Non-Decade Review Post. Decade Review to Follow, probably.
Books
26. Wing Commander: End Run; Christopher Stasheff & William R. Forstchen
27. Wing Commander: Fleet Action; William R. Forstchen
Computer Games
19. Wing Commander: Standoff; Standoff Devs/EA (PC, 2009)
It made sense to take these three together because Wing Commander: Standoff follows the plot of much of Fleet Action, which in turn follows directly on from End Run.
End Run is actually two stories; Milk Run, a short story, followed by End Run, a short novel. Between the two of them they tell the story of the Vukar Tag campaign, for which, given the dedication to Lieutenant General James Doolittle inside the cover, and the knowledge that Wing Commander is the Pacific Theatre of World War II in space, the plot can be guessed.
OK, so you'd be wrong on the timing and how everything fits together, but the overall story isn't far off. We start off in Milk Run by Christopher Stasheff, following the crew of the TCS Johnny Greene, a beat-up, oft-repaired and off-spec corvette kept on patrol far longer than it ought to have been because the Confederation is running out of ships to relieve it. A skirmish with Kilrathi[1] raiders sends them back to port for repairs wherein the plot is encountered, in the form of a recon mission to Vukar Tag, an unimportant dustball being defended vastly out of proportion to its actual usefulness.
There then follows a section in which we are treated to a badly-imagined conflict between the mission specialist they've picked up and the tight-knit crew of the corvette. This could have been an excellent passage, but what we get instead is a one-sided portrayal in which the mission specialist is portrayed as an overpromoted jerk who doesn't know what she's doing[2]. It's supposed to build up to a big catharsis on both sides as both sides realise they were wrong about the other in order to set up the bittersweet conclusion, but because the set-up is so badly done it more comes off as "hey, when did she become competent?".
It is in any case fortunate that she did, or the plot of End Run by William R. Forstchen would make relatively little sense. Forstchen's day job was as a military historian and he has a pilot's license; both of these attributes help him paint a picture of carrier air (err, space) group operations that at least seems entirely plausible. Not having ever flown off an aircraft carrier it could be entirely nonsense as far as I know, but the verisimilitude is there. End Run is the story of the Confederation's all-of-nothing gamble to regain parity after a year of disasters. The military plan is surprisingly clever for a licensed novel. Vukar Tag, the ancestral home of the Kilrathi dowager Empress, is occupied and her palace destroyed (she isn't in it). Kilrathi honour requires that the Imperial Guard sortie to avenge the attack; consequently, the light carrier Tarawa and her escorts are sent on a deep strike at Kilrah to force the Guard to split its forces. Thus divided, it is hoped that the six or so carriers expected at Vukar Tag may be ambushed and destroyed by the four fleet carriers of the Confederation's Navy's Third Fleet whilst they are unloading troops.
We follow the TCS Tarawa, and her flight group commander Jason "Bear" Bondarevsky. He's already known to Wing Commander veterans, having shown up in the WC2 mission packs as the leader of a mutiny aboard the destroyer Gettysburg caused by his refusal to fire on Kilrathi civilian evacuation ships. (It comes up occasionally in the book, but I don't think they're significantly weaker if you don't know that since context is generally provided.) The war bits, as I have said, are done well. Space combat feels both like the games and plausible modulo standard space combat physics[4] (well, there are rather more starfighters involved than would have been possible to render when WC2 was released, but it feels reasonably like Standoff at any rate, with an understanable increase in complexity), and the Tarawa feels like what the author tells us it is - a light escort carrier designed to be expendable (and then sent on a suicide mission).
Things that aren't the space combat fall into two halves. There is the romance subplot. Um. I think the only way I can plausibly do justice to the cheesiness is a brief quote:
"And another thing, you egotistical bastard-"
Suddenly the whole thing seemed totally absurd and he started to laugh. She looked down at him, her eyes filled with rage. And then it all started to melt away.
"You were about to say," Jason whispered, looking up and smiling.
She hesitated and then her words came out as a whisper.
"Can I spend the night with you?"
Fortunately at that point the scene ends. The romance also somewhat derails Svetlana, who is set up as a hard-bitten marine combat veteran who is part of the nastiest side of the war and is almost disdainful of pilots. They're supposed to have been a couple at the academy but really she has little in common with Jason; yet the relationship is not really described as love-hate or "fuck it, we're all going to die in two weeks and you're the best-looking man on this goddamn tugboat". Ah well, Forstchen is not exactly the first writer to have no idea how to write a love story.
The remainder, the military interaction, the talk between pilots and the interservice rivalry, that's fine, and so End Run is a very good story - if you don't mind the plot being stolen more or less wholesale from history and are happy to skip over the cheesemance. I think Forstchen is slightly guilty of projecting too many of the foibles of a peacetime navy onto the 30-years-at-war TCN, but incompetence in high places makes for some more plot, I guess...
Fleet Action, set six months or so after the end of End Run, follows up our story. The Confederation's new strategy having proven remarkably successful, what we have here is a slightly different take on the old fake surrender cliché. It's a somewhat more plausible take than most, inasmuch as the armistice doesn't magically cause the Confederation's fleet to be concentrated in one place to be hit by a surprise attack. What it does do is buy them time to complete their latest large series of fleet construction and new generation of carriers, and convince humanity to stand down from a war footing and begin mothballing sections of the fleet. (Well, most of humanity. The first quarter of the book is taken up with arguments between the military and the frontier worlds, who don't believe the Kilrathi, and the political leadership of the core worlds, which does).
Skeptical military brass send the "decommissioned" FRLS Tarawa deep into enemy territory[5] to act as base ship for an intelligence mission to find out what the enemy are really up to. This bit is...well it's a bit dull really. I mean, yes, I get that covert operations are kind of like that given that ideally you'd like nothing to happen on them, but I should not be spending upwards of a hundred pages wondering when I'm going to get to the good part. Readers of any of the later Tom Clancy novels will be familiar with the syndrome, though at least it only goes on for about a sixth as long. Meanwhile, in a book that's written much more from the Kilrathi viewpoint than the last one (in which there are occasional snippets from their perspective but no more), rival factions jockey for power in the Empire, which is at peace for almost the first time since achieving interstellar flight. This section is really quite good - and it picks up on a theme that Wing Commander IV will rediscover, wherein large sections of the Terran military have spent so long trying to understand their enemy they've become like them. Our chief perspective for Kilrathi politics is Baron Jukaga nar Cakxi, the Kilrathi foreign minister and general expert on humanity, whose struggles with his increasing admiration for humanity form an intriguing subplot (with a fitting conclusion, too).
So between enemies within and without Kilrathi high command is forced to launch the new fleet with only five of their twelve supercarriers ready - a figure which they calculate gives the humans almost no chance of survival, but nowhere near as little as they'd like. Meanwhile on the Confederation side, the decommissioning program has left Admiral Tolwyn (who irritatingly conflates England and Britain throughout the book - his sentimental descriptions make it clear that Britain is being referred to despite the fact he always says England, a fact that a man who lives in the Shetland Islands when not aboard a carrier would be expected to get right) with only three fleet carriers to parry the advance. This final section of the book is pretty epic. It does large-scale fleet combat extremely well, as we spend a long time riding with Confederation heavy bombers as they try to launch torpedo strikes...and this feels almost exactly like it does in the game if you try and make a torp run before the fighter cover is cleared. The frantic pell-mell nature of the close-range capship melees the Tarawa ends up in trying to defend the border worlds is fairly well done, though it does generally need reading twice before you pick up on everything that's going on. Which is somewhat how it should be, but...
In the best traditions of these things it naturally comes down to a desperate defence of Earth, with the Confederation, running short on torpedoes and bombers to launch them with, resorting to sending marine boarding ships armed with large bombs into the open hangars of the enemy carriers. Fleet Action is a straight-up war story - End Run presumably convinced Forstchen not to try romance again - and so there is less embarrassing badness and more explosions, which is always good.
Standoff, then, follows the same story but with none of the same characters, instead focusing on the adventures of the escort carrier TCS Firekka. It's a total conversion of the somewhat ancient (1998!) Wing Commander: Secret Ops, meaning it runs on an updated eleven-year old engine. This would be enough trouble to be going on with, you'd think - but EA haven't released the source code for the engine, unlike Volition with Freespace 2, and instead the modding has been done by hacking the game's EXE to load a DLL which overwrites the relevant bits of the engine. This cannot be a tremendously efficient way of doing things, surely. Given that, it's suprisingly pretty - not quite as pretty as FS2_Open, but then the nature of combat is a bit different and there are no beam weapons and fewer explosions, so there's less opportunity for pretty colours anyway.
What we do get is pre-rendered cutscenes, making this a genuine Wing Commander game with a lot of plot and some pretty decent writing. Our opening cutscene contains the line "Of all the pilots on all the carriers in the whole damn universe, she is the one they kidnap?" The screen is in black and white and light jazz music plays over the opening credits - yes, Standoff is, um, game noir, I guess. We play as Captain William Bradshaw, TCSF, Wing Commander of the TCS Lionheart, and, subsequently, the TCS Firekka. Abetted and occasionally even aided by our trusty air wing, our task is to blow shit up across 25 to 30 missions, rising to 50 or so should you go back and play through the various different branching paths of the campaign.
And boy is there a lot of stuff to blow up. One of the advantages of using a slightly older engine is that the lighter CPU load means there can be a great many more ships on screen than happened in most games of this type. This really helps with a proper sense of scale for battles, and we don't have fighter squadrons being deployed in three groups of four each arriving after you've killed the last. For the finale the battles are appropriately epic. The second mission of the finale epsiode, for example, is a Confederation Heavy Strike against the vanguard of the Kilrathi fleet. This is a strike by 20-odd Terran fighters against eleven Kilrathi capital ships, who have eighteen fighters up by the time the strike arrives with more launching (this sort of thing makes sense - the carrier starts launching fighters when it detects the inbound strike and hasn't finished yet). It makes the game more frantic and also more tactical - deciding what to do with you and your wingmen actually means something when there's meaningfully different parts of the battle. Fortunately the game comes with an excellent tactical map that allows making these decisions to be something other than guesswork. This is useful, because as the game was written both by and for Wing Commander fans, an assumption has been made you've probably been playing this sort of game for ten to fifteen years and are thus rather good at it - and it is thus rather hard. I like my space combat games that way (that would be why I had it on the hardest difficulty level..), but people who've played less of them than I have might want to give it a miss. Still, they'd be missing out. Standoff, while not exactly professional inasmuch as most of the writing is fairly poor and the voice acting is largely rotten, is an awful lot of fun. The flight engine's close to the best I've ever experienced, and unlike the other plausible contender for that title, Starlancer, the mission design is well-balanced and challenging (though the "losing" paths showcase most of the imagination; the winning route is a bit formulaic). Their version of the Terran Rapier fighter is amongst my favourite computer game starfighters to fly, and the Kilrathi Vatari is right up there with X-Wing Alliance's TIE Defenders as my most hated enemy. I love Standoff; enough to Let's Play the game and to write most of a walkthrough/strategy guide, something that will be eventually finished.
My, that was an awfully long post. Here are the footnotes.
1. The Kilrathi are humanity's enemies throughout most of the Wing Commander series - aggressive, religious bipedal felines whose government operate on a clan system. They're a mixture of the Kzinti and the Imperial Japanese (obviously)[3] except competent.
2. For those of you worried about sexism here, when we get to End Run there are three seriously competent, strong, female characters.
3. Shockingly, the Terran-Kilrathi war actually didn't begin with a sneak attack on a major Terran naval base.
4. Actually there is an excuse provided for this, but it isn't a very good one (from a physics perspective - it's a great storytelling mechanic) so we shall ignore it.
5. It's not like they didn't have practice at it
26. Wing Commander: End Run; Christopher Stasheff & William R. Forstchen
27. Wing Commander: Fleet Action; William R. Forstchen
Computer Games
19. Wing Commander: Standoff; Standoff Devs/EA (PC, 2009)
It made sense to take these three together because Wing Commander: Standoff follows the plot of much of Fleet Action, which in turn follows directly on from End Run.
End Run is actually two stories; Milk Run, a short story, followed by End Run, a short novel. Between the two of them they tell the story of the Vukar Tag campaign, for which, given the dedication to Lieutenant General James Doolittle inside the cover, and the knowledge that Wing Commander is the Pacific Theatre of World War II in space, the plot can be guessed.
OK, so you'd be wrong on the timing and how everything fits together, but the overall story isn't far off. We start off in Milk Run by Christopher Stasheff, following the crew of the TCS Johnny Greene, a beat-up, oft-repaired and off-spec corvette kept on patrol far longer than it ought to have been because the Confederation is running out of ships to relieve it. A skirmish with Kilrathi[1] raiders sends them back to port for repairs wherein the plot is encountered, in the form of a recon mission to Vukar Tag, an unimportant dustball being defended vastly out of proportion to its actual usefulness.
There then follows a section in which we are treated to a badly-imagined conflict between the mission specialist they've picked up and the tight-knit crew of the corvette. This could have been an excellent passage, but what we get instead is a one-sided portrayal in which the mission specialist is portrayed as an overpromoted jerk who doesn't know what she's doing[2]. It's supposed to build up to a big catharsis on both sides as both sides realise they were wrong about the other in order to set up the bittersweet conclusion, but because the set-up is so badly done it more comes off as "hey, when did she become competent?".
It is in any case fortunate that she did, or the plot of End Run by William R. Forstchen would make relatively little sense. Forstchen's day job was as a military historian and he has a pilot's license; both of these attributes help him paint a picture of carrier air (err, space) group operations that at least seems entirely plausible. Not having ever flown off an aircraft carrier it could be entirely nonsense as far as I know, but the verisimilitude is there. End Run is the story of the Confederation's all-of-nothing gamble to regain parity after a year of disasters. The military plan is surprisingly clever for a licensed novel. Vukar Tag, the ancestral home of the Kilrathi dowager Empress, is occupied and her palace destroyed (she isn't in it). Kilrathi honour requires that the Imperial Guard sortie to avenge the attack; consequently, the light carrier Tarawa and her escorts are sent on a deep strike at Kilrah to force the Guard to split its forces. Thus divided, it is hoped that the six or so carriers expected at Vukar Tag may be ambushed and destroyed by the four fleet carriers of the Confederation's Navy's Third Fleet whilst they are unloading troops.
We follow the TCS Tarawa, and her flight group commander Jason "Bear" Bondarevsky. He's already known to Wing Commander veterans, having shown up in the WC2 mission packs as the leader of a mutiny aboard the destroyer Gettysburg caused by his refusal to fire on Kilrathi civilian evacuation ships. (It comes up occasionally in the book, but I don't think they're significantly weaker if you don't know that since context is generally provided.) The war bits, as I have said, are done well. Space combat feels both like the games and plausible modulo standard space combat physics[4] (well, there are rather more starfighters involved than would have been possible to render when WC2 was released, but it feels reasonably like Standoff at any rate, with an understanable increase in complexity), and the Tarawa feels like what the author tells us it is - a light escort carrier designed to be expendable (and then sent on a suicide mission).
Things that aren't the space combat fall into two halves. There is the romance subplot. Um. I think the only way I can plausibly do justice to the cheesiness is a brief quote:
"And another thing, you egotistical bastard-"
Suddenly the whole thing seemed totally absurd and he started to laugh. She looked down at him, her eyes filled with rage. And then it all started to melt away.
"You were about to say," Jason whispered, looking up and smiling.
She hesitated and then her words came out as a whisper.
"Can I spend the night with you?"
Fortunately at that point the scene ends. The romance also somewhat derails Svetlana, who is set up as a hard-bitten marine combat veteran who is part of the nastiest side of the war and is almost disdainful of pilots. They're supposed to have been a couple at the academy but really she has little in common with Jason; yet the relationship is not really described as love-hate or "fuck it, we're all going to die in two weeks and you're the best-looking man on this goddamn tugboat". Ah well, Forstchen is not exactly the first writer to have no idea how to write a love story.
The remainder, the military interaction, the talk between pilots and the interservice rivalry, that's fine, and so End Run is a very good story - if you don't mind the plot being stolen more or less wholesale from history and are happy to skip over the cheesemance. I think Forstchen is slightly guilty of projecting too many of the foibles of a peacetime navy onto the 30-years-at-war TCN, but incompetence in high places makes for some more plot, I guess...
Fleet Action, set six months or so after the end of End Run, follows up our story. The Confederation's new strategy having proven remarkably successful, what we have here is a slightly different take on the old fake surrender cliché. It's a somewhat more plausible take than most, inasmuch as the armistice doesn't magically cause the Confederation's fleet to be concentrated in one place to be hit by a surprise attack. What it does do is buy them time to complete their latest large series of fleet construction and new generation of carriers, and convince humanity to stand down from a war footing and begin mothballing sections of the fleet. (Well, most of humanity. The first quarter of the book is taken up with arguments between the military and the frontier worlds, who don't believe the Kilrathi, and the political leadership of the core worlds, which does).
Skeptical military brass send the "decommissioned" FRLS Tarawa deep into enemy territory[5] to act as base ship for an intelligence mission to find out what the enemy are really up to. This bit is...well it's a bit dull really. I mean, yes, I get that covert operations are kind of like that given that ideally you'd like nothing to happen on them, but I should not be spending upwards of a hundred pages wondering when I'm going to get to the good part. Readers of any of the later Tom Clancy novels will be familiar with the syndrome, though at least it only goes on for about a sixth as long. Meanwhile, in a book that's written much more from the Kilrathi viewpoint than the last one (in which there are occasional snippets from their perspective but no more), rival factions jockey for power in the Empire, which is at peace for almost the first time since achieving interstellar flight. This section is really quite good - and it picks up on a theme that Wing Commander IV will rediscover, wherein large sections of the Terran military have spent so long trying to understand their enemy they've become like them. Our chief perspective for Kilrathi politics is Baron Jukaga nar Cakxi, the Kilrathi foreign minister and general expert on humanity, whose struggles with his increasing admiration for humanity form an intriguing subplot (with a fitting conclusion, too).
So between enemies within and without Kilrathi high command is forced to launch the new fleet with only five of their twelve supercarriers ready - a figure which they calculate gives the humans almost no chance of survival, but nowhere near as little as they'd like. Meanwhile on the Confederation side, the decommissioning program has left Admiral Tolwyn (who irritatingly conflates England and Britain throughout the book - his sentimental descriptions make it clear that Britain is being referred to despite the fact he always says England, a fact that a man who lives in the Shetland Islands when not aboard a carrier would be expected to get right) with only three fleet carriers to parry the advance. This final section of the book is pretty epic. It does large-scale fleet combat extremely well, as we spend a long time riding with Confederation heavy bombers as they try to launch torpedo strikes...and this feels almost exactly like it does in the game if you try and make a torp run before the fighter cover is cleared. The frantic pell-mell nature of the close-range capship melees the Tarawa ends up in trying to defend the border worlds is fairly well done, though it does generally need reading twice before you pick up on everything that's going on. Which is somewhat how it should be, but...
In the best traditions of these things it naturally comes down to a desperate defence of Earth, with the Confederation, running short on torpedoes and bombers to launch them with, resorting to sending marine boarding ships armed with large bombs into the open hangars of the enemy carriers. Fleet Action is a straight-up war story - End Run presumably convinced Forstchen not to try romance again - and so there is less embarrassing badness and more explosions, which is always good.
Standoff, then, follows the same story but with none of the same characters, instead focusing on the adventures of the escort carrier TCS Firekka. It's a total conversion of the somewhat ancient (1998!) Wing Commander: Secret Ops, meaning it runs on an updated eleven-year old engine. This would be enough trouble to be going on with, you'd think - but EA haven't released the source code for the engine, unlike Volition with Freespace 2, and instead the modding has been done by hacking the game's EXE to load a DLL which overwrites the relevant bits of the engine. This cannot be a tremendously efficient way of doing things, surely. Given that, it's suprisingly pretty - not quite as pretty as FS2_Open, but then the nature of combat is a bit different and there are no beam weapons and fewer explosions, so there's less opportunity for pretty colours anyway.
What we do get is pre-rendered cutscenes, making this a genuine Wing Commander game with a lot of plot and some pretty decent writing. Our opening cutscene contains the line "Of all the pilots on all the carriers in the whole damn universe, she is the one they kidnap?" The screen is in black and white and light jazz music plays over the opening credits - yes, Standoff is, um, game noir, I guess. We play as Captain William Bradshaw, TCSF, Wing Commander of the TCS Lionheart, and, subsequently, the TCS Firekka. Abetted and occasionally even aided by our trusty air wing, our task is to blow shit up across 25 to 30 missions, rising to 50 or so should you go back and play through the various different branching paths of the campaign.
And boy is there a lot of stuff to blow up. One of the advantages of using a slightly older engine is that the lighter CPU load means there can be a great many more ships on screen than happened in most games of this type. This really helps with a proper sense of scale for battles, and we don't have fighter squadrons being deployed in three groups of four each arriving after you've killed the last. For the finale the battles are appropriately epic. The second mission of the finale epsiode, for example, is a Confederation Heavy Strike against the vanguard of the Kilrathi fleet. This is a strike by 20-odd Terran fighters against eleven Kilrathi capital ships, who have eighteen fighters up by the time the strike arrives with more launching (this sort of thing makes sense - the carrier starts launching fighters when it detects the inbound strike and hasn't finished yet). It makes the game more frantic and also more tactical - deciding what to do with you and your wingmen actually means something when there's meaningfully different parts of the battle. Fortunately the game comes with an excellent tactical map that allows making these decisions to be something other than guesswork. This is useful, because as the game was written both by and for Wing Commander fans, an assumption has been made you've probably been playing this sort of game for ten to fifteen years and are thus rather good at it - and it is thus rather hard. I like my space combat games that way (that would be why I had it on the hardest difficulty level..), but people who've played less of them than I have might want to give it a miss. Still, they'd be missing out. Standoff, while not exactly professional inasmuch as most of the writing is fairly poor and the voice acting is largely rotten, is an awful lot of fun. The flight engine's close to the best I've ever experienced, and unlike the other plausible contender for that title, Starlancer, the mission design is well-balanced and challenging (though the "losing" paths showcase most of the imagination; the winning route is a bit formulaic). Their version of the Terran Rapier fighter is amongst my favourite computer game starfighters to fly, and the Kilrathi Vatari is right up there with X-Wing Alliance's TIE Defenders as my most hated enemy. I love Standoff; enough to Let's Play the game and to write most of a walkthrough/strategy guide, something that will be eventually finished.
My, that was an awfully long post. Here are the footnotes.
1. The Kilrathi are humanity's enemies throughout most of the Wing Commander series - aggressive, religious bipedal felines whose government operate on a clan system. They're a mixture of the Kzinti and the Imperial Japanese (obviously)[3] except competent.
2. For those of you worried about sexism here, when we get to End Run there are three seriously competent, strong, female characters.
3. Shockingly, the Terran-Kilrathi war actually didn't begin with a sneak attack on a major Terran naval base.
4. Actually there is an excuse provided for this, but it isn't a very good one (from a physics perspective - it's a great storytelling mechanic) so we shall ignore it.
5. It's not like they didn't have practice at it