System Shock Enhanced Edition Released; Look Back At Wing 0 Minigame

With all of the excitement over Wing Commander 1 this past weekend, it's been easy to overlook another classic Origin (via Looking Glass) game in the news. An enhanced version of

was

last week. While this famous RPG/shooter deserves a major spot in gaming history on just its own merits, the CD version of the game also added a fantastic Wing Commander minigame! You can find a full writeup of the game's thirteen missions, read what the various wingmen said and download a savegame with the minigame unlocked

.

The original disk version of System Shock included a number of mini-games you could collect during the game's cyberspace mode and then play whenever you had a quiet moment. These were small, simple games that loaded in the player's left VDU - versions of things like Pong and Tic-Tac-Toe. For the subsequent CD version of System Shock the designers went all out and included a major homage to Wing Commander: Wing 0, a tiny Wing Commander shooter.

Wing 0 features a 13-mission campaign complete with traditional Wing Commander plot elements: wingmen, speech, traitors, nav points, talking heads, familiar fighters, autopilot flybys, lasers, dogfights and so on... all done in a 148x139 corner screen!

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"...for the CD game I outdid myself with a relatively complete Wing Commander minigame, Wing 0--written just before Wing 3 was released, it's both an homage and a parody, featuring, for example, one pacifistic wingman who refuses to fight (and strangely never gets attacked either, because he's actually a traitor!!!), a mission where you get something like 8 wingmen, and a final 'aww, what the heck, let's send you out by yourself to defeat their entire armada' mission."

The easter eggs didn't just go one way. WC3's Victory Streak also included a review of the

holovid movie, which references the main antagonist of the earlier game.