Wing Commander

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Howard Day

took some time out of his busy post-

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

launch schedule to release an update to the online

rolling demo

for Wing Leader! Much like the actual

WC1 demo

, this isn't a playable artifact, but it shows live assets interacting in the game engine. Even moreso than any trailer, this gives fans a first hand up-close look at what the game will actually be like live. The battle is pretty intense - all those Dralthis start to make me nervous, but fortunately they have both Firekkans and Confed opponents to contend with! Load up the rolling demo

here

.

The live demo's been updated! Includes the intro, menu (static for now) and initial fighting in a Dralthi! as soon as you die, tho, it switches back to Hornet.

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Artist Alan Gutierrez has posted another one of his fabulous Wing Commander scenes commissioned for the Wing Commander Customizable Card Game. It was mirrored and used as the art for the Magnum Launch card. It's hard to tell if this was just due to image processing, but there are possibly some very slight differences between the two scenes: the ceiling structure is more pronounced in the recent posting while the light reflections on the deck appear slightly more distinct on the card. Mr. Gutierrez notes that this scene was likely the inspiration for a similar fighter launch scene he did a few years later for Steve Jackson Games titled X Wing Fighter Scramble. You can find links to some of his other Wing Commander items below and plenty of other nifty sci-fi scenes here.

From the card game "Wing Commander" commissioned and published by Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weis, 1995

A "Luck" card, it was the

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LeHah tipped us off about the news that legendary visual futurist Syd Mead will be receiving a highly prestigious William Cameron Menzies Art Director's Guild at the organization's upcoming annual event. Mr. Mead is mostly known for his work on the original Star Trek movie, Blade Runner, Tron and Aliens, but he's actually had his hand in a wide range of products. These include Wing Commander Prophecy where he was responsible for a couple of the new ship designs as well as the Nephilim themselves!

Most recently, it's been reported that he's enamored with the new Tesla Cybertruck, saying it's "stylistically breathtaking" and "has completely changed the vocabulary of the personal truck market design."

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Remember: the love arrow always loves you. Hope you have a happy day!

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The Spring Sale may be over, but GOG is rolling right into a handful of smaller specialty sales to help give gamers who are sheltering at home something to do. A particularly fun deal running right now is dedicated to space games of all types. This ranges from Space Quest to the X series (wow, they made an X4?) to Wing Commander. If you have a friend stuck at home right now, gift them a Wing Commander game and help them get through the quarantine! You can find the GOG midweek sale here.http://

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Ever wonder how medals work in Wing Commander I? Well, I am putting together a guide anyway.

It's not uncommon for discussions at the CIC Forums to touch on the concept of "medal points" and how this influences whether you are awarded a certain star or sometimes nothing at all. It often shows up in the news and on Discord too. Many fans have had a general understanding dating all the way back to Secrets of the Wing Commander Universe, but what exactly are the details? How many points do you get for taking out a Dralthi versus a Snakeir? Certain missions each make a single medal available, but we realized we didn't have a nice concise article that spelled out what that threshold was and how you achieved it. So LOAF finally went and did it! This then naturally led into topics like the hypothetical maximum medal slate that a pilot can earn based on their path through the game, which have been noted

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Chronocidal Guy's recent 3D printed Excalibur model was a big hit, and fans wanted to get a closer look at the actual model renders to appreciate the design in all its beauty. They look wonderful, and Mr. Guy has provided a variety of angles to give everyone a great view. He has a few additional notes about areas that he had to tweak for producibility, but the fighter still looks pretty spot on!

The 3D model is currently a mess of assembly structures and supports, but drawings I can absolutely do. Fully orthogonal, instead of those odd perspective renders we've had for so long.

The second side view has the near tail and missile bay moved and flipped around to show their backsides, and give a clear view of the rest of the ship behind them, with the back engine bank moved down to show the inner surface. No markings yet, and I don't have the details built for the darker access panel areas, but those

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Justice has kicked off a live-streaming playthrough of Wing Commander Standoff. Standoff is a spectacular fan mod based on the Secret Ops engine. It takes place during the events of the Fleet Action novel, which were exciting times ripe for further exploration. The game was largely released in the 2004-2009 timeframe across five main chapters. While it was one of the most popular mods at the time, there's probably a lot of people these days that either missed it or just weren't into fan games back then. The two videos below get about halfway through the story, which is pretty good progress. Now's your chance to get a taste of what you might have missed!

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Today marks twenty-three years since the Wing Commander Movie was released! It's hard to believe it's been so much time since we - and many of you - lined up at theaters. A lot has changed since then. Sure, there are still plenty of snarky podcasts that do their thing with it, but I've also noticed a big shift in the last few years. Lately, a lot of people have given it a second chance and can appreciate it for what it is. While the film remains hard to find on physical disc, it's also nice to see that it's once again easy to rent or buy on various streaming services. If you're checking it out again, let us know. We're always down for a rewatch or discussion!

Also if you missed it from a few weeks back, I wanted to point out Klavs' clean-up of the movie's universe map. It's pretty slick!

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Happy New Year all! Today we've got our annual January 1 poll that asks Wingnuts for their expectations for the year ahead. As we saw in yesterday's news post, 2022 was a busy year, and we've got every reason to believe 2023 will be just as exciting! What do you think? Whatever happens, we're looking forward to sharing it with you!

The old poll was a Halloween-themed choice between ghostly named fighters. The powerful Vampire took the top spot, but the spooky Jincilla Skull was close behind. WC4's Banshee and the Wraith also did quite well. Sadly, almost no one likes the Phantom.

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As a special birthday treat, LOAF's wife Alexis made these custom ink prints based on WC2 Thrakhath. One is a framed portrait and the other is a nifty canvas tote. Very very cool!

Look what Ali made for me!

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Van Burnham has posted an update on the next phase of the campaign to produce a Deluxe vinyl pressing of the WING COMMANDER score. While the initial Indiegogo effort didn’t hit the funding goals necessary to kick off production, Van is working the numbers and determining what it will take to move forward from here. The album was initially projected for next year, so there's still time to work through options and figure out how to close the gap and make this a reality. Of course, Wing Commander fans are nothing if not patient. Stay tuned for future updates!

Hi everybody... thank you so much for supporting this project. I'm incredibly excited to make the Wing Commander orchestral score on deluxe vinyl a reality. That said, it goes without saying that I'm disappointed the campaign did not reach it's minimum funding goal and am in the process of sorting out some issues with this platform as a result. I

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We've reported in the past on the sale of the Origin Museum collection and today we're happy to report that the new owner is serious about preserving Origin's history! Dominus Dragon has begun digitizing Origin Museum material and he has been kind enough to share the Wing Commander-related discoveries with us... including an enormous Wing Commander Prophecy producer's bible! We're very grateful for the effort and the thought that went into sharing this for the Wing Commander community. Here's an index to 17 new documents added to our digital archive... plenty to explore and it sounds like there may be more to come!

Wing Commander I:

• Best Sound Presentation award
• Advertisement Draft

Wing Commander III:

• Concept Board Photo
• Hire and Quantity List
• Production Notes

Wing Commander IV:

• Bug Report
• Team Patch Design

Privateer 2:

• Customer Service Issues
• New QA Tester Information

Wing Commander Prophecy:

• Anderson Costume

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Accelerwraith tipped us off about a wonderful little easter egg segment in the animated show Invincible on Prime Video. He captured the clip below where a bunch of purple people in helmets and suits run down a red corridor. The way it frames both their heads and their feet seems to confirm it's an intentional nod to the classic Wing Commander dash from the briefing room to the flight deck. Here they are side by side so you can appreciate the similarity!

.@banditloaf Someone(s) on the @InvincibleHQ team played Wing Commander. pic.twitter.com/XOFfh3bogZ

— 山ㄩㄥ千 (@Accelerwraith) November 10, 2023

Did you know there are actually several different running sequences in the original Wing Commander? You can get different combinations of crew wearing a flight helmet, cap, long hair and short hair. Pretty neat!

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Today we have a very cool flythrough of a set of Space Engineers maps by Jason Musgrave. We've seen a handful of impressive designs over the year from Wing Commander 1 to Privateer to WC4, but WC3 was relatively untapped territory. Now we're getting three-in-one by way of a fantastic TCS Victory, plus a Confed cruiser and Kilrathi carrier. There are even fighters across the deck that you can get inside. Phenomenal effort on display here!

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Thanks for the background, friends. Of course, I was curious for Wing Commander-related reasons. Specifically, I was fascinated to see the names of the Kray twins because... of Privateer 2's Bray twins:

Reggie Bray is the guy who is selling Uncle Kashumai's religious artifact. For that mission you have to look up their bio in the database and then find their business partner.

There's also a Joe scene where he warns you to look out for the Brays. And you kind of have to wonder: why, since Reggie isn't any particular threat in the auction scene. And heck, why are there two of them anyway? Is it just for the (unknown to me until last night!) joke?

In fact, it's a case of cut content! In the shooting script we see that the Brays were supposed to be the enemies in the Tamessa Ames cinematic mission and that Ronnie (the muscle, as in real life apparently!) was then supposed to continue trying to hunt you down.

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It's time once again for... SNACKS OF THE TERRAN CONFEDERATION!

The famed TCS Victory's rec room always has popcorn on the tables...

The Grey Ghost, TCS Lexington, has little bowls of peanuts all around the lounge.

... and finally the megacarrier Midway has a megasnack: big cheeze doodlepuff type things.

The Victory's bar has some other options, too: bowls of peanuts, cherries, orange slices (only around when Flint is drinking!) and what I think are Tootsie Pops?!

Does anyone ever actually eat the bar snacks? There's a scene in WC4 where Blair palms a peanut and then puts it back while he's talking to Maniac... but I think Captain Paulsen is the only one who ever eats anything!

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Scout recently found this spicy post on the Game Collecting Reddit. A user named charitysmyth1 had just acquired a copy of Wing Commander 2. Much to their surprise, it contained a collection of vintage early '90s adult media. These look like rather tame items all-in-all, but they might have been considered pretty racy before the internet age. Although not pictured, it sounds like the box did include the WC2 disks at least!

Scored some big box PC games over the weekend. What I found in Wing Commander II completely caught me off guard.

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NightBall06 recently decided to try his hand a several new Hellcat angles. Since his design is essentially drawn 'by hand' rather than being a 3D model, this took some artistic skill rather than modeling wizardry. The result is similar to his previous concepts at first glance, but these represent his most ornate takes and elaborate angles yet.

Well - A little update in short. Had the feeling I needed a perspective bottom view.... So here it is.

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EmuMusicFan recently added a Japanese copy of Wing Commander 3 for the Playstation to his collection. This version has some absolutely gorgeous documentation that I don't think we've posted before, so here's the Combat Guide instruction manual in its entirety! It's in full color, which is really sweet. I always always like to see what bits of the game and interface remain in English after the rest is translated. It's very cool all around!