Wing Commander

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This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.

Our Polaroid research continues to produce surprising stories: this time, we've found a justified star. Or at least... the star of Justified! While the label on the photograph reads "BW Pilot Garret 'Moose'", the actor in question is none other than Walton Goggins (credited as Walt Goggins). Moose appears in the Peleus jamming scene, one of the three Border Worlds Banshee pilots that are ambushed and shot down by a flight of Excaliburs. The Polaroid gives us a great look at a Border Worlds flight suit, which the production dyed grey from the original tan Confederation suits with some minor alterations (like the Union of Border Worlds patch on his left shoulder).

Credited as Border Worlds Pilot #3, Mr. Goggins would quickly go from nearly faceless tertiary

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It's officially the season of giving now, so here's our annual recap of Wing Commander items to gift to your friends and family - or help round out your own collection! The most popular deal continues to be the discounted digital purchases of Wing Commander games. They're 75% off for the next week at GOG.com.

One new addition this year is the MT-32 Archival Edition of Team Fat's classic Wing Commander 1 audio album. It's a super sized sampling of some stellar WC tunes. I also can't recommend a physical copy of Academy on DVD highly enough. They're dirt cheap and preserve you ability to watch the show forever!

CIC Drink Coasters are also 25% off today!

Games ($1.49 each)
Wing Commander 1&2 Wing Commander 3 Wing Commander 4 DVD Wing Commander Prophecy & Secret Ops	Wing Commander Privateer Wing Commander Privateer 2 Wing Commander Academy Wing Commander Armada

Movies & TV

Academy DVD: Amazon $7.99 | Walmart

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Happy Thanksgiving out there to Wingnuts who celebrate! We hope you are all able to have a safe and healthy day with your families. As a prime Pilgrim-themed holiday, it's a good opportunity for us to remind you that the third and final Wing Commander Movie novel, Pilgrim Truth, is available online. And of course, it's not all about the Pilgrims. Native partners, such as the Mopoks and Dolosians, were critical in the effort to defeat the Kilrathi!

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The crew of the TCS Majestic is gearing up for their final battle and conclusion of a two year campaign. Everything culminates this weekend in the Gemini Sector RPG. This won't be the end of the group's online roleplay adventures, but it does mark the end of a major story arc. Even if it feels like an odd time to join in, the group welcomes all to join and watch at their Discord server! It sounds like they'll have a great time. Check out a few associated vids to set the scene below:

The crew ready for a final strike on the Zhelnar tactical carrier. This is the final mission of the Nitir Campaign. If the pilots manage to destroy the carrier, the kilrathi presence in Ragnarok will be destabilized to a point where ISS can safely protect the colonies.

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Andrea Contato is back with a new series of retro gaming history books. He's planned out everything from the 1970s through today in five volumes. The first couple are already researched and written, and he's now in the process of translating them from Italian to English. These earlier issues won't quite get to Wing Commander's timeframe, but his previous books on the History of Origin Systems were interesting and insightful looks back at the company's history. You can still order these at his website - the hardcover version is currently on sale, although it looks like the WC-themed extra (bookmarks and cloth art) are probably out. You can also learn more about his new project here.

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Today we've got a pair of fabulous 3D printed bombers to show off. They're the latest creations by Adm_Maverick. These are some of the biggest pilotable craft out there, and at nearly a foot long, they've been built to an appropriately hefty scale. This allows for some of the detailed elements like turrets to really stand out. Mav has some quirks that they'd ideally like to correct, but I think the results are already pretty fantastic. Bravo!

Printed up, and assembled the parts for a Longbow heavy bomber. There is something I really like about of the Longbow. Sadly the printing process was somewhat uneven resulting in some warping and deformations. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do about it. I could make new parts, reprint the original parts with different settings, or maybe create new files to be printed. On a side note, I need to do some number crunching but I think this might actually be

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Mac has another gorgeous wallpaper image ready to grace your desktops. It shows a pair of Sabres racing away after a successful strike on a Fralthra. In keeping with his recent Johnny Greene theme, he's dubbed this one "Ramona's Revenge" after the late Lt Cmdr Ramona Chekova. This one's pretty intense, but a beauty to look at all the same!

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Today we've got a new scan previewing the release of The Secret Missions on the Super Nintendo. AD found it in the November 1993 issue of Super Action. I love how colorful and exciting everything looks. We get plenty of screenshots of spaceflight, life aboard the Claw and of the special new War Hammer XII cutscene added to the game. The images repeat film-reel style across to top to sell how cinematic something like this was considered at the time. As was also common back then, there are also some basic tips for how to approach the different types of missions. You heard it here first: "a lot more technical," "big improvements all around" and "a lot more depth than the original!"

The sequel appears a lot more technical than the original, basically because of all the options and choices on offer. The amount of onboard information you can punch up with a slight slap of your joy pad is staggering.

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GOG is holding a special sale this weekend on games from the Electronic Arts catalog! This means you can get the Wing Commander series for 75% off. If you've already completed your WC collection, Bioforge, Crusader and the other Crusader are also on sale!

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The long awaited Artemis mission has finally lifted off! If you were like all of us in #Wingnut, you were glued to your screens to watch the historic event. But since everything went down at nearly 2 am US Eastern time, here's a quick recap video if you haven't had the pleasure of watching the Space Launch System rocket launch. This marks the beginning of a 26 day mission to reach and circle the moon. Crewed missions will follow, and with steady progress, this could be a big step towards reaching Mars. Congrats to all of the many people who helped make this possible!

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This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.

Today's polaroid led us to several interesting stories. Pictured here as "Confed Cap #3" is actor Charles "Chip" Esten. Since appearing as a featured extra in Wing Commander IV, Esten has gone on to a considerable amount of success including appearing as a series regular on ABC drama Nashville, playing Josh Porter on The Office and on multiple iterations of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. Mr. Esten is very active today and even retweeted our request to help identify his polaroid!

The polaroid gives you a good look at a Terran Confederation Navy jacket complete with a name and rank that aren't visible on screen (JARVIS and Lieutenant Commander, respectively). Wing Commander Prophecy would later establish a different canonical rank for Lieutenant Commander (three

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Inspired by Nightball's Hellcat model, L.I.F. is back with a neat plan to upgrade his Freelancer/Wing Commander conversion mod. His original program allows you to play through the regular Freelancer campaign, but with familiar WC ships! Now he's looking at addressing the open ended portion of the game. Some of the new features are described below.

I've gone back to the mod and am adding some further features. The release being targeted is an open-ended sandbox, so without the original game's campaign. I've added a small chance for military-grade equipment to drop from destroyed military fighters, with the understanding that the player will not be allowed to buy them in any circumstance whatsoever, thus providing a long-term end-game goal rather than quickly becoming utterly overpowered.

The other thing I am working on right now is capital ship patrols: destroyers and corvettes that will patrol core

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Nightball06 has finally accomplished the lengthy mission to model his Hellcat fighter. As you might recall, he previously made an intricately detailed two dimensional sketch of the medium fighter from Wing Commander 3. It took him a while to find a partner with which to add the extra dimension, but he did manage to connect with such an artist and the results are below. The first image shows the new model, and the second is his original sketch (and Klavs' Wildcat, which was also an inspiration). Hit the discuss link to let him know what you think!

IT IS DONE!!! Ladies and gentlemen - May I present you:

The F-86E "Hellcat V refit". With the help of a very talented 3D-artist from Israel called "lexa6ix" I was able to finalize my vision.

It was a blast to work with him - especially because I was able to present and discuss my ideas, which he then knew how to make real. And because of that - I was even

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Darkmage DMJC has some great news for WC4 fans on Linux. After years of steady progress, he reports that the latest build of Wine successfully runs GOG's DVD version of the game. There's a particular checkbox in the winecfg file that you need to make sure is unmarked, but after that, it should be fairly smooth sailing. As with anything like this, there's always the potential for unique hardware/software configurations to produce new hiccups, so hit up the CIC Forums or Discord if you encounter issues!

Wing Commander IV DVD edition works on Linux! Set this in winecfg. If that box is ticked it fails. Also run regsvr32 Mpeg2DecFilter.ax and regsvr32 ac3filter.ax to make sure the codecs are installed.

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Zounds: the sketchy Chandrilan banker on the latest Andor is played by Richard Dillane... who was Hunter in Wing Commander! I did not notice this at all, credit to AD!

Let's think through other Wing Commander movie veterans in Star Wars... Hugh Quarshie was Mr. Obutu and Naboo's Captain Panaka in The Phantom Menace! 1999 was a BIG year for Quarshieheads.

Freddie Prinze Jr. went on to voice Jedi Knight Kanan on Star Wars Rebels! Which is the reverse of how that happened before.

In the opposite direction, Mark Hamill voiced Merlin (the Rapier's bitchin' betty) in Wing Commander and... I feel like I don't have to explain who Luke Skywalker is.

Cyril Nri is Pegasus' Security Officer in Wing Commander and he's credited as a First Order Officer in The Rise of Skywalker. I think that's him at the meeting where Kylo Ren confronts the First Order leadership. (RIP Boolio)

The internet tells me that the late, great

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Today we've got a really awesome physical Wing Commander model that popped up on YouTube. capi spotted the Tarsus from Privateer in an episode of Me, Myself and Die! The ship becomes the centerpiece of a game of Five Parsecs From Home. We see the host, Trevor Devall, play around the table and get really into the action. The game itself looks cool, but I can't get enough of that gorgeous ship! capi asked about its origin, and apparently a viewer of the show sent it in previously. What an awesome find!

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This update is part of a series covering Wing Commander content from Computer Game Review magazine. You can find the introductory post here. This update covers the magazine's reviews of Wing Commander games from 1991 to 1996 which were, by and large, very positive! It's a fascinating leap back in time...

October 1991 - Wing Commander IV

August 1992 - Special Operations 2

October 1993 - Wing Commander Academy

December 1993 - Wing Commander Privateer

December 1994 - Wing Commander Armada

February 1995 - Wing Commander IV

May 1996 - Diamond Multimedia Kit (with Wing Commander II)

May 1996 - Wing Commander IV

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The WC4 Remastered team has a new article on their journey to improve in-flight comms. The videos that come across your VDU in flight are far smaller and more compressed than the game's regular FMV, so getting these tiny clips to look good is an extra challenge. So, ODVS has incorporated several technologies to try to bring them up to modern standards. Check out the new video below to see how they look!

A future release of the project's demo will share these in action. In the mean time, if anyone is an expert at extracting Playstation videos and would like to contribute to research in this area, let them know!

Aside from the miniscule resolution of the source material, another major problem is compression. In order to fit all those thousands of frames onto the game’s CD-ROMs, they were quite heavily compressed using mid-90s techniques. The unfortunate side-effect for us is that they’re blocky

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Computer Game Review (later Computer Game Review and 16-Bit Entertainment and then Computer Game Review and CD-ROM Entertainment) was an American gaming magazine published from 1991 to 1996, covering much of Wing Commander's heyday. A sister magazine to the better-known console-focused Electronic Gaming Monthly, CGR was on friendly terms with Origin Systems and their editorial content frequently defended their high system requirements and delayed games. The Internet Archive has recently added almost the entire run... and we've combed through it for Wing Commander content! For those curious: the missing issues are 11/91, 12/91, 2/93, 4/92, 2/93 and 4/93 if anyone has copies in their collection!

What follows are Computer Game Review's 'previews' of Wing Commander games. These articles were typically the result of a reporter visit or a press junket covering a game in development. As Origin and the games

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This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the first post in the series' introduction here.

Our next continuity polaroid is a familiar face: it's Bob-O-Matte! Eagle-eyed Wing Commander players will recall that Bob-O-Matte is one of the three Border Worlds pilots who is ambushed and destroyed in the cutscene that opens the Peleus 'jammer' series of missions. Despite his apparent death at the hands of a Confederation Excalibur, Bob-O-Matte appears again in Wing Commander Prophecy reading a tarot deck in one of the game's most unusual transitions. Bob-O-Matte's flying scene takes place in the game's Banshee cockpit set which is a simple triangular backdrop (shots of the instrumentation are reused from the more elaborate Lance cockpit set). As you can see in the photograph, only the top portion of the flight suit was necessary since the shot