For some reason, Model 1 games have been listed as "Not Working" in MAME for years, even though they're all, as far as I can tell, totally playable. Maybe it's an oversight, or maybe there's some special technological reason that's beyond my grasp, but you can definitely play them. And this is one of them! I think it might have been the last of them, too, coming out in 1994. Model 2 games Daytona USA and Virtua Cop had already been released the previous year!
But being the last Model 1 game, it is also the most graphically sophisticated by a long way. It's a game about one-on-one aircraft combat, with aged propellor planes, modern fighter jets, and a few attack helicopters on offer. Also on offer are two modes of play, selectable right at the start of your credit: dogfight and expert. Dogfight is the best, but I should at least explain the differences between them.
Dogfight is by far the most videogamey, and specifically the most like a SEGA arcade game of the two. In this mode, you and your opponent fly on a fixed path over each of the stages, and every ten seconds or so you switch positions between being the attacker at the rear or the evader in front. As the attacker, you can fire your useless machine gun, and your slightly less useless missiles, while as the evader, you've got to fly around to evade your opponent's weapons and at a pinch, you can release a smokescreen to confuse their missiles.
Expert is a lot more complex, and it's all the weaker for it. In this mode, the stages are just differently-decorated large square plains over which you and your opponent are free to fly around and try to shoot each other down. Now, dogfight mode ends much more often than not in a time out finish with the victory going to whoever scorded the most lucky hits, but expert mode adds in the struggle of having to seek out your opponent before you can even try to hit them. Many of my Expert mode matches were decided with only one hit having been landed by the time time was up.
The game does have a problem with how unreliable the weapons are at hitting their marks. It is a problem that plagues both the player and their AI opponents, though, so the luck-based gameplay is at least equal in its tedium. I'm not sure how it could be fixed, unfortunately. lock-on weapons ala Afterburner or Panzer Dragoon would grossly unbalance dogfight mode, though they would greatly improve expert mode. But would they also ruin the psuedo-realistic verisimilitude to which expert mode aspires?
Though the game has some serious problems mechanically, it is at least aesthetically beautiful. Like I said, it's the most visually complex Model 1 game, and the stages look great, especially in dogfight mode, which sees you flying through them on a fixed path like you would in a sprite scrolling game. They're varied, too: there's a New York-like city, a wild west desert, and a high-altitude fantasy plateau with waterfalls, rainbows, and dinosaurs. Something else worth noting is that there was a version of this game housing in an R-360 cabinet, which might explain its existence: maybe SEGA wanted to put a polygon-based game in one of those, but there was some reason that it wouldn't have been practical to put a Model 2 game in there.
Wing War isn't a particularly great game, but it is one that looks really cool. And I suspect that that's the whole point of it existing: in an age where polygonal 3D games were new, this was one that had a lot of cool-looking stuff happening at a high speed, and sometimes it was even in a gimmicky cabient that span the player round a bunch. If you like looking a pretty low polygon vistas, give it a look. If you don't, it doesn't really have anything else to offer.
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