I was cleaing out one of the shelves in my study when I came across a box of old PC game manuals that, for some odd reason, I held on to.

Laying on top of the pile was a blueprint of a Terran Confederation Rapier. Almost immediately, I was pulled, rather willingly, into a time-warping vortex of nostalgia. The game: Wing Commander.

All the way back in 1990, I had a 386 with a luxurious 1 MB of RAM and a monitor capable of 256 colors. In those days, that was considered pretty swanky. After tinking with the autoexec.bat and config.sys files on my Wing Commander-only boot disk, I was able to load things into high memory and and run the game at a blazing 15 frames per second.

The game came with a "magazine" which doubled as a game manual, accompanied by four blueprints of the Confederations fighters. I remember playing this game and living my Last Starfighter fantasies. I looked over... no... studied the manual and blue prints until I instinctively knew the ranges and flight characteristics of each weapon. I knew I needed to strike early with long range lasers, then pummel those cursed, feline Kilrathi with my mass driver cannons up close. I knew that the Dralthi had wicked-fast rate of pitch, but its yaw rate was too slow for any Confed ship I flew.

To this day, I haven't run across any game that put so much love and care into things like the interactive menu system and the ability to evoke the feeling that I AM THERE. That I was the ace pilot that could protect the Earth from the best that Kilrah could throw at me.

I loved it so much, I bought ever Wing Commander game that followed, except for the abortion that made its way to Xbox Live Arcade.

For the love of the series, I added an extra 1mb of RAM that I bought from Egghead for $50 and learned to install a CD-ROM drive.

The series makes another technological leap with full FMV cutscenes with big name actors like MarkHammil playing Christopher Blair, John Rhys-Davies as Paladin, and Malcolm McDowell as Adm. Tolwyn. It also had semi FMV menus if you can believe that. For this game, I upgraded from my two-button joystick to a fancy CH Flightstick.

At the risk of sounding like an old man.... they just don't make 'em like this anymore.