Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger

RETRO NEWS

This week in retro gaming, the original Xbox is getting rebuilt brick by brick with a massive Mattel collector’s set, while Golden Axe is trading the arcade cabinet for an animated series on Paramount Plus.

Meanwhile, Rare and Blaze are giving one of the all time greats, Banjo-Kazooie some well-deserved Evercade love, with Rare reportedly enthusiastic about bringing the bear and bird to the retro handheld. Old consoles, classic Sega, and one very talkative backpack. Not a bad week for retro fans.

PRESS START

An Introduction To Today’s Game

Wing Commander 3. If there was ever a game to be the poster child for 90’s gaming, this would be in the running.

Space combat, Full Motion Video cutscenes, Star Wars’ Mark Hamill being a badass and chewing out Back the Future’s Biff Tannen. Good times here.

This 1994 space combat epic landed on PlayStation in 1996 and was my first experience with the series. It landed hard for me and was an early Playstation experience that I never forgot.

Strap in, this one earns its reputation.

BEHIND THE PIXELS

Let’s Dive Into The Game

Wing Commander 3, subtitled Heart of the Tiger, is a space combat simulator wrapped inside what Origin Systems called an interactive movie.

You spend missions flying various starfighters against the Kilrathi, a warrior race of catlike aliens locked in a decades long war with humanity, then return to your carrier to sit through filmed cutscenes featuring Mark Hamill as the game’s protagonist, Christopher Blair. Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, Thomas F. Wilson and a young Josh Lucas join the cast.

The dialogue choices you make in these scenes actually matter, since crew morale and the tone of your relationships shift depending on what you say. The game will pause during these conversations and give you multiple options on how to respond. This will pretty mind blowing back in the 90s and very rare to see, especially in a console game (this was ported from PC).

Combat itself is a classic space sim setup. You pick your ship, your wingman, and your missile loadout before each sortie, then fly out to clear waves of enemy fighters using lasers, guns, and lock on missiles.

Tie Fighter is my all time favorite space combat game. And by the time Wing Commander 3 came out, I had been obsessed with this game for years already.

WC3 doesn’t quite match the depth of Tie Fighter, but presentation and story definitely make up for that.

The targeting and throttle controls take some getting used to on a gamepad, since this is a game clearly built with a joystick in mind, and more than a few players have reached for one just to keep their aim steady.

Missions lean heavily on a sweep and clear structure, fly to a navpoint, destroy what is there, move to the next, and that repetition is the game's most common criticism even from people who otherwise love it.

The visuals were a genuine leap for the series. Wing Commander 3 dropped the flat sprite based ships of the earlier games for texture mapped 3D models, chunky and angular by today's standards but state of the art for a game built around a mid nineties processor.

The PlayStation version carries some extra load times between the Victory's corridors that the PC original does not have, though it otherwise plays close to the source.

Audio holds up better than you might expect, with a full orchestral score and voice acting that treats the material seriously even when the plot leans into melodrama.

The real hook is the branching story. Choices in conversation, in combat, and even in how Blair copes with losing people close to him can steer the game toward different missions and different endings.

It is not full open world freedom, but for 1994 it was a genuinely new way to make a linear war story feel like it belonged to the player.

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GAME INFORMATION

WHERE TO PLAY

• The original copy or emulation will be your best bet in playing the original version.

• The PC version can be found on GOG.

• Original Copies of the Game (All prices in USD)

  • Loose: $20

  • Complete: $35

  • New/Sealed: $195

COVER ART

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GAME OVER

Why You Should Play This

So why boot up Wing Commander 3 today? The game earns a look because it tells a complete, self contained story that is actually engaging. There’s a twist later in the game that actually hits pretty hard.

You do not need to know the rest of the Wing Commander series to follow Blair's arc from grieving pilot to reluctant hero. Although, much of the cast returns for Part 4 and it continues the story. So there’s more out there if you like this.

The mission structure shows its age, and a gamepad is not the ideal way to fly, but the cast, the score, and the surprising weight given to a war between humans and cats hold up. Give it a ew patient evenings, and it will deliver.

SUPPORT

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RETRO HARDWARE

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