All that hard, boring work is done for you. But don’t expect to need to mine those asteroids like this was EVE Online or even Mass Effect 2.
WING COMMANDER PRIVATEER BAR GAME FULL
Instead of sand, dump trucks and toy soldiers, this sandbox is full of stars, asteroids with valuable minerals and space pirates. Long before Grand Theft Auto brought out the kind of open-world game play mechanics that everybody and their mom would try and emulate, Privateer‘s Gemini Sector was designed to be a very particular kind of sandbox. Instead, Privateer sets you on the tracks of a pretty standard science fiction plot: “Here’s an alien artifact, go talk to nerdy scientist X on world Y about precursor species Z.” It’s not a world-shattering epic by any stretch, but the simplicity of the story keeps it from getting in the way of the game play.Ĭlockwise from top left: The cramped cockpit of your starting scout ship, the docking bay area of one of the game’s many ports of call, the fat cat who gives you Merchant Guild jobs and the reasonably hot secretary working for the Mercenary Guild. The military organization of the Wing Commander universe, the Confederation, is busy keeping the feline Kilrathi at bay but, for the most part, Grayson has nothing to do with that sort of military drama. Privateer casts players in the role of Grayson Burrows, a guy just getting his start in the somewhat untamed Gemini Sector of the galaxy thanks to his grandfather leaving him an old, beat-up scout ship. There isn’t anything I don’t like about the game. If I loved it, I’d end with what I love, and if I hated it, I’d sharpen my verbal knives and get to stabbing in the last paragraph. Normally this would be where I break down my thoughts on the title into what I like and don’t like. Seriously, at the time, chocolate and peanut butter ending up in the same mixing bowl had nothing on this feat of gaming alchemy.Ĭue 16-year-old me jumping up & down like I was 10 years younger. When I found out the premise behind the game, seeing it as a combination of the aforementioned games, I think blood shot out of my nose or something. Two years and several expansion packs after that first foray into character-driven space shooting, I learned of the release of a game called Wing Commander: Privateer.
So back when I was fourteen, this blew my fool mind. Even now, to me this seems like a great way to tell a story in a video game. When I wasn’t playing a LucasArts game (back when they were interested in smart & funny adventure games and not just squeezing more life out of Star Wars), I was playing either Elite Plus, the seminal space flight & trading game that had finally made it onto DOS systems, or one of the games in the Wing Commander series, which not only let me shoot at alien invaders with lasers from a space fighter cockpit but also featured a branching storyline with winnable medals and multiple possible outcomes.
WING COMMANDER PRIVATEER BAR GAME FREE
When it came to the childhood fantasy of space flight I still clung to with the tenacity of a baboon hanging from a branch over a cliff, two computer games had dominated most of my free time in the previous years. My entry for the Escapist’s Review Wars 3.
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