Wing Commander

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It continues to be a good season for Wing Commander autographs. Despite the ongoing pandemic, there are quite a few conventions still planned for this year. Here's some highlights that will feature familiar faces:

The Texas Frightmare Weekend will provide a double opportunity in Dallas from April 29 to May 1 with both Ginger Lynn Allen and Matthew Lillard appearing. Lillard also has a solo appearance lined up at the HorrorHound Weekend in Cincinnati March 25-27 as well as a mail-in event via CPA Authentics in April. Francois Chau, who played Vagabond in WC3/4, also has a busy year with appearances at the Lexington Comic & Toy Con March 24-27, Huntsville Comic & Pop Culture Expo April 22-24 and Rangerstop & Pop Comic Con June 10-12. There is another neat mail-in option via Galaxy Con in March as well. Robert Rusler, who played Seether in WC4, will be at the Mad Monster Party Carolina February

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Somehow we're well into January, so our annual Fan Project of the Year vote will soon be coming to a close. There's still time to register your favorite, so here are the nominees one more time. Scroll down for the official poll entry!

• AI/Neural Net Enhanced Wing Commander Videos - ODVS has expanded on his award-winning enhanced WC videos by adding new language options for WC3, dabbling in 4K, experimenting with WC2/P2 and pushing image quality even further.
• Bonkus Maximus' Streams - Bonk has been publishing Wing Commander livestreams all year long. He's covered every main game in the series, plus spinoffs like Academy. In the words of his nominator, his streams are "both good quality and plentiful."
• Collectors: Rare WC Finds - This one is a different type of nominee. For the first time, we're recognizing the combined efforts of adventurous fans (such as, but not limited to, the work of Dennis Mull

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EmuMusicFan has shared this collage of the many different Wing Commander characters that he's sketched out for his graphical novel project. He's been at it for almost two years and built up quite a stable. Many of the faces here will be familiar favorites, but some dig deeper into some of the novels' lore and haven't otherwise been pictured before. It's nice to see them all in one place for the first time!

I have drawn more than twenty WC characters appearing of being mentioned at least once in the official works.

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The new Mac's Lore video alluded to earlier this week has finally dropped! It's a focused look at the Wake class escort carrier TCS Tarawa. We start with a comprehensive overview of this ship type as well as some highlights from the 'End Run' that preceded the False Armistice. Most Wingnuts are pretty familiar with these early novel exploits, and fortunately there's also some really good False Colors history included that's less well known. Mac also created some really beautiful animations and scenes with Klavs' models that are wonderful to see here - don't miss it!

When 1/3 of the carrier fleet gets blown to hell by the Cats, the Terran Confederation looks to stealing ideas from World War 2 to keep them in the game. It ends up working astonishingly well.

Thanks for HotT for the rapid tip!

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In our continuing mission to share bits of Wing Commander history from around the world, today we have a review of Wing Commander from the January 1992 edition of the Spanish gaming mag Micromanía. This comes from the RetroManía30 Podcast. I used to love all those little insets describing the fighters and stuff like that. The little cuts on the corners of the screenshot boxes also give it kind of a spacey cockpit vibe. I'm not so sold on the pink background, but it was the '90s!

There goes the review of Wing Commander (1990), published in MicroManía # 44 (SE). It was the beginning of a long saga, which to this day continues to have a multitude of followers. A space flight simulator, with a spectacular cinematic setting. A great title!

As a double feature of Spanish content, The Game Abbey also has a Spanish language retrospective feature on the WC series. Language transition captions work on this

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Mac reports that his next WC video is going to take a bit more time, but as a consolation prize, you get a snazzy new wallpaper! It once again features Klavs' escort carrier floating serenely in in orbit. I like the shift in color balance with emphasis on the blue tones this time around.

The next Wing Commander is gonna take longer then I expected. But, whatever, here's another rendered image I did for it that I totally did not rip off from a movie in another Sci-fi franchise.

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GOG.com runs a lot of sales, and I'm always so surprised how popular each one is. You might think that by 2022 everyone who is going to buy Wing Commander already has their copy, but that's very much not the case! We keep hearing stories about new prospective fans dipping their toe in the Vega Sector waters through one of these events, so we'll continue to keep highlight them. As such, GOG is running a weekend sale on vintage Electronic Arts games. This extends to other Origin franchises like Ultima as well as some EA favorites like Sim City. Check it out and fill out your collection by Monday morning here!

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I'm not a Wordle player, so I can't claim to understand what's going on here, but LOAF has this historical WC nugget to share with Wordist Wingnuts everywhere. Yesterday's word was 'Tangy', which is a term with some associated Wing Commander trivia to it!

Saturday everywhere! So Origin’s Wing Commander Secret Ops page in 1998 included this screenshot that got fans talking. Who was TANGY, a new NPC wingman or just what the guy taking the screenshots chose as a call sign?

Soon after I was invited to tour Origin! At one point my tour guide brought me into a plain cubicle and excitedly announced “I knew you’d want to meet Tangy!”. It turned out Tangy was a random marketing guy and they thought the community was obsessed with HIM for some reason.

Here is an actual photo from the trip. That is me and Neil Young (not Tangy). Despite appearances I am a seventeen year old high school senior here and not a Tintin

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We recently reported on Malcolm McDowell's official website adding Wing Commander autographs to their online store. In case you were curious about the final product, here are the results! LOAF's copy came a few weeks after placing an order, and it's pretty nice! It's an odd choice of art, but that also makes this somewhat unique. You can add one to your collection for $65 plus shipping here.

Ta da! It’s a nice heavy stock paper with a semi-gloss printing. Why did they choose a 1995 Wing Commander III Playstation port ad? Who knows!

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George Sanger, aka The Fat Man, has just announced the immediate release of his Wing Commander I Complete Original Soundtrack: "MT-32 Archival Edition." Way back in 2007, George put out a fantastic album of WC1 music known as Wing One, and it's been on our highly recommended list ever since. This new edition scrubs Fat's archives for a complete reckoning of all the music in the game. Today's release clocks in with 55 tracks and 85 minutes of audio - compared to 27 tracks and 34 minutes in the original release fifteen years ago.

You can stream the entire album below or listen to all of the individual tracks at the publisher Xeen's YouTube Channel. I'm listening right now and it's wonderful! You can also buy a digital copy for $10 at Bandcamp to get access to high quality downloadable files - or just thank the team for their continuing commitment to Wing Commander! When you check out, there's a

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Cherno has shared a neat video of tech demo project he's put together. It's a top-down 2D space shooter with Wing Commander models. This reminds me a whole lot of the early Arena concept shots. Although it's conceptually pretty basic, there are some nice touches with familiar asteroids and damage sound effects included. Cherno's been toying around with different ideas to give the game some more meat, and we hope he continues to develop the idea further!

This project was started about two years ago using Unity, then abandoned and now (January 2022) I got back to it, fixed some bugs, and made this short gameplay video. What you see is all there is to it: just glorified placeholder assets using the original graphics and sounds of Wing Commander. I always wanted to make a top-down game but the limited field of view restricts the gameplay mechanics. Initially, I opted for a straight conversion of the

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ZOmegaZ continues to make expeditious progress on his Wing Commander challenge coin Kickstarter campaign. The funding phase closed just over a month ago, and he's already gotten the manufacturer to fabricate his designs. So far, it seems like this is moving along just like clockwork - and the coins look cool too! Contributors to the project could start seeing packages arrive soon!

I think they all look fabulous. Now the shipping begins! Again, some of you don't seem to have received a survey link. I can't resend it for some reason, but don't stress, we'll get it worked out.

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We've had a number of non-English language vids in the news lately... and here's another one! But in the various translation methods aren't quite your style, this one has been helpfully translated in real time by native Russian speaker enilenis. Seeing WC on vintage television programs was always a rarity, and catching an international show was even harder, so we're really lucky that opportunities like this exist! This one comes from the Russian program "Hard Off." It covers Wing Commanders 1-3, but the focus is on the flashy FMV of the latter title. WC3 was a big mainstream crossover!

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Mac has posted a new teaser about his next Wing Commander-themed video. He maintains a nice mix of topics on his channel that touch on content from multiple universes, but the WC series is always a go-to win. There's a new wallpaper image to go along with this - it features a nice reversal of the Shiraak being assaulted by Arrows as seen on the Armada box art.

PS, the next video wont be Iron Man related, but it'll be a #WingCommander thing since I'm still having trouble coalescing the Tribes lore into a video I'm happy with.

Hint: It'll be a carrier that will eventually serve as a start point for future related videos.

Also I bet you guys will never guess where I ripped off the shot composition for this one.

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AD has been doing a lot of digging into magazine archives lately, and he's found a lot of Prophecy love in the Russian mag Game.EXE. To kick things off, the December 1997 issue had a big WCP advertisement and four page review spread. It earned a 91% score and "Hall of Choice" award by the editors. They followed up in a big way in February 1998. In this issue Prophecy received a big "space simulator of the year" title, they held a contest and also interviewed producer Rod Nakamoto. As I've said before, I just like admiring the interesting and colorful vintage layouts, but if you don't speak Russian, there are still ways to interpret what's been written. A smartphone app with a camera feature such as Google Translate does a pretty good job of converting the text in real time to your preferred language.

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DocteurJ has done lots of Wing Commander videos for Oldies Games TV, but this one's a little different. Rather than streaming a playthrough, this one is an analysis of the romantic relationships in Wing Commander 3. He walks through what happens if you choose Flint, Rachel or neither. J's videos are always in French (using ODVS' high quality French WC3 package in this case), and it's interesting to see how they managed the dub of such a sensitive scene into another language. I couldn't get the built in YouTube universal translator to work, but the smartphone version of Google Translate worked pretty well.

Alors que le colonel apprend la mort d'Angel, Rachel et Flint osent désormais draguer notre cher

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Super Wing Commander has cutscenes showing the Tiger's Claw jumping between (most) systems. There are a couple special versions: this is the unique 'fleet' one that starts SWC's version of The Secret Missions. But do you notice anything funny about it?

The ships that enter the jump point (first picture) are the Claw plus an Exeter destroyer, a Dilligent transport and four Venture corvettes. But out the other end comes... the carrier, Diligent, Exeter, six Hornets and four Raptors. What happened in there?!?!

Here's a clip with all the 'regular' jumps the game actually plays together. Enyo doesn't have one since it's the start, Dakota, Border Zone and Tartarus are skipped in favor of special midgames and Hubble's Star just doesn't play a jump for some reason.

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Last week we shared a cool Australian promotional shirt for Wing Commander 4, and now LOAF's found one from Singapore. The design is markedly different with the Black Lance symbol over the WC4 logo on the front. Classic Blair, Tolwyn and Seether art is featured on the back side on a lightly stone washed background. Very nice!

Scored another great find on southeast Asian shirt sorting Instagram

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AD found a fun trove of Wing Commander goodness in the May 1996 issue of Computer and Video Games magazine. It's naturally a treat to find a WC article in any publication, but this one has two - plus a bonus! Wing Commander 4 initially debuted on the PC on February 12, 1996 while Wing Commander 3 made its way to the Playstation on March 27. Due to publication and newsstand schedules, that put both in back-to-back review slots in this issue. There's lots of lovely screenshots to admire here. Interestingly enough, they actually gave the WC3 PSX port a higher score than WC4, which is pretty surprising. Nevertheless, there's a final tease on the upcoming release list. Wing Commander 4 is showing as an in-development title for the 3DO. While this was briefly the case, the game was not to be!

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Klavs is kicking off the new year with a new model for Wing Commander fans. He's posted this downloadable Centurion design based on popular demand. It's a fan favorite year after year. This one's not totally finished, and the underside is a bit bare, but it's complete enough for many purposes. If this is just what you needed for your next 3D printing project or fan mod, grab the file at Sketchfab here!

Hi everyone, I've had some requests for the Centurion model lately. I've not had the time to finish it, but here she is in her current state. Have fun!