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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Firefox which was the origin of the original design for Wing Commander's Rapier fighter. You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
Jun
…We are sad today to report the passing of a man whose connection to Wing Commander we didn't know until it appeared in his obituary. Steve Sanders was a Austin-based voice actor who appeared in numerous Origin games starting with 1995's BioForge who died earlier this month. You can read his obituary here in the Port Aransas South Jetty; it's particularly well written and gets across that he was a good person.
Mr. Sanders is credited with three 'name' roles in Origin games. He played the main villains in both BioForge (1995) and Cybermage: Darklight Awakening (1996), the Mengele-esque Doctor Mastaba and the cyberpunk supervillain NeCrom respectively. He did double duty in BioForge as Dane, a cyborg at the emotional heart of the game. He was also credited with performing additional voices in Ultima IX, the credit given to most of the game's cast.
What we did not know is that he also acted in Wing
Jun
It's time for GOG's annual summer sale! The Wing Commander series has been marked down 60% across the board so that each package is just $2.39. Complete your collection below!
Jun
Earlier this year, Xeen Music published an incredible Wing Commander II and Academy archival soundtrack. Now they're back with a similar release for the wonderful-but-oft-forgotten Words of Ultima: Martian Dreams. Like Wing Commander, Martian Dreams used the OriginFX graphics engine and was produced by the great Warren Spector (who also appears as a character!). Martian Dreams' composers include Wing Commander veterans George "The Fatman" Sanger and Dana Glover. The album is a comprehensive 57-track collection which is available for purchase on Bandcamp or through the Xeen Music patreon. Like the Wing Commander album, this release is fully licensed from Electronic Arts and picking it up is a great way to show there's interest in Origin's classics!
Jun
…Six months have passed since the Battle for Sol culminated in the destruction of Titan Cocijo. With the alien threat repelled, communities across the core systems are beginning to rebuild economies, infrastructure - and hope.
Stations which suffered caustic devastation have long since restored full services. Local economies have bounced back and, in some cases, flourished thanks to the recent wave of new colonisation efforts.
Across the bubble both small ceremonies and large public events have taken place. Memorials for the dead, celebrations of brave pilots who engaged the alien threat, and spiritual guidance in the aftermath are common occasions. A memorial beacon deployed near the remains of the Titan wreckage in Sol draws visitors from across the bubble, the site representing both a crucial victory and a tragic loss of life.
Sociologists note a wave of emigration from systems heavily
Jun
…
The official Wing Commander movie club is BACK!... and for the record, we did find Showgirls pretty fascinating. But now we're back to movies that have been credited with inspiring Wing Commander and this week's film is a big one, at least visually: it's Firefox (1982). The legendary Clint Eastwood directs and stars in a high tech thriller from the height of the cold war. It's Eastwood vs. the Soviet Union in a race to capture a high tech airplane that should look pretty familiar to veterans of the Vega Campaign. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
Firefox's influence on Wing Commander isn't a mystery… it's right there in the name! Firefox's titular MiG-31 Firefox super-jet is the very clear inspiration for Wing Commander's own F-44 Rapier II design. The Rapier becomes 'less' Firefox in each iteration but you can still see the inspiration all the way through some of the early
Jun
…What's in a name? One of the great, small innovations in Wing Commander II is that any ship can be assigned a custom name. The game's mission designers took great advantage of this, naming all sorts of background spacecraft… including 23 different human transports across the three campaigns! WC2 did an excellent job of coming up with 'unusual' names for its ships; while many future settings simply put classic warships into space, WC2 found more unique choices… especially for the Clydesdales and Free Traders.
I recently made a surprise discovery while playing Special Operations 2: a Clydesdale which we had always listed as the "Coatmain" was actually the "Cootmain". Which obviously got me thinking: what the heck is a Cootmain? I wasn't able to find the term anywhere, not on Google, not in old Usenet posts and not even in the sum total of human knowledge stored at the Internet Archive! From there I
Jun
Here's a case of escort duty you DO want to pull: AEdwardBaker is back with another fantastic piece of Wing Commander art! This one is called Exeter Escort and it shows a mighty Exeter battleship escorting the famed Tiger's Claw. Maybe it's the Formidable! You can find the original on DeiantArt and more of their fantastic work here.
Exeter class destroyer escouting the carrier Tiger's Claw. Ships from Wing Commander.
Done in Blender.
Jun
…Greetings WingNuts,
The Wing Commander movie club is back from Hell in the Pacific and we were surprised by how interesting this movie we had never heard of before was! Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune are the only actors in the film, enemies unable to communicate abandoned on an island in the pacific during World War II. They must go from deadly foes to reluctant friends in a compelling anti-war story with great acting and very meaningful cinematography. The end result is more like an overly-lush stage play than any of the epic war films we've seen in previous weeks… totally unexpected, to say the least!
While Hell in the Pacific was absolutely the prototype for Enemy Mine and at least three Star Trek episodes we could not find the Wing Commander connection. We're going to make the extremely rare claim that there isn't an apparent one. Chris Brown, VFX director on the Wing Commander movie, cited Hell in
Jun
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way… except this week in which the movie did not inspire Wing Commander in any way. Tonight's film is Showgirls and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
Jun
Mac is back with more lore! This time he's taking on the very complicated subject of the F-90 Hellcat V medium fighter, the middle-of-the-road ship that kicks off both Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV "prepped, primed, loaded, locked and ready to kick some ass." As always, Mac has created literally oodles of cool animation to show off the ship… and his fantastic presentation and serious treatment of Wing Commander's lore is already converting casual observerse to our universe! You can find the Hellcat video here (embedded below) and be sure to check out Mac's previous work here.
Jun
…An Imperial strike force has launched a surprise assault against the Archon Delaine's flagship, the Mictlan, in what many are calling a long-awaited act of retribution.
The offensive took place in the Beta-3 Tucani system, where Delaine is believed to have attended a gathering of notorious underworld figures. Witnesses reported intense fighting around the Mictlan, with Imperial vessels engaging both the pirate dreadnought and its escorts.
Casualty reports are unconfirmed, but several pirate affiliated ships were destroyed or forced to flee.
A brief statement from Emperor Arissa's spokesperson confirmed Imperial involvement:
"Let this serve as an answer to the provocations of August last year. Those who threaten the Emperor or her citizens will be dealt with using proportionate force."
The attack appears to be a response to Archon Delaine's boasts following previous assassination attempts on
Jun
…We've updated the Cockpit Reference to include the redrawn versions of the four original Wing Commander ships as they appeared in the Super NIntendo (SNES) port of the game! If you've only played one or the other, you might be surprised by how different the other looks beyond having distinct aspect ratios… the Scimitar's layout in particular is totally rearranged! We've put together a 'normal' and 'alarms active' version for each of the ships.
I also made some new notes about differences between the two platforms:
- The SNES version does not have damage states; your cockpit never sparks or scars, there are no exposed wire or scorched panel graphics.
- The hit indicators and the fuel warning lights are either non functional or removed entirely in the SNES version.
- The 'sides' of the Hornet cockpit aren't actually clear; you can't see the skybox through them.
- The afterburner speeds are significantly
Jun
…The cat is out of the bag… the WCAT, that is! AllTinker has released the first public beta of his monumental Wing Commander AllTinker overhaul mod! This is a patch for the original DOS version of Wing Commander that adds the speed limiter it has been missing all these years. This is a big, big deal. The patch works on both actual hardware and in DOSBox which means that anyone, anywhere can finally play the original Wing Commander the way it was meant to be played. The project also adds a host of bug and even content fixes (no more Dart and Joker!) and adds support for 4-axis, 4-button joysticks... which means Wing Commander should play great with a controller! AllTinker writes:
The most critical thing it does is introduce game-wide sync-to-blank-based speed limiting. To do this properly required a huge number of code changes as many "scenes" in the game are coded slightly differently, requiring
Jun
…
Back in February when we watched Battle of Britain, people jokingly complained that they would rather watch Paul Verhoeven's disasterpiece Showgirls instead of another war movie. I responded that if we watched all four remaining war movies in the series then we could take a break from Wing Commander-related movies and watch it. Well, last week's screening of Hell in the Pacific made that a reality so this Friday we'll be watching Showgirls!
Showgirls is a 1995 erotic drama which famously bombed at the box office. But it was also the film Paul Verhoeven's similarly underappreciated Starship Troopers, a favorite of movie club. Could it also be underrated? Or at least maybe ridiculously fun? We'll find out this week! Please note that this is not part of the official movie series; there will be no after action report for Showgirls! But it should be a good time, regardless. You can join us this Friday via
Jun
…What's the buzz? More Hornets! An artist named ulimann644 has built a new CG model of the Hornet and posted some wondeful compositions on DeviantArt. You can find a wonderful gallery of their other work here... and we can't wait to see what the next Wing Commander ship will be!
F-36 Hornet (DeviantArt)
This is my first WING COMMANDER mesh - a few others will follow this year.
I've started with the F-36 HORNET from the first WC-PC-Game. I made some modifications in the hope that the fighter will look better than in the templates.
Hope you like it.
Software:
- Lightwave 2024
- PhotoshopCombat Space Patrol (DeviantArt)
This is my first WING COMMANDER Wallpaper with my F-36 HORNET mesh.
KILLER BEE 701, flown from Lieutenant-Colonel Deion "COOL TOUCH" Grafton, and KILLER BEE 707, flown from 2nd-Lieutenant Carrie "SILVER" Langdon, are on patrol.
Hope you like it.
Software:
- Lightwave 2024
- Photoshop
- ImageFX
Jun
…Today we're looking at a pair of 'trade ads'. These are magazine advertisements that mention Wing Commander because they're promoting different pieces of middleware that were used in the creation of the series. The first is from the July 1995 issue of Next Generation magazine which promotes Wing Commander III's use of Silicon Graphics' graphics computer to generate its CG sequences:
Here's an excerpt from Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander III where Chris Douglas talks about the team's then-intense SGI requirements:
CD: Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. The first and greatest surprise for the artists was that we had about two years worth of stuff to do, but only one year of time to do it. The second surprise was the hardware. We needed high-tech computers. We needed lots of them. At first we thought that one Indigo II, and three Blue Indy computers would do the trick. Then we realized that we couldn’t
Jun
…Greetings WingNuts,
It's no secret that most of us love Star Trek and we generally felt that The Motion Picture is a film that becomes more and more compelling the older it gets. What was once decried as slow and moody now feels impressive and relevant. And it's really the only of the Star Trek movies that directly follows the characters as they were in the original TV show.
The Wing Commander connection this time around was that Chris Roberts asked Wing Commander composer George "The Fatman" Sanger to pattern the original game's music after Jerry Goldsmith's spectacular Star Trek The Motion Picture score. I have a tin ear, but others in our party did claim they could hear the inspiration! Here are the main themes for both if you'd like to compare them yourself.
Another connection between ST:TMP and Wing Commander is that the film was Syd Mead's first project as a concept artist for film. He was
Jun
This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Hell in the Pacific which inspired the look and feel of the Wing Commander movie. You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!
Jun
…Typos! Don't you hate them? Well, I don't… because they've added at least two Kilrathi fighters to the Wing Commander canon! It may come as a surprise to many but the people involved in writing a Wing Commander tie-in weren't always players of the games they were adapting. Writers and editors often relied on the series bible produced by Origin's creative services group to get the nuts and bolts of the universe correct. As a result, it was easy for small errors to make it to press… especially when they involved words that weren't "real" like Kilrathi ship types. Here are two times when letting the wrong name go to print added a little bit of mystery to our world… and one where it didn't!
Our first example is the Grakhi, a ship type mentioned one time in End Run. From the text, reprinted below, it's pretty clear that Dr. Forstchen had intended to use 'Grikath' for the ship – they're described as heavy
