Description
Spawned from the success of Wing Commander, Strike Commander takes the same style of gameplay and brings it back in time to a much closer future. You lead a rag-tag mercenary fighter squadron, trying to make a living in a dangerous, chaotic world. Pretty and simplified dogfights in your blackmarket-purchased F-16s is supplemented by interactive cutscenes where you converse with your teammates, or go into town to buy new contracts.
Fly against a very diverse set of aircraft as you find yourself fighting for and against many of the world's major nations. The concern of managing your team's armament expeditures and keeping the group in the black adds a side to the game that few simulators have.
Featuring an improved engine over Wing Commander 2, Strike Commander was the first in a series of three games that attempted to take the 'Commander' series in a non-sci-fi direction. Ultimately, they failed to capture the same crowd as the WC series did.
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Trivia
One of the most resource-hogging games at the time of its release. The 1994 equivalent of Ultima: Ascension.
Editor's Note: He's right -- Strike Commander was so ambitious that it began development in 1992 with features that then-current 386 processors couldn't handle adequately, (such as real-time true 3D texture mapping with Gouraud shading, fractal terrain, and atmospheric hazing of distant objects). Numerous optimizations were made in an attempt to get the game running smoothly, but Strike Commander was one of the first games to attempt such a complex engine, and optimized 3D texturing techniques weren't prevelant in the industry. By the time the average gaming machine was a 486/33, the game shipped, nearly 2 years later.
The game's notoriety for being unplayably slow on average gaming machine's reached far and wide, even into PC Magazine cartoons (one particular joke was about how trying to run Strike Commander on OS/2 with a defrag running at the same time used up so much power that lights dimmed throughout the house). By the time a greatly-optimized version (almost 3 times as fast) version was released, it was too little too late.
This entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
A.D. Lee (8) on Apr 24, 2000.
