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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!
Sep
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!
Sep
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!
Sep
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.
Sep
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...
- In the subhead “Platolum Alloys + Prussian Retailers = Practical Thinking?” what does ‘Prussian Retailers’ refer to?
- 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:
Aug
…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
Aug
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!
Aug
Is there a better aesthetic than ~1994 Origin CD-ROM design?
Aug
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 shipFor ASMR, radio plays or to relax
Aug
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!
Aug
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
Aug
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.
Aug
…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
Aug
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.
Aug
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!
Aug
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.
Aug
It's time for our annual poll where we gauge how long fans have been visiting the CIC. Although this is our 25th anniversary at wcnews.com, we also have an option for people who've been following the team's Wing Commander news exploits for even longer than that! How long have you been visiting?
The old poll asked about the best Kilrathi ship recreation in the Wing Commander Academy television show. The Dralthi was the hands down winner, which is no surprise, but there were plenty of very well done craft in the show!
Aug
A you may know, we recently purchased a collection of Wing Commander IV continuity photographs which we've been researching for front page updates. In honor of the birthday we thought we'd jump ahead and share the full collection of photos. Stay tuned for more articles covering the unsung histories of these actors and characters! You can find the current slate of feature articles here.
Aug
…There's a joke in there about being old enough to need reading glasses these days, but these are the drinking kind! Back for our sixth birthday in 2004, we had a fun batch of clear tumblers with a Confed logo printed up as door prizes. They were a big hit, and we continue to get frequent questions about whether they are still available. Here's our second edition, which are now full pint size. And we'll be giving them out at the birthday party live on Discord! Our graphical skills are a bit rusty, so thanks to Defiance Industries for making sure our Confed star is on point.
We don't encourage anyone to buy these and we make no money whatsoever on them, but we are sharing the Zazzle link to anyone who might be interested in getting their own. It looks like they're about $15 normally, but there is a 20% off sale this weekend that brings the price down to about $12. If you do pick one up, send us a
Aug
FekLeyrTarg has a second clip that shows off his modern video editing acumen! He's been experimenting with a variety of tools to enhance his ability to merge Wing Commander settings and live action. This is just the beginning of what he's got planned, but it's already pretty neat!
Happy 25th birthday Wing Commander CIC!Some work-in-progress test shots combining low-quality live-action footage with renders of Perry Naval Base as seen in "Wing Commander Privateer".
