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Micromania Reviews a Mega-Game
Don't you love these international magazine scans? We can thank Maxi de Sokar for another set! This is an issue of Micromania (No. 76) from 1994 - it's feature article is about Wing Commander Armada, but it also has updates on Super Wing Commander and Heart of the Tiger. I can't even read Spanish, but the layout speaks for itself - people all over the world were excited about Wing Commander in the same way!
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Star*Soldier Gloss: Page 21
This is the Star*Soldier gloss for the third systems page:
CONCEPT: See the previous post!
REFERENCES-
- "Corsair System" - Corsair was originally seen in Secret Missions 2, although we don't learn much about it. The game mode here is, obviously, the 'Gauntlet' map with the Midway-class ship centerpiece.
- "Vanhecke" - KrisV from WCNews, the man behind the scenes who keeps the show running.
- "New Confederation" - Although I flesh out this one later (and note it!) a lot of these factions are just throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks. The hope here was that it would explain just how broken-down this frontier area has become... and, in this particular case, why the Confederation logo is still seen in so many places.
- "floating city" - Everyone felt dreadful after the community reaction to the Midway wallpaper and so I was drafted to come up with some theories that could be used if the question came up in a press interview (it never did, of course). I outlined a few possible stories - floating refugee city, modified for transit through Nephilim space, part of the 'block II' Midway design, etc. I obviously focused on the favorite (floating city) here, but I worked in all of the others somewhere too.
- "mercenary, Privateer and would-be shogun" - I like that last one! Here, again, we note a clear difference between mercenaries and Privateers (with a capital P!).
- "Chloe" - After my cat.
- "Battlecruisers" - This is also something that predates the manual concept - I was asked to develop an explanation for the battlecruiser mode because the team thought they were significantly different from capital ships seen in the past. I don't entirely agree with that (we even see this kind of fleet action in the novels and the movie!) but I came up with the idea that their design is specific to fighting the Nephilim.
- "Texas-class battleships" - My attempt to name the battleships seen in Action Stations (and to connect our story to them.)
- "Ardai" - System seen on the original Vega Sector Claw Marks map and mentioned in Wing Commander I's dialogue.
- "Kraken" - The 'big bad' shipkiller from Wing Commander Prophecy, now operating in squadrons to suggest the size of the war.
- "Torgo" - Confederation HQ (later conquered by the Kilrathi) seen in Wing Commander III.
- "Kabla Meth" - Kilrathi HQ seen in Special Operations 2.
- "Dakota" - Human system seen in Wing Commander I (and the Wing Commander movie).
- In general, I am sorry to say that I don't have any idea what most of these things are. They're settings rather than stories - something familiar mixed with something new that you have to expand yourself. You haev to decide President Harrison was and what Zhrtx's Doublecross was. I honestly did not think out a single one of these 'new' events in my head. I made sure to double-reference things and keep internal consistency... but the stories are up to the fans (or Electronic Arts, someday).
- "TCS Conquerer" - Another Royal Navy-derived name for the battlecruisers.
- "TCS Lawrence" - After T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia).
- "Colonel Casey" - Lance Casey, the main character from Wing Commander Prophecy - here a little bit older and of higher rank.
- "Farragut Naval Station" - I threw this in to explain which battlecruiser it is you see fly past the camera at the menu screen!
- "visually similar, owing..." - Technobabble to explain why the Kiranka and Indomitable are very similar looking in the game. Surprisingly, no one complained about this.
- "Kilrathi Midway" - I lied, this is the one story that I thought through and then didn't do a very good job of explaining. The reference here is the late 1940s when the Russians copied a captured B-29 bolt-for-bolt and then introduced it to their inventory. America was shocked to see Russian B-29s appear in a military parade one day. So, my fun concept here was that the Kilrathi had done the same thing to the Midway - built their own Kilrathi version. Imagine the megacarrier made from tan Kilrathi durasteel and covered in red clan markings...
- "thousands" - I wanted to remind everyone that capital ships in Wing Commander exist in great numbers (ref. Confederation Handbook).
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