Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Wing Commander Prototype (SNES)

Both Wing Commander fans and SNES collectors should love this working (!) Wing Commander prototype that recently hit eBay and is so far sporting an incredibly modest asking price. The cart comes from old favourite Mindscape, whereas the seller kindly ships worldwide. 

7 comments:

  1. I was pretty happy when wing commander came to the snes, but having played it on the PC before, I must say that I was disappointed with the graphics. But then again, what was I expecting them to be?!

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  2. You are of course right. After all, the SNES did cost a bit less than the Soundblaster Pro (with some decent speakers) back in the day. And WC does need a joystick to be fully appreciated, but this one was a decent try.

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  3. I had the Amiga version, which was pretty cool. Got the EA Replay retro collection for my PSP, which included the original Wing Commander - it's a complete bugger to play on such a small screen.

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  4. Still, eh? Can you imagine how utterly amazing a portable Wing Commander would have soundedm back in the day our 286 PCs and Amigas struggled to play the thing? How time flies...

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  5. Or Doom running perfectly on a Gameboy Advance.That would have been mind-blowing to anyone who ever struggled with autoexec.bat's and ini files to get it to run smoothly in DOS.

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  6. Yeah, I remember the first time I ran Wing Commander, I had to use Mo'Slo to slow down my CPU (and it was just a 75Mhz Pentium with 32 MB Ram!). Now it seems that everything can handle this game, even the GBA had its port.

    Great game, though, I really appreciate its cinematographic cut. And if nobody puts a bid, 69£ for a working prototype is really a bargain.

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  7. @ Bob: Absolutely. Mind you, I'm still impressed with such observations.

    @ Mik: Mo'slo eh? Well, I had to put up with torturing frame rates, but it seems I must have given it a try a couple years earlier. Mind you, the complete Wing Commander II remains a brilliant game. Didn't get a GBA port though :P

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