Games time forgot: Wing Commander III

Okay, okay; I promise, this is the last FMV-heavy forgotten game I will spotlight ever again.

Well, not for a long time.

Well, not for a few months.

Anyway, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger literally represents one of the best combinations of film and videogaming yet seen* — with a celebrity cast that actually delivers good performances, anaccessible control scheme, and a production budget of $4 million (making it, at the time, the most expensive game ever made), Wing Commander III strived to take the blockbuster feeling of a film like Star Wars and combine it with the interactivity of the best videogames.

Surprisingly, it sort of works. Hit the jump to learn more about a game where Luke Skywalker and Biff Tannen fight Evil Space Lions together.

*Not to mention I’m using Wing Commander III because I couldn’t get Privateer 2 to work on XP.

Story:

A significant amount of Wing Commander III‘s marketing billed the game as “the world’s first interactive movie,” which should tell you a lot about director Chris Roberts’ priorities. As one of the first videogames to put a great deal of effort on securing quality actors for the game’s numerous cutscenes, WC3 roped in the talents of:

Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), playing Christopher Blair (aka the player)

Malcolm MacDowell (Alex from A Clockwork Orange), playing Blair’s hard-yet-condescending-yet-intelligent-yet-badass superior officer 

John Rhys-Davies (Sala from Raiders of the Lost Ark), playing a fat guy who, for no reason whatsoever, has a horrendous Scottish accent

Josh Lucas (that guy who has consistently been not-quite-famous for the past decade), as a young, douchebaggy hotshot pilot

Thomas F. Wilson (Biff from Back to the Future), playing Biff from Back to the Future…but in SPACE.

The cutscenes, filmed almost entirely with a combination of real actors and green screen, make up a hefty portion of the game’s running time — so much so that the game was once re-edited without the interactive portions in order to create a full-length film.  

Story-wise, the game can be summarized in three words: humans versus space-cats. Not having played the pervious games of the Wing Commander series, I can’t speak to what drama may have preceded Heart of the Tiger, but the basic plot simply revolves around evil catlike creatures (the Kilrathi) attempting to snuff out all instances of human life, and our rag-tag group of B-list celebrities has to stop them.

Gameplay:
The actual flight mechanics of the game favor simplicity and accessibility over the realism one might find in a flight simulator. Unlike a title like, say, X-Wing, you can’t divert blaster power to your shields or thrusters, or vice versa. Switching between weapons, changing targets, and matching the speed of your enemies is really about as far as the actual combat interactivity goes. The player can also communicate with his wingman and give general orders (attack, cover me, retreat, etcetera) — nothing particularly new here.

The main area where the gameplay truly shines is when it synergizes with the story: branching conversations, multiple mission storylines, and numerous endings are really what give Wing Commander III its kick. Midway through a conversation with a character, for instance, the cutscene will stop and provide two options to the player — do you trust this new recruit, or do you think he’s hiding something? Do you accept the hotshot’s challenge, or do you take the moral high ground? While these branching conversations seem to have little consequence early on in the game, they can later contribute to one of a few different endings.

Similarly, certain missions will allow the player to choose a specific course of action. For instance, after wiping out a fleet of Kilrathi ships and returning back to the base, Blair is contacted by the commander and told that a single human ship took off in pursuit of some distant Kilrathi. Through ship-to-ship communication, the player can decide whether to leave the pilot for dead and return to base, or to go after her on his own. Again, these choices decide which ending the player will eventually recieve.

The combat is simple and straightforward in order to focus the player’s attention on the interactive storyline — one could easily argue that the storyline might be even more immersive if the player had greater control over his ship, but Wing Commander III is what it is.

And, to be sure, it is a straightforward, fast-paced bit of space combat. While the graphics are abysmal and the gameplay isn’t particularly unique, the accessible controls and interactive story aspects make Wing Commander III undeniably playable, even today. 

Why You Probably Haven’t Played It:

If you’re a few years older than I am (that is to say, you were born some time before 1988), then it’s a fair bet you actually have. As mentioned earlier, it was the most expensive game of its time and as such, garnered a fair amount of attention (and obviously sold well enough to warrant a few sequels and a movie). 

However, keeping in mind that a significant portion of our readership is probably around my age, I’m going to take a guess and assume that most of the people who are reading this sentence haven’t played it. If you weren’t around for its initial release, there probably wasn’t much reason to: its space combat gameplay has since been improved upon, the Wing Commander film probably scared more young people away from the franchise than it roped in, and the game is a positive pain in the ass to get running on XP. I couldn’t actually get it to work on my PC, and so, for the purposes of this article, I had to play the PSOne version.

NEVER play the PSOne version of this game. All the cool cockpit animations are gone, the graphics are even worse, and the controls are abysmal in that special way that results when programmers try to take fifteen different actions made for use on a keyboard and port all of them to a standard console controller. As a result, doing something relatively simple like asking for permission to land takes roughly ten seconds (hold select then hit left then hit down then hit R1 then hit left then hit R1 then let go of select then press L1, L2, R1, and R2 simultaneously).

Still, if you’re at all a fan of interactive storytelling, or if you just want to see Mark Hamill as a space pilot once again, you owe it to yourself to give Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger a spin. It’s only 100 points on Goozex, after all.

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