Wing Commander 2 came out a year after...I didn't expect that for a Chris Robert game.... "He had minimal involvement" Ah that explain it.

Hobbs, the Kilrathy defector is named HOBBS! I just got that 40+ years later! If I ever play wing Commander again, my callsign is going to be Calvin.

150+ minutes of unparalleled nostalgia? You rule

Awesome that there's still people making videos about these old DOS games!

Liking and commenting for the algorithm because I want this channel to remain alive until he gets to Tachyon: The Fringe

So many memories. I was 13 years old, had my first 386 DX and jumped into this story and game. Loved every bit about it. Especially since I was a huge fan of the old Battle Star Series and loved the Vipers….

I remember being SO EXCITED when this came out, since I loved the first one so much. I had a 386/33 with a Gravis Joystick and I was READY. I didn't have a CD-ROM at the time, though, so it came on about a million floppy disks. So many great memories. The cinematic quality of the cutscenes was really unprecedented for computer games at the time. Can't wait for your next video!

I wasn’t sure this day would come! Congratulations on the newest video. Can’t wait to sit down and watch it. WCII is an absolute favorite of mine.

❤❤❤ I hope the Wing Commander III video is five hours long (because two of those five hours will be dedicated to the Kilrathi puppets) ❤❤❤

About wingman death, they will always live, while they have a story element left. After their story is finished abs you can still fly with them, they won't eject.

Didn’t remember the swagger of Paladin’s outfit from back in the time I played the game. This rivals the Jake Sisko outfits of early DS9 😂.

This was the one I had as a kid, where my love of Wing Commander comes from.

I really like how you weave the gameplay and story analysis together over the course of the video. It's really engaging. Keep up the great work!

I played this when I got the Kilrathi Saga set. I dont remember having the problems you did but I did play this on Windows XP when it was new. I used a Joystick Throttle stick and it all ran just fine. Best guess was it was all on, at the time, 'normal' hardware. Great video, so glad your continuing this

As an old gamer, Wing Commander II was possibly the first time that a PC game impressed me in terms of cinematic storytelling with both visuals and speech. Yes, the story itself wasn't that deep in the long run, but they were successful at making me feel like watching a movie or TV show. Randomly crashing to MS DOS right after getting shot down was definitely a thing back then, so I hear you. Incidentally, I went back to play the original Wing Commander a few years later and I enjoyed how it did more to make you feel like a pilot, even if the actual narrative was very barebones. You could argue it had a better sense of atmosphere than the sequel. I'm very thankful for your historical retrospective and documentation efforts too, because I never knew about the original script.

Can't wait for Freespace, Strike Commander and Starlancer!

The joystick thing reminded me of my experiences trying FreeSpace 2 with a flight stick. I have played FreeSpace 2 with keyboard only for over 20 years, and every time I tried to use a flight stick the amount of skill I would have to develop just to make back my skills on the keyboard were forbidding. Even when I got into flight sims, it was still forbidding because none of the intuitions you develop about how a stick works and its relationship to the machine carry over to "steering" what is effectively a floating camera with no concepts of control authority, energy management (not in the sense of powering your ship's systems but rather treating its momentum as a resource that must be guarded and not wasted on willy-nilly, futile maneuvers), performance envelopes, or stall characteristics. Jerking a stick all the way to its detents, constantly, every maneuver feels extremely unnatural after learning how to feel out a plane's limits and maneuver using subtle, gradual inputs in a flight simulator. If anything, the joystick makes the limitations of the whole space sim format created by Wing Commander more apparent, casting a harsh and revealing light over how little physicality the spaceships have. There is no sense of simulated mechanical sympathy you get after an hour or two practicing with a plane in a flight sim. There is no need to even practice a ship at all because they all fly the same way. As for the Rapier vs. Jalkehi, plug in their numbers into a 3D engine and the Rapier is completely, *overwhelmingly* superior. Both in WC Standoff on the Prophecy engine and in my mod projects on the FreeSpace engine (which alas never came to proper fruition) the Rapier is incredibly nimble and difficult to hit, while the Jalkehi is a very slow, very large, very ponderous target. In fact all of the Kilrathi fighters in WC2, if using their printed stats, stack up extremely poorly in a 3D engine compared to not only their Confederation counterparts, but sometimes even their own WC1 predecessors. The Dralthi II for instance, exceeds the capabilities of the Drakhri in almost every way, and aside from the turret the Jalkehi is generally inferior to the Jalthi and Gratha.

Thank you for this video. I loved the WC games when I was a kid.

Just take your time. Your video is EXCELLENT, to say at least. I went through EACH of them, FULL, even when it takes day for me to watch it through once, I still managed that. These are my memories and you're bringing them back. You're doing excellent work here and thank you very much.

Hobbs is such a good friend. I hope he never turns his back on Blair.

Glad you're continuing with this. I hope this video also does well, tho I hear the Algorithm doesn't like long breaks between videos.

i was very fortunate to play these games in all thier glory with my Sound Blaster 32

Yeah, the 'Cant fire while turning' thing was something I ran into playing Earthsiege 2 as well. Emblematic of gaming controls at the time I suppose.

As someone whose been watching Ross Scott since I was in highschool and am now in my mid 30's, I'm used to slow uploads, lol.

Great documentary and insight into the Game. Thank you!

About "the sci-fi last resort things", in original Macross anime, humanity is overwhelmed by sudden alien invasion, immediately starting to loose, trying to use repaired alien super ship, it's brokes down and then they trying to use ship's teleportation device and it's makes the whole situation so much worse. And this is only the begging of the series!

Return of the King

Great video. I never played Wing Commander 2 when I was a kid. After beating the first Wing Commander my parents were going to buy Wing Commander 2, but we saw X-Wing and decided to buy that instead. I never regretted the choice but after watching this video, I think it would have been a pretty fun game to play back in the day.

We making it out of Wing Command 1 with this one!!!1!!!11 💀💀🔥🔥🔥🔥💀

This is for the algorithm gods! Good to see this project still going strong. Cant wait to see what the next title is going to be. Doing these large projects takes time. Other people who actually cover long formate projects like this take a fair amount of time. These projects aren't quick to make.

@1:20:00 or so, I've noticed you don't do a lot of rolling in these clips. From my recollection, the key to utilizing the wider-spread cannons was rolling to align with the wide axis of the targets.

YAY! this came out. Glad to see it. The joystick to gamepad comparison was interesting Nice to see that either way works well enough. Sorry i wasn't able to fund the entire flight stick then.

So happy to live this franchise through you.

I owned and played this game all the way through when it first came out. I was in high school at the time. I threw out my old copy some years ago during a move, and just recently bought it back to put into my Big Box collection. I'm glad to have it again.

37:05 Ooooooh yes, taking control of the turrets was so much fun in a Broadsword. No light fighter could ever sneak up on me! Unfortunately, turrets were never again this much fun in the series.

Enjoyed this trip down memory lane. When I was teenager I used to replay WC1 & 2 over and over again. What I wouldn't give to see these games re-made in the Freelancer engine.

I was still in the Army when the first two Wing Commander games came out. I had my 386 PC in my room in the barracks, and I played this in my downtime. The speech pack being sold separately wasn't some hideous crime at that time like Bethesda's horse armor DLC. It was a very new technology having voice acted scenes in home video games. The only others I recall having voice were the arcade games of the late 70s and after (Star Wars (the monochrome one), GORF, Sinistar, Dragon's Lair/Space Ace, etc.). I built my first PC in 1983 at age 11, but it wasn't until 1992 that I actually had state-of-the-art audio with my first Sound Blaster card. I primarily bought it for my Sierra adventure games, and this. Very few games at the time made full use of its capabilities, so buying a speech pack for a game at that point in time wasn't unreasonable. The ultimate audio setup back then was having a Sound Blaster with the Roland MT-32 which produced the best sound experience. Another thing of note is the Kilrathi ship scene at 06:25 is 3D rendered, which was also an emerging technology. The 3D renders in WC2 were among the best examples of it at the time. *Edit* Also, no one with a PC in 1992 was playing a flight sim with the arrow keys on the keyboard. You're thinking too "modern" where everyone has a PC now including the dumbest and laziest people on the planet. The only ones with PCs in 1992 were people who had intelligence, or had money, and just wanted cool "gadgets". If you were playing a flight/space combat sim in 1992, you had a joystick. Period. The Thrustmaster was a favorite budget friendly option, but there were some pretty hardcore joysticks with a separate throttle that would set you back a few hundred bucks in 1992 money. A Thrustmaster was about 50 bucks. Only a complete moron would seriously attempt to play a game like this, or Star Wars: X-Wing with the arrow keys. It's just not happening. I DID attempt to play WC2 with my mouse, but it wasn't as accurate as a joystick, so I stuck with that.

Taking me right back to junior high. I loved this game.

They did charge for the voice pack but I recall some sound cards coming with it as part of the packed in software to try out the new product. It’s crazy to think of these days but before gamers were obsessed with crazy expensive GPUs, we had to beg our parents to buy us a sound card for the family PC. This changed a couple years later with the rise of the CD-ROM, as it was very common for the CD-ROM controller card to also be a sound card. Within a couple years every PC had one but in 92 it was a lot rarer

I did not see the Postmasters comment coming. Well done sir for memorialising that tragedy in your video

I've been playing these sorts of games since TIE Fighter and I've had a few different flight sticks over the years. Hands down my favorite control scheme for any of these games has been using the Dualshock 4 on the PS4 version of Elite Dangerous. I could move exactly how I wanted, access every function I wanted and even look anywhere I wanted all with the comfort of a lightweight game pad. For me, that's the new standard I compare any other space sim control scheme to.

As to the problem of many fighters attacking you at once: You can cheese a large squadron by no locking any particular fighter but rather fire a few shots onto one, maybe tail it if you can but abort and turn towards another after only a few seconds. This takes a lot of patience and makes it harder to use missiles but it works, kinda…

Funny coincidence; the exact moment when I finally registered the meaning of a tiger named "Hobbes" was about thirty seconds before you put the "Calvin And-" character onscreen.

I love your videos. I’m hoping you do a deep dive on WC3/4/prophecy and videos for Tie Fighter/XWvsTF/XWA. Top-notch coverage with the videos you have made up to this point.

Love your laid back style. another great watch!

Lets gooooooo! Been waiting on this since episode 1 was a few weeks old.

Awesome to see another WC video from you. Great work once again! I grew up playing WC 1, 2 & Privateer on my 486 with keyboard and cheap gameport joysticks. I've always liked using joysticks for arcade flight games and mech sims, but I didn't always have / have a working one, so I played my share keyboard only too. Gamepads and thumbsticks just feel like wrong to me when it comes to flight and/or sim games (really felt this trying out Ace Combat) but for games like WC and Crimson Skies, I think it really does just come down to what the player is most comfortable with using. Definitely a classic WC thing to have such imprecise turning regardless of input method though!

First boxed PC game I owned, 4 floppy disks, ahh the nostalgia :) And yeah, didn't have a SoundBlaster so I played with farts for explosions and no music or dialogue xD Also played with keyboard input and the biggest hurdle was that you had to stop turning to shoot as keyboard wouldn't accept multiple keys pressed at the same time, the final bossfight was really annoying because of that. Also regarding flak I've found that rolling through the attack run seems to mitigate some of the damage. But since so many years have passed can't tell if it was true or just confirmation bias on my part.

Was kind of expecting to see Riker from Star Trek Insurrection using the ThrustMaster to pilot the Enterprise as a cut away.

I like how the leader of the Kilrathi's big speech to the current heir to the throne is basically an admission that the entire family is made up of stupid people, and that he's only allowing him to go into combat because if he gets himself killed, the throne will pass on to someone more capable and less impulsive. That, coupled with the fact that the heir is apparently motivated by his cousins teasing him (I know that you could interpret it as him feeling he doesn't measure up to them and their achievements, but it's much funnier to me if the cousins are all mocking and belittling the person who is going to inherit the throne at a family get together and he runs away, teary eyed, to go see his granddad and beg him to be allowed to pilot a spaceship so he can show the other boys that he's just as hard as they are), really doesn't paint the most threatening image 😂

When I first played WC2, decades ago, I actually did not realize that there were story-related interludes behind one of the airlocks. I thought that the entire narrative was conveyed through the missions, pre-mission conversations, and in-mission cutscenes. That I still had no problems following the story and didn’t even notice that part of it was missing just reinforced how extraneous the airlock segments were. 20:50. Re: the Ferret. I was pleasantly surprised by how capable it was. Certainly, it was way better than the Hornet and Scimitar from the first game. For one thing, its “Gatling mass drivers” fired extremely rapidly and didn’t take long to recharge. It could pump out such a stream of projectiles that even heavy fighters like the Jalkehi could be easily downed with a well placed volley. In fact, I found the Ferret more deadly against Jalkehi than Sartha and Drakhri just because of how easily you could hit the heavier ship. Flying a Super Ferret against heavy fighters, in Special Operations, didn’t feel nearly as onerous as flying a Hornet against a Gratha, in Secret Missions. The Ferret was at least a glass cannon. Can’t take hits but can really dish out the damage. A later game using the same engine as WC2, Wing Commander Academy, allowed you to select any Terran ship from WC2 and fly it against increasingly powerful waves of enemies. One of my highest scores in that game was in a Ferret, surpassed only by my performance in a Broadsword. I think a large part of what made those ships so effective was the increased rate of fire of mass drivers.

1:00:50 - Remember this for the WC3 retrospective.

I was soo happy too see this pop up. I love the idea of this series and you're doing a marvelous job. Can't wait for the next one. If you need to do a short one, there's always Wing Commander Academy.

Can't wait to go through this banger, much love

Been looking forward to this one! I don't have much experience with Wing Commander 2, as I spent more time trying to get through the first game when I started playing the series. I'm encouraged it another shot after watching this retrospective. I'm glad your brought up the original screenplay when discussing the plot, as well as the reality of making a game story work when there are so many moving parts. I think it's an aspect of game development that's often overlooked when people complain about the linearity and restrictions of "cinematic" games. It certainly explains the messiness of Wing Commander 2's story, seeing how much has cut or changed.

Man... you could not believe it... but yesterday I was thinking "is there a videogame of Wing Commander?"... and I didn't even said it loud... and today... this... man I start to freaking out...

Late to the party, but happy to see you upload a new video! Thank you for your hard work.

Back in the day I played the Kilrathi Saga with WC1-3 included, I remember there were a ridiculous number of CDs I had to feed into my PC to install the games, especially WC3! The packaging the games came in was great and I held onto it for decades, until I had to downscale for a big move.

You may not have been as skilled with the joystick immediately, but your movements were much more precise, even in that first mission footage. I was able to pick it out easily.

This is something else, again. Great stuff. I greedily hope for WC3 and WC4 documentaries of this quality.

Amazing work! My first WC was part 3 on the 3DO back in the mid nineties and it blew my mind haha. Hopefully I get to see your take but I’ll plant myself down for the duration for whatever is next haha

Love these vids! I bought & played these games when they came out in the early 90s. Yes using a joy stick was the key to improve targeting. Like others I played WC1 only using a keyboard which was not ideal. I didn't have internet so there were no helpful tips or cheats - Just slogging through each level failing most of the time, but learning new strategies. So frustrating & hard yet exhilarating when successful. I vote for you doing a video for Wing Commander 3. It was the first game in that era (that I'm aware of) with video cut scenes & real actors. I was blown away at how cool that was at the time. All I wanted to do was play WC at every opportunity. Thanks for the videos!

It was quite something to behold in 1991. Hearing digitized speech on my ancient 486SX was mindblowing at the time. Still surprised they managed to fit all that on a few floppy disks. Programmers these days with their bloated 100gb game installs could really learn a thing or two.

Wellcome back, Wing commander!

My only experience with Wing Commander was the SNES version then WC 3 for PS1 but i still love it to this day

Oh hey! Huzzzah! I just had a thought the this video would finally be done and uploaded. Always a nice treat when long format content on youtube finally drops!

My introduction to the world of flight sims was with elite dangerous and I got REALLY into it and bought a good HOTAS that cost ~$200usd and a VR headset. I got absolutely addicted and put over 3k hours into the game. The peripherals for games like this are an absolute gamechanger but there is definitely a learning curve lol

I absolutely love your stuff. You've got a great sense of humor.

Sabre and Rapier are good examples of why you don't want all your guns active all the time, per se. I had... a very different experience, particularly with the former. Meanwhile, the Broadsword was my bane, as a mobility focused pilot who def afterburner slid a lot. Thank God for the Crossbow in the expac.

We did it! I know it was hard work making this. But it was harder work waiting for it 😊

Automatons do walk among us so I wouldn't be surprised.

I love these videos Dont take it the wrong way i put them on if i need to sleep I think ive seen all of them like 5 times each I get nuce dreams with these

Enjoyable and well thought out, as I've come to expect from your work. Good job.

The series turned more into a movie as it went on and became a less satisfying space sim. I always preferred the approach that the first game took: you're just a regular pilot hearing the events of a war relayed to you as you work through a campaign that dynamically changes based on your performance. All the sequels were almost completely linear and scripted. I think WC2 was the last one where the space sim part was still satisfying. I don't think the torpedo runs were a terribly fun mechanic though. To this day, the ONLY other space sim I ever played with a campaign that dynamic was Colony Wars for the Playstation 1. I definitely recommend hunting that down if you're interested in the genre.

It's cocaine!

I was wondering just the other day when we'd see a sequel to the Wing Commander retrospective, and lo and behold, here it is! Thanks! your retrospectives are really informative and interesting! May I live to see a Strike Commander retrospective one day. :)

I remember installing the voice pack on many many 3.5 in floppies and installing sound blaster and it was worth every penny... that my parents paid for my xmas present lol

I need to replay this series again. They don't make them like this anymore.

I've been trying to track down a game for a while and this looks like the place to ask. I remember playing a late 80's/ early 90's top-down spaceship game where the plot was that a crew either takes an experimental ship through hyperspace or returns from a long mission where they were recovering a ship capable of that. When they return to Earth, it had been taken over by an empire of spider aliens with a full army on the way and arriving within a few years. It was up to the player to venture out into space, ally with other races and add them to your fleet and strike back against the invaders before it was too late. There was a lone fighter pilot of some cat-man race who would attack you on sight if you entered the orbit or solar system he was in, but if you had rescued some princess of the race, he would join you and you would have an infinite number of crew members. Combat was top down and kind of slidey and took place on like half the screen where the other half showed the remaining ships in your fleet besides the enemy fleet. Does anyone remember the name of this game?

I always thought mouse controls would be awkward and never tried them for these space games until recently with Elite Dangerous and wow, what a difference that was! It made me want to replay all those space games again now with mouse controls instead of a gamepad like I've been doing for decades.

I recall using a Logitech Wingman Warrior flight stick, it's served me well during my teenager years!

Looking forward to seeing which game wins the poll for next retrospective.

I played WC1 with a mouse for a while. I quickly saved up for a joystick because the game was so awesome. But, it was definitely fun and playable with a mouse. It's wild to me to see this game running so fluidly. I was running it on a system that was barely adequate. Even the cut scenes ran at like, 5fps lol. Even the cockpit had reduced detail for me; I think the animated hand on the flight stick only shows up if you had more than the minimum amount of RAM.

I love your videos and their quality makes the wait worth it for me.

I hope one day you do Strike Commander. Such an awesome game too.

I love wing commander 2, I hated the rapier when I first played it but I practiced in it a tonne on wing commander academy and got really good at it. Once you learn how to fly it you do surprisingly well

Incidentally, if you have the desire to fiddle with the WC Armada game for schmitts and giggles... I have the CD lying around here somewhere...

I played the Kilrathi Saga version of this game on (if I remember right) a Pentium III, and...it was a problem. The framerate was higher than intended, which made it all that much harder to do many of the missions. I think I eventually gave up on trying to beat the challenge, and used a cheater option to make the ship invincible.

You could always chapterify your work and make a mega-cut at the end, although that doesn't help if you're worried about being able to edit any point at any time. It would definitely help the algorithim, and seeing your channel name more often helps with retention and subscribe count! Great work as always, love your 3 films!

Regarding the next video, perhaps you can also mention Wing Commander Academy. It's a somewhat small WC game where you customize a mission and then play it as you fly and fight ships that were featured in WC1 and WC2.

Funny thing is, my experience with the original Wing Commander was on SNES. I still have that copy. I would have purchased WC2 on SNES. I didn't play the series on PC until WC3 or maybe Privateer. I don't remember which one I actually purchased first unfortunately.

I'm pretty sure the huge joystick dead zone which affects WC1, WC2 and Privateer is a problem related to dosbox or modern hardware. I do not remember the controls being so laggy and imprecise when I originally played it back in the day. Maybe someone with original hardware could confirm. The main problem I remember back then was cheap joysticks drifting and needing to be recalibrated often.

5:40 BBS systems you could dial into to get files and such were a thing at the time so you could get patches that way, but the voice pack probably would not have been a download due to the file size. Though it is hard to say. 1991 is right in the middle of the shareware boom, and bbs owners are not too picky about copyright infringement. Copyrighted software or ways to remove copy protection are pretty easy to find on them.

Baby, wake up, a new Space Cadet Rewind video just dropped

I’ve never finished WC2 properly. I was a kid who had access to the cheat code and I was more invested in the story than the gameplay, which I think speaks to the quality of the narrative - I wanted to see what happened. This was in contrast to having finished X-Wing on my own (but not without help of excessive manual pilot backup)- I think I was unimpressed with the sprite based graphics since I played X-Wing first. I don’t think I even knew about the branching mission paths at the time since I don’t think I had the game’s manual. I am also a joystick user. I personally can’t imagine using a thumb stick on a flight sim (I have my Rhino X56 HOTAS thanks to the release of SW Squadrons), but again this was probably the influence of X-Wing and its complex controls as well as Descent not many years later. Glad to hear that thumb stick users can still enjoy this kind of game properly, I had always wondered about that! I’d love to see you take a look at Descent I-III and their spiritual successors Miner Wars and Overload sometime. Let me know if you want any input from me. As a veteran Pyro jockey I will say those games are often overlooked (the multiplayer element is interesting to consider, especially as it ties into the history of the old IPX network protocol), and Overload can even be played in full VR - though that can be very rough on a pilot! Word to the wise from a veteran to anyone deciding to try Overload in VR. After all, the pilot’s call sign in Descent was “Vertigo One” and Overload is very faithful to this!

Glad to see you released again a Video :D

I would argue the speech pack isn't a piece of jewelry, it adds value to the game experience itself. But that's just my opinion.

Fun video. I look forward to more videos.

i played WC1 when it first came out, secret missions 1 + 2 and WC2 as well. I can say for a fact that the first time i played WC2 it was one of the greatest gaming experiences I ever had, and even though its dated as hell even to say PS1 standards, I still think its one of the greatest pc games ever made.

It was always sticks for me, although it didn't start off as a big money splurge. My first home computer was a C64 and the external ports on those would take the old Atari joysticks. So those of us with little extra income would pillage Atari console joysticks for use on C64 flight sims and other things such as Sid Meier's Pirates. Although those Atari sticks would degrade rather quickly with use, including the single orange button, eventually requiring more applied strength. We'd take off the rubber stick cover to reduce the resistance a bit to counteract it. After going over to DOS, though, being able to raid old Atari sets in closets was out of the question. Using keyboard just didn't feel right and was clunky after using a joystick so long. Had to cough up some cash at that point to get compatible hardware.