Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom

The Good
Actually, not much. The only thing that could justify paying for this game when it was released was the great amount of cinematographic content which was a way to show off your new Pentium back then. The movie sequences were pretty impressive! Some scenes were filmed depending on what you chose to say or do, and I found that nice to finally be able to control a movie character.

The Bad
The action sequences were just too plain hard for me to spend weeks trying to get a hold of them. Since there's no diversity in them, the only thing that kept me going was the tentation to see a new cut scene.

This game is spilled on seven - yes, seven CD-ROMs. Swapping CDs is like going back in the eighties when you had no space left on your 20 meg hard drive and had to swap floppy disks in order to play games which took increasing real estate. If I still had this game, I should try to burn it on a DVD just to get rid of these nasty memories.

The Bottom Line
Origin often surprised us with technological breakthroughs. This one pushed the term "interactive movie" even further by letting us spend more time looking at multimedia content than playing the game. I heard rumors that the game cost a whole bunch of money to create, which is clearly due to the large amount of film in it. The actors must have got as bored as much as those involved in Star Wars as it is obvious that they spent a lot of time in front of blue screens.

While this game is really something the first time you see it considering it was released in 1995, you quickly get bored and the gaming sequences aren't good enough to keep you interested.

Chris Roberts finally had its chance at directing a real WC feature movie in 1998, but you can see that creating a movie, not a game, was his trip with WC4. I can't really blame him as he brought us great games before that.