Wing Commander

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Comchia recently shared some eye-popping screenshots of the EGA version of Wing Commander 2. WC2 is well known as a gorgeous game with lush colors and beautiful art, but not everyone in 1991 was able to appreciate its high end VGA graphics. Everyone with a high powered system quickly switched over to the 256 color option, but some fans were limited to just 16 simultaneous colors. It's pretty shocking how limited this was, however it's equal parts impressive that the artists were able to squeeze so much graphical fidelity out with such limitations. There's very little EGA Wing Commander content online these days. I've added an EGA WC1 video below so you can get a sense of what everything looked like in motion. It really makes you appreciate how far we've come!

Some screens of the EGA version of Wing Commander II. I'm used to seeing this game in the far more colourful VGA version, but I'm still

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Greg14 shared this French preview of Wingleader from a June 1990 issue of Génération 4. It appears to be based off previews from the Consumer Elections Show in Chicago. The name change to Wing Commander happened relatively close to launch, so a lot of the prime promotional materials from this summer emphasize the 'Leader' name. Can you imagine how amazing these huge screenshots would have looked at the time? Also check out that small in-game Wingleader logo!

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If you haven’t filmed an exhaustive retrospective of the Wing Commander series on a hillside while sitting on a giant boulder, are you even a Wing Commander fine? Yes, if you’re reading this, you definitely are, but this is still one of the most unique takes on the WC series rundown video I’ve seen in a while. Where will the next Wing Commander fan vid take place?

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This prompted me to dig up the original Tarsus model...

But what's that written on the rear!?! Zoom in and enhance... HIDDEN LORE!

Is this visible in the game itself? Not even a little.

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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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This weekend is the last chance to grab the Wing Commander games on sale via GOG's 15th Anniversary Sale. Coincidentally, this timed perfectly to overlap with the Wing Commander series' birthday earlier this week. It's also a slightly higher discount than we've seen recently with a full 75% off each title in the franchise. Grab them below!

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Now let's take a look at some of the background vehicles that did make it into the game!

This is TRUCK, CART and CARGO which drive through Perry Naval Base. Truck and cart also appear on the mining base.

LOADER is a variant of truck that appears in the ship upgrade room. From the dev files (and the Oxford promo shot that started all this!) it looks like they intended for these guys to appear on the landing screens too.

This is the first of several CAR models. It drives through the New Constantinople concourse scene (in both directions.)

Perry's pad vista has this blink-and-you-miss him fellow: a tiny SHUTTLE that comes in from the left entrance. I can't believe they built so many tiny models (large at the time) for background animations that weren't more than a few pixels in the final game.

New Detroit's landing pad has two vehicles flying around: JACKO and AIRCAR.

New Detroit's street level has another CAR

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We've got a delicious update today on WC4 Remastered. Pedro reports that the team is digging deep into the ground missions of the game. As is usual on a project like this, once they started peeling back the layers of the original, things got complicated. This has necessitated some clever solutions, which have been detailed in a new WCRespace article. A few options include taking some artistic license and deviating from the original experience slightly, but this should produce a more engaging product overall.

The first issue was to add support for loading the terrain and we had to ensure that the models which we had full transforms for lined up exactly as they did in the original game.Classic buildings and terrain.

We have accomplished this and added support for terrain collisions. The ~1 million vertex original terrain can be rendered on modern hardware in a single draw call – but still that’s

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Here's a fresh batch of whimsical Privateer scenes and objects by Cybot. He's got a couple of inspired bases, a sharp-looking Centurion, the Mercenaries' Guild office and some cars! Many of the items depicted are available as 3D models to download. Grab them at the CIC Forums here!

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Our new poll asks about some of the most underappreciated games in the series. The "A-games" are all considered secondary titles, but each one fills a significant niche. We pulled Privateer from the list since it routinely gets plenty of accolades, but Privateer 2 has its own pros and cons that affect its popularity. There are also quite a few much lesser known ports that are remarkable in their own way. Prophecy Advance took a modern 3D accelerated game and managed to fit it on a tiny 2003 vintage handheld cart. Sega CD's version of WC1 includes full speech, Super Wing Commander is a complete revamp of the original and the 3DO port of WC3 has a slew of new missions, weapons and gameplay dynamics to suit the console. We think every game on this list deserves more credit, but you can just pick one this time around!

The old birthday poll asked when fans first arrived at the CIC. Once again, the

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80s Baby recently posted their review of the Wing Commander movie in honor of the film's 20th birthday. Back in 1999, the author was fortunate enough to stumble on a double feature of Never Been Kissed and Wing Commander bundled together. She recounts her review as a memory of the events all those years ago. The recollections meander about as much as the reviewer did when the NBK credits rolled, but it's honestly not the worst WC Movie review I've ever read. At least there's no nerd complaining about sound in space! Check out the full article here.

Ah, memories. They can be hazy and hard to trust, but some of them — some of the lucky ones — stay trapped in your brain as crystal clear as the day the experience happened right before your eyes.

In 1999, I was living it up in one of the best cinematic years of my generation. I feel like I was at the movie theater every weekend that year, with extra

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EmuMusicFan has continued to experiment with and refine his art style for the Kilrathi characters he's sketched out of Wing Commander Action Stations. Here's a few different techniques employed on Baron Vakka nar Ki'ra. And while at first it might look like this guy could pass for any noble Kilrathi, Emu has put a lot of thought into how the look exemplifies the attributes of each character. Some of his rationale is included below!

When reading certain scenes of Action Stations, I really feel that this book depicts the Kilrathi as a relatively complex civilization, not just a simple fierce brutal race. There are complex relationships and politial issues among the clans. So I am trying to imply different feelings to different characters.

Let's see Gilkarg and his two sons, Ratha and Thrakhath. These three characters are definitely villains. But they are not the same. Gilkarg's actual military ability

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Here's one from deep in the archives. AD found an interview with the Fat Man and Team Fat in an early 1995 article of the New York Times, before they even started posting stories online in 1996. This one's been turned into a digital story for completeness so future generations can learn a little about the state of early game audio. It goes a little bit deeper than your typical magazine blurb. The conversation begins very similarly to many other interviews George Sanger has given over the years, but it also delves into some of the side-projects and other attempts that he was trying to use to expand his business. These are portrayed as controversial, but it sounds more like they were trying to throw everything at the wall to see what stuck - which a lot of folks were doing in this new media space at the time! You can read up on the whole article here.

Starting with "Loom," one of the first computer

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The German Shock 2 gaming site has posted a new speculation piece about the potential for a new Wing Commander game. They base this on comments in Jeff Grubb's GamesBeats show. As the story goes, EA Motive of Star Wars Squadrons fame is working on a new game that's a comeback of a popular franchise. For many years, Wing Commander was in a distant third place behind Electronic Arts' other space sim franchises, Star Wars and Mass Effect, so prospects were slim. A lot has changed lately with Star Wars going non-exclusive and the mixed fortunes of the Mass Effect franchise. This means Wing Commander is certainly a potential contender once again, although the stars would need to align for a viable project to actually see the light of day. It's only a matter of time though, and we'll be here to bring you the news when it happens!

Google's translate features are working better than ever these days, so

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It's a good week for Rapier I art. We posted an uncommon 3D render of a fan model a few days ago, and now we've got a top down line art sketch of the CF-117. The rotary neutron gun is a bit long, but the ship portions are pretty good overall. This type of drawing was really big in the late '90s, so I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this over the years. bagera3005 is certainly a fan of this art style with thousands of Star Trek ships and other similar designs in his gallery. He's also made a Kilrathi-inspired ship, pictured below. It's kind of a funky cross between a Goran and a Sorthak by my eye.

My version of Wing Commander Rapier from the movie

If you'd like to see more cool WC line art, be sure to check out our prior updates.

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Looking Glass Museum has posted a brief but nifty thirty year old video. Before E3 was a thing, the Consumer Electronics Shows was one of the primary venues to showcase your big video game. This was recorded by someone at the Summer 1992 CES. It features some of the upcoming games for the Sega CD system on a cool nine-television video wall. We get lots of flickering WING COMMANDERS on screen interspersed with some nice Hornet on Dralthi action. What a show that must have been!

LOAF: Interesting video clip from CES in 1992 showing Sega’s Sega CD display look at! Obviously I want a nine TV bank that flashes WING COMMANDER but the unreleased Ultima Underworld port is probably more interesting!

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If you've been following some of our recent news posts, you've seen that LOAF has been making some incredible strides in finishing out the Privateer-related entries of the CIC wiki. Many of the recent discoveries and explorations have been crowdsourced in Discord #Wingnut, and new contributors are always welcome. Whether you'd just like to read up on the latest, or get a sense of what yet needs to be done, check out some of the major indices such as the main Privateer page, the components navbox and the ships/vehicles navbox. Did you know the shape of the radar changes by sensor type? The Maneuvering Jet art started out as an EMP Shield? The Paradigm Destroyer is internally coded as "Frigate"? And there are nine different color shades in the MFD damage display? All of this is just the beginning - learn more at the WCPedia!

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We've got great news to share today. Destro's fan project to add complete voiceovers to the original Wing Commander is complete and ready to release! He's managed to carefully map the speech files from the fully voiced Mega/Sega CD edition of the game and patch them over top of the familiar PC edition. While this fully voiced version of the game has existed for three decades, relatively few people have heard it due to the semi-obscurity of this console port. That's what makes this project so special!

The mod is specifically designed to work with the WCDX enhanced version of WC1 in Windows, and detailed instructions on how to get all that set up are available at the CIC Forums. We've mirrored the version 0.81 main file (342 meg zip) to make sure a permanent archive is available. All other necessary files are linked from this post. The reviews from fans so far have been fantastic, and what I've

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Here are the amazing takeoff and landing sprites from the original Wing Commander. Along with the cockpits these were absolutely essential in establishing the player's ship in their head (and showing-not-telling damage after a mission!).

Here are the Wing Commander II versions:

This is an interesting comparison to the WC2 landing art, the similar (but decidedly different) side views used for the eject cutscenes. They didn't do these for the new ships in the mission disks!

And here's the kind of detail that makes a Chris Roberts game special: when the cockpit slides open you can see just a little strip of the tan cockpit... which matches the side view you have in flight!

You can download a reference pack with dozens of cockpit images from WC1, WC2, WC3, Academy, Armada and Privateer here!

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It's been several years since our All Wings Considered live Wing Commander show has been in production, but LOAF is trying to get his space legs under him again. He's messing around on YouTube this evening in a totally unstructured stream about the WC Movie's Confederation Handbook. Check it out below!

In 1999, HarperEntertainment published the Wing Commander Confederation Handbook. Was it the greatest book ever written in the history of the world? Yes. Let's talk about it!