Read review by hardwired
Graphics: 7 ‧
Music: 8 ‧
Playability: 9 ‧
Overall: 8
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Strangely, there is no A1200 version of this game, but there is an excellent CD32 version which can be played on an A1200/A4000 (the files on the CD call it "Amiga CD" version). The CD32 version does not appear on Lemon Amiga for some reason. The A500 version may be an achievement but it looks rather ropey, the lack of colours seems more apparent than on almost any other Amiga game I can think of. The CD32 version with the patch (mentioned by someone below back in 2012) is superb. Colourful, very fast etc. I haven't played the game much myself but if you're going to be playing it on an AGA machine, I highly recommend getting the CD version.
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Great dramatic music and sfx, not so great graphics which are slow and lacking in colour - the whole game not just the 3D sections. I reckon this couldve been faster even on a stock A500
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Well...i was young and my Amiga 500 1mb RAM don't permit me to play this game in the right way! Anyway lot of hour it grabbed me on the tv...
now, with a emulator (amiga 3000)...another world!! Speedy, exciting, simply fantastic game!
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It's very good on a '030 Amiga, but the PC version is even better and an all-time classic. Don't try this game on a 68000 Amiga.
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Vote 8/10 but only if you have a very fast CPU.
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The new Chris Roberts game is called Star Citizen and is being financed on a crowd-funding campaign... But hey, everybody knows that by now!
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I'm gonna make this short as I would probably waste dozzens of pages worth of review otherwise:
I love this game: It was the first serious game I ever played that made you feel that everything you did made a difference. The hopes of the Confederacy more or less rested upon your shoulders. You got to know, and started to care for your wingmates in battle. I remember cancelling/reloading a mission multiple times in order to re-do a failed mission in which a wingman got killed. I always keep an eye on my wingman, just as its preached in the WC-manual.
This game was a breakthrough in many ways. I'm not gonna speak about that with regards to graphics and similar, but I do know there were basically NO similar game available at the time of WC's release.
And just today, 11th september 2012, I just heard that the creator of Wing Commander, Chris Roberts, is in the process of creating a new Space-sim game. (no name yet)
So the legacy continues and remains strong after several years of rest.
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At the time it was released I had my Miggy stuffed with a GVP 530 @ 50 MHz ... And as anyone would guess ... I was disappointed by the quality of the conversion ...
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This Wing Commander version rocks ! Hey, don't forget, it's for ECS Amiga with 68000 at 7 Mhz ! PC version required 25Mhz 286 to be playable. Make it work with 16 colours on a basic A500 is a miracle
Now, if you really want to play Wing Commander on Amiga, I recommend you the wonderful CD32 version with AGA GFX. And for an optimal experience, just copy the files in your A1200/A4000 HDD, and use "WCPatch.lha" you can find on Aminet : FastRAM use and better engine for x5 acceleration. You will see what is the Wing Commander experience on Amiga
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Wing Commander sucked me in so bad that it made me almost overlook the painful issues with playing it on a plain 1 MB A500 from floppy disks. Mission branches, a simple but complete flight model, the dynamic ingame music and a Cinemaware-like depth for the storyline and characters gave it some truly unique magic.
It's really a pity about the graphics. I read some early previews promising ingame 64-color Half-Brite mode and was a bit disappointed after checking out the dithered 16-color mode, and not even as a fair price paid for a decent performance on 68000 Amigas. But why on the cutscenes too anyway? They made all the characters look like they're blushing!
At least the game scaled well on CPU, memory and hard disk. Everytime I did a hardware upgrade, I would first thing replay the whole Wing Commander campaign. I don't think I've ever been a bigger fan of a gaming series than I am of the whole Wing Commander saga. I'll go as far as to say that my perception of the video gaming experience matured altogether after playing Wing Commander on Amiga.
For the ultimate Wing Commander experience, do yourselves a favor and get the CD32 version to run on a 68030+ Amiga or a beefed up UAE installation. It's a shame the Secret Missions disks were never ported though, despite the built-in support. IMHO they should have bundled them with the original game, since it came out some two years after the MS-DOS release.
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Yes, played this on my old A500 and loved it. Have loved the entire series and genre since then and eagerly await it's rebirth - cause it's gotta happen! I'll admit that the implementation was far from perfect - the slowness of the flight simulation makes it almost unplayable. But the environment and feeling of being an important part of something grand is unbeatable. Comeradery and exploration of human nature, wrapped in simplistic and appealing gameplay - from beginning to end. So, in spite of technical shortcomings, this is a solid 9, hands down.
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It's not often that I'll say a game is a "must play" but Wing Commander is one of them. From start to finish WC will keep gamers who enjoy flight sims/shooters entertained and coming back for more.
You have to pick and choose your wing mates carefully or risk losing them, this along with the different ships and weapons at your disposal allows the player to experiment with different groups and loadouts.
WC was ported over to several systems through the years and should be a very easy game to find. I played this game to death on the Amiga and I had no issues. 10/10
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Amiga couldn't handle this game very well
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Played this for the first time today and I have to say its excellent. Even after playing modern games this is still fun to play. It holds up well for a 20 year old game, the graphics dont hold it back, everything is clear unlike some amiga games today. Surely one of the best amiga games ever made and definately the best of its type on the amiga.
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The best sc-fi flight games ever released. My favorite part of the whole game was landing on the Tiger's Claw and see the state of the fighter...in my case i only had one gun left and the fighter was in shambles.
The downside for the WC games was the controls. Eventually you get the hang of it, but starting off is rough. The SNES was blessed to get WC,WC II and the secret missions.
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I found the thrust to be essential when negotiating the asteroid fields.
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This game got my attention due to an awesome story and atmosphere created by all ingame animations. Each character has its own features which make him unique. It is rather unfortunate that the game itself has some flaws which are not in favour of its beauty and ruin the gameplay. I am one of those who do not fancy simulations. This one I like. I manage to fly the ship, I manage to destroy some ships but the asteroids belt is just too much. I wish I could do much better and at least accomplish the first mission.
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I remember my PC-havin' friend ridiculed me to bits after he saw this on my A500...shows what he knows, right? The sign of an enjoyable gaming experience is that the player is sucked into the world of the game - and that totally happened, lousy graphics or not. The "Briefing" animation and the launching spacecrafts still gives me goosebumps! ANOTHER true classic.
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Played it through on my slow ol' A500... And loved it. Remember the asteroid sections were to tough and slow on the A500... So i just removed the asteroid data file and presto.. Instant cheat! No more asteroids! HAHA! Its a classic game on any format, and i never even dreamed they could get it to run on the amiga!
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I couldn't stop playing this game when I got it. It was just so epic. The story, the characters and the spaceships... Amazing.
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I bought this version and liked it pretty well. A little slow, if I remember right. The PC version ran faster but, like someone else has already said, it didn't look nearly as good. Amiga was better! I was torn after buying this for Amiga. Then I got a PC. But after compariing the 2 versions I wasn't too upset for long.
Seriously fun game though, I just loved how your ships energy balls (or whatever those were) looked when they hit the other ships. Had that been done before?
9/10-if the speed had been better a solid 10/10. I'll absolutely revisit so I can push the speed of the emu up and play this at a speed it was always meant to be played.
Freelancer on the PC is the way to go if you want something like this today. I was just playing the trial version of it yesterday. The graphics have aged a little, but it's still good stuff and will remind you of this. The III and IV versions were superb on the PC. It's a real shame the cast from those didn't go on to do the movie. What a major goof that was...replacing them with young actors. Well, I guess the real goof was the script. But having Mark Hamil and Tom Wilson in that would have helped a lot.
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The AGA version of this game on an expanded 1200 with 030 @50 is bloody awesome
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I can't believe how many hours I spent on this game and I ran in on a plain Amiga 500 when it came out...which I can't understand today how I could live with it
Agree with the previous poster that Origin didn't take any real advtantage of the Amiga's capabilities....imho Origin were lazy coders..just look at the PC version which needs a 386 CPU with 25-33mhz to run at the correct speed...if you use a 40mhz 386 it runs a bit to fast and it runs at warp speed on a 486
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A very disappointing conversion with only 16 colours - even with HD and turbo board it makes no real fun...
Just another characteristical Origin 'we're clueless about the capability of the Amiga' port...
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When i first read about Wing Commander in an Amiga magazine i was really excited. Once i got it, i played it on a 68000' for a while and i loved it anyway. Especially for this game i upgraded my A500 with an 68020 board a year later. Crazy! One of the most enchaining games for the Amiga.
In fact you could tell the game to load special missions from an add on. But never was released.
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Hardly playable on the 500, but worked pretty well on 1200.
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I had the CD32 version, and with a little of fast ram on the sx1 module, I had a great experience with this game. Great plot and good atmosphere.
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Be sure to grab the CD32 Version. With AGA graphics and the awesome Amiga Soundtrack you have the best possible Wing Commander version available. (Well maybe except the Windows remakes from the Kilrathi Saga Box).
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Not so bad port of this great PC game. Not really worth playing on an A500 with 68000 but on a 68030+ it's pretty cool. The CD-32 version has better GFX, too bad it's not listed (yet) on this site.
Anyway, if you like the style, this game is great.
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To everybody who thinks that the game is slow and ugly: please, check out AGA version on A1200 with some fast memory or on A4000. The game runs and looks as good as on PC + has better sound effects and music.
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I remember playing this game for hours on my A600 when it was new... Saying that the game was running somewhat slow is an understatement; perhaps 2 fps while fighting in an asteriod field.... Crappy 16 colour graphic didn´t matter much to the gameplay in my opinion.
I also had the CD32 version which had 256 colours and ran even faster than the 16 colour version! (probably because the cd32´s akiko chip...)
I really liked that you could affect the ending of the game depending on how well you completed your missions. Missions would get really hard if you were failing too much...
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I first played and won this game on a 1 meg 500 from floppy disks. Really clunky but still playable.
A year later, I played it on a 1200 from hard drive! HUGE DIFFERANCE!
Two years ago I downloaded the DOS version of this game, and (SIGH!) the VGA graphics blow the Amiga away...
Oh, well... Still a great Amiga game anyway!
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God did I love this game, I remember the first time a played it I was hooked. I remember reading a preview in A.C.E for an upcoming space combat game called Wing Leader. Yes that is what it was originally called. I did not run that well on my 600 with 1 meg of Ram but when I upgraded too 2 meg it ran a lot better. Mission after mission I would play. I became a VERY big fan of the series. I had all the others on my later PC`s but this version still sticks out in my memory as being the best.
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Predsesa - Origin made the game for the PC in 1990, hence copyright 1990. The Amiga version was in 1992. When this was released you could have paid £400 for an A1200 and £200 for a big hard drive, and got something almost as good as a £1200 PC. Why didn't you?
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I finally got my hands on AGA/english (I only had AGA/german version before) version of Wing Commander (Thanks to some nice fella at amigagames.com)! Man, the magic is still in there! I'm gonna spend whole weekend kicking Kilrathis' butt.
AGA version runs slower than ECS version due to 256 colours but gameplay couldn't be more perfect on 060 machines at least. Everything runs fast and smooth. Like a dream!
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Dull as dishwater. Tedious beyond belief.
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Competent conversion of the PC shooter. Works best on an A1200 but loses marks for the 'jerkiness' of the asteroid-dodging parts on any unaccelerated machine which affects the overall gameplay (since the programmers seemed to think we were all dead-keen on dodging rocks).
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Karpow, I hear your dismay (I felt it then, too), but in my defense 1. I owned/still own an A1000 with 80mb hard drive (GVP, no less) and 2. My brother, an A500 owner, didn't UPGRADE his PC, it CAME with a hard drive and SVGA card and SoundBlaster card included (and cost less than my A1000 with less memory and smaller HD). I realize that our lovely Amiga could eventually match WC on the PC, but this game was always perceived as a PC game, much like Tomb Raider is perceived as a PlayStation game, even though it was available on the Saturn too. Wing Commander pointed to the inexpensive and, regrettably, more powerful nature of Gateway and Dell and Compaq. Not EVER as SMOOTH as Amiga graphics, but more powerful (higher resolution, fancier sound, more colours, more memory, cheaper)...
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Rsherbine, Your brother upgraded his PC, so why didn't you upgraded your Amiga? Oh dear, this is so common story...
I finished this game couple of times on A500 with GVP Hard drive. It was slow, yes, but still a great game. Later I tested this game on A1200 with 68060 and on that setup the game ran way, WAY too fast!!
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Yes. The beginning of the end. Even on a 386 with a nice soundcard this baby made me cringe with envy for my brother's new computer and begin to worry about Amiga's future. And, frankly, I still believe that the exclusion of a hard drive from base Amiga systems was the largest nail in our computer's coffin. That and SVGA graphics really made early PC games more desireable to many. And who's gonna word process and be satisfied swapping disks? Hmm? (But I digress... Sorry...)
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Kim Lemon, a strange event: there is a sign "(C) 1990 Origin Systems" on the WC title screen, but you have its origin dated to 1992. Where is the truth?
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If enough people had put their weight behind the A1200 (and alter advances in Amiga technology), fighting the PC could've worked out okay. This really is a treat on an A1200, bringing a revolutionary and thrilling game to a different audience.
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On an A1200 this game really worked (unfortunately it didn't look all that great due to the dithered ECS graphics) but on the A500 it was little more than a pain in the butt. Slow, and jerky, the game became almost unplayable as soon as more than 2 or 3 ships were on screen. Thankfully the kill all enemies cheat worked, so that I could at least see how the game ended. WC was the beginning of the end for the Amiga, and this conversion just accentuated how hopeless fighting the PC was really going to be.
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This is one of the early realistic PC space simulation games ala battlestar galactica that was quite revolutionary at the time, converted to the Amiga. Truly immersive. I remember the nice intro with classical music, the option to train in a simulator on board the mothership, and the lift off sequence. Best to be played on an A1200 (with expansion board). A memorable classic.
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Impossible made possible? I thought this was an excellent conversion of massive PC hit. Using smart dithering the graphics didn't suffer from lesser colours but looked almost as good as in original. On A500 the action can get sluggish but I was blown away at the time when playing this on A1200! Wheeee!
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