Part 54: Mission #50: 13 August 2654, Charon system

Mission #50: 13 August 2654, Charon system

Previously on Wing Commander: Clearing out the way for Tiger's Claw to be able to withdraw to Vega sector. Hopes are that we do enough damage so that Firekkans can resist the Kilrathi.


Well, at least we don't have to listen to Maniac's rambling...





Mission Time!














That's not nice at all!







Welcome to the final mission of SM2 and I guess also of WC1! Unlike previously, there isn't any kind of big assault, we just need to defend the Tiger's Claw as we make our way out.

• Mission Video (Youtube)
  

So, really, there is basically nothing special to even say about this. It's exactly what it says on the tin--go out, defend, land when done. There are no 'gotchas', secret conditions or anything like that. Even enemies don't really come in any way strongly at you so you can simply pick them off one by one. Seriously, just pick them off slowly one by one and you'll be fine--just don't let those Hhriss have a good shot at TC and that's it. Even Maniac seems like quite a good wingman in this one for some reason!

I thought it's pretty funny though how you launch with high speed almost straight into an enemy just as Maniac is saying 'Ramming speed!'. I like to think it was done deliberately as a joke.

But anyway, after 50 missions--nice round number--here we are finally at the end of Wing Commander 1. Since the game doesn't let you see the killboard any more, the final tally is 501 kills, so just about 10 per mission as was mentioned before.

As you saw in the cutscene, everything went well on Firekka and the Kilrathi did withdraw in the end. A proud new ally of the confederation... that will never be mentioned again--in the games at least.

In the end, I felt that SM1 and SM2 expansions seem like good value as they give you a decent amount of new missions (16, almost the same as the shortest winning path through WC1 itself which has 18), with increased difficulty, more enemies to fight and relatively interesting story in the background; SM2 even makes attempts at character development! Wing Commander 2 of course will expand on this quite a bit.

So, onwards and upwards.



Bonus from the losing side

This game features a slightly more unusual mission tree than before. Basically, the Tiger's Claw will always withdraw at the end, and you'll always fly these two missions with Maniac, but the cutscene afterwards will differ based on what you did before. If you fail a set earlier in the game, you still get shunted to these two missions, but it will turn out that you DIDN'T do enough damage and the Firekkans will be enslaved by the Kilrathi as evidenced by the subsequent cutscene. If you do win all previous mission sets, you still have to fly these two missions with Maniac, but you get the winning cutscene we saw above. So basically, unlike in previous games, there is no separate 'losing branch', just the ending cinematic differs depending on how you get there.

So without further ado, here is the losing version:

• Failure at Firekka (Youtube)
  

Next time on Wing Commander
There is after this, quite literally nothing else to do in Wing Commander 1, so we'll be moving on to the next game in the series--in next update, we'll start on Wing Commander 2 and its expansions; arguably the best game in the series. At least we don't have to worry about a question that many people faced back in 1991... do we have a powerful enough computer to be able to run it?

In other words, get ready for a tale of epic epicness.