Wing Commander

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Look at that little thing go! The Mars Perseverance team successfully flew the Ingenuity helicopter today. The first powered flight on another planet. Despite all the Earthly setbacks of the past year, it's just wonderful to see the progress still being made.

Witness the historic moment in full. The Mastcam-Z cameras on @NASAPersevere show us the takeoff, hovering and landing of the #MarsHelicopter. pic.twitter.com/ypdIWmC4D1

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 19, 2021

  

Have you heard? We flew a craft on another world for the first time ever with flying colors. Now, relive the scene in Mission Control as news of Ingenuity's nail-biting takeoff made it back to Earth.#MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/ER25G6uhdp

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 20, 2021

  

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Wing Commander mouse pads are relatively rare, but they do exist and they're crazy cool. Most people would be lucky to have one in their collection, but Dennis Mull now has three different ones just for Wing Commander 4! He is undoubtedly the coolest kid on his block!

New old mousepad arrived

Another Wing Commander IV Promo Mousepad

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Here's a nice preview of Wing Commander 3 from the October 1994 issue of the UK PC Games magazine. I don't see the connection between the "Resistance is Useless!" headline and anything else in the article, but everyone was still enamored with the Borg and all back then. The tone of the article is infectious and really gets readers pumped that WC3 is the start of something big. And for a time, it really was! The main scans are from Pix and AD found the cover. They sure picked a funny game to lead with that month - not a lot of people still talking about Inferno these days!

It has to be said that Wing 3 looks like it's the closest you're going to get to taking part in a sweeping space opera. Forget Battlestar Galactica, skip Star Wars - if Origin delivers everything it promises, Wing 3 looks set to be the start of the next generation of PC CD games.

If the 7th Guest was the excuse people needed to

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Here's a recorded copy of the George Oldziey live streaming event last year. We had posted about the interview in the run up, but never shared the final link. George talks with the Los Angeles College of Music where is is part of the Composing For Visual Media faculty. This was at the height of the summer coronavirus wave and they were finding creative ways for people to connect. It's an hourlong conversation, and most of the first twenty minutes or so are on his history with Wing Commander. They talk about how he got hired into Origin and into detail on how he orchestrated the games' music. There's even footage of the live WC orchestra recording that he crowdfunded several years back. It's a fun and informative watch!

Composing For Visual Media Faculty GEORGE OLDZIEY, gives us a behind-the-scenes look into his creative process for film scoring and orchestration! George is an award-winning

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Plywood Fiend has a new video inspired by Google Translate memes. When you translate a string of text from one language to another and then back again to the first language, the results can be bizarre. While there are a handful of hilarious results, it's also almost as interesting to see how much lines stay pretty close the original despite the double translation. See what happens when the first Enyo mission gets wrung through the wringer below:

Earlier I chanced upon some google translate parody videos and, ever a slave to my passing whimsies

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Chronocidal Guy has returned with an update on his elaborate 3D printed Excalibur model. He's taken advantage of valuable stay-at-home time over the last year to refine the design into a number of purposeful modules that come together into a highly accurate representation, complete with exquisite panel lines. The guns, engines and other components have also been finely modeled to closely resemble the originals. His finished product looks superb, but there's always room for further tinkering and enhancement in the future!

Hey folks, I figured I'd drop an update on this project after all this time. The pandemic gave me a lot of time to work from home, so it was a big opportunity to let my printer operate in the background. I didn't want to necro any old print threads, or derail someone else's, but if any mods think it's appropriate, feel free to merge this one with another topic. I mostly didn't want

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GalaxyCon's Freddie Prinze Jr. signing event is happening soon! The cutoff is this weekend for fans who would like to get an autographed Wing Commander poster. It's not cheap, but there aren't very many opportunities to have Wing Commander stars sign things these days. A simple/personalized autograph is $92, and a short quote adds an additional $30. It comes on a cool 11x14" sheet, which is itself nice to have and suitable for framing. Get your order in here by Sunday!

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KRANT! It’s time to answer one of the great universal questions: do they have, y’know... two?

Short answer: yes? There are two cockpits on the VDU and if you look closely at the sprites you can see two distinct cockpits on the 3D model.

And here’s what the Claw Marks art looks like mirrored so you just see the top. Head canon: they’re bubble canopies and the Kilrathi pilot and weapons officer (maybe?) can give each other thumbs ups.

But nothing twin-cockpit can stay: when the Krant was redesigned for Super Wing Commander it lost its most distinct feature. Designer Sean Murphy, who would go on to create the TCS Midway, said he was asked not to refer to the original.

Even the Nintendo Power comic parodying Wing Commander I has only a central cockpit:

The Krant shows up in the Wing Commander movie script but I don’t think any serious concept art was developed. It was dropped early to save the overworked FX

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Thanks in no small part to UnnamedCharacter's WC Toolbox, we've seen lots of fans undertake some pretty amazing WC1 hacks from inserting new ships to whole language conversions. YPersonified has another slick project, which is a straight clean-up of the original game's text and dialogue. WC1 has a handful of typos, misspellings, mixed up grammar and odd formatting. You might not have even ever noticed it, but there's room for improvement, and (after more than 30 years) YPersonified is doing the improving! Some examples are included below. You can try out what he's fixed so far by unzipping the contents of this file (211 k zip) into your gamedat folder. Help share feedback or point out additional items here.

Wing Commander - Improved GAMEDAT Files

The project of fan-edited GAMEDAT files from Wing Commander for better gameplay experience. The work is mostly focused on slightly demanding but basic

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Inspired by UnnammedCharacter's WC Toolbox and Marty2Life's recent German translation, L@Zar0 has put together a brand new Spanish translation! He's been steadily making progress for the past month, so releases are available for both Wing Commander 1&2, plus both Secret Missions and Special Operations. This is a wonderful surprise for fans trying to play the classics in their native language, and there's even hope that he might tackle Privateer in the future. You can download the WC1/SM package here (4 meg zip) and the WC2/SO package here (5 meg zip). Readmes are included with more instructions or you can learn more at these pages at his site. This should work for either the original DOS or GOG versions. Even if you're not up for playing through the game in another language, check out these juicy images of it in action!

I want to give the thanks to UnnamedCharacter (and the members) that have

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We're rewinding the clock back a few more years today with a classic article from the December 1991 issue of PC Games. The First and Final Frontier talks about the surge space-themed games hitting the market in the early 1990s, including Wing Commanders 1 & 2. There are a few other promising games of the day mentioned, but there are big throwbacks and comparisons to the WC series. It's also got some really funky early '90s art, which was also typical of the day.

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Marvelous Videos has put together a feature on underappreciated sci-fi films from the 1990s. Yeah, it's a little click-baity and their pronunciation of certain terms is just bizarre, but they lead off with Wing Commander as the first must-see film on the list. I also wholeheartedly agree that "fans will be amazed to see how loyal the story is to the film," but perhaps not in the same manner as they intended it.

Given how extensive the subject matter actually is, there is no other film genre that can match up to the creativeness and originality of science fiction. Thanks to this particular genre, we have been able to witness an exciting array of remarkable, mind-boggling movies. But, while it is true that we fondly remember flicks like The Terminator, Independence Day, Men In Black, The Matrix, Inception, and Avatar amongst many others, there also seems to be an entire range of the sci-fi genre that

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Today we've got a double feature of articles from Computer Games Strategy Plus. The first one is a brief blurb in the follow-up to E3 that year. There's not much info on the game, but a few elements really date the article. First, in 1996, we were still a ways from E3 being a giant online spectacle. Given standard lead times, it would just be natural that news from the springtime event would be trickling out in the August issue (which would have appeared on shelves 1-2 months afterwards). Also on the game picking up the "Privateer" title, they note gamers have "always wanted an updated version of that classic." That's a funny take from our perspective nearly thirty years after P1's release.

The second article is the big one. It's got a fantastic cover celebrating the game, plus a huge two-page feature with plenty of exotic art. They talk about the interactive movie's story, open world setting,

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AD found this spectacularly awesome clip of doctorcdcs playing The Secret Missions 2. We've all been there before: head to head against a Dralthi, guns destroyed, out of missiles, out of afterburner fuel, no more front armor and splash damage erupting all around. But do we call it quits? No! doctorcdcs demonstrates exactly what makes the original Wing Commander such a perfect game. You can just feel the tension right through your screen as if you were there. Watch the one-minute snippet to see how it ends!

Who needs guns and afterburners when all you really need is a ship and a dream?

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AD came along an interesting Wing Commander sale at Movies Anywhere. As we reported a number of years ago, Movies Anywhere is a unifying service that allows your digital purchase from one storefront to appear in your library at many others. This includes Apple/iTunes, Amazon, Microsoft/Xbox, Google/YouTube and Vudu. Today's sale offers up free access to one of ten films if you buy one of a corresponding movie, including Wing Commander. Interestingly enough, WC is included in the Disney/Fox category, although the distribution rights have been a bit murky since reverting to Chris Roberts a few years back. Wing Commander briefly disappeared from storefronts and the disc copies went out of print, but it's since become widely available in digital format again for about $10.

As we continue into year two of the coronavirus pandemic, a small number of virtual conveniences have cropped up that I hope are

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DefianceIndustries has managed to insert another animated-style Wing Commander ship to the original WC1 engine. This time it's the Hornet, and the process turned out to be a little bit trickier than the Tiger's Claw import. The results are very cool though!

On the subject of a larger conversion pack, Defiance has some thoughts on how to integrate the different fleets. Some of the ships, like the Tiger's Claw, Scimitar or Fralthi are directly depicted in the cartoon show. But there's no Rapier or Salthi - would a WCA Sabre or Sartha be a good replacement? Check out the proposed swaps and share what you think would be a good fit!

So I continue my playing around and started working on fighters. Fighters are different beasts a bit from the WC1 capships as they have to be scaled appropriately (if you render the sprite too large, they appear giant in the game). My experiments yielded the best results at

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Interested in the Wing Commander Movie but not willing to commit the 95 minutes it takes to watch the whole thing? Or do you have a friend you need to quickly get up to speed without watching the entire film? The Movie Fanatic channel has you covered with a five-minute mini cut with key scenes and a comprehensive story overview. The weird content farm nature of their channel and the computerized narration voice comes across as pretty sketchy, but it's actually not the worst summary edit of the film I've ever seen. If it's been a while since your last viewing, this is a nice quick watch to jog your memory.

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If you missed Matthew Lillard's Wing Commander Movie script reading on Friday, the segment has been archived on Twitch. It's not overly hammy, which is impressive, and it's genuinely nice to hear what fond memories Mr. Lillard had of the film's production. Most of the Beadles and Grimm's team tried to get into the atmosphere with WC backgrounds and do their best with material that they're not as intimately familiar with as you or I might be. It was also fun to hear Lillard's recollections on the differences between early script and finished movie.

And that's not all! They really got into the spirit of things with a full scale Wing Commander-themed April Fools joke on Thursday. It's the perfect kind of prank where you wonder for a split second if it's real, but without any kind of crushing letdown that mocks the reader or anyone else. The idea is that they were putting together a "Platinum Maniac

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There's a very cool event happening this evening on the Beadle & Grimm's Twitch stream. Matthew Lillard and the streamers will be doing a table read of key scenes from the Wing Commander Movie! This could be a ton of ridiculous fun. Head over to their channel here at 7 pm Pacific time / 10 pm Eastern and tune in!

Come tune in for a table read of select scenes from Wing Commander tonight at 7pm PT!

You might recall this 1999 sci-fi film was preceded by the first-ever trailer to Star Wars: A Phantom Menace.

Now you get to see it again, but with a *slightly* smaller budget.

Tonight! 7pm PT! Join us live on Twitch for a once in a lifetime event!!

See @MatthewLillard once again as Lt. Todd 'Maniac' Marshall as the B&G crew, @nouralogical and @MikaelaVSims read select scenes from the critically acclaimed film, WING COMMANDER. https://t.co/rljbkdmrsu pic.twitter.com/Wk9Wc4N3oQ

— Beadle & Grimm’s 🎲🎲

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Here's a spectacular experiment conducted by DefianceIndustries. Goliath and UnnammedCharacter made some great headway a couple years ago on adding enhanced models into the original WC1 engine, and Defiance has taken that in a different direction. He's taken his animated series-style Tiger's Claw and converted it into a collection of sprites to be displayed in game. The result is that players are now able to fly around a Bengal straight out of the Academy television show. What a trip! Let Defiance know if you'd like to test this out or if there would be interest in a conversion pack with more ships.

So I was playing around with the WCt Toolbox and decided to try and make a WC1 mod. So I took my WCA Bengal and converted it into a sprite sheet. It was a larger process than I originally thought but it is kinda fun to do this sort of messing around. Admittedly I stand on the shoulders of giants here.