So I was digging through old CDs yesterday looking for system backups when I glanced at a bit of a purple disk slightly sticking out of the bundle. I pulled it out, only to get a nostalgic flash - here's one of the first videogames I'd ever played, and, to this day, one of the best. I spent a few hours tweaking my system to get it running, and now I'm hooked all over again.



Not particularly well known today, Strike Commander was probably the most significant pioneer of the air combat sim genre. In addition to being incredibly fun, SC had one of the most technically sophisticated 3D engines ever seen in video games. The game featured terrain with mountains, canyons, rivers, seas and even city scapes, some of which was covered in textures. Hell, tie fighter, which came out years later, didn't even have textures! Besides all that, SC had a strong story component (told through pre-rendred and animated cutscenes)with features not unlike those found in modern RPGs (develloped characters, tons of dialogue, tons of cutscenes, branching storylines with multiple possible outcomes). The story line is awesome in itself. It's free of most annoying cliches associated with game stories these days. No alien invaders, no evil germans or russians, no demonised arabs, no overblown epic conflict, no american army patriotic bullshit. It even had a sex scene, for you angry moms complaining that modern games are getting morally degenerative.

The game takes place in 2011, which, back then, was the distant future (lol). You play as the commander of a mercenary band called the wildcats. As an obvious Tom Cruise lookalike (minus scientology madness), you command your rag-tag team of 80's hairdo-totting, tight-jeans wearing, southern-accented goons, which consists of (namely, but not exclusively); lovable texan man 'Tex (whose real name is Travis but is rarely refered as such), psychopathic bitch Janet (aka "Vixen"), trusty air-to-ground specialist Gwen (aka "Pheonix"),wise old mentor "Hawk", and always-reliable maintenance specialist Miguel. Most of the characters have rich and interresting personalities that often clash with eachother with vastly entertaining results.

You're responsible for maintaining the group, which consists of tasks such as; purchasing replacement F-16s, purchasing bombs and missles, making tactical descisions and travelling to a nearby bar to meet with contacts and accept missions. The financial aspect of the game adds some interesting strategy; You'll find yourself with an ennemy plane right in your sights, homing mechanisms buzzing and your itchy finger hovering over the triger when suddenly the thought comes to you; "Shit, if I fire this missle, I'm gonna have to spend 60 000 bucks to replace it".

The missions themselves are rather similar due to technical limitations (bomb this, shoot down that), but the original context in which the story is told makes the missions interesting. Some of them involve flying down the grand canyon, accepting a job at an egyptian airshow after you realize that you're too broke to afford real missles, or even working for a seperated Quebec nation in dealing with rival mercenaries hired by hostile Canadian occupation forces. Fuck - I wish modern game stories had this much guts.

Everything about this game just screams awesome.


Cutscenes:


Gameplay (Quebec missions, shooting down Canadian SU-27s):

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i've got this, it came with our sound blaster cd-rom we got with our pentium 90 i didn't like it that much though, maybe cause i wasn't very good. i could never hit anyone with missiles cause of the damn chaff and shit, i used to set up practise missions shooting down c-130s and stuff cause i could hit them hehe. what did you do to get it running now?

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latest version of dosbox + messing with soundcard settings and IRQs + tweaking dosbox .cfg file to get the joystick working. I think after I'm done with this I might run through tie fighter.

Come to think of it, I used to suck pretty bad too, but then I was what - 7, 8 years old?

It's challenging, but definately not as challenging as I remembered it to be. Especially considering that I didn't understand english in those days, so I never knew what my objectives were.

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Last edited by Project-K on Oct-03-2008 at 04:23

That looks awesome.

You must have had a fucking super computer to run this in 1993!

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Awesome game, but i never really got into it. Falcon 3.0 was my flight sim of choice

This runs on a WC3 engine right? That had some insane hardware requirements back in the day, i remember that it used to take 3 to 5 minutes to load up a mission on a 486/100. Simply insane.

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Yeah, I was running it on a pimped up 486. Always took a while to load, but lucky the game gives you a little minigame to play with while it does.

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Oh man, what a trip seeing this. I also got this when I got my first sound blaster card. Came on a CD with Pagan Ultima VIII, Syndicate Plus (another wicked game), Strike Commander, and Wing Commander II.

Damnit, I'm gonna go see if I can make this run on my work laptop. Thanks for posting this absolute win of a game.

I had this back in the day as well. It was definitely a bundle with something else though bc I didn't buy it on its own.

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quote:

Originally posted by zokissima Oh man, what a trip seeing this. I also got this when I got my first sound blaster card. Came on a CD with Pagan Ultima VIII, Syndicate Plus (another wicked game), Strike Commander, and Wing Commander II. Damnit, I'm gonna go see if I can make this run on my work laptop. Thanks for posting this absolute win of a game.

haha that's the same cd we got


in other dos box related news, i just grabbed last night and started playing dune 2 and defender of the crown

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I had f16 combat pilot for my Amiga 1000 and that one was a good one for me. I played it non stop on doing bombing runs.

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W00t, just finished the campaign from the expansion 'tactical operations'.

You know, sometimes I revisit these oldies I was playing over a decade ago and end up pretty disapointed once the nostalgia effect wears off. Thankfully that wasn't the case this time. I think I might've even enjoyed it more than I did back then.

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I play a lot of these classic games and sometimes i fear that i will be disappointed by playing them again, that they just aren't as good as i remember them to be. But you know what, that doesn't happen all that often, in fact if we discount the graphics i find that I enjoy playing older games more than many of the newer titles. It just feels many of these old games had a soul and most of the new one just don't.

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