Front Mission 3

Front Mission 3

Front Mission 3: Nomad, vagabond, call me what you will: I’ll redefine anywhere. That is to say, I don’t call any one locale home for long. I’ve lived all over the place, but for a longer while than usual, I built a nest in Melbourne. That nest was mostly constructed out of games, and when I was tasked with cleaning out the old place late last year, I made a fantastic and humbling rediscovery: a dusty black tub full of the yesteryear PC glory that moulded me into the gamer I am today.
Immediately obvious and symbolically the most important to me are: Fallout, Fallout 2, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, Wing Commander: Prophecy (as lousy and Z-grade as it totally is), StarCraft and its Brood Warsexpansion, Disciples II expansion Guardians of the Light, Wizardry 8, and the Ultimate Sci-Fi Series Collection (which boasts Westwood’s finest adventuring hour, Blade Runner, plus Dune 2000 and Wing Commander: Prophecy. Yes, again. Why? I don’t know. Send help).


Buried under all that are Normality and Realms of the Haunting (Gremlin FTW, and also RIP),Deus Ex (naturally), MechWarrior 2, Command & Conquer, Shadows Over Riva, and too many point ‘n clickers to count: Sam & Max Hit the Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Curse of Monkey Island, Noctropolis.

Noctropolis is one of the worst games ever and nobody’s heard of it. I’ve played it over a hundred times.

My gaming life may not have begun with these games (that honour goes to the original NES), but in unearthing this formative trove I realised something: The habits of a gameplay lifetime and my enduring passion for the art have all been typified by the contents of this dusty black tub. I may spend an excess of time in front of the consoles these days – just about the entire industry is to be found on Xbox Live, making it doubly hard to detach – but without my PC I don’t think I’d still be here.

My Wing Commander obsession accounts for the fact that I cannot play anything without inverting the crosshairs. I just can’t. An adolescence spent methodically parsing over pixelly objects of possible interest has also left me with a “tortoise” mentality: the slower the better. When companies stopped making pixel hunts, that indentured wiring kept firing. What was I supposed to do now? Discover JRPGs, live happily ever after. Hey, turn-based strategy is slow, too. I like it.

Front Mission 3