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The Art of Wing Commander Arena - Part One
While we were visiting Gaia Industries in New York last month we were treated to an amazing slide show of concept art from Wing Commander Arena - everything from Wing Commander characters to familiar (and new!) ships to space stations. We were so impressed with this cache of previously unseen 'behind the screens' work that we insisted it had to be preserved for the future. Luckily EA Producer Sean Penney agreed and granted permission to release some of this spectacular art! Special thanks to Taino at Gaia, too, for providing it (and, of course, for creating it in the first place).
First up is a beautiful splash screen showing a Rapier II in hot pursuit of an Arrow set against an asteroid field. I'm surprised that this didn't make it i nto the finished game as one of the loading screens somewhere - it's at least as beautiful as the Arrows on a flight deck. It's just a stunning piece of artwork - and it makes a great widescreen Windows background!
Keep watching the news over the next few weeks - future Art of Wing Commander Arena posts will be interspersed with Point of Origin updates... along with a third 'Wing Commander History' series which will be revealed soon! If you would like to thank the guys at Gaia for making the effort get us this art then you should pick up Street Trace NYC on XBLA... it's a fast-paced racing/combat game - some of the guys from #WingNut put it through its paces last weekend and it's a lot of fun! There are plenty of game modes, beautiful graphics similar to those in Arena and a neat future setting that you can lose yourself in. I'll Street Trace with a WingNut any time!
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Update published on 9/26/2007. View all news from that day.
Wing Commander CIC - Visit the front page
Official news, fan projects and topics of particular interest to Wing Commander fans.
- Rapiers in High Demand on the Frontier
- 2010-09-02 -- Kevin Caccamo has released photos of the updated Rapier II to be featured in his Freespace mod, WC Hostile Frontiers. Two basic paint schemes have been revealed, and both revolve around the Republic of Landreich faction. Their use in this remote region mirrors their late era service in the Border Worlds (WC4 novel) and Epsilon Sector (Arena).
- Victoria super Omnia
- 2010-09-01 -- TonViper has cleaned up the textures on his Excaliburs a bit more. These will eventually get added to the Homeworld 2 Mod, which will allow them to be built on command. This pushes the design more towards a fresh factory paint scheme instead of a worn scorched look.
- Star Ruler Space Sim
- 2010-09-01 -- wc3 tipped us off about Star Ruler, which was just released for Windows. It's a space sim/strategy game with dynamic "procedurally generated" galaxies. Individual technologies can be developed throughout the game, and there's also a large multiplayer component.
- HCl Develops Sega CD Voice Extractor
- 2010-08-31 -- HCl took a break from investigating the 3DO file formats to dig into the Sega CD/Megadrive. His preliminary work has already produced a utility that allows extraction of Sega CD speech! WC1 on Sega CD includes full spoken dialogue in place of the original game's subtitles.
- Rapier Returns in Paper Form
- 2010-08-30 -- Péricles is working on a new paper model. His latest masterpiece is the Rapier II Blade based on the original Arena 3D meshes. The ships from Arena apparently make great source models for paper designs.
- Road Trip!
- 2010-08-30 -- The CIC Staff's 2010 adventure is under way! Here's our American crew ready to get the party started. We'll be posting periodic updates to the Facebook page and Twitters (@banditloaf, @aclawson & @chrisreid) if you'd like to follow along.
- Bestowing Bob's Badass Bengal
- 2010-08-29 -- Remember that swanky Tiger's Claw in Bob's recent propaganda poster? It was singled out for being a nifty artistic take on the ship, and now it's yours to download! Grab the 3DS Max 7 model here (160 k zip).
- CIC Forums Go Mobile
- 2010-08-29 -- The CIC Forums look better on the latest generation of smartphones than ever before, but they're still a bit cumbersome to use. KrisV fixed that today with an upgrade to support Forum Runner. The new app support allows iPhone users to browse threads and reply to posts as easily as working with email.
- Radical Rapier RocZ!
- 2010-08-28 -- JasonRocZ has posted another star trio of fighters from the Arena 3D Mesh pack. From left to right, these are the Rapier Blade, Vanguard and Cavalier. Although the ships might look unfamliar to some, they are based on the authentic F-54 Rapier II frame - from Super Wing Commander!
- EA Holding Weekend Sale
- 2010-08-28 --
Did you know EA runs some killer deals on the weekends? The EA Twitter reports that Dead space is $10, Spore is $20 and Mirror's Edge is just $5. These are all the digital download PC versions.
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