News Bulletins Cataloged

We've finished a long-awaited addition to the WCPedia: a complete collection of screenshots showing all 233 Privateer 2: The Darkening News Bulletins! We've also included game-extracted text, scans from the official guide and new info and nav boxes to make exploring them much easier. Privateer 2 players may remember the bulletins as the system by which the game offers big changes to commodity prices. One is selected each time you land and available in the Booth. Some of them are tabloid articles, some are advertisements and some mark changes to pricing because of current events (a flood might reduce the price of water on a certain planet and so on). Many people don't pay attention to the text in Privateer 2 and I think that's a mistake: the game's designers wrote a fat novel worth of text for the Booth and the various missions and it expands the Tri-System and the Wing Commander universe in so many interesting ways!

As part of the process we squared each entry name to the sometimes-slightly-different one listed in the official guide. And in the process we made a pretty interesting discovery. The guide lists a title, "I'm just an 'armless orphan, guv", which doesn't appear in the actual game. For decades we assumed it was just a last minute cut. But by arranging everything in a spreadsheet we discovered that it was actually simply a case of one entry being renamed at the last minute. In the final game that bulletin is present but changed to Carts of Parts hit the Marts! You can find the complete News Bulletin index and more information about how they work here. I've also started an informal diary on the wiki to document what I'm doing. I'm hoping it will inspire others interested in joining a big, open project with a lot of fun work left to do!