Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger combined extensive filmed cutscenes with Hollywood actors, including Mark Hamill in the lead role of Captain Christopher Blair, with classic space dogfights in which the player, as a fighter pilot, battles the hostile Kilrathi race, and the player's decisions in dialogue scenes affect the further course of the story and missions. Space combat in open space with no fixed horizon made it a logical candidate for Forte VFX1 support, since looking around the cockpit and tracking enemies in every direction matched exactly the kind of experience stereoscopic headsets promised to deliver.

In practice, however, the game ran into the headset's usual limits, namely the low resolution that made it hard to make out distant fighters and cockpit instrument details, and a limited field of view that, paradoxically, made harder exactly what the headset was supposed to make easier, namely tracking enemies at the edge of vision during a dogfight against multiple opponents at once. The cutscenes, one of the game's main draws and taking up an unusually large amount of space on CD discs for the time, also didn't display in the headset's stereoscopic mode the way they were designed for a standard screen, so players often switched between the headset and the monitor depending on whether it was an action flight or a story segment.

Wing Commander III is remembered today as one of the most expensive and ambitious titles of its era thanks to its combination of interactive film and space simulator, and its influence on the genre is evident in a whole range of later games built on cinematic storytelling and branching narratives based on the player's performance. In the context of the VFX1, it remains an example of a game where the title's strengths, namely its cinematic presentation and acting performances, were at the same time exactly what translated worst into early virtual reality.

Why play: For fans of cinematic storytelling and space simulators, Wing Commander III is an ambitious combination of interactive film and action, even though its strong cinematic presentation translated worst into early VR.