Part 129: Freya System, Vega Sector, Mission 2 (Gameplay)

Just about managed to get two updates out in the calendar month (my new goal for this LP), if you ignore the fact it's gone midnight here. The videos were ready before midnight, just not uploaded.

18th September 2669, Freya System (Mission 2), Vega Sector
TCS Victory

The Victory's Excaliburs attack ground defences on Freya II protecting the jump point to Kilrah.

Pre-mission conversations (Youtube) (Polsy/Gamerstube)



Briefing Video (Youtube) Briefing Video (Gamerstube/Polsy)


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

Kills this mission: 16 Allegedly. I'm not sure how, since there were 20 Kilrathi fighters around, no other friendlies, and I didn't see any collisions, but that's what the game says. I'm not going to bother futzing with killboards again to claim 20 though so I'll just take the 16 and whine about it a bit here instead. As I say in the video, the mission's pretty attritional and you certainly can lose it if you're careless with the three Ekapshi fights, but careful flying combined with an Excalibur will generally win out. The difference in style required for the switch between Ekapshi and Dralthi (the two most dangerous non-ace enemies in the game - well, on Nightmare, anyway) was my biggest problem here. Quite a lot of the delay in this update wasn't me procrastinating editing the commentary like it usually is, but actually never being happy with any of the videos - I'd fly well against the Ekapshi or against the Dralthi but not both. In the end I decided an acceptable video was better than a perfect one that would never happen and took this one, where I do the Ekapshis competently and just sped up the last set of Dralthis which were done very much with the flying style that I'd used for the previous three fights.

The other interesting thing to note about this mission is that the 3DO version of Wing Commander 3 didn't include the ground sections, so this mission is completely different. Instead of having game engine sequences ground strikes are covered by cutscenes. I present this one here as a demonstration of the contrast between what Origin envisaged for how ground strikes were supposed to look and what they actually produced:


Ground Attack Video (Youtube)

Ship of the day:
Nah. No more new ships to encounter in the game, though I was leaving Thrakhath's Bloodfang for our next encounter (I still don't think it's a spoiler to say he'll be back), so that is still to come.

Total kills (Wing Commander III): 28 missions / 324 kills
Total kills (this thread): 55 missions / 690 kills
Total kills (including previous thread): 163 missions / 1597 kills

Next time on Let's Play Wing Commander:
So it turns out that the drawback of capturing a jump point to Kilrah is that it's also a jump point from Kilrah! Who'd have thought?