News Collection: On This Day in WC News

2022.034 (February 3, 2022)

Vintage Video Shows Sega CD WC1 at CES

Looking Glass Museum has posted a brief but nifty thirty year old video. Before E3 was a thing, the Consumer Electronics Shows was one of the primary venues to showcase your big video game. This was recorded by someone at the Summer 1992 CES. It features some of the upcoming games for the Sega CD system on a cool nine-television video wall.

2021.034 (February 3, 2021)

Explore the Excalibur's Historic Role

Mac's Lore has another video in his ongoing series in Wing Commander history. This time it's a profile of the fantastic Excalibur heavy fighter. Mac does a great job weaving together elements from both the Wing Commander 3 game and novelization to craft a singular narrative. The focus is definitely on its 2669 performance and stats, but we do get appropriate nods to its later postwar appearance and brief encounters with the Nephilim.

2020.034 (February 3, 2020)

TCS Victory Taking Shape in Voxel Shipyard

L.I.F has a proven record of bringing exciting fan projects to the community, and now he's launching into another adventure with the Minecraft-like From the Depths. His main objective is to recreate the TCS Victory.

2019.034 (February 3, 2019)

Talon Tally Just Scratches the Surface

We have a new poll today that asks about the many flavors of the F-38 Talon fighter. Some people may not be aware there's actually five distinct paint schemes out there. As the story goes, the corrupt Gemini Sector Governor Menesch illicitly sold untold numbers of the craft to rogue groups such as the Church of Man. This explains how commonplace they are in Privateer as well as why they're equally flown by both the local militia, Retros and random pirates.

2018.034 (February 3, 2018)

Select A System That Suits Your Style

A whole bunch of exciting new video game hardware has come out in the past year, and it's been quite a while since we last asked what systems people would most prefer a new Wing Commander game on. The latest console and handheld devices out today are more powerful than high end PCs from just a couple years ago, so any of these platforms could produce stunning results. Which would you like to see?!The last poll was our annual pulse on what fans are expecting for the year ahead.

2017.034 (February 3, 2017)

Early Wing Commanders Finally Receive Rating in Australia

Electronic Arts has recently asked Australia's Department of Communications and the Arts to provide a rating for Wing Commander, Wing Commander 2 and Privateer. Evidently, the three oldest games in the franchise (published before Origin was acquired by EA) had never been rated for the Australian market. With several Wing Commander games showing up on Origin Access, a digital delivery/subscription service, it's possible that EA had to quickly get that straightened out. All three have been classified Parental Guidance, with Privateer considered the tamest, due to just mild sci-fi themes and violence.

2016.034 (February 3, 2016)

Wing Commander Finally Gets Its Due?

Den of Geek recently ran an article on the 50 Underappreciated DOS Games. As one of the best selling and highest rated DOS games of all time, we'd probably agree with Space Game Junkie that Wing Commander doesn't really fit on this list. Rather, this instead seem like a missed opportunity to highlight something like Wing Commander Armada or perhaps Privateer 2. Nevertheless, we'll take it as a fun look back at some of the highlights of yesteryear.

2015.034 (February 3, 2015)

Thousands of Lines Extracted for WC4 Audio Mega Pack

Last month's audio pack with all of Plier's WC4 witticisms was a big hit, so AD has rolled up (nearly) the whole enchilada this time. He's assembled a much larger zip with some 6,000 various clips. It's mostly comm chatter, but there is some music in there as well. They're also mostly unlabeled due to the quantity of files here, but anyone who needs pilot voiceovers for a fan project is in luck.

2014.034 (February 3, 2014)

New Privateer Trade Profit Calculator In Development

Whiplash has been tinkering with a new tool to help the pilots of Gemini Sector. He's used Privateer's commodity prices to build a calculator that helps predict the best cargo purchases and trade routes. The basic mechanics are working, but he's now asking for feedback to fine tune the best formulas and user interface. If everything works out, he may be able to get this running at a smartphone/tablet app for convenient Quine in the cockpit!

2013.034 (February 3, 2013)

Fralthi Let Loose on Vega Sector

Klavs has finished up the textures on his new Fralthi, which makes the warship essentially complete. Its Kilrathi durasteel hull looks super sharp, and there's plenty of fine details to gorge your eyes on. All angles look imposing. The snappy escort provided by several Dralthi and Salthi craft are a nice finishing touch.

2012.034 (February 3, 2012)

Fighter Tokens See Battle on the Table

Progress continues to be made on Wing Commander TacOps Online. Avacar has implemented numerous bug fixes in the last several weeks and has big plans about the next phase of the game's development. After an upcoming flurry of coding is complete, the idea is to launch another beta test game that involves capital ships and their escorts. Meanwhile, capi has mocked up the current game using his counter tokens.

2011.034 (February 3, 2011)

Pix's Origin Adventures Cover Tremendous Territory

It's been almost two years in the making, but Pix's Origin Adventures blog has blasted through more than a decade of classic Origin material and covered most of the Wing Commander series as a result. He's played through Wing Commander 1, Secret Ops and nearly everything in between, but he's still finding cool contemporary articles and most recently reviewed False Colors. Quite a trove of information and experiences have been amassed! What's even more impressive is that while this could be referring to just his Wing Commander exploits, Pix has actually been playing everything from Origin's catalog.

2010.034 (February 3, 2010)

Model Giveaway Benefits Fan Projects

SolCommand has a big gift for budding modders. He has created dozens of space ship models for use in a Freelancer mod that fell through. Rather than see the ships go to waste, he's posted them online for other projects to incorporate. Some designs look inspired by WC craft, but they come from a mix of science fiction origins.

Prelude to Darkness Meeting Milestones

It's been a busy week for the Frontier - Prelude to Darkness movie. There's a new profiled ship, the Asimov, and Executive Officer Paul Laski has a highlighted character biography. Two special wallpapers were even released yesterday. Footage for chapter 8 is about a quarter complete, and lew82 hopes to get the next release out late this month.

2009.034 (February 3, 2009)

RedLime Still A Mystery

EA has announced that a Jason Bourne videogame is being developed by Starbreeze Studios. Roughly one year ago, we learned that the Swedish developer is working on a game that "reinvent(s) one of EA's most acclaimed classic franchises." The mystery title, codename "RedLime", is being developed for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC. Yesterday, the company told Eurogamer that the project is still in development but offered no further information.

Welcome To Luyten

The enemy force in Luyten decided to throw a welcoming party for the pilots of the TCS Cerberus. This week's Community Replay assignment kicks off with over twenty enemy fighters at Nav 1. Scramble! Here's a sample of DaveO's adventures in Cygnus.

2008.034 (February 3, 2008)

Community Replay A Big Success

Wing Commander fans have reported in with some interesting stories about their adventures in the first few systems of Wing Commander 1. This week's agenda focuses on a second set of three systems in the original game. This could be some configuration of Brimstone, Dakota, Kurasawa, Rostov, Port Hedland or Hubble's Star. Post your experiences here.

The Art of Wing Commander Arena - Part Sixty-Four

This shows some more early work on the '3D' aspect of the 3D avatars. Here we see a Terran in various positions - it would have taken quite a bit of work to build an entire engine for 'personalizing' these heads.This is part of a series of beautiful Wing Commander Arena concept images graciously provided by Gaia Industries. You can find the original article here.

2007.034 (February 3, 2007)

Print Some Tabletop WC Markers

WholeHazelNuts from the SCNews Forum has created some markers for the Victory By Any Means game system. They kind of make me think of Wing Commander pogs. VBAM is a modular infrastructure that allows gamers to easily create their own rules, settings and environments for tabletop games. A handful of SCN posters are trying to develop a set of rules for a Wing Commander variant.

ASCII Cargo Is Brilliance

Development of the Privateer: ASCII Sector project is progressing at an impressive speed, and developer Chris Knudsen has posted the latest update: the cargo manifest. Since the manifest won't fit in the multi-function display, it gets its own ASCII screen. Following on from this, the next parts of the game to be developed will be code relating to cargo containers in space.

2006.034 (February 3, 2006)

Standoff Episode 3 Improvement Patch Released!

The highly anticipated upgrade to Standoff Episode 3 is now available! Although the team behind this popular fan project is hesitant to release interim updates between episodes, they have isolated a number of major things they were able to fix and expand on in the last month. In addition to these improvements, the Tarsus has been replaced by the Arrow in the Standoff Simulator. The new ship looks great and should be very popular.

Geek Empire Gets The Wing Commander Message

Smooth over at Geek Empire has published a neat retrospective on the life-changing impacts of the Wing Commander universe. The series is symbolic of the types of games that went beyond being just fun to play. Wing Commander captivated the imagination of millions of science fiction fans and has been a source of great enthusiasm for fifteen years now. None of this is new to the regular readers of our site, but it's always an important message that we like to see get around to a new audience.

2005.034 (February 3, 2005)

Another Peek At The WC3 Production

TopGun found an old copy of the old Sci Fi Universe magazine. In November 1994 they did a preview of the upcoming Wing Commander III production. There's a few mistakes relating to the date and characters, but it's a pretty interesting look behind the scenes of the production.But with Wing Commander III, 26-year-old Chris Roberts, director and creator of the previous Wing Commander games, wanted to define interactivity in a new way, by creating an interactive movie that employs all the conentions of film to tell a story, and also allows the viewer/player to become part of the action by interacting at key points in the plot, thus advancing and changing the course of events throughout.

Enterprise Cancelled!

Yesterday UPN announced some very unfortunate news for fans of Enterprise.UPN and Paramount Network Television have jointly announced that this will be the final season of Star Trek: Enterprise on UPN. [Production will continue until the end of this season, which will finish shooting in March.] The series finale will air on Friday, May 13, 2005.

2004.034 (February 3, 2004)

Fun With Antman's Utilitarian Wing Commander Art

There was a delay with our regularly scheduled CIC updates for today, so Antman stepped up and sent us a nifty 3d representation of the Hari Sector from Fleet Action.It'd be neat to be able to zoom in and rotate something like that.

Beware The Kilrathi Saga Fraud

While for the most part trading on eBay is safe, you do occasionally get unscrupulous people. Currently one seller is offering what at first glance appears to be a copy of Kilrathi Saga for $59.99. What this person is in fact selling is cheats for the game, but the cheap Buy It Now option may catch some Wing Commander fans off guard.

Ultima V Remake Draws Attention

Various sites are reporting about a major project to recreate Origin's classic Ultima V in the Dungeon Siege engine. It's getting a lot of positive press and seems to have some good momentum right now. A playable test demo has been released to let people try out what is available so far. New mods come and go every day, but the attention this one has gathered is a tribute to the popularity of many of Origin's original franchises.

2002.034 (February 3, 2002)

In The Money

This war agrees with them: AVault reports that Electronic Arts has more money than a dead fish. This, of course begs the question: just how much money does a dead fish have?Video game publisher Electronic Arts reported a 50 percent jump in its fiscal third-quarter profit on Wednesday, led by strong sales for its Harry Potter games franchise. Redwood City, California-based Electronic Arts reported a net profit of $132.

Holding the Line: Chapter 120

Next up is Raptor's introduction for the latest chapter of Holding the Line. You can find the chapter here.Hey all, Raptor here.HTL continues with part four of the "Toeing The Line" series, this one beingcalled "Scrap Mettle".

2001.034 (February 3, 2001)

Real World Flint And Stiletto Photos Surface

Jennifer MacDonald (Flint) and Heather Stephens (Stiletto) from WC3 and WCP always tended to strike me as somewhat plain and restricted. But recently some saucy photos of both turned up for sale one eBay. I think they're considerable improvements. I'm not the only one, there were more than a few bids for the original versions of these photos.

Where's LOAF?

A number of people have been asking us lately where LOAF has been these past couple weeks. He's still around, and you can find him in #Wingnut periodically. However, he'll be undergoing one of his most serious surgeries yet next week, and right now he's in the process of moving from Texas to Maryland for recovery this year. So he's been a busy guy and has a lot to go through in the coming days.

Massive Conspiracy Thrillers Are Nothing New In Europe

Karl Frank explained to me the other day that large scale conspiracy thrillers, such as Neil Young's Majestic, have already proved to be pretty effective forms of spooky entertainment in Europe. The famed producer of monitors and workstations in the 27th Century, Nokia, conducted huge promotional events these past two Novembers that engaged participants in a massive conspiratorial adventure. Apparently there were webpages, e-mails, SMS messages, newspaper ads, TV spots, radio spots and phone calls all throughout the course of the game. Some things were very spooky and difficult to distinguish as a part of the game.

2000.034 (February 3, 2000)

German Peter Telep Pages Up

Over at the official Peter Telep site, Jens Borner and Richard Bowden have put together a version of the website in German. You can find it here. You can find Jens' site here. The Russian pages should be up very shortly.

New mirc Version Released

Yesterday those wacky people at www.mirc.co.uk released version 5.

Digital Anvil President Leaving Company

DA's president, Marten Davies, left Digital Anvil as of February 1 this week. There hasn't been a whole lot of explanation online, but that's to be expected. We had dinner with his son just before the movie premiere, they're a bunch of nice people. Anyhow, there are plenty of online news briefs that mention this news.

Would You Like Ice in That?

Story by Conrad Feef. Emergency services on Hermes were working around the clock yesterday following the impact of a huge ice asteroid. Approximately 35,000 were killed in the incident, which has created a large freshwater lake on the site where the town of Gelid used to stand. On the plus side, the planet's bars have declared a 3 month happy hour in an attempt to utilise the huge surplus of ice-cubes.

1999.034 (February 3, 1999)

Pretty Pictures

Yes folks, it's time the CIC added another section! You want fan art? We've got it.. in the Fan Art section!

McCubbin Reports

Chris McCubbin was kind enough to drop me a line to explain some things about the Confederation Handbook -- everything he says makes a lot of sense for those of you who care about continuity with the games and such. Let me just mention that I realized a lot of the below, and apologize if I made it seem as though I thought he'd actually forgotten things. Here's the note...Just read your review on the CIC.

Conventional Standards

Sivar, of agwc, reported some interesting news. Apparently Peter Telep (WC novelist extraordinaire) will be appearing at a pair of sci fi conventions in Orlando: MegaCon (March 5-7th) and Tachy10Con (May 28-31). Don Perrin (who created the Wing Commander Card Game) will be at that second one. Anyway, I'm interested in heading down south for one of those...