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Scimitars may not be known for going fast, but blink and you might miss this one. Hit the gear in the lower right and you can slow the clip down in slow motion. At 0.25 speed you can admire the design a little more. This is just one of the Wing Commander fighters that

Stephen Fender

is working on. He's got four Confed and four Kilrathi ships coming together, and with that he's considering putting together a Lego movie or comic. Whatever form this ends up taking, we'd love to see it!

A little LEGO model I designed in Lego Digital Designer, converted to 3DS, then imported into Lightwave for a quick test render.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Today we've got a little snippet unearthed by Sash's RetroBytes. It's a segment from the British TV show Bad Influence! that peeks behind the scenes of Wing Commander 3. Most of the footage looks like material we'd have seen on other longer WC3 BTS features, but it's always nice to see times when Wing Commander was showcased on television!

The Heart of the Tiger! Hollywood comes to video games in a big way - as we see in this clip of Bad Influence series 3 episode 4 where they went behind the scenes of the production of Wing Commander III. #Retrogaming #dosgaming #wingcommander #technology #90s#GameTVNibbles pic.twitter.com/kU9j4qkdol

— Sasha's RetroBytes (@SharkaBytes) October 9, 2023

The Heart of the Tiger! Hollywood comes to video games in a big way - as we see in this clip of Bad Influence series 3 episode 4 where they went behind the scenes of the production of Wing Commander III.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Again, it should be pretty obvious that this is a photo from the set and not a frame from the movie. But it did get me thinking about Tchéky Karyo headshots...

This picture shows up as a lobby card and in other promotional material... but it turns out it's NOT the same as the headshot that's used in the movie!

But here's some neat continuity: that in universe one DOES match the photo in the Confederation Handbook for Paladin's psychological profile.

I also checked the archive of the movie's official site, which had this little bit of lore we've saved all these years. A third photo!

... but here's another great touch: the signature on the letter at the movie site matches the one used for a letter he authored in the Handbook! Now THAT is attention to detail.

On a separate note, Mr. Karyo was born in Turkey, which suffered a terrible earthquake this week. You can help donate to relief efforts in Turkey and

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bsmith1702 was recently going over the killboard in Wing Commander 3 and noted that while it called out ace kills specifically, capital ship destructions were not included. It's just a fighter killboard. Then he had a truly "eureka!" moment. Most pilot rosters like this are sorted either by displayed name or number of kills. The WC3 board isn't ordered either way though, so it's easy to dismiss the question and assume they're more or less randomly assigned. But actually, the pilots are listed by each character's last name, not callsign! That's a pretty cool realization. Jace Dillon comes after Wingston Chang who comes after Laurel Buckley and so on. And now you're an even smarter Wing Commander fan because you know!

Another random thing I noticed was how the names are listed in the kill board. At first it didn't make much sense to me (and I liked how in WC1 the names were ranked by number of

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We've got a couple smaller updates for the WC4 Fan Remake today based on questions from fans at the CIC Forums. The first request was to add VR headset support, which the team was surprisingly open to. There are existing tools out there that facilitate conversion to VR, but they are rapidly evolving, so it would be something the team revisits much later on when the mod is closer to release. There were also questions about cockpits, and we got another beautiful shot in reply that shows off their potential. They look like a good mix of classic WC style with information embedded while being rather inobtrusive like in Prophecy. As designed by Origin, WC4 reacted hard to the popularity of invisible HUD cockpit options in Armada, WC3 and Kilrathi Saga. While they may have been the predominant way people were playing in 1995, the game loses a little something by not having them as an option. It's nice

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As the calendar crosses over into another new year, we took a look back and were once again amazed at all of the happenings in the world of Wing Commander. You guys were busy! And so were we - here's a look back at some of the highlights of 2018.

One of the more surprising things to me was how much happened with WC1/2. UnnamedCharacter's

WC Toolbox

opened the door to some pretty fun stuff. In conjunction with Goliath and Howard Day, they're working on amazing

model upgrade tests

. Sheppard developed

Wing Hard

to adjust game difficulty. Rehsin is

adding characters

and creating

campaigns

. Some of this is bleeding into WC2 and Privateer 2, and it was pretty neat to see a WC2

arcade cabinet

at Britizencon. We continue to learn a lot about these games even after 28+ years, including the recent discovery of multiple

easter

eggs

buried in WC1. And it's neat to still see WC easter eggs pop up elsewhere in

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

Dear Players, Many of you have asked about the impact of current events on Cryptic Studios, so we wanted to provide an update: We are actively taking preventive measures to protect the health of our employees and their families. Plans are in place to ensure Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, and Champions Online remain operational and Magic: Legends continues active development. Meanwhile, our teams will continue to work remotely in accordance with recent “shelter in home” orders enacted by our local county. We appreciate your understanding while we adapt to both ensure a positive play experience for all of you and keep our studio family safe. —Cryptic Studios

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John Rhys-Davies has started a new YouTube channel, and one of his first videos is a reflective piece on the impact of the coronavirus. He talks a bit about his personal history and describes how humanity will endure through tragedy as it always does. Mr. Rhys-Davies is an eloquent speaker and it's nice to hear his perspective on things!

21st March 2020. John Rhys-Davies shares his thoughts from his home in the Isle of Man. He reflects on the experience of his family during the war and what we can learn from a generation that faced the greatest adversity of the 20th century.

Not all the clips that he's planning to post will be nearly as heavy. Here's the easygoing intro he posted a couple weeks back. Thanks to capi for the tip!

Quote from No Man

We always wanted No Man’s Sky to grow and develop after it released. I’m happy we’ve been able to do that.

I am so proud of the team at Hello Games, what they did was incredible. Over the years of development the average team size was 6, the final team was just 15 people at launch. No Man’s Sky has grown to be a very broad game, ambitious, technically unique and very pretty at times, all the more impressive for a team that is still small.

Whilst I couldn’t be prouder of the team, I personally made mistakes. I could talk all day about things I personally would change. Certainly one regret is that the intensity and drama of launch left no room for communication with the community.

We decided instead to focus on development rather than words. Following Foundation, Pathfinder and Atlas Rises, we really want to include you, the community, more.

We know that a million gamers played on the day we launched Atlas Rises. That

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Due to a bug involving missile launchers this Kilrathi tank and Confederation frigate were cut from Wing Commander III. The frigate would be resurrected for WC4!

That's why they call them missiles. They always miss!

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Azimuth Biotech has outlined plans for the corporation's future following the confirmation of Salvation's death.
Director Torben Rademaker, head of strategic operations, submitted a statement to public newsfeeds:
"The loss of Salvation, formerly known as Caleb Wycherley, is a sad day for our organisation. We will remember his sacrifice on humanity's behalf, but recognise this as a chance to forge a fresh path towards the future."
"Azimuth Biotech is now under new management, with myself as its acting CEO. We have lost a great deal of expertise and personnel, but our decades of xenological research will serve a vital purpose in the war against the Thargoids."
"Unfortunately, due to a misguided campaign by radicalised saboteurs, many of our official facilities have been illegally snatched from our control. Yet plans are already underway to rebuild our corporate infrastructure. Of our surviving

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Professor Ishmael Palin has established a permanent base of operations in the Arque system.

Aegis Research confirmed the news with a statement from Professor Alba Tesreau:

"Having fled the Maia system, Professor Palin and his staff have installed their equipment at the planetary port Abel Laboratory on Arque 4 E."

"All of the engineering services previously offered by Professor Palin are now available at his new location. His study of meta-alloys and other Thargoid-related materials has also resumed."

"The megaship Carson's Spring, which facilitated an emergency evacuation of the Palin Research Centre, has left the Arque system to resume other duties."

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We've come across a small treasure today: extracts from a 1994 textbook about game development called The Magic of Interactive Entertainment by Mike Morrison. The book includes a lot of introductory information about building games (some of which is still very accurate!) and an entire chapter focused on the development of Privateer! There's a lot of interesting information here, from sales figures for some of the different games to some never-before-noted details about how Privateer came together. First up is an overview of the Wing Commander series and the work that went into it:

Next is the Privateer chapter, which is truly fascinating:

And we end on a short section covering Wing Commander Academy:

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Since we've kicked off a new console generation this month, it's time for a new poll asking about your preferred platform for a new Wing Commander game. A lot has changed in just the couple years since we asked about mid generation options (Xbox One X/PS4 Pro). For starters, cross-platform play has become much more standard, so it's easy enough to buy the system you want and still play with your friends if they're on a different machine. It's also not uncommon for practically identical versions of a game to be made available for everything from PC to Switch to mobile OSes. We've also added cloud gaming services for the first time. We've grouped them all together since no single service is a major player, but they certainly kind of exist. This stands in stark contrast to promises for the last 15 years or so that such a thing could be viable. There's also been minimal change on the Nintendo side

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As part of Wing Commander's 30th birthday celebrations, people have had a lot of questions about the history of the franchise. A frequent topic is the famous box art used for the original game, which was highly unusual for featuring what purported to be a screenshot. Although it's not an actual reproducible image from the game, that's for good reason! LOAF goes into the details on why this is the way it is below. You can also find our previous coverage on this topic for a line-by-line rundown of what's different between the cover and what actually ends up in space!

I’ve seen a lot of folks talking about the “bullshot” used as the cover of the original Wing Commander and thought I’d try and provide a little background.

First of all: yes, it’s “fake” and not as is sometimes rumored an early build with different graphics. The image itself was created in DeluxePaint by pasting together

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One of my favorite pieces of Wing Commander art is the stylized box of The Secret Missions for the Super Nintendo. It doubles down on the SNES ports' conversion of the Jalthi into a "green Salthi" and puts the new ship front and center. Players got a poster of this depiction when they bought the game, but it's folded into nine squares to fit into the cartridge-size box. elend set out to fix this and has created this nifty version that does away with the crease lines as well as all of the logos and fine print that cluttered up the bottom. It looks pretty slick like this! The thumbnail below pops open a 1080p version, but you can also get it in 5K resolution here (5 meg jpg).

There, no logos, no creases. I might exchange the WC Logo and Title with the vector versions, once I got around to vectorizing this. Also it's AI upscaled.

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Did you know that Wimg Commander’s future history includes a two-century pandemic that forces Earth to quarantine from the rest of the solar system?

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

LOAF has scanned a great article on the making of Wing Commander 3. It appeared in the August 1994 issue of Computer Game Review and followed the game's film shoot. The author talks about the experience with the CGI backdrops as well as the Kilrathi animatronics. There are also sidebar conversations with Chris Roberts and Mark Hamill. It sounds like filming all of the different angles and plot choice variations was as tricky as you might imagine, but they pulled it off well!

Oh, and here's Zephyr, which came out at the same time as WC3 yet somehow had worse graphics than WC1...

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The Internet Archive is an incredible tool providing access to countless terabytes of archived websites, scanned media, imaged disks, preserved video... and a whole bunch of printed biographies of Freddie Prinze Jr.! While exploring the Archive's collection I happened to find they had digitally preserved six biographies of Wing Commander star Freddie Prinze Jr.! Mr. Prinze was something of a teen heartthrob in the late 1990s and so was the subject of a stack of quick 'teen pop' biographies. These 'trashy' unauthorized books were put together quickly, mostly from published interviews and press photographs, and sold at newsstands and book fairs. They were aimed at teenage fans and usually padded out their very simple chapters with press photos and film credits. Naturally, we've pulled out the chapter on Wing Commander from each book and collated them here for your reading pleasure:

Freddie Prinze Jr.:

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I bought a joystick! Normally if it ain’t Thrustmaster I ain’t going, but I think they’ll forgive me for straying in this case... Look at the insane choice of screenshots! One is a clip of the box of a different game! Wild!