Talk:Wing Commander game series
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"The Secret Missions is historically important, being one of the first (if not the first) expansion packs ever released for a computer game." Not true -- addons weren't a new concept. Examples predating Wing Commander include Battle of Britain: Their Finest Missions, Sim City: Terrain Editor, Paladin: The Scrolls of Talmouth and four addons for Test Drive II. ~~
"Because of the speech pack, the player character is named for the first time; curiously, as "Armstrong" rather than the later "Blair"."
There is no Speech Pack for Super Wing Commander - as already noted in this entry, the game features full speech as an original feature. This is also not the first time the played character had been given a name: 1991's Wing Commander I & II Ultimate Strategy Guide names him Carl LaFong. Pointing out the contradiction is rather odd as well ('curiously')... since it's not all that curious that he had a different name than one not yet invented (if anything it's curious that they didn't go with 'Armstrong' or 'LaFong' for WC3).
I've removed the claim that the ships were reused in Privateer -- it's difficult to support, since Privateer ultimately came out several months before Super Wing Commander. The reality is that both games were developed by shared teams (Armada, as noted, did re-use SWC elements).
Super Wing Commander was considered a much higher priority internally, though, as Electronic Arts positioned it as the crown jewel of its slate of early 3DO titles. The 3DO, developed by former President Trip Hawkins, recieved a significant amount of support from the company.
- LOAF
"Produced in England, The Darkening is the only non-mainstream Wing Commander game to feature live-action video."
The fact that the game was produced in England doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it's the "only non-mainstream Wing Commander game to feature live-action video" -- this shouldn't be a single sentence.
Furthermore, this claim isn't even true -- Privateer: Righteous Fire used the same FMV technology as Wing Commander II for a brief segment of its introduction (and, of course, one can debate whether or not Wing Commander Prophecy is a 'mainstream' game). It's also not the only Wing Commander game produced in England... the Amiga, CD32 and unreleased A1200 ports of the original game were developed there. LOAF 05:54, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
"All three of these games were planned for release after the 1998 motion picture, which seemed to have convinced Electronic Arts that the market for the Wing Commander series was dwindling. Privateer 3 was still current in speculation when Origin was folded into the remainder of EA in 2003."
Groan -- patently untrue. Privateer 3 was cancelled in January, 1999 following a decree from Electronic Arts' corporate that the Origin studio be focused only on developing Ultima Online-style massively multiplayer titles. This was three months before the Wing Commander movie even came out (March 1999). I know the internet has a chip on its shoulder about the movie, but we can't manipulate time itself to blame the film for all our problems.
It's an invalid thesis to begin with, anyway, because there have been dozens of cancelled Wing Commander titles that you didn't include, most of which predate the movie by many years (and many of which had a lot more serious work on them done than Privateer 3): WC4 3DO, WC3 and 4 M2, WC3 and 4 Sega Saturn, WC1 A1200 Port, WC2 Amiga, Prophecy PSX, Chris Roberts' Privateer 2, Tank Commander, the Privateer 2 'tie in' game, Privateer Special Missions disk, Wing Commander 2 Talkie, Special Ops 3, Wing Commander 2 SNES, Maniac Missions, Strike Team, the second (and third) parts of a Prophecy 'trilogy', etc. (Heck, the third game you mentioned, Strike Team - which was not Wing Commander 6 - was dropped a whole year before the movie came out... this is bad, biased research.)
The last part is also false - Privateer 3 was never an active project after its cancellation. Origin did serious development on Wing Commander Online at two points - one immediately in the wake of the movie's release! 23:21, 12 February 2006 (UTC)LOAF
