Grand Theft Auto III celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. Scary, isn’t it? Looking back now, it’s easy to forget what a landmark the game was – one of the first games that presented you with a vast, open world to roam around in, populated by NPCs who would react to your actions and driven by missions that could be tackled in myriad different ways. Oh sure, it’d all been done before, but GTA III was the first time it was done right.
While other game types have seen similar leaps forward, one genre has stubbornly refused to move on. You can hardly even say that it reached its zenith in the late 90s and it’s been downhill ever since, because apart from a few isolated examples released since, hardly anyone has bothered to do anything with it at all. I’m referring to the good old-fashioned PC space combat simulator.
Yes, I’m talking about Wing Commander again.
The last good space combat simulator to be released commercially was Wing Commander: Prophecy. And the last good space combat simulator to be released in any form was Wing Commander: Secret Ops, the freebie followup to Prophecy. Those are the facts! I can hear you beating away at your keyboard proclaiming that Freespace 2 was pretty good or that the X: Beyond the Frontier series exists, but you might as well stop bashing and save your energy. Those games are rubbish. The fact is that Wing Commander has always held the crown for perfectly balancing the key ingredients, the Holy Trinity, of great games: fun, storyline, technical achievement.
My first exposure to Wing Commander was in glorious 32 colours on the Amiga 600. It was slow, and you knew when you’d died before it happened because the game would pause while it loaded in the death sequence from floppy disk. But that didn’t matter. It was a fantastically immersive game, managing to eke every bit of power out of the hardware to give you great-looking cutscenes alongside the space battles. It even had much better music than the PC version – inevitable for the time.
Fast forward to 2012, and it’s nearly fourteen years since the aforementioned Secret Ops was released. I’ve been playing through it again and it still holds up as a great game. For a game to deliver the visceral sensation of actually being at the centre of the action – whether that’s driving a rally car, swinging from buildings sporting Kevlar fetish wear because you’re Batman, or piloting a space fighter – is a comparatively rare thing, and Secret Ops delivers. Even without support for force feedback joysticks and constrained by the systems it was designed to run on in 1998, it delivers by the bucket load.
An amazing thing about the Wing Commander series is its dedicated fan following. Fan site the Wing Commander CIC has boasted an update every single day for x consecutive number of years, where x is an unlikely, silly number for a game series that hasn’t had an official update in over a decade.
Thanks to its dedicated fans, Wing Commander has had numerous unofficial updates in that time, all of which have kept it feeling fresh without the slightest input from EA, the custodians of the Wing Commander franchise. They’ve taken the original game engines and bent them to their will, to spectacular effect. There are at least a couple of excellent, high-quality fan games – I know of Unknown Enemy and Standoff – hosted entirely in the Secret Ops engine. I’ll probably come back to those games in another post, because they’re excellent!
Indeed, some bright sparks have been hacking around with the Secret Ops engine so much that you can now run the game in high resolution, with updated graphics, without messing around with patches or anything. Although some of the textures look a bit shoddy by modern standards, the game itself is practically timeless – and because nothing has come close to challenging it in the intervening years, Secret Ops with new graphics is the best space combat available for free.
Gamers. Get the Wing Commander: Secret Ops Enhanced English Installer Package now. Go on. You owe it to yourself.
And game developers: the PC space combat market is an open goal. What’s holding you back? Get on with it.
