Wing Commander Standoff – Day 3

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I’m called straight into action with no briefing at the start of Episode 3. We have to help out another ship in the fleet while its fighters are out on patrol.

There are some new Kilrathi ships to fight in this mission, or at least new to WCP as they are familiar to anyone who played WC2. These Grikhaths have rear turrets which have always been the bane of my existence in Wing Commander games.

This first mission is relatively straightforward. Afterwards we escort the Verdun back with us.

Mission 2 has us chasing down some of the Kilrathi capships. There is a small fleet of them in the system including a Snakeir which hasn’t been located yet. We are meeting up with Concordia pilots for this which finally places the game in the WC timeline for me. They are flying Broadswords and the like which have been modelled up to the usual standards. I always liked the Broadsword in WC2 – fingers crossed I get to fly one in Standoff.

We have to take out a Ralatha to start the mission and then get word on the Snakeir and go after that as well. This is the trickiest mission in Standoff so far and takes me a few attempts. If I lose too many wingmen the mission is aborted which is a problem when taking out the Snakeir.

One of my pilots is steaming drunk when I get back – the action here is taking place over Xmas and he is missing his family. I thought people got drunk pretty often in Wing Commander games but my character doesn’t have much sympathy for him.

The third mission is a bit different. We have been ordered by Tolwyn to retreat but are mining the system as we go. I have to protect the mine laying ships at 3 nav points. This is another tough mission with all my wingmen getting blown up in seconds at the final nav point. I retry a couple of times and the final time the last nav point is really easy without me really doing anything different.

I can’t help but notice that the mines are as wide as the ships laying them so I don’t know how they manage to fit so many in. I can only think that they must be inflatable.

Some of my wingmen have been off helping a convoy in the meanwhile and have recovered some new fighters. It’s about time I got to fly some new ships.

Unfortunately these new ships still need assembling so I’m stuck with the usual suspects for now. For this next mission, I have to rescue two more capships that have missed the retreat. Rescuing the first of these is really tricky.

When I arrive at the nav point the ship is under heavy attack already. In fact it dies so quickly that I assume at first that I’m not supposed to be able to save it until I get a mission failed when I arrive back. If there is a key to this mission, it appears to be attacking the Grikhath heavy fighters rather than the lighter Dralthi which presumably don’t carry torpedoes. The problem is that there are more of them than I can possibly take on by myself and they are spread out over a large distance.

After enough attempts I luck out and attack the right ships. I escort it back then have to go and save another one. Thankfully, saving the second ship is easy.

Spoons has been moaning about flying with Squealer due to his defection to the pirates but Squealer wins him round by helping him out during a tight spot and he comes in to apologise at the end of the mission. He is still not happy about Sparrow though.

Episodes 4 starting scene shows the Kilrathi advancing toward Earth. We’ve been retreating but are now finally making our stand.

This episode took me quite a long time to play through. The difficulty level was more along the lines of WCUE but it was probably about right – it shouldn’t be too easy as an episode only came out once every year or so. I’m looking forward to flying some of the new ships in the next episode – I’ve been a bit surprised how few I’ve got to fly so far, although I’ve probably missed a few in the alternate missions.

Wing Commander Standoff – Day 2

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For this series of missions, I’m going to be chasing after a Kilrathi capship. To start off we need to pick up some incoming fighter ships that are going to be strengthening our squadrons.


I run into Squealer who showed up as a Militia pilot to help out during the base attack in chapter 1. I’ll be flying with him for a lot of these missions – he’s the sort of guy who really enjoys the killing aspect of our job but he is useful to have around.


Our mission goes all too smoothly until we get called out to help out a ship under attack by retro’s. There are a lot of these retros but their ships only take a couple of hits so this is a fairly easy start to the chapter.



We jump into the next system and I have to go out on a recon mission while we await more incoming Rapier fighters.


The recon mission is something of a non-event but the incoming Rapiers run into Kilrathi and we have to go and help.


Sparrow is one of the Rapier pilots, she had to turn up at some point. The fight itself is a tough one with a lot of my wingmen ejecting and a serious number of Kilrathi to contend with. I’m expecting the mission to be a failure after all these losses but fortunately enough ships survive for me to keep going.


Sparrow is hanging around back on our base ship but I’m not ready to talk to her yet.


Now we have to go and take out two Kamekh capships. These were of the the smaller capship type so should be vulnerable to laser fire if this plays the same as the original Wing Commander games.


Sure enough the ships don’t take much destroying. The graphics for the Kamekh’s are very nicely done as ever. The Gothri fighters impress me more than anything out of the Kilrathi ships with the HDR lighting showing up the curves on the ships.


The final mission for this chapter has me flying against the capship we have been chasing – a Ralathra.


Sparrow is in the team for this mission and Spooner isn’t happy about flying with her but continues with the mission. This is the hardest mission of this episode. The key seems to be the encounter with the light Salthi fighters at Nav 1. They can take out my bomber wing in no time but if I hold back and let the fighters take them out I can get to the main encounter with my wingmen intact.


Getting to the final battle with a wingman makes all the difference. We have to use torpedoes on the capship which is the usual WCP engine, bridge affair. I take out the bridge and my wingman deals with the engine. It’s a reasonably simple mission now I’m not on my own.



In a brief cutscene, Sparrow wants to thank me for helping her out before.


We jump out of system and into Chapter 3.



The Kilrathi are attacking in force and we are seriously outnumbered. No doubt Chapter 3 will have us dealing with this threat.

I’d been putting off playing this chapter on the basis that I wanted to have enough time to get through the whole thing in one go, then when I did play it the whole thing only took me an hour. This was a lot easier and shorter than the first episode. I expect it’s all the branching that went on late into episode one. There must be a load of alternative missions that I didn’t see. I wasn’t expecting the diffculty level to drop though and with me completing all but one mission on my first go.

It was still fun and the new versions of the Kilrathi ships were very well done but I don’t feel like I got very far in the games 4 missions. It was more setting up for things to come. I’m more than a little curious about the alternative missions. I can see myself finishing my run through blogging this and then replaying the whole thing again straight away making different choices.

Wing Commander Standoff – Day 1

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Standoff is a Wing Commander Prophecy mod that has been in progress for about as many years as it took Origin to release Ultima 9 with the final episode coming out a couple of months back. It’s done by the same team behind Unknown Enemy which I played a while back but from what I know is seen by the team themselves a much more polished product, having learned a lot from their first efforts. UE was good fun in its own right so that bodes very well for this sequel. I’m told that the game has been hugely enhanced with the final episode of this mod and been brought bang up to date despite still using the aging Prophecy engine.

I don’t know anything about the plot or gameplay which is just as I like it. With the lengthy development time, I’m expecting something pretty special. With EA holding the Wing Commander license this is probably the nearest I’ll ever come to a Wing Commander 6 but this is still an amateur fan mod so I probably shouldn’t get carried away.

I know that there are numerous branches for the plot in the game. I’m going to attempt to choose what seems like the right/winning path at all times and see how it works out rather than attempt to follow each of these. I may go back and replay the game later but I’d prefer to keep it simple while I’m blogging.

The game starts with an in-engine cutscene with a voice-over of my journal entry for the day. I’m serving on an about to be decommissioned ship called the Lionheart. We are in a truce with the Kilrathi and our ships are being decommissioned as they are no longer needed. One of our ships has just been raided by pirates and a load of Sabres stolen and a few hostages taken including an ex-girlfriend called Sparrow.

All this intro is done with voice acting which isn’t too bad for an amateur game although my character does come across as a bit whiny when he’s going on about Sparrow and doesn’t strike me as a battle hardened Wing Commander.

The graphics in this intro look awesome though, far better than I’d expected. That ship flying by the Standoff logo looks so good in a screenshot you would think it was pre-rendered. The engine has been modified to work in Widescreen with HDR effects and increased detail and you just wouldn’t think it was based on Prophecy.

After the main intro is over there is another scene of me (that’s me in the screenshot) chatting with my engineer about the upcoming missions where we will be going after the pirates to recover our ships and hostages. The detail on the faces in these is well done. There is more than a hint of Thunderbirds about the animation but again this stuff is way beyond what you would expect and just having it there at all is impressive.

From this screen I get to make all the usual choices you expect in a Wing Commander game and it works just like any other game in the series.

One slight change is that my communications are now inside the game whereas I had to use an external viewer in Unknown Enemy. I’ll also say that the writing quality is a big improvement on the previous game. The previous efforts were obviously fan fiction whereas the communications here are at least as good or better as you would expect in a commercial product.

The briefing screen is the same as ever and our first mission is a simple one – escort the Lionheart to the jump point to go after the pirates. Despite my state of the art PC this screen runs a little slowly but nothing too bad and the rest of the game is as smooth as you like.

I get in the cockpit for the first time flying a Stiletto. We have a whole new set of virtual cockpits and ships to fly in this game and the background music appears to be enhanced versions of the WC2 themes which is fine by me.

I’m struck again by just how good the graphics are. The starfield in the background is immensely detailed and the ship models have far more detail than anything I’ve seen before in a Wing Commander.

Predictably enough the mission gets sidelined as we receive a distress call and have to go and rescue a freighter. This gets me into my first combat of the game and its a bit different to anything in Prophecy. The ships all appear to be around WC2 technology and the behave in a similar manner, firing massive projectiles and the shields being paper thin but recharging quickly. It makes it difficult not to sustain a lot of damage in these fights but the mission is still easy enough.

There are new video landing sequences for landing, just like WC2. This is almost like playing an updated version of that game.

We didn’t make it to the jump point in that last mission so the goal in Mission 2 remains the same.

We have to defend the Lionheart from some of the stolen Sabres in this mission but again it’s not too tricky and unlike UE this game is giving me a gentle introduction.

After the battle is over, I’m sent to investigate a lone ship which turns out to be a Kilrathi. I’m not sure if this is potentially a branching plot point as I could shoot him down or not inspect his cargo as ordered if I felt like it. Since the truce is on, I carry out my inspection and leave him alone.

We still haven’t gone through the jump point but are about to do so. I have to secure the entry area then patrol some asteroid belts.

I get to fly against some Tarsus’s, which look suspiciously like the ship you start out in for Privateer. They are an easy target anyway. There is a bit of a Privateer feel about a lot of this game. The locations are taken from that game and a lot of the pirate sound effects have been ripped from there also.

While patrolling the asteroids, we find the pirate base. We are ordered to retreat for now which I do. I was hoping that the asteroid field might have born some resemblance to the WC2 ones but no such luck. We haven’t had decent asteroid fields since the move to 3D.

My ship got truly beat up on this mission and this is shown in the landing sequence. I do like little details like this, you can tell that the guys who did this game were huge Wing Commander fans.

The next mission is escorting the Lionheart to near the pirate base.

You just know there will be a surprise when a mission briefing is that straightforward and at the end I have to go investigate a signal in the asteroids.

In the asteroids I run into my ex co-pilot and assumed hostage Squealer who has infact defected to the pirates. He doesn’t want enforced retirement and tries to persuade me to go along with him. There isn’t really much incentive here for me to go with him, we could have done with a few missions where I got to know the guy if this was going to be a difficult decision. It’s an obvious plot branching point but I choose to stick with the side I’m on. I leave Squealer and claim not to have found anything when I get back.

I tell my engineer that my flight recorder shorted out and she seems to believe me. My wingman Spoons is less convinced though.

There is a bit of a cutscene again here where I pine about Sparrow some more and speculate about who may have gone over to the pirates.

I have to get on with flying though and the next mission is taking out the pirate base. Squealer is here and tries to talk us out of it but that isn’t going to happen. We clear out the fighters then go after the bases turrets.

The turrets deserve a mention as they are the best in any Wing Commander game by a mile. They are detailed and turn moderately slowly meaning that I can see where and when they are going to fire. They absolutely rip through my shields if I do get hit making destroying them quite a tactical affair and a lot less about luck and perseverance.

This mission takes me a few attempts. The winning strategy turns out to be an old favourite of staying near my capship at the start and using its turrets to help take out the fighter cover. After the mission one of the Sabres which is supposed to be returned to us flies off.

I have to go after it and get to choose my ship this time. I go for the Sabre since its clearly the best ship here.

The ship has been taken by Sparrow of all people and I now have to fight her.

The fight is very easy indeed and she ejects afterwards. I get to make more choices here. I could leave her, shoot her or beam her in. I choose to beam her in but then lie about her defection when I return saying that she was a hostage.

That ends this first chapter and the final cutscene shows me arguing with Spoons who had guessed that Sparrow defected and that I’m covering for her. He’s also not happy about me not telling him about Squealer.

The chapter 2 intro cutscene starts before I can stop it. It jumps forward in time a bit and we appear to be at war with the Kilrathi again and the Lionheart has been decommissioned. We are under-equipped and outnumbered. I’m on a Firekka for this ship which means more new graphics and possibly new ships but I don’t get that far for now.

Playing this has been a blast. The plot is genuinely interesting and the game is extremely polished for a fan mod, especially the missions themselves. I’m enjoying the retro feel combined with modern graphics. This plays like WC2 or WC1 and has far more in common with them than WC3 did. It appears as though every aspect of Prophecy has been modified with everything from the in flight commuications and videos, through the ship screens, ships, sound effects, music, etc being new to this game. It’s an amazing effort and I can see why it would take so long. I can only hope it will improve as the team builds upon its experience for each new chapter. If that does happen this could ultimately be a better game than Prophecy itself.

Back for more

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My breaks between games on here get ever longer but I’m going to start up again this weekend, writing the first post on Monday at the latest. I’ve lost the drive I had when I was trying to complete the main part of this blog and it’s going to be a case of playing each game as and when I feel like it but I expect to speed up after Summer. I’ll have a lot more time when the rugby season finishes in a few weeks.

Since this blog is something of a gaming diary, I thought I’d post a bit of an off topic catch-up post. I still haven’t got round to playing the 2nd Tales Of Monkey Island but I’ve had a go on a few of the Interplay games I picked up in the GOG sale. I enjoyed Sacrifice a lot which I’d never played before. It’s a 3D RTS from Shiny that completely passed me by at the time but still plays well 10 years afterwards and has masses of replay value with 5 different factions to align with + the option to swap between these factions as the game progresses. At $5.99 I’d recommend this to anyone. I’ve also had brief goes on Redneck Rampage and Die By The Sword which aren’t that bad but I’m not sure I can ever see myself getting very far in either of them. With the 2 for 1 offer, I’m not too worried if I don’t play some of my purchases much as others will make up for it. I’ve already had my moneys worth out of Sacrifice. The Might and Magic 6 special edition is also out of GOG which includes every M&M game before it – this would be a must buy if I didn’t already own the boxed version. M&M is clearly inferior to Ultima in my eyes but I still enjoyed World of Xeen enormously. It’s an RPG stripped down to its most basic elements with no real dialog or plot but it does it so well that its one of those games that you sit down to play for 20 minutes and still be there 3 hours later.

It’s been said that the games on GOG often fail on being either good or old, and as much as I like GOG there is definitely some truth to this. I’ve been going properly oldskool and playing a few ZX Spectrum games, which for those of you who don’t know was a very popular home computer in the UK back in the early/mid 80’s. There’s even a challenge on youtube at the moment where a few of us old speccy types try to outdo each other on Daley Thompsons Supertest and post our efforts. What appeals to me more than anything about the Spectrum was the fact that anyone could create a game for it independently and this led to a huge number of games and loads of originality. There’s a lot of nostalgia for me going back and playing some of these old games but in all honesty the Speccy wasn’t up to much. The C64 and Apple 2 have it well beat in terms of games that are still genuinely interesting for the era. That’s not to say a lot of the games aren’t still fun – they are just a bit on the simple side. Growing up with a speccy is probably one of the reasons I can still cope with playing Apple 2 and DOS games, since they usually look and/or sound better.

To go even further off topic, I’ve discovered a very nice bit of software called Guitar Rig 3 which has seriously rekindled my interest in playing the guitar. I’ve played on and off for years without ever getting particularly good but being able to use a bit of software like this to get the sound I actually want has given me the incentive to get practicing again. This is probably going to eat into my gaming time more than anything else but my fingers aren’t up to playing for too long. I’ve decided to use youtube as a sort of video diary for my guitaring, so as I learn new stuff I can post it on there and hopefully look back at it in a few months time and see that I am actually improving. Posting on youtube also gives me some incentive to try to do a half decent job of learning something so that it isn’t embarrassingly bad. I’ll see how this works out but it will be months before I know if I’m getting anywhere.

I mentioned looking at some of Origins literature at the end of the last post but I’m going to go for a game next instead. I’m still undecided on which one but I’m veering towards Standoff. I gather the latest version fixes all the bugs and I fancy an arcade game after all the creeping around in Thief.

Thief : The Dark Project – Day 11

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The penultimate mission starts with me discovering dead bodies on the way to the temple. Something is amiss….

I had been wondering how I was going to sneak in through the front door but when I get there the place is a mess with more bodies and statues toppled.

Constantine has been here first and the beasts from the last level are patrolling the corridors. There is a lot more shade here so I’m better able to sneak up and blackjack them than in the previous level.

Apart from the destruction the temple is the same as before. For the most part its empty. There are a few bonus items to pick up for exploring but the main area of interest is the altar which has been moved to reveal a ladder to underground caverns.

I’m not clear on what this area is supposed to be but there is a large series of rooms including some very strange areas like this one floating in a void. The level is well guarded by the same creatures as before + a new variety of spider which is particularly nasty. On the whole I’m finding progress here a lot easier though.

I find a window with the Hammerites behind it. They are under siege by Constantine’s troops. Their high priest has been kidnapped and they want me to rescue him. They also ask me to return their sacred chisel which I’ve already found this amongst some spiders higher up.

TO help me out he gives me a map and a key. The key opens up the only locked door I’ve found upstairs.

I soon come across the area with the high priest. This has 3 guards around a campfire and isn’t the easiest place to sneak into. I use a water arrow to put out the fire + a couple of gas arrows and then blackjack the last guard.

The priest is lying in the corner. I have to carry him all the way back to the siege window which takes a while but is easy as I’ve already cleared out the route.

I get him here but I’ve still not completed the level as I have one final requirement to destroy all insect-beasts. I’m assuming these are the giant grasshoppers and I’ve blackjacked every one I’ve seen but I head out searching for more.

After a while searching it occurs to me that the objective is to destroy the beasts. I have to search out all the bodies and use my sword on them until they stop bleeding. This is a bit of a pain but the level isn’t that big so I soon finish this and it completes that objective. I now just have to walk all the way back to the siege window with my chisel.

This level has been decent without being anything too special. It’s moderately easy with a lot of the map being used up on the same temple locations I’ve seen before. It would have been more fun if I hadn’t had to seek out the insect-beast bodies but I possibly should have thought of killing them sooner.

That brings me to the games final level. The Hammerites have given me a fake eye which I can swap with the real one to stop Constantine. First I have to get to him which means descending into the Maw Of Chaos.

This place starts off like a typical end level for a game of this time with a load of coloured lighting.

It settles down into a more traditional cave level shortly afterwards. I’m constantly having to go down to reach Constantine. There are plenty of guards in evidence but I don’t feel the need to take them all out this time. They all tend to be on their way up so I just wait for them to pass and head on my way.

As I get further down, the terrain starts to change and I enter a volcanic area.

This then gives way to giant crystals (presumably of ice). These hurt if I walk into them and the ground is also slippery which makes this happen quite easily when you are trying to pick up the water crystals placed by each one.

I carry on down through increasingly rough terrain, including a pit of platform hopping above lava until I get to a very strange looking hole in the ground.

The laws of physics have taken a holiday here and I have to swim through a series of tunnels (and up a waterfall) until I’m swimming in the roof above this hole. I then dive out and into the water at the bottom.

The sights of this level continue to get stranger and I find the trunk of a monumentally big tree. I have to go inside here and climb up to the top.

I then cross a particle bridge….

…into a room that looks very much like I’m nearing Constantine. The room is trapped and the lights in the wall shoot at me. I notice a pattern of shadows on the floor which may have helped but I just bunny-hop through at speed and get by unscathed.

Through here is a portal. This is where Constantine’s forces are coming from and one of my mission requirements is to get it closed. I can’t actually get to it from here which means I need to use arrows.

There are four fires burning on each corner of the portal and I simply have to shoot each one with the appropriate type of arrow. This isn’t all that easy a shot at this distance, especially as the various arrows fly differently. I only have one left of a couple of arrow types and have to reload a few times before I manage it.

In the next room, Constantine is preparing his incantation. He has his back to me and I have to quickly take the chance to swap the eye.

Doing this quickly enough isn’t all that easy as he tends to turn around before I manage to back away again into the shadows. In the end I do this by shooting a few moss arrows into my path and running in and out over the now silenced ground.

From here on its just a simple case of waiting for Constantine to finish the ritual. This end mission was well done, concentrating on the sneaking and also not allowing me to ever get lost so the game accelerated toward it’s conclusion. It’s a fitting last mission for the game.

The fake eye does its thing and Constantine is killed without completing his plan to destroy the world.

The end cutscene shows me (complete with new eye) talking to one of the keepers. This keeper thinks I should seek out a book of runes but I’m not interested in helping them out and tell them I’m through. He seems to think I’ll do it anyway as prophesied and tells me to beware the age of metal.

I’ve enjoyed Thief a lot but I’d need to have played this at the time to consider it a true classic. It’s a game that might get better with replaying though, as I’m far from clear about the storyline. I’m not even certain exactly what Constantine was trying to achieve although I’m sure it was mentioned in a book somewhere along the way.

The best levels were added in Thief Gold and were not there in the original product. Take these levels out and Thief would be an interesting game but something of a lost opportunity with a lot of poor levels near the start. If Thief 2 has a full set of missions equivalent to the extra ones added to Thief then it should be the classic that Thief nearly was. This is still a great game that I should have played years ago though. I’ve always found FPS games age especially badly but the gameplay still strikes me as original even now and I’m very much looking forward to the sequel. I’ll have to find somewhere to buy it first but I’m assuming that won’t be too difficult.

I’ve just bought a ludicrous number of games from GOG in their Interplay 2 for 1 sale + I’ve got the 2nd Tales of Monkey Island game to play so it could be a while before I get to the next game on here. I’ve been fancying a look at some of the various bits of Origin literature so I’ll probably start on some of that next, with either Forge of Virtue or Avatar Adventures.