Wing Commander II FM Towns

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Wing Commander II was released for the FM Towns somewhat belatedly in 1995. Once again it got some cool new box art. Since I don’t strictly speaking own a copy of this one myself, the photo is from an Ebay auction where you could if you were so inclined buy it for the giveaway price of 400 Euros. I’m resorting to playing it from a burned CD instead. I’ve been looking forward to playing this one for a while now actually. WC1 received numerous ports and even a complete remake, most of which I’ve already played through on here. I haven’t played Wing Commander 2 on the other hand since blogging through it about 9 years back.

The Towns port of WC1 could be played on the base hardware (including the Marty console). WC2 needs to be installed to a hard disk however and needs a faster machine so Marty owners can forget about playing this one. The installation process is painfully slow from the single speed CD drive. I think I may prefer the pile of floppies it originally came on. Which one is actually quicker would be a close run thing. To be fair, this does include both the expansions right from the start making it the Towns equivalent of Wing Commander II Deluxe.

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On starting the game, everything should look and sound very familiar for anyone who has played the PC original. Setting up my pilot proves to be a bit tricky as I’m presented with a screen of Japanese to contend with. I bash buttons randomly until it lets me through. Other than this, the graphics are straight from the PC version looking nice and crisp on the tiny screen. The music plays from the CD again but this time it’s literally just a recording of the MT-32 soundtrack. It may sound the same but this is a step back really as you have to wait for the CD to seek when changing track so it’s considerably less responsive than it might be.

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The speech has been re-recorded with Japanese actors and has new subtitles to match. The audio quality appears to be better than the PC provided you don’t object to the massive amount of reverb on everything. Giant metal spaceships probably would have a serious echo I suppose so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. I can’t comment on the acting but I would imagine that can only be an improvement also. These new samples do only replace the original speech so there isn’t full speech throughout like there was on the Sega CD WC1.

There are also new digital samples for all the sound effects. These are a mixed bag but I think I preferred the work that went into Wing Commander 1. Some of the sounds used here come across a bit cartoony for my liking with over the top swooshes for spaceships flying by and a particular offender being the breaking glass sound when spaceships crash into each other. There isn’t a whole lot else to say about the cinematics. The space combat is nearly as familiar with some reservations.

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Firstly, there is no apparent support for the analog joystick that I used with WC1. Without a manual, I’m not 100% sure there isn’t a means to get it working but I had to revert to using the keyboard. I originally played WC2 like this back on the PC many years ago so it should still be playable except it didn’t respond in the way I recall. The Towns port uses a system where the pretend joystick is gradually moved further from the center as you hold down the cursor key for longer. In theory, this means you have accuracy but it comes at the expense of very slow movement when tracking spaceships which is what you spend most of your time doing. I really struggled with it. As I type this, I’m wondering if you could hold down shift to go straight to full turn on the PC version but I’ve not been back to check.

I seemed to run into issues when several keys were pressed at once. I have no idea whether this is a thing on the FM Towns but instead of turning diagonally I would often just move in one direction. Having to slowly build up turning speed again just rubs this in. Similarly, I struggled to control my speed while doing anything else. This is a particular problem on the Towns since for some reason the spaceships in this version just love to crash into each other. I was forever running straight into my enemies who would stop dead when I was right behind them. It wasn’t just me having this problem as the enemies frequently flew into each other or my wingman. Just staying out of the way could be a good tactic in this port.

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My final reservation is the speed of the game. I’m running this on a 486SX Towns – I originally played WC2 on a 386SX so I’d expect the Towns to be able to cope. Initially everything seemed OK until I got to the mission where you have to escort 2 Broadswords from the Concordia to blow up a Fralthi. The framerate in combat dropped as low as 1-2 FPS at a guess. I can only presume that some of the later more intense missions must be close to unplayable without a 486DX or better. With those sorts of specs, you could just about have been playing Wing Commander III instead on the PC.

I got about 7 missions in and decided I could have far more fun playing the PC version again so called it a day. There just isn’t much new to see in this particular port. It’s a curiosity but clearly not worth that Ebay asking price. The only arguable enhancement is the digital sound effects. If I had a faster machine and could figure out a method to use the joystick it could possibly compete with the PC original but as it stands I can’t recommend it. The only other Wing Commander to get a Towns port was Armada which was a straight up port which needed running directly from MS-DOS rather than Towns-OS as I recall. My Towns isn’t up to running that one so I’ll be passing it up.

It seems to me that Wing Commander didn’t get the best deal in terms of ports to the Towns. Love or hate them, the Ultima ports I’ve played were a whole lot more interesting. I do still have Ultima 4, 5 and 6 to revisit on this machine and will get around to them sooner or later despite the thought of all the Origin staff doing the voice acting in Ultima 6 filling me with dread.

Through the Portalarium

It already seems a long time ago but just over a week back, I got the unlikely chance for a tour of Portalarium and questions with Richard Garriott. The offices are on the 7th floor of an unassuming office block in downtown Austin.

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They had just put the Halloween decorations up when we arrived. Letting LOAF lead the way, we were ushered into a small conference room barely big enough to get us all in. It was immediately apparent we were in the right place though as there was an entire wall of Ultimate RPG concept art on the near wall. I’m unfortunately not allowed to talk about this but I can mention some of the other adornments such as the original Ultima 9 tapestry artwork and a trio of cover art pictures for Chuckles’ 3 games including Caverns Of Callisto:-

Caverns Of Callisto - Origin Artwork

A brief wait later and we are getting the tour from Richard Garriott himself. The hub of the tour is a central corridor in which Garriott has placed some of the significant items from his gaming history. The plan is to bring more of this collection out of storage as Portalarium and the offices grow but even now it’s still the sort of display that any Ultima fan would have to remortgage their house for:-

Portalarium Akalabeth Display

This is the first section with the bottom left being some of Garriott’s pre Akalabeth games on paper tape + his written out code which never got punched in. The earliest Computerland Akalabeth case contains a version on cassette as Akalabeth actually predates the Apple II disk drive. He doesn’t think he sold any of these but wasn’t entirely certain so there may be one out there somewhere.

Going further down the corridor there is the original artwork for just about every Ultima game as well as some Destination Games displays but I don’t have photo’s to share unfortunately.

Wing Commander Artwork

For the Wing Commander fans, in the next room off to the side there is some more artwork including the original Wing Commander logo as well as a very familiar looking Wing Commander Prophecy movie style poster. Also in this room is Garriott’s pre Akalabeth D&D games map which was fairly massive and had some very familiar town names. He explained that it formed the basis for Ultima 1 although interestingly it was more or less all one large land mass. This fits in with an ancient RG interview I read elsewhere that Ultima 1 & 3 were in fact based on the same game map with the 4 continents of Ultima 1 being chopped up/rotated around versions of the same world as Ultima 3. This looked to fit with what I saw but I wish I grabbed a photo. Maybe next time…

We strolled through some of the developer’s offices after this. One of them was working on removing the Garage Sale text from the Ultimate Collector artwork so it looks like it’s going to have a name change. The name Ultimate Collector was apparently “borrowed” when a TV show of the same name contacted Garriott and he liked the name so much he thought he would use a variant on it.

Richard Garriott's Apple II

The Portalarium offices are quite a modest affair at the moment and we were soon back in the main corridor where at the far end there is the original Apple II used to write Akalabeth and the early Ultimas, permanently set up running Akalabeth these days. There is also a small but growing new collection of toys which has been inspired by all the cool items the team has come across making Ultimate Collector. Another recently acquired item is a teletype machine exactly the same as the one used to punch in the pre-Akalabeth D&D games.

With the tour concluded it was back to the conference room and a Q&A session. I can’t speak for everyone else there but this isn’t the sort of thing I’m used to and it’s hard not to get more than a little starstruck. It’s not like RG isn’t an easy-going sort of guy but I’ve thought of a lot of questions I should have asked afterwards. In no particular order, this is what I remember from a week later much of which I’ve already covered in a previous post.

One of the questions that came up was whether he would be able to help track down a copy of Wing Commander 2 on the SNES. This has been a holy grail for Wing Commander fans for a long time. The game was sent out to reviewers and full write-ups appeared in magazines back at the time but it never went on general sale. It even had some enhancements to the original version such as colour communications screens. The good news here is that RG was extremely positive that he may have a copy. He said that he made sure to get a copy of every Origin game and 10 copies if it was Ultima and thinks that with WC2 getting that far he will almost definitely have it in storage. The downside is that he wouldn’t just let us rummage around for it so we will have to wait some time.

I took the chance to ask if that could also mean he had a copy of The Lost Vale. He didn’t think it had ever got finished but I’d take the word of Sheri Graner Ray here and assume that he just didn’t follow it too closely at the time. Going on what he said previously, there must be at least be a slight chance that he may just have a copy but we’ll have to wait for that alongside WC2 SNES.

There was some talk about Ultimate RPG although it’s clearly in an early stage. He discussed how Portalarium’s Poker and Ultimate Collector games are necessary building blocks towards the technology needed to make Ultimate RPG within a small company like Portalarium. He confirmed that he would be appearing in Ultimate RPG and it would always be him playing his own character just like in Ultima Online.

Inevitably there was some talk of space travel (which he thinks will be as affordable as a first class airplane ticket within 20 years). Although he is now an employee of NASA, it turns out they were less than helpful with his journey to the space station despite the fact that he was doing experiments on their behalf. I gather that NASA didn’t want to be seen as spending USA tax payer’s money on “some rich yahoo’s” jaunt into space.

For instance, Garriott had to sign a fairly standard disclaimer before travelling to the Space Station. NASA never got around to countersigning this and 3 days before the flight tried to change the terms so that RG wasn’t allowed to take photo’s through the windows owned by NASA, take photos of the NASA owned portions of the station or actually go on the NASA side of the station in the first place (more or less negating the first two). The rest of the astronauts thought this was as ridiculous as he did and advised him not to sign it since they could hardly stop him flying at this point. After being further pushed to sign it however, he had the bright idea of getting NASA to agree to add a final clause that all terms were under the guidance of the mission commander on the space station (this was actually already the case anyway and this would just reaffirm it). The moment he arrived the commander welcomed him on board, told him he could go wherever he wanted, take any photos he wanted and not to feel the need to ask again.

To get back to Earth and Ultima games, the topic of Mount Drash came up somehow. The story is that Keith Zabalaoui (a friend of Garriotts who was credited on Akalabeth) had already written the game but Sierra weren’t going to publish it unless they could use the Ultima branding to increase sales. The game was never intended to be an Ultima but Garriott gave this his blessing to help his friend out, hence Ultima – Escape From Mount Drash. This makes it a legitimate part of the Ultima series as far as I’m concerned and a whole lot more collectible (if that is possible). I might even be prepared to fork out the money myself now if the chance ever arose although I’m not so sure I wouldn’t rather buy another bookcase full of less extreme vintage software for the same price.

I asked about Ultima 4.5 which is something I’ve been curious about ever since I heard of it. According to an RG interview I read a long time back Ultima 4.5 and Ultima 5 were being developed side by side for a while and I wanted to learn more. Garriott didn’t think this was the case however and said that Savage Empire was the first time they had tried to reuse an engine.

He went into some detail about the thought process behind each of the Ultima spinoffs. The original idea was that reusing the same engine would mean that the game could be made for less than the original which is certainly what I would have expected. However with Savage Empire, it apparently was so much work to strip out the original assets that it ended up costing just as much as Ultima 6 to make. They thought could learn from this with Martian Dreams but that also cost just as much and both games sold less than the mainline Ultimas casting questions on the whole notion of engine reuse.

With the U6 spinoffs not entirely going to plan, a different approach was taken with Serpent Isle whereby the original game assets would still be used for the most part which was supposed to keep costs down but this plan failed once more. It occurs to me now that I should have asked about Crusader at this point, which I’m assuming was Plan C. If so this probably worked out better by using the engine for a completely different genre of game and thereby not just appealing to a subset of those that bought Ultima 8.

LOAF asked about the Ultima anime which was supposedly made in Japan in the 80’s. Garriott was adamant that there was never any such thing which would certainly explain why it hasn’t surfaced by now. I would assume that the screenshots that exist were simply created for a Famicom TV commercial which sounds like a far more likely explanation.

The only other things I can recall were a mention of Ultima Forever as he had just been out for dinner with Paul Barnett the day before and agreed to appear in the game travelling around in the skies. He thinks their heart is in the right place for U4E but he hasn’t seen the game so couldn’t give an opinion on it.

We also got an impromptu illustrated guide to the iconic shapes of the Wing Commander 1 fighters (and other things), which Garriott considers to be far more memorable than those in later games. I also recall asking (more to fill an awkward silence than anything) whether Time Bandits really was the inspiration for the cloth maps which of course it was but we all knew that anyway.

Richard Garriott Space Suit Badge

Our hour was up almost as soon as it had begun. We got some final photo opportunities and there was one little bonus when we were gifted Richard Garriott space suit badges. I came out slightly shell shocked and I still can’t quite believe I got to do this in the first place. Many thanks to Lord British for taking the time to show us around and also to Loaf and Chris Reid for all but one of the photo’s on this post.

PC Format Origin Collector's Series

This is a 32 page pullout from the September 1994 PC Format. It’s the first entry in their collector’s series which featured companies like Microprose, Lucasarts & Gremlin. Since it’s on here, it goes without saying that this first volume is entirely on Origin:-

PC Format Collector's Series - Origin

It includes a brief history of the company, interviews with Richard Garriott and Chris Roberts, previews of coming games (with Warren Spector interviews) and a look back at the Ultima and Wing Commander series. There is so much misinformation in the Ultima history that it beggars belief but there is plenty of good content in here otherwise. According to the Ultima 8 article, at this time Garriott saw the Avatar as being separated from the human plane and more of a supernatural being in Ultima 9 and already had an Ultima 10 plot ready to go.

Wing Commander 1 and 2 Demos

I don’t have many of them but I thought I might have a look at some Origin’s demos. I’m starting with these two which are both new to me and were downloaded from WCNews. Since they are both short, I’ve put them up on Youtube.

Wing Commander 1 is a rolling demo with a good mix of cutscenes and in game action. This would have sold me on the game at the time but is the least interesting of the two as there isn’t much new here. There are some changes to what appeared in the game with the most obvious being the cockpit art and the fact that Origin FX was the Origin sound And graphics system at this point.

The Wing Commander 2 demo doesn’t show any gameplay but instead has a short piece of the WC2 intro. The majority of this was changed in the final game with several cuts to dialog, whole scenes removed and new voice acting. Some of the changes were for the better but I expect others were made to save on the already ridiculous number of floppies the game shipped with. My 3.5 DD version came on an insane 14 disks as it was, not including the speech pack. The lid barely even goes on the box.

Out of the new bits, I especially like the long flight to the palace and the sequence with Thrakhath walking past all the guards. Both would have added to the final game. I’m not so won over by the medieval style Kilrathi guards with little cat ears on their helmets.