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The greatest Maniac of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time! Director Quentin Tarantino has come for... Matthew Lillard? While promoting his new Kill Bill-based Fortnight expansion, Tarantino made several outrageous statements calling out specific actors... including, for some reason, Wing Commander's Matthew Lillard. Lillard, himself promoting the new Five Nights at Freddy's movie at a convention, reacted soulfully:

Quentin Tarantino this week said he didn't like me as an actor. Listen, listen, listen. The point is is that it hurts your feelings. It sucks. And he wouldn't say that to Tom Cruise. Quentin wouldn't say he doesn't like Tom Cruise cuz he likes Tom Cruise. He wouldn't say that to somebody who's a topline actor in Hollywood. I'm very popular in this room. I am not very popular in Hollywood. Two totally different microcosms, right? And so, you know, it's it's humbling

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The Digital Antiquarian is back with another article about the history of Chris Roberts' career, this time ostensibly covering the founding of Digital Anvil and the making of the Wing Commander movie.

We've reported on these articles in the past with little commentary. This time, though, I want to stress that these articles are incredibly misleading. They are poorly researched blog entries built around an incredibly inappropriate bias. Their entire gimmick is that they attempt to mimic the form and tone of academic writing without any of the necessary rigor. Anyone familiar with the subjects being discussed (this is not limited to the Wing Commander pieces) pretty quickly recognizes how they work: they cap a generally uninteresting personal review with a lengthy rewrite of someone else's article that takes every opportunity to intentionally twist meanings towards whatever personal narrative the author

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Perhaps the less said about last week's screening of Crash the better! No, it was a pretty fascinating movie and absolutely one that made you think. Just… not one you'd tell your parents you were watching! This week, the Wing Commander movie club is going to go with something much, much safer: all time crowd favorite Back to the Future (1985). You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The big connection between Wing Commander is, once again, the flying car! We've already talked about how The Last Starfighter's Starcar and Blade Runner's police car influenced the flying cars seen on New Detroit. But we need to give some credit to Back to the Future's evolution of the idea and specifically how (at the end of the movie) the Delorean's wheels turn in and stay that way for the flight (the Starcar also does this, but they're then sealed closed). Both "car" and "jacko" (the silver one) fly this

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There's a small but satisfying discovery for fans of tragically lost games: we've found a screenshot from the cancelled Wing Commander II port for the Sega Genesis! This screenshot showing a Broadsword targetting a Sartha (or a Drakhri?) and viewing a Grikath appears in a March 1993 Electronic Gaming Monthly supplement called the "1994 Video Game Preview Guide" which collects previews of games shown at that year's Las Vegas CES. And it was sponsored by Electronic Arts' EA Sports division! If you compare this Broadsword cockpit to the game you'll see it isn't a stock PC shot, it has been modified for the console version.

WING COMMANDER II
The popular PC classic is now on the Genesis. Using the revolutionary ASICS chip, the action is smooth and incredibly fast. Battle against the Kilrathi Empire for control over space.
BY ELECTRONIC ARTS

Wing Commander II for the Genesis was being developed for Electronic

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Here's a couple of slick screenshots from Cmdr Exorcist's Tarsus built for Space Engineers. It's a little blocky due to the nature of the game, but the overall layout looks pretty good!

"Sorry boys, I'm just a tourist with a fried nav console."

The legendary TARSUS from Wing Commander Privateer is the latest addition to my shipyard workshop. I hope you'll enjoy flying this beast!

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The Wing Commander movie club is back from our vacation to Westworld and, well, there are still a few bugs to be worked out. The movie holds up very well, it's still tremendously fun. Objectively, you recognize that it isn't much of a story as over half the run time is devoted to setting up the world and explaining how the theme park works… but subjectively, that's the fun part and Michael Crichton made exactly the right choice focusing on what's actually most interesting here. And after so many somber British war movies, its breezy sub-90-minute run time was certainly a nice feature!

We already talked about Michael Crichton's star system in the intro post so there's not a lot more to say about Westworld's connection to Wing Commander! We did manage to find one almost-reference: hidden in Privateer 2's data is a list of ships for an earlier version of the booth database which is totally different from