Thursday, October 23, 2014

Wings! Remastered

I've written many times about my fondness for the Cinemaware games that came out for the Amiga 500. They're a wonderful collection of worthy games.

Wings! was one of my very favorites. Flying in a WWI-era plane was an amazing experience because it was so incredibly personal. Dogfighting was very close quarters combat, and it was real seat-of-the-pants flying, because instrumentation was so primitive.

Didn't know the Immelman Maneuver? You weren't going to last long. Couldn't accurately shoot the gun? Same.

Wings! also wound through a deeply personal story of war, so both the flying and the time in-between missions felt personal. And for the era, the gameplay was tremendously engrossing. There were three types of missions--dogfighting, strafing/bombing ground targets, and destroying weather balloons--and they held my interest for the duration of the game.

If all that wasn't enough, Wings! also has one of my absolutely favorite endings to a game.

That's a lot of gaming love in one package.

So when I saw a Kickstarter for a remastered version in HD, I backed it, of course. It came out a couple of weeks ago, and I'm very happy to report that (through fifteen missions) the development team has done a terrific job. The game looks great, the solid gameplay feels unchanged, and I'm just as sucked into the experience as I was twenty years ago.

This is an important piece of gaming canon, and if you've never played it, you should rectify that immediately. Here's the Steam page: Wings! Remastered Edition.

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