Wing Commander Privateer - Cola Powered Gamer reviews an adventure space flight simulation classic!

After the success of Wing Commander II, the franchise received its first spin-off game. Wing Commander: Privateer or simply Privateer. It can be looked at as Origin Systems take on open-ended gameplay, and their take on the legendary Elite (1984).

Released in the Fall of 1993, Privateer had an interesting development history. The working title for the game was “Trade Commander”, and at one point Origin Systems considered naming all of their games with the suffix “Commander”. The game uses a vastly improved Wing Commander II engine, with some features that were also used in Strike Commander, a different Origin game. It was designed by Joel Manners, and it was helped by Chris Roberts, who at the time was working on Wing Commander II, Strike Commander and Privateer.

Wing Commander - An incredible space sim gets a BIG Cola Powered Gamer review

When talking about space sims, sooner or later someone will mention Wing Commander. Developed by Origin Systems, Wing Commander can be considered one of the best and influential space sim ever created.

Wing Commander had a different take on the then established space sim formula, bringing the game and space combat to the levels of Hollywood blockbusters. The game is set in 2654 and follows the Terran Confederation and the ongoing war against a predatory feline race called the Kilrathi (they were inspired by Kzinti of Larry Niven’s “Know Space” series). In Chris Roberts words the game is inspired by WW2, especially the Pacific War. When you start a game you have just finished a training sim session, and you must enter your name and callsign. The player character has no name, but internally in Origin, he was nicknamed “BlueHair”, because his hair although black, had highlights of blue (due to a limited color palette), which was what probably the reason they named him Blair in the later games.

Ultima 7 (Exult) - Modern recreation gets an Amiga AGA release!

In 1992, Origin Systems and designed by Richard Garriott released one of the best RPG's ever created, a game that even today can be enjoyed by many by downloading it from GOG. It just had to be ' Ultima VII: The Black Gate ', the seventh instalment of the Ultima series of role-playing video games, with the designer even saying  "was the most masterfully executed of the Ultima series. his own favorite instalment overall ". It was so popular by the gamers that a fan based developer created ' Exult ' which is a project to recreate Ultima 7 for modern operating systems, using the game's original plot, data, and graphics files.  Well that same engine has now been made available for the Amiga by NovaCoder with the recent release of the Amiga AGA port of Exult!