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This week's movie seems like an interesting one: Go for Broke! (1951). It's the story of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, the heroic all-Nisei army unit that served with great distinction in Italy during World War II (and in so doing brought even greater shame to America's horrible policy of Japanese American internment). That's a story that we're interested to hear… but we're also cautious that it's from 1951 when there was a very different understanding of World War II! It should be interesting to learn more. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

What's the Wing Commander connection? It's a weird one! The title of the movie, Go for Broke!, is an expression meaning 'give it all'. It's the motto of the 442nd regiment and... and it's the name of a ship that doesn't appear in Wing Commander II! The missions for the 3space Wing Commander games store all of the ships that can appear in a

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The last time we saw CountvonSchnaps they were making some handsome cat fighters... and now they're taking things in a direction you couldn't have predicted! The good Count has now posted their take on another one of the Wing Commander universe's signature ships... Privater 2: The Darkening's famous Heretic! Amazing to see a Privateer 2 design re-interpreted like this.

Privateer 2: Heretic Medium Fighter (DeviantArt)

A (re)design of a well known medium fighter in Privateer 2 The Darkening... the Heretic Medium fighter. In use in the civilian market the fighter is in use by mercenaries, smugglers and pirates alike.

This commission was made for Heretic1311 and asked for a bronze blue color scheme and little to no markings... since the craft in question is in use by a privateer.

Fun design of a great game I enjoyed playing... already quite some time ago.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

It can be hard to find archival scans of the American PC Gamer magazine online; the magazine's lawyers did a good job of taking down preserved material for a time and now it lags behind other collections. And there's one PC Gamer issue that Wing Commander fans likely remember better than most others: the October 1996 "Origin's Cutting Edge" issue. This was the first place we saw art from Wing Commander Academy, the finished form of Privateer 2, mention of the Wing Commander movie, details on Ultima IX and Ultima Online and mentions of lots of cancelled projects like a Privateer 2 crossover and an Academy game. We posted some of the Wing Commander-related pages fourteen years ago but I find myself trying to find the rest of it all the time... so we're dropping it in the archive today. The articles include a cover, an extensive interview with Richard Garriott, previews of several games and a

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

If you're looking for a funny romantic movie then… Ten Thousand Bedrooms is not that. Much like The Dam Busters, it's clearly a movie designed for sensibilities that simply no longer exist. With an interminable run time, few songs worth listening to and a meandering barely-a-story that goes nowhere slowly. The sets and the exterior shots of 1950s Rome are nice, though! And the cast is certainly compelling, though their characters are not.

Which is to say that Anna Maria Alberghetti is at least pretty impressive! And we've enjoyed learning about her this past week: she was a successful teen music star who became an actress. She's best remembered for her work onstage but she headlined a number of movies similar to Ten Thousand Bedrooms. And she kept her star power for decades; Secret Ops' writers may have best known her from a series of popular salad commercials in the 1980s where she played herself!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

An agreement has reportedly been reached between October Consortium and a coalition of the remaining Powers within the enclave, ending large-scale hostilities in the region.
The "October Accords" formally places HIP 87621 under the custodianship of October Consortium who will act as chair between the remaining enclave powers to ensure neutrality is maintained.
Under the terms, the corporation will also retain responsibility for system security and commercial rights, with authority to defend those interests if challenged.
The talks are also understood to have focused on shared scientific access to Radicoida unica and cooperation on research initiatives following the recent publication of promising genetic findings by Dr Casimir of the Holloway Bioscience Institute.
The coalition involved - an informal alignment of Imperial, Alliance and independent Power forces – had recently announced a

Quote from Freelancer News-Bot

Our beloved space arcade shooter is like all of us getting older by every year. Thanks to the community and every member of it, this game is relevant and is getting more and more content from its community every year. Like last year, we are celebrating this event with a large 6 Day Event Series with showcases and Server Events across the board, all live-streamed, so if you can't join or are not in the mood to play, you will not miss it.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Napoleon famously said that "a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon" and he was most likely thinking of the original Wing Commander. In addition to its famous medal system, Wing Commander I has something not seen in any of the later games: an accompanying achievement-style system that awards players those bits of colored ribbons for specific in-game achievements like scoring five kills or flying ten missions. We decided to take a closer look at this system… and we were surprised by what we discovered!

Many of Wing Commander's ribbons have been mislabeled online for decades for two very good reasons: difficulties and errors in labeling in Claw Marks and a bug that has been with the game since its original version. Wing Commander I has twelve different ribbons that are awarded throughout the game. Two of them are story-related and have actually been given to you before you fly

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We've said it before and we'll say it again... better late than never! Thanks to your suggestions we now have the official slate of nominees for both of our 2025 awards: Fan Project of the Year and Hall of Fame. For Fan Project, pick the one that you believe is most exciting today and for Hall of Fame put your mind back to the early days of Wing Commander and choose which classic fan or project to honor! We encourage you to vote for your choices before March 15th -- we'll announce the winners on first contact day. We had lots of great suggestions this year and we hope your preferences have made it to this stage.

• Wing Commander AllTinker Overhaul Mod - Origin couldn't do it... a generation of fans couldn't do it... but 36 years after the release of the original Wing Commander, AllTinker has done it! They've produced a beautiful patch that limits the game's speed and makes it function as it was intended

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Back in 2021, a wingnut named Rehsin did some incredible work that we covered here including the Wing Commander I Christmas Edition and the Wing Commander I Face Mod. There's egg on our face today because we've realized we never reported on a third project updated just after those: a very nice mission editor for Wing Commander I and Wing Commander II!

I was working on a Wing Commander II-related project and happened across the ModDB page for Wing Commander Editor 1.2 and was shocked to find a fascinating little piece of software! It lets you change (and for my use examine) the campaign files from Wing Commander I and II and all four mission disks. It quickly became part of my daily WC toolkit… and then I realized we'd never posted it here!

We've added a copy to our archive here (2 megs). Resin has a page of their Wing Commander work here (which includes some other neat stuff including a comic and a

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The Wing Commander movie club can report that Ten Thousand Bedrooms was... not spectacular. In spite of it being a pretty bland movie we did make a pretty surprising Wing Commander discovery! But you'll have to wait until Friday to learn about that. This week we're going back to our roots and watching a movie that pretty much anyone reading this will love: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

Star Trek II is obviously a massively important movie that clearly helped shape countless IPs including Wing Commander. But what's the specific connection? This one is a bit of a followup to our look at THX-1138: the 'other' jokey credit for a Mandarin pilot in Special Operations 2 is Mandarin #16309... which is a reference to the USS Reliant's transponder code!

We don't have a gender bending mystery here but we do have a bit more audio! Mandarin #16309,

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

If you're a fan of Wing Commander composer George "The Fat Man" Sanger or mid-1990s edutainment then you may be interested to learn that he's offering the soundtrack to Pajama Sam 3 on vinyl through his Bandcamp page! These Humongous games are in the middle of a cultural renaissance right now so we'll bet it's going to be a big success. Which leads to the next question: could he put out any of his spectacular Wing Commander soundtracks physically? The fact that his team seems to have registered the 'fatmanvinyl.com' domain leaves us at least hopeful. Here's their initial announcement:

I am so excited to announce we are finally pressing George's delicious so-Fat-they're-Humongous tunes to licorice pizza. He and I both believe every turntable is born to play jazz, so we're gonna make that happen for you.

This is an EXTREMELY LIMITED EDITION (150 units total in this pressing) 12" LP featuring a selection

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut event happening on Discord this morning! Join us at noon EST/9 AM PST for a fun filled morning of television... that all connect to Wing Commander somehow! This time around we're traveling back in time to the early 1990s to celebrate some of the terrible shows the original Privateer team apparently enjoyed (or just couldn't look away from). You can find details on the shows included as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. Be sure to download the episodes so they're ready to play with the group!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

By popular demand we aren't going to let February 14 end without a visit from the Love Arrow... now available in three distinct styles!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

I don't know that we would say THX 1138 is a movie that you sit down and explicitly enjoy but it is pretty fascinating. As a work of art, it's superb. It follows in the footsteps of dystopian futures like the ones imagined by Huxley and Orwell mated with the same sort of 1970s washed out tomorrow you'd find in things like Logan's Run or Beneath the Planet of the Apes. There's very little handholding, either; you're expected to figure out the world and what's going on quickly and before the film gets too far away from you. It was also very interesting seeing how much of THX's future ends up in Lucas' Star Wars six years later. It's a bit like playing an early alpha of a beloved video game, in that respect!

The big literal connection to Wing Commander (and many, many other things) was the name of the movie and lead character, THX 1138. THX is played by a much younger Robert Duvall and the designation

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film, special for Valentine's Day, is Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

And don't forget our seventh Wing Commander Cartoon party is early tomorrow!

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Distant Worlds 3 expedition has confirmed a series of key achievements as its diverse fleet continues toward an unexplored region of the galaxy.
Expedition control reported that the flotilla has successfully cleared inhabited space and completed its first major staging objective at Colonia, designated Waypoint One of the current route. Colonia served as the fleet's primary logistics and regrouping hub before the start of extended deep-range operations.
While the fleet consolidated in the Colonia area, many independent commanders carried out a hazardous surface insertion on a lifeless rocky world informally dubbed the "Monde de la Mort" by pilots. The landing has been cited by organisers as one of the most technically demanding surface operations of the expedition so far due to its dangerously close orbit around the white dwarf star of Spoihaae XE-X d2-9.
The fleet has since reached

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's a deep and useful look at some obscure gear: mkdud1 has posted a control map for the 3DO CH Flightstick Pro and a look at how to restore their potentiometers! The distinct CH Flightstick Pro is probably familiar to a lot of classic fans… but fewer know that a version was also released for the 3DO which was explicitly supported by Super Wing Commander and Wing Commander III! Tracking down (or emulating) a Flightstick Pro makes the 3DO Wing Commandering experience a truly beautiful thing. If you'd like to know more, you can find the original thread on Reddit.

Here is a map for the CH Flightstick Pro controls for 3DO SWC. I have updated this on 1-18-26 to include some of the hat functions; this is helpful during combat when you want to send a quick taunt during combat or a command to your wingman. The slightly hidden red printing for the right shift button reads "Right Shift with B = Brake to 0,

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The work continues! Our exploration of Wing Commander Prophecy's hidden mechanics has been taking longer than we expected but we are ready to premiere the WCPedia pages for the second series... along with a couple of fascinating discoveries! This week we are looking at the G'wriss Series which introduces enemy capital ships and gives you the first look at the multi-wing strikes that make a lot of Prophecy missions so cool! There are six missions in series C but you will only encoutner three of them in any given playthrough. C1 is the same for everyone and we've discovered some cool secrets there. C2 is decided based on how much damage the Midway takes in C1, with more damage meaning more NAV points to visit (just one in C2a, two in C2b and three in C2c).

You can find the individual pages for the first series missions below.

• C1: G'wriss - Convoy Rescue
• C2a: G'wriss - Alien Starship Encounter
• C2b:

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Back in 2024, we made an interesting discovery: we identified that the 'pin up' poster briefly seen in Lieutenant Blair's quarters in the Wing Commander was made from a stock photo that had been reused in other places! This conclusively disproved an old (and already very unlikely) piece of IMDb trivia that it was a photograph of Sarah Michelle Gellar and it brought us to a new question: who was the stock photo model?

As unlikely as it seems, we now have an answer... because she stopped by the forums to tell us herself! Her name is Rae Cline and a portfolio shoot made it into a stock photo collection way back when. Here's her story:

Hi Bandit LOAF. The woman is me. Yes, it is from stock footage. The photographer is Jack Cutler. You can find him on IG @jack_cutler_foto. You can find me on Instagram, too, @raeclineauthor.

I never received any royalties for the stock photo in Wing Commander, of course, but