Great music, bad archive

(Review for Wing Commander 3: Game rip by honkstar82)

Wing Commander III continues WCII's tradition of excellent interstellar orchestra music with a solid military feel. This is a great collection of tunes in MIDI format, but unfortunately this archive is heavily flawed. Many songs, from the haunting "Behemoth" track that plays when you fly past the massive planet-killing starship to the more mundane 'feel-good' light jazz of several of the five bar tunes that play if you step into the TCS Victory's living area, are absent. The music for flying in a heavily damaged ship is also missing, along with the music for dogfighting and defeating the Klirathi crown prince.

There is a lot of excellent music here. The game's orchestral introduction as well as both ending tunes are here, one for the Earth ending and one for Kilrah, along with shorts like 'Ejecting!' or 'Exploding!'. The whole of the archive sounds great, the audio part of this game's multi-million dollar budget was well spent, and it really makes you feel like you are fighting at the turning point of an interstellar war. However there are some problems even with the songs that are present. The names of most of the songs are only found in the MIDI data, not in the filename. Most songs have 'wc3-5' or 'wc3-a' as their titles. I cannot in good conscience give a high rating to this archive due to its flaws and absent tracks, but I do highly recommend its music to any interested listener. If you've never heard Wing Commander III's soundtrack before, this is a wonderful taste. If you are looking for a complete archive of the old game you love, this ain't it.

5/10