And The Winner Is...

I’ll admit to a bit of mild disappointment that my Twitter poll about the next Flight Friday game didn’t get more responses. Oh well, I said I’d go with the results, and the people, all three of them, have spoken. The next Flight Friday series will be Wing Commander!

I'm looking forward to being back here again.

Now that I’m not disappointed about. I believe that I’ve mentioned before how meaningful the Wing Commander series was in my professional development, and I’m genuinely excited to play through them again, hopefully while sharing them with at least a few folks who’ve never played them. It’s going to be a good time.

Now here’s the big challenge: including the various expansion packs, each of which has a sufficiently long campaign to constitute its own game, the Wing Commander series has a total of fifteen games. That’s five mainline games, five expansion packs, two Privateer spinoffs, strategy/space combat hybrid Wing Commander Armada, mission builder/playground Wing Commander Academy, and top-down multiplayer blaster Wing Commander Arena. Even discounting WC Arena for its total lack of single-player, that’s still a hefty number of games. Bear in mind too that the four game Star Wars: X-Wing series took me three and a half years to play through.

I’d like to not be still playing through this series when I’m forty-five.

One of the things that made these games unique for the time, and is still remarkably rare among modern games, is the branching campaign structure of the first two major titles. Winning or losing a series of missions doesn’t necessarily cause you to fail the mission, just take on a different, slightly harder series that can eventually get you back on the winning track, provided you don’t continue to fail. One of the things I’ll be trying to do in these playthroughs is hitting all the possible branches in each game. That’s going to increase my playtime significantly.

Another thing I’m excited about: I’ve never actually finished either of the Privateer games, or the Secret Ops expansion for Wing Commander: Prophecy. I’ve never touched WC Armada or WC Academy. That’s going to be fun when I get there!