Wing Commander (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
217A playthough of Mindscape's 1992 space flight sim for the Super Nintendo, Wing Commander.
Wing Commander is a name that pretty much any PC gamer from the 80s or 90s is well acquainted with. The series is a huge space opera that desperately chased after Star Wars, and it was a series that was extremely influential in its earlier entries.
Origin's original PC game drew a lot of attention when it first showed up in 1990. Space combat sims were standard fare at the time, but Wing Commander introduced a number of innovations to the genre. A story told through animated cinematics, wingmen that you give orders to, scaling sprites that rotated smoothly to approximate a proper 3D game space, a campaign with multiple mission paths... the original game was a pioneer in many ways.
You play as the not-yet-officially named Christopher Blair (as he became known in FMV-heavy WC3, played by Mark Hamill), fresh out of the academy and reporting for duty aboard the TCS Space Claw. The Terran forces (Earth guys) are struggling in the war against the Kilrathi (giant bipedal spacecats), and of course, you've arrived just in time to make a difference.
Wing Commander puts a heavy emphasis on its story with its between-mission conversations. You can chat with the bartender and your fellow pilots in the lounge, and the conversation changes depending on how you've been playing. Everyone will love you when you're winning the war, but their tone changes if you find your side on the ropes. And if any of your wingmen die in battle, they're actually dead. The funeral scene is a bit sad and a bit comical, and you'll definitely notice the empty seat in the lounge if that happens.
You'll get to see that happen in this playthrough. Poor Bossman.
The flight portions require that you fly to different nav points making sweeps, escorting high value assets, and blowing up enemy transports and capital ships. Sometimes you might get stuck flying through a field of mines or asteroids, but overall, though missions are all fairly standard stuff, it is cool that the story actually justifies the objectives it gives you.
This SNES version of Wing Commander is an unexpectedly faithful conversion of the original PC game, though it comes with the cutbacks you'd expect in being ported down to a console.
The graphics are reasonable for an SNES game, but the game is slower and the pace is more deliberate, largely because the game doesn't seem to send more than a ship or two at you at the same time. On the rare occasion where you get a couple of enemy ships and your wingman and some bullets onscreen at the same time, the framerate eats it. It stays fairly steady most the time, but the controls can get twitchy at those moments. The scaling effect makes it a bit difficult to get a read on distance just looking at the sprites, but the UI does give you some useful info to help compensate for that. Still, I don't mean to sound too critical of the way the game has been adapted. The cinematics look pretty good, and the battles work well enough to stay enjoyable. The music's not too shabby, either.
(But does anyone else think that the lowered resolution makes Angel look like Shannon Dougherty? What's up with the eyes?)
The controls are a bit difficult to get your head around, though. They are easy enough once you memorize the commands, but there are *a lot* of things mapped to every button on the controller. If you want to use your hyperdrive, hit Select+Y. Wanna chat with your wingman? Select+X cycles between your computer displays. Need to shut off your engines before someone flies straight into you? That's L+R. It's all as intuitive as it possibly could be on a SNES pad, but be warned: it's not an arcade shooter, and it never tries to pretend like it is. The SNES's lower difficulty level does help compensate for the inherent clunkiness of it, though.
In this day and age there are far better ways to play Wing Commander than on the SNES (the PC game and the 3DO remake are definitely the ways to go here), but if you can overlook the limitations that the system places on the game, the story has a folksy and engaging charm that I felt made it worth a playthrough. I really enjoyed it.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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