EA Soft-Launches Ultima Forever

Electronic Arts today launched Ultima Forever, the latest attempt to revitalize the venerable Ultima franchise. Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar is an iOS game based loosely on Origin Systems' Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. It is a mobile game with a 'free to play' business model; the game itself is a free purchase while various enhancements are available as microtransactions. Despite this, the title has an impressive lineage: it has been in development for three years by a team of dedicated Ultima fans at Mythic Entertainment.

There's just one more catch: today's Ultima Forever release is a soft launch which makes the game available only to users in Canada. iPhone, iPod and iPad users in Canada can begin playing now, while everyone else must wait for a date in July (which will be specified at next months' E3 conference.) If you're in Canada, you can pick up your copy via iTunes.

Most interesting for Wing Commander fans, beyond EA's unexpected interest in revisiting a classic Origin franchise, is that the game supposedly includes a quest with a damaged Kilrathi ship, referencing the one found in Ultima VII. As soon as it's discovered by Canadian players, we'll provide more information!

Wing Commander 'Flat Universe' Unveiled

Long time Wingnut Maslas has revealed the first screenshots of his new fan project, Wing Commander: Flat Universe! He's paired up with his brother to build an impressive new top-down shooter game based on the original Wing Commander. They have some ambitious goals, including multiplayer support and unique cockpit interfaces to fit each classic fighter. Everything is still in the prototype stages, but this is a great first look. Some of the art used below comes from items created by elend and Howard Day. It looks promising so far, so we wish them luck!
What I'd like to announce is that in some spare time that I am stealing from my everyday life (work, family, etc...), I have started to build a game that recreates Wing Commander I as a 2D top down shoot 'em up game (I loved ASCII sector) but with sprites, animations, opengl particles etc.

When hopefully this project is finished, it must fulfil the following goals:

a. Exact recreation of the Wing Commander I. Same ships, guns, missions, characters, story, dialogues, music even colours.
b. Top down 2D gameplay, with animations, physics, lights, particles.
c. Multiplatform support. Windows, Linux and Debians and Mac OS (mobile phones and pads will be considered in the future).
d. Multiplayer support and 2 player support on the same PC. With VS mode in the simulator and cooperative mode in the main campaign.

Xbox One Unveiled

Microsoft announced the new Xbox One console today. The system doubles down on the Xbox 360's multimedia strategy with numerous tie-ins to television, apps, multi-tasking and smartphones/tablets. Gaming specs have also been bumped with an 8-core processor and 8 gigs of RAM. Additional hardware features include a Blu-ray player, 802.11n, a 500 gig hard drive, USB 3.0 and streamlined controllers with trigger force feedback. The Kinect motion camera has been beefed up with 1080P resolution, enhanced tracking abilities and support for group Skype chats. Kinect will also be bundled with the system at launch later this year.
Like the Playstation 4, the system will not be backwards compatible with prior generation software. This is, of course, concerning to fans of Wing Commander Arena for Xbox Live Arcade. Although Microsoft has stated that there are no plans to discontinue the Xbox 360 in the near future, its days are certainly numbered. Xbox Live support for original Xbox games was shut down in April 2010, about five and a half years after the 360 debuted, so hopefully we can all continue to enjoy Arena for years to come. It wouldn't hurt if some smart people got to work on figuring out our options to continue playing indefinitely though!

Origin Museum Interviews the Vampire

Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum has a pretty cool toy and an interesting piece of history! The Vampire space superiority fighter pictured below was created by Origin Systems to advertise Wing Commander Prophecy at trade shows like E3. Joe recently came across it in a lot of props and costumes saved from Origin after all these years. The Vampire features light-up engines and was originally paired with a model of a Nephilim fighter. Unfortunately, no photographs of the Nephilim ship have surfaced yet... but we're happy to know the Vampire is now preserved for history!

Wing Commander Airing on HBO & On Demand

Blaster reports that the Wing Commander Movie has been added to HBO’s Video On Demand section on DirecTV. You can find the film listing here. It's also been recently airing in high definition on the HBO ZHD channel. The next showings are on May 21 & May 31 at 3:45 AM EDT. These broadcasts and the recent HD streaming options are great, but the big high definition prize will be Wing Commander on Blu-ray in less than three months!
A space pilot (Freddie Prinze Jr.) with an encoded message, his sidekick (Matthew Lillard) and their superior (Saffron Burrows) fight attacking aliens.

WC Vet to Lead New UT Gaming Academy

The University of Texas at Austin has announced that Wing Commander producer Warren Spector will be leading a new gaming academy at the school. The program will also be directed by Blizzard COO Paul Sams. Twenty slots will open up for promising students in the fall of 2014, and the end result will be a distinguished post-baccalaureate certificate. Each participant will make a small scale game of their own over the course of twelve months. UT Austin is also home to a massive video game archive that's full of historic Origin material. It'd be a great place to be if video gaming is your career path, but admission is highly competitive!
Texas is an epicenter for the computer and video game industry. It has the second-largest concentration of game companies in the U.S., with more than 155 development and publishing companies throughout the state providing around 4,000 full-time jobs, according to the Texas Film Commission in the Office of the Governor.

The academy will be industry driven – instead of a graduate degree, students will earn a post-baccalaureate certificate, which offers fewer restrictions than a traditional academic degree and will enable the program to remain relevant and responsive to industry trends.

"The Denius-Sams Gaming Academy will create the most-intense program of its kind, in which aspiring professionals enlist in an all-in adventure, rather than complete mere credit hours," said Roderick P. Hart, dean of the College of Communication. "The program will prepare students to become creative team leaders who will drive the creation of games in the future, and ensure the vitality of the gaming industry."

A Little Austin Adventure with LOAF

I'm back in Austin visiting LOAF this week, and here's a tiny peek at our exploits. First things first, we hit up three vintage game stores and scored some WC merchandise at each one! It's always so great to see the store clerks light upon mentioning the Wing Commander name. Apparently, my rental was built for just this scenario and has a slot designed to carry an SNES cartridge. These images are followed by a picture snapped of us at the offices of Cloud Imperium Games/Roberts Space Industries.


We also caught the series finale of The Office on Thursday night and assembled all 18 ingredients from Michael Scott's Pretzel Day super pretzel to celebrate. And we even got some good old fashion Texas shootin' in! Last, but not least, we were at the premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness Wednesday night. Check out this link and like the photo to help LOAF win a Star Trek prize pack!

Strike Commander Gains OS X Compatibility

Good Old Games has added Macintosh support for ten more games, and this latest batch includes Strike Commander! This is good news for fans of classic Origin games, but it doesn't stop here. Fill out this form and let GOG know they need to add more Wing Commanders!
Do you feel like it's the time to spread your wings? Strike Commander is an action-oriented modern-day jet fighter combat simulation from the creators of Wing Commander, for only $5.99.

Slick Sabre Slicing Shapeways Soon

Klavs' latest design is another star of Wing Commander 2, the heavy attack Sabre. It's looking both sleek and vicious in these new renders. The F-57 still needs a set of colorful textures, but we can't wait for this bird and its Broadsword bomber brother showing up at Terran Fleet Supply soon!
Blair put the eight of us in line astern formation.

Single file, with one Sabre behind and slightly below the next, the carrier could only hit the leading ship, and the rest of us would be protected from the defensive fire while we went for torpedo lock.

The tactic would guarantee that most of us would make it to torpedo launch. It was inspired, except that Blair forgot about his own skin, like always. The leader of the formation would be absorb the brunt of the Kilrathi point defense, sparing the other ships, but sacrificing himself.

Not to be out done in the suicidal bravery department, I firewalled the throttle and broke formation. Couldn't let him have all the glory, could I?

Cuhna squalled at me, but quickly shut up as I bored in on the carrier. Dry launching everything I had, I threw it into a 960° slew/spin, firing intermittently at the carrier while we corkscrewed along its length. I heard wretching over the ICS, but I also felt the 'whump' from the turret as Cuhna also fired at the carrier whenever it flashed into view.

Good girl.

My torpedoes didn't have a chance at penetrating the carrier's shields without a lock, but the Kilrathi were concentrating on us anyway, throwing up everything they had to take us out. Hopefully, it was buying the others a smoother ride.

As I spun over the bow of the ship a flight of Jalkehi flashed past, launched forthwith to put an end to our monkeyshines. Blair would be close to launch now, but I had to keep the fighters off the strike team while they gained a lock.

I charged into the Jalkehi formation, fighting them for what seemed like hours. All the while Cuhna whumped away with her little turret. At some point, I noticed the whumping had stopped.

Then the sky lit up like a second sun.

-Maniac

'Hazardous Duty' Pitch Revealed!

Origin alumni and consummate archivist Binky has discovered another great treasure: the 1997 Origin pitch video for Wing Commander: Hazardous Duty. Hazardous Duty, named after one of George Oldziey’s music tracks for Wing Commander Prophecy, was an attempt to spin Wing Commander off into an FPS game. Binky saved a VHS of the demo all these years and recently digitized it for the ages!


The Wing Commander FPS project would have been built on the then-modern Quake engine and pitted Terran Confederation marines against space pirates and Kilrathi warriors in the Border Worlds. The plan was for it to stand out in the FPS market (and connect back to the initial IP) by featuring a more elaborate AI “wingman.” A very basic demo was done in-house by the Maverick Team (largely a reskinning of Quake, with some level design.) While the project was ultimately not funded by Electronic Arts, the multiplayer was enjoyed for some time in-house by the team!


Check out the pitch video here:

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