AusGamers Throwback Thursday - Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (1994)

Post by Steve Farrelly @ 09:11pm 13/11/14 | 10 Comments

The second entry in our new weekly series, Throwback Thursday, looks at the tour de force that was Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger from 1994, starring a certain Mark Hamill and was one of the first major games to truly take advantage of the (at the time) new CD-ROM format.

Chris Roberts is a name that is now synonymous with an indie game being made with the budget of a Hollywood blockbuster, but back in the mid-90s he was known as a developer who made games that simply wanted to look like they were Hollywood blockbusters. So the key difference between something like the currently in development Star Citizen and 1994’s Wing Commander III is that the former is a space combat simulator, and the latter is a space combat simulator starring Mark Hamill.

Click here for our Wing Commander II: Heart of the Tiger Throwback Thursday feature.

Drop us a note in the Comments section if you have a Throwback Thursday request as well.

throwback thursday space combat star citizen chris roberts wing commander

Latest Comments

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Joaby
Posted 09:24am 14/11/14

Some people tried to shame me for playing this on the PlayStation, but I didn't have a joystick and my PC at the time was a complete turd. Legendary game.

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Steve Farrelly
Posted 09:42am 14/11/14

It's unfortunately one of those games I missed and will regret missing forever, but will likely never revisit

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nachosjustice
Posted 09:54am 14/11/14

I also missed this game, which sucks. I'm one of the people that played the original games on a computer that barely passed minimum specs so I had to disable the rendering of the in-game hand on the joystick. Oh, how far we've come.

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TicMan
Posted 10:37am 14/11/14

I loved the Wing Commander series. It's up there alongside the Sierra quest games, Doom & Quake for me.

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KostaAndreadis
Posted 11:08am 14/11/14

Yeah me too, this baby shipped on 4 CDs (at least!) and was one of the first games I played on my brand new 2x CD-ROM. Between the Wong Commander games and the Sierra/Lucas line-up, that's what defined early '90s PC gaming for me.

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Khel
Posted 03:02pm 14/11/14

Yeah, had this on my 486 with 4mb of ram and dear god the loading times. Could pretty much start loading a mission, then go make a sandwhich and get a drink and get back in time to watch it still loading. Upgrading to 8mb of ram did help a bit though.

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Spook
Posted 03:05pm 14/11/14

I also missed this game, which sucks. I'm one of the people that played the original games on a computer that barely passed minimum specs so I had to disable the rendering of the in-game hand on the joystick. Oh, how far we've come.

haha, i hear that bro

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Raven
Posted 05:43pm 14/11/14

Yeah, had this on my 486 with 4mb of ram and dear god the loading times. Could pretty much start loading a mission, then go make a sandwhich and get a drink and get back in time to watch it still loading. Upgrading to 8mb of ram did help a bit though.

The funny thing is when I go back and play it these days now, I have all the TRE files on a directory on disk. I've also loaded the whole lot in to a RAMdisk just for s**** and giggles - you actually get the c***pit displayed before the audio catches up.

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Raven
Posted 09:20pm 14/11/14

Oh yeah, as for Wing Commander and nicknames/callsigns, it was the first game I played of the 'Enter your callsign' type - from the start it was for this game that I picked 'Raven' and stuck with it ever since.

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Raven
Posted 09:38pm 26/11/14

Allllllso, Wing Commander III and IV are $2.49 on Origin until Friday.

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