar Green]

The intended way to play is with a joystick but those aren't something everyone has these days. I find the keyboard to work just fine. The mouse thing is a problem with how GoG has DOS Box configured. You can go and mess with the sensitivity yourself in the config file where your game is installed. I think I have it set to 500. That will solve the mouse problems when navigating the ship though it's still difficult to aim when piloting and I'd stick with the keyboard.

And yes the game is pretty dated and it's a genre that a lot of people aren't familiar with anymore. I wouldn't be surprised to see more reactions like this.

It's easy for me to sing its praises because I grew up with it and the control is second nature to me. The in-flight graphics are hard to stomach now (WC2 improves it a bit and 3 onward uses 3D models) but the rest of the artwork and character design holds up in my opinion.

If you talk to your shipmates they'll give you some hints, like reducing your speed in the meteors so they're easier to dodge and won't damage you as much if you smack into them.

[NebachadnezzaR]

Tried what you said about the mouse sensitivity and it worked, it's much easier to navigate through the Claw now.

I think I'll put some more time into it, see if I can at least beat the first mission.