Article 199 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: leela.CS.ORST.EDU!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!rutgers!psuvax1!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: davereed@wam.umd.edu (Michael Robert Bromery) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Wing Commander version A6.81E Keywords: game, simulation, 3D, flight, combat, interactive movie, commercial Message-ID: <1jphreINN1ai@menudo.uh.edu> Date: 22 Jan 93 19:27:42 GMT Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Reply-To: davereed@wam.umd.edu (Michael Robert Bromery) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 272 Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Wing Commander, version A6.81E BRIEF DESCRIPTION A 3D space combat simulator and interactive movie. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Origin/Mindscape Address: Origin: PO Box 161750 Austin, TX 78716 USA (512) 328-0282 Mindscape: PO Box 51 Burgess Hill West Sussex RH15 9FH England (0444) 239600 LIST PRICE About $40 (US) in stores. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Any Amiga with at least 1 MB RAM. For hard drive systems, 1.5 MB RAM is recommended. SOFTWARE Compatible with AmigaDOS 2.0. COPY PROTECTION None. The game installs pretty easily on a hard drive with the provided install utility, as long as you put DH0:, DH1: instead of HD0: given in the example of entries for the path. MACHINES USED FOR TESTING A500, 1.2 ROMs, 2 Megs Fast RAM, 512K Chip RAM A500, 2.0 ROMs, 2.5 Megs Fast RAM, 512K Chip RAM, hard drive. I plan to test it also on: A3000, 2.0 ROMs, 2 Megs Chip RAM, 4 megs Fast RAM, hard drive. A4000, 3.0 ROMs, 2 Megs Chip RAM, 4 megs Fast RAM, hard drive. OVERVIEW Wing Commander is a 3D space combat simulator / interactive movie. You play the part of this pilot aboard a great space craft carrier called the Tiger's Claw. You get to meet and talk with the people on board. Some will give you tips, others may throw you a curve, and some will just tell stories. It is hard to describe fully everything in this game in less than what will seem a novel for a review. Those of you who had played this game on other systems know what I mean. There are lots of animation sequences between missions, and the game is fully scored to interactive music. You get to fly various missions, often with a wingman at your side who can take orders. The main story is about Man's discovery of a hostile alien race named the Kilrathi. The Kilrathi are a cat-like humanoid race that will stop at nothing until they vanquish all Terrans (Humans or Earthlings). By the time the game started, humans have already been fighting this race for over 20 years. You happen to be a new and proud space jockey that is ready to fight for the cause. As you fight each mission, depending on how well you do them, you will go on to bigger and better things; getting promotions and flying different ships. The game does everything to get the person to not just PLAY Wing Commander, but LIVE it. The complete musical score (with mostly digitized orchestral instruments), cartoon animation, interactive combat music that actually gets more excited and heated up depending on the intensity of the combat, all contribute to this feeling. The computer can detect these different situations and will smoothly change the music accordingly. (Especially with a hard drive). GRAPHICS Well, the game is basically like the IBM original except with a couple of little additions in this later version. The graphics is the tricky part. When I did my tests on two Amiga 500s. My friend's computer had the old 1.2 ROMs installed. On machines with 1.2 and 1.3 ROMs, you will see the game play with a 16-color palette. There is obvious dithering there, but the graphics still aren't bad. In fact, they do an excellent job of dithering, but it can make the animation parts of the game look a bit altered in comparison to the 32-color or original IBM versions. You don't choose the graphic set; the program does it automatically by detecting which graphics.library you have in your ROM. Those of you with AmigaDOS 2.x or higher operating systems will at least have 32 color screens that look extremely close to the 256 color versions. Note the version number I listed above: all the ones that are released to mail order companies should sell this version of the game, but make sure. If you are in flight, and you press the F10 key and you see a number older than A6.81E, then you may not have the up-to-date version. The 32 color version looks brilliant. You even get nice smooth color shading effects that give you that fine lighting effect people came to love on 256 color machines (AGA for instance -- A1200's or A4000's). After I test the other machines I mentioned above, I'll be able to tell you if the game upgrades again for 3.0 machines. Note the fact that they only need one set of graphics to support all formats. Mindscape used an algorithm that correctly and nicely adjusts the graphics, without losing much detail, according to how well the graphics.library handles certain amounts of bitplanes. For example, a 2.0 system handles 32 color graphics as well and as fast as a 1.2 system handles 16. OK, enough about OS versions. This was made to be the first bitmapped 3D combat simulator made for home computers. In fact, it is probably the first thing to use bitmaps where polygons were used in a 3D game environment. The effect gives you 3D shapes with much more pixel by pixel detail. The cartoon part is just cartoon stuff where all the words are written in the basic color of the person speaking. The mouths of the characters seem to move according to the words printed. (I guess for people who can't read text but can only read lips.) You get a full virtuality 3D atmosphere and different cockpit layouts for every ship you fly in the game. The animations always change; there seems to be an amazing amount of them just within the first 6 or 7 missions. I believe you will fly at least 20 missions, possibly more. In the bar, you can talk to people or you can try out the training simulator which functions as a video game that trains you how to fight the real guys. See improvements below..... SOUND This is the part where the game excels the most. The graphics are hard contenders to the pit orchestra that seems continuous through the whole game. To choose sound over graphics is hard for they both seem to push with the same glorious luster. You get real french horns, drums, tympani, digitized flutes, pianos, with the addition of the very nice sounding electronic instruments. Clarinet and bassoon lovers are not left out of the cold: you'll even hear some lead parts lead by those instruments. The music is always changing depending on the situation. This is a beautifully scored game that could have a CD collection made of it for the soundtrack. There aren't many truly scored games out there, and this is one of the few. In combat, the music pushes you on, and when things get intense, the computer knows and will make the music more intense. (Yes, you can still hear sound effects while this happens in a very good use of track design by Mark Knight -- the person in charge of the musical conversion). The game consists of many songs and background mood setters. You know when things get exciting when you hear a lot of brass hits and cymbals crashing, and then a tympani roll followed by military snare rolls behind string chords. Often, you will hear the title screen melody repeated in different keys and different type songs in a way a true score will. These are new samples, so this was the first I can mention in the IMPROVEMENTS section. The original IBM version used some FM synthesized sounds from a particular sound card, but that doesn't generate true sampled instrument sounds. GAMEPLAY In terms of gameplay, the game plays beautifully on any amiga in my opinion, but you won't get quite the super cool frame rate until you have it accelerated to at least a 14mhz 68000. A stock system will play it at a comfortable level and definitely fast enough to drag you into leaning left and right in your seat, but if you have an accelerator an AGA system or an A3000 or better, you are really flying.... Since this is a review of an Amiga game, I will be reluctant to mention other computer ports much as to make a comparison. Those of you who have played the original IBM versions of the game will find out how amazingly fast a stock 500 can play this game. (Those of you who have played the original versions on systems with CPUs other than the latest CPU out on that system). The flight is very comfortable. It never seems to jump around or skip. You get a whole array of interior and exterior views in flight. You can use communication on your on-board computer to talk to other pilots, enemy ships, or bases. You even get to see people who talk to you via an on-board video camera that is intentionally in monochrome. This is the only other version of Wing Commander out that uses what the company calls "3Space algorithms" for realistic 3D environment, so it still uses CPU math. You will see the fastest graphics done with all system friendly programming commands. This thing is the most compatible game I've ever seen run. It will run out of Workbench even if your Chip RAM is only 512K max, and you have a 16 color Workbench in 2.0 with a nice sized picture as the background. The only limitation of this game seems to be that it doesn't like screen blankers, especially machine language-hacked screen blankers. If you turn those off, it will run fine. IMPROVEMENTS OVER THE IBM VERSION There are mainly two major types of improvements in this game over the original IBM version. There may be other enhancements, but they are not as obvious. 1. The sound quality. The fact that french horns are now truly french horns is a refreshing thought. As you can see, the french horns were one of my favorite instruments in the game. The very beginning of the game hints at the sound by having the orchestra there to kick off the Origin Graphics and Sound FX system. The music pushes your emotions in this game and gets you involved and feeling just like Han Solo, Indiana Jones, or the Last Starfighter in your own personal movie. 2. They absolutely made this version have the best version of the training simulator. When you go to choose the ships you are to fight against, you don't just see outlines of the ships; you see the actual ships in 3D form rotate around so you can choose the ship by clicking on the various motion graphics. When you do choose it, part of the simulator will do circular lights while the ship that you chose will move to the center and zoom up. While that ship does its stuff, the other ships will zoom away into the background until they disappear. Then all sorts of statistics about the ship get listed while another window shows the old outline (weapon, armor) graphics schematic of the ship. All other parts of it are the same. COMPLAINTS Well, for the first time for a game, this section will be very small. Apparently, I can only find one complaint about this game: you can't seem to exit the game from anywhere except from the bunkers. The manual states that ALT-X allows you to exit the game, but I haven't gotten that to work yet. I've run into this problem before on other games, but it was usually resolved because they just wrote the wrong combination in the manual and I figured out the right one. Here, I haven't found out what the real combination is, and until I do, this one complaint still stands. On another note, I'd hate to tell the company about this since absolutely everything else seems so perfect. PRAISES Well, I can write another 6 full type-written pages on this one, but I think I've mentioned enough here. Other than the exit game puzzle, I would give this game the award for absolute best port. This exceeds the quality of about all other ports by far. (Maxis is right around here too in terms of quality lost or gained in ports to Amiga.) This game does in an OS-friendly environment what so many hardware hackers thought couldn't be done. Fully compatible with every Amiga, has features such as those I mentioned above, and improves on accelerators -- not crashes them. It has a great choice of color palettes and looks marvelous in 32 color mode. CONCLUSIONS All that is left to say is whether I think this game is worth every penny to jump out and buy it. In my opinion, I definitely believe this is a game EVERY Amiga game player should buy. Worth every penny in all respects. I believe Mindscape and Origin deserve to get lots of money on sales for this port alone. This game has done so much that I am actually willing to write letters of appraisal to the companies themselves for it. So fellow Amiga game players and designers, you won't be sorry for buying this game. ------ Don't just play. Live the experience of Wing Commander Amiga ------ ----- Version A6.81E for yourself ----- Michael Robert Bromery davereed@wam.umd.edu --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Article 205 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: leela.CS.ORST.EDU!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!rutgers!bobsbox.rent.com!s4mjs!plts!sdl!news.mentorg.com!uunet!ukma!gatech!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: davereed@wam.umd.edu (Michael Robert Bromery) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: Re: REVIEW: Wing Commander version A6.81E Keywords: game, simulation, 3D, flight, combat, interactive movie, commercial Message-ID: <1k8uinINNb1j@menudo.uh.edu> Date: 28 Jan 93 15:36:55 GMT Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Reply-To: davereed@wam.umd.edu (Michael Robert Bromery) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 25 Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Apparently, I made a big mistake in my review of Wing Commander from Mindscape. I said that OS revision 2.0 makes the 16-color cross hatching go to 32 colors, but this is not correct. It is the fact that the cross hatching or dithering, under composite video output, antialiases and smooths out to a point that the in-between colors create a smooth shade of color between them. This makes the composite or TV output of the game look like a 32 color version; in fact, you can hardly see the cross hatching at all with composite video. Those of you who can connect to TVs or composite monitors will see an improvement in graphics quality; it is not dependent on the OS. I'm truly sorry for this mistake, this is the first time I've ever seen this trick done. In future releases though, I'll test machines that are connected to monitors and just use mine to test compatibility. In addition, Mindscape said that there is an AGA specific version being released that will support the 256 color mode on AGA machines. Those with AGA machines such as the A1200 or the A4000 may want to wait for that version to be released instead of this version of Wing Commander. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu