Did you really register on this forum just to post that?
I guess we touched a nerve?
In all seriousness, though, I do not mean any grand offense... if y'all love this guy, keep on loving him. There is absolutely no reason why anything I say should count. I have been exactly the same kind of huge internet jerk as he is for many years, but for a very specific fandom that I love. My opinion really should not matter to anyone who registered today to post to this thread.
Plus, lets be a little self aware--we're all being all kinds of stupid here. You've come here to go out of your way to post angry rants about how I went out of my way to post an angry rant because someone you like went out of his way to post an angry rant about something I like?
Can we just pause for a moment, appreciate that zany situation. Y'all love Spoony, we love Wing Commander and we can send angry fanboys back and forth until the end of time. Lets move to Wing Commander. That's all I really care about, at least.
As a fan of Wing Commander and video games in general you Bandit should be outraged that a beloved game franchise got such a raw deal on the big screen instead of personally attacking a man for "reviewing" it for the sake of a few laughs.
That "raw deal" is absolutely fascinating to me, though--because it's the result of being an absolutely amazing unique deal.
Why are most video game movies dreadful? Because no one cares about them. They're essentially a budget item for publishers--FOX will give us ten million dollars for the film rights for our game and we can figure that into our overhead.
That's the extent of game developer involvement in a movie game... the movie is out of their hands after they sign the rights away. The film studio can go and spent $200 million making a blockbuster or they can give the license to Uwe Boll or anywhere in between those two points.
But not Wing Commander! Wing Commander is such a strange movie because Electronic Arts *gave away* (literally!) the film rights to the creator of the series... who then personally produced and directed the film (started his own production outfit and CGI rendering house, raised the budget himself, etc.)
As many problems as we have with it, it's not some case of an outsider not understanding what they were making... it's Chris Roberts doing Wing Commander the way he apparently wanted. How can that not deserve some serious examination?
And for that matter, you're a regular in a forum devoted to a game that (except for an XBLA knock off) saw its last release 13 years ago. Where do you get off calling him out for doing a video of an old movie?
Hah, I'm not just a regular, I run the place!
Seriously, though, we're a great community even without new games... we've put together some amazing things over the years. Check out the 'Standoff' fan project, which is a wonderful new game built out of
My big focus is preserving the history of the series--getting stories from the developers, archiving old documents and so on. We even got to spend a week at EA scanning and photographing and backing up all their old Wing Commander material a year or so. Wing Commander as a brand may be pretty quiet, but we're a good fanbase that does some interesting stuff.
As for official releases, the philosophy that I try really hard to impart to everyone here is to really appreciate all the little things. I'd love a fifty million dollar Wing Commander 7... but we aren't sitting around waiting over the decades for just that. We've had a heck of a good time revisiting Wing Commander I and IV on the PSP in recent years, playing the XBLA game together, searching for lost stuff and so forth.
And seriously, he called out a bad movie for what it was, and talked up the games so much that I'm going to try and track down a copy of WC3 despite how little I liked the first two games.
That's cool! Wing Commander 3 is indeed a big jump from the first two... I like it less, but lots of people like WC3 and 4 exclusively.
Do not listen to the advice going around that you should get the PSX version--it's nowhere near as smooth as the PC release. If you need help running it, our tech support forum has you covered.