Wing Commander 3 is now free on Origin

Didn't even know EA own the rights to the Wing Commander series. Still cool though. You can pick it up now.

Anyone have any fond memories of Wing Commander?

Oh man, one of my favorite series ever. Except Prophecy of course.

Download this game people, seriously. It's worth installing Origin only for this game. It's that good. You play as Mark Hamill!

I think it's high time to start playing this series, along with Civilization; I feel like I missed out on a lot

Never played it before but I can't say no to a free game. :)

I agree.

I didn't know they had the rights either. Ironic because the name of the company that originally put out the series was "Origin".

And yes, I effing loved these games.

-Byshop

Yeah, EA acquired Origin Systems in 1992, back when EA was still cool. Then something went down in the mid-90s and EA started going full evil, around the time when Origin was working on Ultima VIII, which explains why that game was rushed and shipped in a broken state.

Yeah, U8 and U9 were messes. U8 didn't strike as broken so much as... shitty. U9 was a fucking disasterous mess of broken shit, even after the final patches.

I wouldn't mind getting the entire Wing Commander library on Origin. I don't know if I could go back and replay all of them, though. WC3 was the first one that used 3D graphics (albeit software rendered).

-Byshop

Yes, such a sad tale of mismanagement: Ultima VIII was basically stripped down to meet a 6 months development schedule, which was insane, and Garriott himself admitted he had no choice with the stockholders pushing him. Really sad. Ultima IX was supposed to be huge, but EA forced Origin to re-do the game and use that shitty 3D engine, which left them no choice but to make the world 10 times smaller and created all sort of problems with pretty much any 3D accelerator at the time.

As for Wing Commander, I replayed 3 and 4 just a few months ago and they hold up wonderfully. Yes they look old, yes it can be frustrating to replay a 30 minutes mission because you couldn't kill that skip missile in time, but the gameplay is fantastic, the music is incredible and both movies in WC3 and 4 are actually better than most of what hollywood has done concerning science fiction in the last 20 years. Hamill, McDowell, Davies, Wilson and the rest of the cast deliver great performances, you can tell the production was taken seriously.

I still have a very soft spot in my heart for FMV in video games. Although I haven't played a C&C game in quite a while but I'm thrilled that they've kept this tradition alive. I had the first Creative Labs 1x CD-ROM drive bundled with a Sound Blaster Pro.

Holy crap! I just looked and they have WC 1 through 4 for sale (except 3 which is free) and Privateer 1. Not too shabby.

-Byshop

They are missing a few games: WC Armada, WC Academy, WC Privateer 1 and 2, but it's good they have 1-4 on offer.

@Black_Knight_00: Privateer 1 is on there, but 2 no. I guess no Clive Owen for us.

-Byshop

Privateer 2 is a technical mess, I guess they didn't deem it worty of funding a junior team to fix it up just to sell the game for a fiver on Origin to a niche audience.

Most of what I remember about P2 were 3D graphics and not beating the game.

BTW I bought U7 complete and spent an hour playing last night.

-Byshop

Does it come with Serpent Isle as well?

Yeah, both games and both expansions. I beat the ever living crap out of U7 back in the day and the Black Isle but I never got around to finishing U7II.

How far did you dig into the game's core? I found all kinds of crazy shit back in the day. I used the admin code to explore inside of walls and mountains and one of the craziest things I found was what I refer to as "limbo" for lack of a better term. Everything was about hex values back then so there were a total of 255 speaking NPC characters in the game. When you killed an "actor", the game didn't actually remove them from the game world. What it did instead was spawn a corpse of the actor but the actor was then teleported to a blue carpet inside of a mountain east of Britania and you can only get by teleporting yourself there through the admin mode or making the Avatar ethereal and walking through the mountain walls.

-Byshop

Sad fact: I was never into Ultima back in the day (I was an Amiga owner and none of my Amiga friends had any Ultima games), so I actually never played one more than a couple hours, in more recent years. Heresy, I know, though I tried most of them, staring with Akalabeth, through Ultima Underworld and up to Ultima VII. I'm one of those guys who wants to play series in order, so if I ever decide to get into it, I should at least start with Ultima V, where guys like Shamino and Dupré began being prominent.

By the way, did you ever see this? I think any Ultima fan should see all 3 parts, it's great.

I'm at work so I'll have to check tht out later. Don't feel bad, though. I was aware of the Ultima series but I was much more into the SSI Goldbox D&D games around that time and some of the Steve Jackson-based pen and paper CRPGs like AutoDuel (or maybe it was Roadwar 2000). I didn't really play Ultima games until the era of 7, Underworld 1 and 2, and onward (plus I was in the beta for UO).

U7 was amazing, though. It was basically Oblivion but two decades early. Every NPC had a home, job, passtimes, and schedule. If you wanted to find someone, you had to factor in time of day because it would determine where they will be and what they'll be doing. It was the first RPG I had ever played where the NPCs didn't just feel like quest and info dispensers.

-Byshop

Good point, that's pretty much exactly what Richard Garriot is saying about modern "RPG" (and the quotation marks are a must in this case) in that video series. NPCs need to once again feel less like talking billboards and more like people.

About Ultima VII being an early Oblivion, definitely, it did things that are unthinkable today, and a few years later we also had Daggerfall, which I believe is still the largest RPG to date. It really makes you think how much the leap to 3D hurt the RPG genre. In 1996 we had a 62.000 miles procedural area to eplore with over 750.000 NPCs to interact with. 15 years later we had a 15 miles world with about a thousand NPCs. We sacrificed scope for eye candy, which is not all bad, of course, but it's really shocking how many technical limitations have constrained us since we went 3D.