Introduction

Get Your Motor Running

I love games. I think games are some of the best ways to explore your imagination, take out your aggressions and kill a few hours when you get bored. It is better than cruising the mall and certainly keeps me out of trouble. When I sit back and think about it, I realize not all people love PC games, but hey, that is their loss. Maybe they just did not have a positive first experience in gaming and that is why they feel the way they do. Luckily for me, I started off with some great games that help set the bar high enough so that I knew when games were made right, gaming could be an awesome experience. It may have started on the PC with Zork for me, but one of the biggest influences has got to be in the genre of space games.

Head Out On The Highway

Wing Commander and Wing Commander II are still two of the best games I have ever played in my life. Yeah, they were DOS only and yeah, they did not have the killer graphics that games of today have, but man, they had story and they had it big. I was drawn in so far, I was pretty much obsessed with the first game. It was not the cool joystick that I bought that did it for me, it was the feeling that somehow I was a part of the story. The cut scenes were full of blocky graphics, but who cared! The combination of fighting missions that actually felt like they meant something and those cut scenes that advanced the story was gaming nirvana for a young guy like me.

Wing Commander 1

Wing Commander 2

Wing Commander 3

I spent hours turning into weeks turning into months immersing myself in the Wing Commander universe. The fighting was certainly a blast, but somehow the fact that what I did had a tangible impact on the outcome of the game was very cool. I came to care about the other characters in the game, which has to be a testament to how strong the Wing Commander story was. They added the Special Missions, then Wing Commander 2 and more add-on missions. I was so devoted to the game it rivaled the type of obsession I had with Science Fiction and Fantasy books when I read Conan pulp books, Asimov's Robot books and the Lord Of The Rings series. Ironically, the Wing Commander story was so strong, it also became a series of fiction novels. Very cool.

The series took a turn with Wing Commander 3 that at first seemed exciting, but ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. The whole "Full Motion Video" thing threw me for a loop. I was paying more attention to who was acting as the character than the characters themselves. I liked Mark Hamill, and I liked John Rhys-Davies and maybe that was the problem. It was not about Blair anymore; it was about the actors portraying these people I had grown to care about. I wish they had done it differently and focused more on advancing what they already had in place instead of changing the whole dynamic. Something got lost in the translation.