Wing Commander

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The Blair character bio Universal included with the press kit it so strange. His dad is a space hippie? And his grandma is a senator? He idolizes a World War I fighter pilot? Most of this is never referenced anywhere.

"WING COMMANDER ACADEMY"

FLIGHT MEMBER DOSSIER

Name: Christopher Blair

Callsign: Maverick

Callsign Origination: Maverick received his callsign as a joke from Maniac. When after months as the "perfect" cadet at the Academy, Blair actually bent a rule, and Maniac sarcastically told him, "You're a real maverick, aren't you?"

Rank: 2nd Lieutenant

Pedigree: Since the time of the American Civil War, the Blair family has maintained a tradition of wealth and influence combined with public service. Maverick's grandmother is a member of the Confederation Council, while his father is the chairman of StarPeace, an organization dedicated to promoting understanding among the inhabited worlds of the galaxy.

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CMDBob is back with a pair of eye-popping Wing Commander art pieces. The look is slightly inspired by the animation style of the Star Trek Animated Series, and we can most definitely see the connection! First up is the BWS Intrepid, complete with battle damage. You can see a little Banshee fighter launching from the deck, which is depicted zooming out of the bay in the second picture. You can also find his recent Confed destroyer image here. I love this series!

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Awesome! We don’t stop to appreciate that Wing Commander Prophecy somehow managed to out-map Ultima.

Honor_KA: To all my Wing Commander fans and to those playing Star Citizen. Look what I just found doing some summer cleaning.

Here’s a born digital version of you want to pour over all the references and in-jokes. They even named some systems after especially handsome and well-liked fans!

The map was developed by John "Captain Johnny" Guentzel. He was a designer on Prophecy and Secret Ops who was also, as you can tell, a huge cool nerd. In 1997, Origin put a beta version on the WCP site for fans to comment on… and of course I saved it!

It was also the basis for the map used in the Wing Commander movie intro. Longtime Star Citizen fans may remember that this used to hang behind Chris Roberts in videos! This particular version was nicely relit by Klavs:

Shocking but true: this was NOT the first time a Wing

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Starfield isn't even fully out yet, but those who purchase one of the premium editions have been able to play for the last few days. We've already seen lots of interest from Wing Commander fans, including the first designs inspired by Wing Commander ships!

One of the very first is a vessel based on the Banshee from Wing Commander 4, built by Chris Kabigting. You might recall that he was also one of the initial modders to create WC ships in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw among other projects. While these might not be pixel-perfect recreations of the originals, keep in mind that they are not conventional 3D models. This is what fans have been able to accomplish in just a day or two using the in-game ship customizer tools, which is amazing!

Here's another that is a great first attempt at a Kamrani corvette from LordTyrranus!

If you haven't kept up with the game otherwise, here's a trailer with what it looks like!

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I found something recently that I’ve been looking for many, many years: the CD of production music that was the source of the diegetic clip in the Wing Commander movie where Paladin is listening to opera! I haven’t found anyone else who collects production music, but my CD is part of a lot of like twenty others from the same series and I’m happy to pass those on to interested parties should they exist. You can read up on the extensive discography of Wing Commander here!

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If you caught last night's Voices of War stream, you saw how we discovered that the US and UK versions of Armada shipped with slightly different formats of the game's manual. The American edition has purple on the left and black on the right, and the British version is partially inverted with black and light purple on the left and darker purple on the right. The game's play guides are more similar to eachother with dimensions to match the slightly squatter European shape. I've added pictures of the exterior box as well (US, UK, CD-ROM Classics) for even more side-by-side goodness!

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TONIGHT! I’ll be streaming to talk all about Voices of War, one of the greatest game manuals ever written! 8 PM Eastern on YouTube. Here’s a PDF of the booklet if you want to study up!

Check back here closer to start time for the YouTube link!

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A real surprise today: Dennis Mull sent me an envelope of Smudo autographs! Smudo is a German hip hop artist who loved Wing Commander and so got to have a cameo in Prophecy! You can learn more about that here.

These images were part of a photo series that we've also cataloged here.

Now we are learning about the music of Smudo.

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I’m reading the investment column in Victory Streak and there’s two things I don’t understand. I can’t tell if they’re meaningless or if it’s because I have absolutely no familiarity with finance...

1. In the subhead “Platolum Alloys + Prussian Retailers = Practical Thinking?” what does ‘Prussian Retailers’ refer to?
2. The last line of the article: “remember oil and carpets, two industries that enjoyed temporary fortune, then plummeted.” This has the cadence of a joke or an idiom... but it’s inscrutable to me. Anyone know what it’s referencing?

In case you were wondering, Colonel Blair did invest in platolum and it went pretty well! From the Kilrathi Saga scrapbook:

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After learning about how Denis Loubet came up with Wing Commander's enduring radar display I've been looking into how the design developed over the series. I found a note in the WC2 manual I never picked up on: "In VGA graphics mode, the shade of the dot indicates its range."

I ran some tests and sure enough, it's true! Each dot has THREE shades reserved in the 256-color palette. Close is within 5,000 meters, medium is 5,000-25,000 and far is over 30,000! NEVER noticed in gameplay. So I made a chart:

Strange case I just remembered: Special Operations 1 has the Gettysburg escorted by Epees that show up as GREEN on your radar... for about a second and a half between cutscenes! What an odd addition that never shows up again.

I went on a little tangent experimenting with this. Trying to fly to the Gettysburg remotely to see them hits a bug, no ships spawn until you get to the exact nav point and suddenly

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It may be the dog days of summer in the northern hemisphere and the throes of winter in the south, but GOG is ready to kick off fall today. The Autumn Sale runs from August 28 through September 11. We've noted a few quirks and omissions in the discount rate this year, and they've stepped it up a bit this time. Wing Commanders Prophecy and Privateer 2 are discounted by 70%, and Armada plus Academy are each 55% off. All other DOS/Windows Wing Commander games get the regular 75% markdown from the normal $5.99 price. Just for fun, I checked Strike Commander and it's on sale for 50% off!

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Is there a better aesthetic than ~1994 Origin CD-ROM design?

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The TCS Victory has so many amazing locations. The jump to SVGA 'photorealistic' backgrounds is still seared in my mind. It's so hard to pick a favorite, but the bridge might be it. I love the bar, I love gunnery control, and the briefing room is freakin cool, but all of the little consoles and expansive window with your escort out front really take the cake. Scribbler has created one more ASMR/ambiance video so you can enjoy it for a solid hour in the background.

Today we return to the TCS Victory. She can already look back on a long service. As long as some work shifts in space. No missions and no attacks? It can also be quiet in space but be careful, everything can change quickly. So stay alert and keep an eye on your monitors. The bridge is the heart of every ship

For ASMR, radio plays or to relax

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Did you know that Privateer 2 has two very different sets of manuals? The game had an internally tempestuous release and one side effect of that was that Origin's creative services group completely reworked all of the packaging for the US release.

I thought it would be fun to look at the changes in the introductory letter. And right off the bat you can see it's a lot more than removing the "u"s from the "colours". They even change the name of the writer... flirty Jessica Montpellier becomes straight-laced Ian Esperanto!

Anyway I did a quick diff on the text and here are the results. And my question for readers is: did any of these changes make things better? It sure feels like a lot of change for the sake of change!

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Weird choice for a publication to rank games on a scale of 1 to 57, but it takes all sorts!

Team Nerd: Bill Walsh College Football (Mega Drive) / Wing Commander Secret Missions (Super Nintendo) - reviews from Computer And Video Games Issue 144 - November 1993. #RETROGAMING

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We've got another very cool ultra widescreen art piece today by AllTinker. It depicts the harrowing scene at the McAuliffe VI Research Colony where the scientists either turn the tide against the Kilrathi - or are massacred. He's added a ton of detail to the sides. This will eventually make its way to the Confederation project. At first glance, you might think this is "just" a door and some walls, but it takes some superior artistic talent to pull something like this off! And to show exactly what that entails, Tinker also made a time lapse video. It's amazing to see the expanded scene come to life like this!

First pass down. Like a few of the others, I have to make them wider than 21:9 so that they can still scroll/parallax.

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There's some unfortunate news concerning the Xbox 360 and Wing Commander Arena. Microsoft has announced that the console's digital storefront will be closing in July 2024. This means some 220 games, including Arena, will no longer be available for sale in any form. Wing Commander's debut on the Xbox was part of a new digital-standalone push dubbed Xbox Live Arcade. The results were quite impressive given a variety of constraints such as a 50 megabyte download cap and $10 asking price. Arena was the platform's first 16-player game and made heavy use of features like matchmaking and online leaderboards. Although Arena never received a proper physical release, the "demo" of the game was included on the cover disc of the November 2007 issue of the Official Xbox Magazine. These demos could be "unlocked" into the full game, but that function will presumably be removed as well.

Since the game was

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We're still in recovery mode here, so the team is taking it easy today with another ASMR style ambiance video from Scribbler. This one's a little more laid back than his other recent WC3 additions. You can hear the familiar hum of the Victory's engines and the elevator opening in the background, but this time there's also music playing. It's not quite the swankiest of Oldziey tunes, but it's a nice background track!

Mission successful, report submitted, off to the bar and finally peace and quiet. Let's grab some snacks and good cocktails. A little card games or charming conversations? Or just chill. We're not doing anything tonight.

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And that's a wrap! We hope you've had a good time checking out what we've posted. And if you're reading this just as it went live, the party's still happening in #Wingnut on Discord. As always, this is a huge team effort. It takes all of the staff, all of the many talented Wingnuts who contribute to projects and submit news tips, and all of the many fans who visit each day to keep the community humming. We'll see you again Monday for the latest Wing Commander news!

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This one's a repeat, but it's so glorious that we can't help but share it again (and will be doing so for many years to come!). Last year, Klavs commissioned this wonderful Cameo clip from Malcolm McDowell to celebrate our 24th anniversary. He fondly remembers both his role as Admiral Tolwyn and how his late friend, David Warner, also got to portray the character. If you missed this earlier, be sure to check it out now!

I must say, I did love Tolwyn. A really wonderful character in many ways. Strong. Very, really cool. ... I'm thrilled that you liked my interpretation of him, because I really went for it, enjoyed it.