Part 115: Alcor System, Vega Sector, Mission 1 (drunk) (Gameplay)

5th September 2669, Alcor System (Mission 1), Vega Sector
TCS Victory

Kilrathi forces pursue the TCS Victory's carrier group from Loki to Alcor; the Sheffield falls back to cover the carrier's flight. With a Kilrathi corvette wolfpack closing in on the destroyer and heavy fighter wings vectoring in on Victory, Eisen scrambles the entire fighter wing.

Pre-mission conversations (Youtube) (Polsy/Gamerstube)
Deleted Scene (TNC Newsbrief, Youtube)

There is no briefing video since this mission is a scramble and doesn't have a briefing. On the bright side, scramble launch music!


Mission Video (Youtube) Mission Video (Gamerstube/Polsy)

Kills this mission: 5, but I'm counting the number I get when I do the mission sober on Nightmare for my running kill totals, because it will be much higher. That video will be showing up sometime in the relatively near future, hopefully. It's kind of hard to convey with words just how annoying that is to play. I think there's two, maybe three different effects being drunk has - I talk about this in the video, but it's annoying enough it bears repeating. The most obvious one is that your inputs reverse themselves about every 30 seconds (but not exactly every 30 seconds). This alone would make flying very difficult, but you'd be able to work around it with enough practice. Unfortunately, there's at least one more and I think maybe to. The second one is that your control sensitivity is deadened, but the amount varies. Sometimes the Arrow turns like an Arrow; sometimes it behaves like a Longbow, most of the time it's somewhere in between. This is pretty crippling, because the Arrow's incredible turn rate is most of what it's got going for it, so if you lose that all you've really got is speed and small size - enough to not get hit, but not enough to do any real damage. And to top it all off, I'm pretty certain that as well as sometimes reversing your controls rotate a bit, since I'm sure I've ended up turning on my axis rather than climbing/diving on occasions - but frankly it's all so disorienting that could just be me. Maybe my mistake was flying this sober. Perhaps drunk it would have made sense.

Ship of the day:
Is still on hiatus. We do get to meet a new enemy ship in this series, though.

Total kills (Wing Commander III): 24 missions / 222 kills (sort of, see above)
Total kills (this thread): 50 missions / 588 kills
Total kills (including previous thread): 160 missions / 1505 kills

Next time on Let's Play Wing Commander:
As previously mentioned, we are, in fact, screwed. Though maybe not for a while because I'm going to be away from my computer this weekend, chasing down somewhere to live, so the next update may be delayed.