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ODVS has a new visual treat for everyone. Even though there's not currently a method to swap the videos into the game itself, he's taken a shot at upscaling the intro cutscene to Wing Commander 3. He recently had tremendous success performing a massive enhancement on the WC4 and Prophecy clips, and this builds on those techniques. Fortunately in this case, he did have the slightly higher quality Playstation clips to work with, although they're still only 320x160 res at 15 fps. It's not too clear if there's a path forward from here with The Heart of the Tiger, but it's still awesome to see! Definitely check out how much more detail there is with the ships and faces.

Hello all, it's been a while since I showed you all something (I've got another project on the go), but I just put this together this evening, tinkering around and experimenting - I thought you might like to see it

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Docteur J from Oldies Games TV is back with a new Wing Commander series. He's covered a number of Wing Commander games on his French YouTube channel over the years, and now it's time for a playthrough of Wing Commander 3. As a special bonus, he's manually splicing in the dramatically enhanced HD videos from ODVS so everything is super sharp. When he started all of this, the audience was mostly limited to French speakers, but YouTube's auto translate feature opens the world up to everyone. Hit the closed captions icon in the bottom and the gear logo for your preferred language. If you're only used to hearing Wing Commander in just one language, it can be a whole new experience to hear a new dub!

Hi all! Here is the start of Let's Play on Wing Commander 3 with the videos in 1080p. Bravo to Owen Davies for his work on the videos.

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It's Friday, so listening to some grumpy gripes seems like a fitting end to a rough week.

Gray Ghosts

Old Grizzled Gamers

has written a quasi-review of Wing Commander 3, and as you might expect, they have some strong thoughts about it. The author is actually harkening back to the 3DO version of WC3, which has some

exciting differences

compared to the PC and Playstation editions. He starts off making fun of all the repetitive transitions, and while most of us quickly turned these off, I don't actually recall off the top of my head if this option was readily available on consoles. Of course, even those transitions were jaw-dropping back in 1994. Despite a few other aspects that haven't aged particularly gracefully, it's clear that they have a soft spot for the game and all its everlasting charm. Check out the full article

here

.

The space combat is what made the game engaging, but it isn’t what made the

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OurStorySoFar

has posted a video review of Wing Commander 3. This one focuses on the Playstation port. While this is decidedly not the best version of the game, there's some neat things such as color VDUs and other interface changes that are interesting to see if you're most familiar with the PC version. The author specifically cites inclusion of the Hobbes explanation clip as one of the reasons to play it on consoles and describes their exclusion on PC as a 'bug'. Amazingly, this was a conscious decision due to disc space limitations, but being able to see all of the extra scenes is definitely a plus here. You might consider going for the 3DO version if you're going to try a port out though. The game was actually enhanced in a variety of ways to better suit the console pacing there - in addition to the extra video content.

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The team behind the WC4 Fan Remake has put together another informative article on some of the unexpected bonuses that have spun off from their core efforts on The Price of Freedom. While working with WC3 assets to better prepare for their WC4 adventure, they've learned a lot about the game's background formats and FMV integration. Some of these experimentally upscaled WC3 artifacts are below. They've even made a high quality Arrow, since that ship also appears in WC4, and they naturally wanted to see what it looked like in WC3 colors! (Spoiler alert: it's gorgeous!) Check out the full article at the WCRespace.com site here.

It was not our intention to port Wing Commander 3 yet, but rather unintentionally we’ve ended up with a bunch of Heart of the Tiger updates.

EXCUSE ME, SIR. DID YOU SAY THE VICTORY?

“Wait what? Wing Commander 3?” I hear you asking.

We don’t want you to get the wrong idea –

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Symphonic Remakes is back with a new reorchestration of a classic Wing Commander track. Up to this point, their focus has been on WC1/2, but now they've jumped forward for a new take on one of George Oldziey's famous WC3 creations. Strike and Escort mission music is first up. Enjoy below!

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Some silly developer jokes slipped into the Wing Commander III PSX credits!

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LeHah is back with yet another fantastic Wing Commander collectible! Already the proud owner of such artifacts as a signed movie soundtrack and double-signed movie poster, he's set a new standard for impressive Wing Commander autographs. Here is his Wing Commander 3 poster with (clockwise from top right) Tom Wilson, François Chau, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies and Mark Hamill all-in-one. Rhys-Davies was his latest addition, and the actor even added "Paladin" to it unprompted. LeHah has been hitting up various conventions and sending away merchandise for years, but it's getting increasingly nerve-wracking to make progress with this one. While the various autographs have cost some $600 in direct money to obtain, the associated time and effort makes it increasingly priceless. I don't know if I'd be able to put this one in the mail and hope for it to return with a sixth signature!

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Today we have a gorgeous Wing Commander 3 spread posted by the Spanish magazine PCMania in 1994. It features a lot of familiar prerelease art, plus gorgeous renders of the Thunderbolt, Longbow and Arrow. Gunnery and flight control are looking good too. The game flow backdrops in WC3 are some of my favorite in the series. At the conclusion of the six page article, the reviewer gives the game a 92% score. Thanks to Maxi de Sokar for the find!

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During the CIC 20th Birthday celebrations we

launched

our

Game Cabinet

feature. This allows you to try out the WC1 and WC2 rolling demos from within your browser - no installation required! By tweaking a few things, we have been able to unlock a bit of extra performance so those demos now run more smoothly. But more importantly, we have been able to add the WC3 playable demo to the collection! The demo features a trailer cinematic followed by a playable mission, although it requires a fairly beefy machine to run completely smoothly. Check it out

here

!

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Christopher Lee has been learning how to use the Maya and After Effects programs for graphics animation, and here's one of his recent tests. He used the Wing Commander 3 introduction as a model to emulate. The results are pretty close! Of course, this also gives us an excuse to post the fantabulous actual WC3 intro for comparison, so enjoy that too. It never gets old.

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DefianceIndustries

has revisited the two iconic Confed heavy fighters of Wing Commander 3. Both the Excalibur and Thunderbolt have been retextured, and the results look great. Thanks to the new normal maps, they have excellent detail without overdoing the greebles.

So I was looking over my stuff on lunch break the other day and realized that I hadn't done any WC3 skins for my Tbolt or Excalibur. I am pleased to say this has been rectified. I also did a few small tweaks to the normal maps to make a few things pop (pun intended) that wasn't as obvious before.

As a side note: a few folks have asked if they can use my renders in their personal projects. My thoughts on that in general are that if I post it up here on the forums the community is perfectly welcome to them. Go forth and be creative! I only ask that if you do use my renders I get a nod somewhere in the credits is all.

As always fellow wing

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Today we have a new set of scans from the Spanish OKPC magazine. Maxi de Sokar sent us the WC3 Preview about a month ago, and now we have the full review. It once again features that crazy Spanish WC3 art front and center and it also reuses the "La X Continua" theme. There's plenty of glorious screenshots throughout, and the game gets a whopping 96%. Check it out below!

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AD has done a little digging and found some interesting new aspects to a wild Wing Commander 3 promotion. We've previously reported about the contest to win a flight aboard a "Russian fighter jet" that was part of the WC3 marketing campaign. It was apparently an even larger event than we knew with French adverts to fly a MiG rather than the Su-27 called out in English fine print (despite them using the same fighter jet image). They do seem to refer to separate trip rewards, however, based on slight differences in what the prize packages entail (different date ranges, mention of spending money, supplemental US trip details, etc). The images below also show how there was a red box sleeve band around certain copies of the game to advertise everything, which is pretty neat. These copies are still listed on eBay for collectors out there! English & French

And here's more detail from our previous posts!

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Destro recently launched a big update to his Wing Loader program that adds speech to WC1. In preparation for a future update that would aim to add high quality videos into WC3, Destro made this simple patch to upgrade the commercially available GOG DOS edition into an updated Kilrathi Saga Windows version. I think a couple iterations of this have been made by various folks over the years, but it's still good to have a modern update handy. You can grab the patch here (51 meg zip). You can also learn more about and download the current edition of Wing Loader here.

Also on another note, I made up a little patch that will upgrade the GOG version of WC3 to the Kilrathi Saga version. Trying to make Wing Loader work with current purchase options available for the games.

WING COMMANDER 3 GOG TO Kilrathi Saga

1) Install Wing Commander 3 via GOG.
2) Right Click DATA.DAT inside Wing Commander III and use

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CountvonSchnaps has sketched out a wonderful take on the Southampton class destroyer. It's a very sturdy and recognizable design, and the artist has accentuated the iconic features really well. We get an aft view here, so the turrets, engines and small flight deck are in view. It reminds me of the familiar perspective we would see from the Victory's bar or bridge. This is their only Wing Commander designs, but they have many more sci-fi ships in a gallery here.

Another universe (game) I recall with fond memories is the Wing Commander franchise so did my take on the already interesting WC3 Southampton Class destroyer. I made it an upgraded version but kept the general feel and structure intact. It is still armed with 9 dual turrets: 2 heavy anti matter turrets (dual barrel) and 7 laser cannons. It has also a heavy missile launcher and is capable to carry a half wing (2x Arrow light fighters) or a

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Today we've got a video about graphically impressive videos from the 1990s. It includes a pretty straightforwards clip from Wing Commander 3. While I never get tired of an opportunity to watch some WC footage, I think the interesting part here is seeing so many of its contemporaries side by side. There's some great and great looking games in this clip, but it also really makes you appreciate how Wing Commander was so ahead of its time! WC3 is the finale chapter at 15:30.

I thought I would spoil you guys with something bigger than usual - an impressive list, if I don't say so myself. A lot of research went to this. The editing was a pain in the rear, but ultimately I think you will find it informative.

----

During the nineties pc gaming was king, pushing the boundaries of what we considered to be cutting-edge. MS-DOS was still the predominant operating system for gaming, only to be superseded by

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Dave's garage has hosted an interview with Raymond Chen, one of the developers of Windows 95. He has a fun anecdote about Microsoft's mission to minimize compatibility issues with the operating system. When testing Wing Commander 3, they detected an error that would occur when pressing Control+C to cloak at the end of the game. The conflicting behavior highlighted some broken logic around accepting keystrokes, which spurred them to change how Copy/Paste was interpreted behind the scenes. It's a cool story! I'm not sure who managed to stumble across this scenario: WC3 DOS didn't really run in Windows - it was a classic "Reboot in MS-DOS Mode" game, but this could have come in handy by the time The Kilrathi Saga came around!

Microsoft developers once drove a truck to Egghead in order to buy ONE of EVERYTHING! Dave interviews Raymond Chen, Win95 developer, about the time they took a truck to EggHead

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If you have “Dick Clark” on your WCNews bingo card, today’s your lucky day! Ripplin spotted this gem in a Classic TV repost of Dick Clark’s The Return of TV Censored Bloopers. These are well known outtakes that show up in various compilations, but it’s pretty awesome to see they were broadcast to a huge audience here. In the mid 1990s, Wing Commander 3 and 4 were rare success stories to cross over to the television circuit like this. Long before tech stations like G4 and modern steaming, this was a rare mainstream glimpse into the digital world. It’s kind of a reverse time capsule: for some of our younger fans, this is what passed for prime Sunday evening TV!

Dick Clark presenting what he says "might be the world's first CD-ROM blooper" featuring Hamill in Wing Commander III.

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Here's another glorious pair of scans that LOAF just made. It's the advertising slick from Japan. This sell sheet would have been circulated to stores and other outlets in mid 1996 to promote the Japanese language conversion of the game for Playstation. It was apparently scheduled for a September 13 release (compared with March 27 for the English version). There's some absolutely gorgeous Excalibur art here along with plenty of text highlights. This would have certainly hyped me up for the game!

The live image Google Translator on this is pretty wild:

A huge story that takes place in space. A dogfight fighter that flies in galaxies. Bring your life to life with SFX Creatures that show strange movements... If only I was able to participate...