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Can you believe we're already heading into the middle of summer? That doesn't just mean swimming pools and ice cream and not being able to afford the electric bill… it also means the next monthly Wing Commander Cartoon Party! And this time around we're moving on from Star Trek to its cool 90s competitor Babylon 5, a series particularly beloved by the teams behind Wing Commander. We've selected four episodes with connections to WC to watch next weekend and we'd love for you to join us!

Season 2, Episode 18 - Confessions and Lamentations: The 1997 Wing Commander Universe map includes at least two nods to Babylon 5. The first is this system in the Kilrah Sector, Pak Ma'hran, which is a reference to the pak'ma'ra. The pak'ma'ra are one of the show's background races, a species of scavengers that seem to generally disgust everyone else. They're never the main point of a story, so we've picked an episode in

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We were shaken but also stirred by the first appearance of 007 in Wing Commander movie club last week! This week, I asked the crew to pick from a selection of religious movies… so of course everyone voted for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Steven Spielberg's introduction to Indiana Jones. Spoiler warning: it's a nearly perfect film. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Our big, unexpected connection this time around is actually… Privateer 3! The game's design document talks about its in-the-works script as being based more on Indiana Jones than Top Gun (a movie we saw very early on in this series). You can read the entire design document here.

The Privateer 3 script should also be a departure from the Wing Commander's Top Gun-ish fighter jock story line. It should have more of an Indiana Jone-ish adventure movie quality, with shady characters, clandestine encounters and even a touch

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Multiple corporations have supported the recent announcement of Colonia's tenth anniversary celebrations.
Vox Galactica business correspondent Marlon Royce spoke to several representatives of major names from the technology, transport, mining and tourism industries.
"Colonia stands as a beacon of human achievement in deep space," commented Naomi Landseer, chairperson of Lakon Spaceways. "Lakon Spaceways is synonymous with success out in the black, and we applaud the continued success of Colonia's people."
Meanwhile, Jaques and the Colonia Council gave Vox Galactica more behind-the-scenes information about planned festivities.
"It's high time the corporations in the core systems showered us with some love and attention," Jaques said enthusiastically from his bar. "So, we're inviting them to help us pull together the first 'Colonia Fair' - a galaxy-sized exposition that'll include exhibitions,

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Tech website Ars Tehnica has run a new profile of Wing Commander IV which offers a solid summary of the game's history and raison d'être. It's always good to see the old games and their cultural importance highlighted like this from an outlet with a wide audience! It begins:

If I had to pick a chunk of the 1990s that feels the most 90s-ish to me, it’d be the two-year stretch between 1996 and 1997. 1996 saw me graduating from high school and starting college; 1997 saw me meeting my future wife and falling in love. While I tried to figure out how to navigate the University of Houston’s still mostly pre-digital first-semester registration process (we had to sign up for classes over the phone, with touch-tone buttons, like cavemen!), the larger world kept turning in ways that felt inevitable and good and right. The Cold War was in the rearview mirror—how could we ever have been so worried about nuclear

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Exteban has unveiled a VERY impressive project: a full Spanish dub of Wing Commander II's speech files! It covers both the original speech, the speech acessory pack and the limited speech that appears in Special Operations 1 and 2. That must've been quite a lot of work! Details and instructions:

Hello, I'm Esteban Martinez.

I've dubbed over 400 voice files from the Wing Commander 2 and Special Operations 1 & 2 Speech Pack into Spanish.

I used both professional voice actors and AI for this.

For communications, I added radio noises, and for the Kilrathi voices, I added tiger sounds in the background to make them more similar to Wing Commander 3.

This was made possible thanks to WCTools.

It's compatible with L@Zar0's text translation mod. (more information)

To install it, simply replace the files in the GAMEDAT folder.

I've also captured a short video as an example.

• Wing Commander 2 Spanish Speech Accessory Pack

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The Wing Commander movie club had a great Independence Day watching Independence Day! It's one of those movies that remains just as much fun as it did when we were teenagers. It's hard to argue that it's some great piece of art or that it's especially clever… but you start watching and you're immediately having a ball.

The big connection this time around is David Arnold's Independence Day score, which was heavily used to temp track Wing Commander… presumably because Arnold was writing Wing Commander's overture! Compare the ID4 theme to the one from Wing Commander:

Chris Roberts would go on to hire ID4's alien designer, Patrick Tatopoulos, to rework the Kilrathi. The work never made it to screen but I think you can see the influence!

Maybe the most memorable 'trademark' of ID4 was the aliens' destruction of major monuments. Gamers had already blown up the White House in Command and Conquer a few months