Look, I’ll level with you. I did not play the Wing Commander games when I was a kid. In the early 1990s, I certainly spent some time with the old Lucasarts flight sim Battlehawks 1942 (if you click through to watch, turn your speakers down), and later sunk some time into X-Wing and sunk many many many hours into TIE Fighter. Suffice to say, I have a lot of nostalgia for old-school flight and space sims, and it’s an itch that hasn’t been scratched for a long time.
Enter Wings of Saint Nazaire, the scratch for all those itches. Imagine Wing Commander, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, or any other early-90’s sim you recall. Wings looks not like those games, but the way you remember those games. It’s got glorious sprite- and low-poly-based graphics with a healthy coat of modern shader and lighting polish. It does everything for those old games that your rose-coloured glasses do.
So far, it’s fun, too, even though it’s in alpha release (unfinished). It’s a free Unity 3D game, so you can click through right here and play it in your browser right now.
If you’ve had a hankering recently to go back and destroy your fond youthful memories of those games by actually replaying them, you crazy person, go play the Wings of Saint Nazaire alpha instead. You’ll be glad you did. It’s every bit as fun and nostalgic as those old games, with none of the bitter taste of reality intruding on your childhood.
Via Screenburn.
