Wing Commander

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We're down to the final hours for Mike Winterbauer's Wing Commander art

portfolio

! The project has topped $3000 and dozens of dedicated contributors to the campaign will get an array of different art products based on the famous painting Mr. Winterbauer made for the SNES WC cover. The process he used to create the piece will also be catalogued in the associated art book. If you want to get in on the action, now's the final day to

pledge here

.

Thank you everybody for making this campaign an awesome success! 26 hours left and we are over 600% funded.

Wing Commander Fans are the best! Thank you!!

I look forward to getting all the awesome rewards out very soon!

Sincerely,

Mike

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AD has found another Argentinian magazine that celebrates a classic Wing Commander release. This one is from the Top Kids Club magazine, number 24. The copy seems dominated by Mortal Kombat stuff, but Wing Commander 4 gets a lengthy review as well. It earns a whopping 95% rating, which is great no matter where you're from. Although the spread is well endowed with flashy WC4 pics, there are also some curious WC3 Arrow press images that sneak in too. If you find the review amazing and just have to own a copy, it's for sale on Facebook Marketplace for $250. I'll probably pass, so I wanted to let you know!

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Pretty much

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Today a larger than normal percentage of Wing Commander fans are outside lighting off explosives and various rocketry. If you're among them, please stay safe! Might want to keep a Super Soaker handy... or leave the pyrotechnics to the professionals. It's also Origin founder Richard Garriott's 57th birthday - Happy Birthday!

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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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The ever-creative Tarsus has created another fun Wing Commander distraction to bring you some holiday cheer. With resources from the new Head Museum, he's created an automatic advent calendar with your favorite original WC characters as the daily reveal. It's a simple concept, but I can't wait to see who's queued up for tomorrow! Check it out for yourself here.

I've taken the liberty of making an advent calendar out of your heads.

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Who knew IMDB made little video shorts? They've just posted a clip to celebrate the recent 25th birthday of the Super Mario Brothers movie. It talks a bit about why the film was the way it was and how it was critically panned. Wing Commander gets a funny cameo as the film that's actually ranked one better than Mario Brothers in the all time IMDB ranking of video game-based adaptations. Check it out here.

May 28, 2018, marks the 25th anniversary of 'Super Mario Bros.' The very first live-action adaptation of a video game, ever, was based on the hugely successful series that helped pull the gaming industry out of the 1983 crash. But when it came to its big screen potential, only one man had the vision, producer Roland Joffé.

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Adm_Maverick

has a variety of cool new things to show off in his Wing Commander

tabletop

game. He's sharpened up a number of his pilot and ship cards, and the basic game mechanics are being written up in a cool player's manual. As he approaches another round of playtesting, Maverick has also started 3D printing nifty little WC fighters and missiles off

Thingiverse

. Although he's got some fantastic paper/cardboard ships, all the vertical detail in his plastic models is pretty nice too!

So the first round of playtesting is less than a month away. I've got a group of 6 people signed up to participate in it... and that means I'm motivated to get everything ready for it.

I've finished compiling version .01a of the player handbook. This contains the basic rules for fighter vs fighter combat including the stats for missiles, and cannons, along with the rules for dealing full body collisions, clipping

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We have an exciting new addition to the archives today: a script for the third episode of Wing Commander Academy, "The Most Delicate Instrument." Over the years we've preserved shooting scripts (and a number of drafts) for all of the Wing Commander games and the 1999 film... but tracking down Wing Commander Academy teleplays has proven much more difficult. Until today, only two of the thirteen episodes were represented in the archive. These documents are especially fascinating for hardcore Wing Commander fans as they include not only scenes cut for time but also names of characters, places and ships in stage directions which were never spoken in the aired episode. You can download the The Most Delicate Instrument script in PDF form here. Stay tuned, two more episode scripts and several treatments will be added in the coming days.

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It's been a while since the GOG's last major sale, but they're holding an EA-specific this weekend. Wing Commander once again clocks in at about 70% off, but there are a few Origin games that come in even higher. The Crusader and Ultima games are 80% off, so it's a good time to round out your collection!

• Strike Commander
• Ultima I, II & III
• Ultima IV, V & VI
• Ultima VII
• Ultima VIII
• Ultima Ascension
• Ultima Underworld 1 & 2
• Crusader: No Remorse
• Crusader: No Regret
• Bioforge

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Bazooka Joe

has published an interesting Wing Commander themed music video. It's three minutes of fighter scenes stitched together from Wing Commander Academy to the tune of "Know Why." Wing Commander fan videos like this were common a while back, but they've fallen out of vogue in recent years. It's not really clear what the theme or motivation for this clip was, but it's more than just the intro paired to random music. Someone spent some time editing together all the combat, so here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Wing Commander Know why music video

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Today we've got a Dralthi sketch by DingoPatagonico. I suppose I have no idea how long sketches are supposed to take, but this one apparently took under an hour, which seems impressive. It's really smooth for a freehand drawing, and by my eye, this one runs very close to the Claw Marks lineart. You can't go wrong with that as your inspiration!

Done in 50 mins in the calm of the work. I think looks a quite good X3

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John Rhys-Davies has started a new YouTube channel, and one of his first videos is a reflective piece on the impact of the coronavirus. He talks a bit about his personal history and describes how humanity will endure through tragedy as it always does. Mr. Rhys-Davies is an eloquent speaker and it's nice to hear his perspective on things!

21st March 2020. John Rhys-Davies shares his thoughts from his home in the Isle of Man. He reflects on the experience of his family during the war and what we can learn from a generation that faced the greatest adversity of the 20th century.

Not all the clips that he's planning to post will be nearly as heavy. Here's the easygoing intro he posted a couple weeks back. Thanks to capi for the tip!

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Here's a crazy Spanish article that LOAF recently found. It comes from the now-defunct magazine PC Manía. On the surface it looks fairly typical - like hundreds of other printed reviews of WC3 at the time. But boy is that box art weird looking! They've

photoshopped

it to change the look of the characters and even the ships. Maybe this was intended to Spanish-ize the cast? What an odd thing to do!

What the heck is going on with the Wing Commander III cover art in this Spanish magazine article?

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We've very happy to announce that Wing Commander End Run is finally released! We've come a long way to reach this milestone as this completes the Baen set of Wing Commander novels - all are finally available to purchase digitally. The CIC has been lobbying the publisher for these for some fifteen years at conventions, on social media and through direct communications. We were extremely happy when it was announced in early 2016 that Freedom Flight was coming. Other books in the series followed, but not End Run. This was disappointing since End Run had a bit of a history as a slightly harder to find book in the later '90s. One even sold at auction for $85 during peak demand. So we got to the bottom of this and helped Baen realize their omission. It took a year for them to find a slot in their publishing schedule, but we're finally there! Pick it up at any of the major storefronts or direct

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There's tons of great Wing Commander fan projects out there, but it's not every day that we get a teaser for a new one.

FekLeyrTarg

has had a hand in quite a few different endeavors over the years, and his latest will be a new short fan film. Projects like these have been proposed a number of times over the years, but we haven't seen very many come to fruition. They have a lot of potential to be pretty cool, and FekLeyr even made a graphic to announce his reveal this Monday, so we're pretty excited to see what's to come!

On June 18 2018, 8 PM Zulu, a new short Fan Film is going to be released.

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Origin founder Richard Garriott recently led an expedition to the North Pole. He conducted various science experiments on behalf of the

Explorers Club

and also helped make history by bringing along the youngest adventurers to ever make the trek - his children Ronin (3.5 years) and Kinga (5 years). The pictures below show them unfurling an Austin flag at the pole and conducting some very cool ice cave exploration. It sounds like modern technology makes the trip far less burdensome than in years past, but there is still difficulty getting the airplanes in and out. Richard

had to stand

on the return flight due to how crammed their plane was! I'm glad they were able to pull off such a cool trip safely. Check out Spectrum News

here

and

here

for more background.

Back in Svalbard with the youngest boy ever to the North Pole! Everyone happy & healthy, happy to have power & internet!

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Here's a third smoking wallpaper by OliverInk. This time he's based the scene on Howard Day's fantastic Bengal model and set it in space over a nice blue planet. The piece is titled "Vega Sector" for obvious reasons, which means the planet could be the habitable world in Venice.

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There's been a lot in the news lately about the Hong Kong protests and how various companies are reacting to those that support them, so it was only a matter of time until this story intersected with Wing Commander. Blizzard has been under fire this past week for their punishment of a Hearthstone player who spoke out in support of Hong Kong. The accusation is that they were overly harsh in their response in order to placate China. That whole discussion is far beyond where we're going to go, but the details surrounding Blizzard's response caught our eye. The president of Blizzard is none other than J. Allen Brack, of Wing Commander fame. He was hired in 1994 to help with quality assurance on Wing Commander 3 and continued on through WC4, Privateer 2, Prophecy and Secret Ops. The TCS Brack was one of the first Confed ships to encounter the Nephilim as told in the ICIS Manual. We've followed Mr.

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German gaming magazine PC Games began covering the Wing Commander series when it launched in 1992, publishing a variety of articles and reviews. Today we've collected the latter, their detailed reviews of nine games running from Origin FX in 1993 to Wing Commander Prophecy in 1998.

May 1993 - Origin FX (nr)

October 1993 - Wing Commander Academy (76)

November 1993 - Wing Commander Privateer (92)

May 1994 - Righteous Fire (80)

September 1994 - Wing Commander Armada (75)

February 1995 - Wing Commander III (96)

April 1996 - Wing Commander IV (93)

December 1996 - Privateer 2: The Darkening (84)

February 19998 - Wing Commander Prophecy (90)

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