News Collection: On This Day in WC News

2025.037 (February 6, 2025)

VGHF Collection: The Darkening Days Ahead

This is the third in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums! Another welcome addition with the VGHF Digital Library is access to the full run of vintage US PC Gamer magazines which have been surprisingly difficult to preserve online in the past. And to show that off, what better than the September 1995 issue (Vol.

2024.037 (February 6, 2024)

Check out Differences From the Early Amiga Rolling Demo Preview

Colonel Halcyon’s uniform is a little crazy in the Wing Commander Amiga rolling demo! The final product reduced everything to 16 colors which looked much closer to the EGA version. The Hornet cockpit slides forward to open instead of hinging up from behind. I can’t explain that change but it didn’t make it to the final version of the port!

2023.037 (February 6, 2023)

Polish Wing Commander Includes Unique Blueprints

Dominus of Exult is back with another neat Wing Commander collectible find! It's a copy of WC1 localized for Poland. There are several fascinating elements. The blue box denotes the 'deluxe edition' that would normally include both Secret Missions, although the presence of just three disks implies the expansions are not included (unless there are missing disks).

2022.037 (February 6, 2022)

Join the Discord #Wingnut Crew

Each year we talk a lot about the CIC Discord chat room in the lead up the CIC Birthday Party, but that's not the only time the place is hopping. In fact, it's a great place to hang out year round! The service suffered an unusual outage a week or so back, and it really drove home how much we missed everyone while it was briefly unavailable. With this invite, you are able to log in via the web or the native phone/table/PC app.

2021.037 (February 6, 2021)

WC Makes Gridman Cameo

It's not often you spot a Wing Commander game in the back of a television show or movie, but on occasion it does happen. Xyzzy Sqrl caught a fun one in an episode of Gridman, The Hyper Agent. It's from episode 17, "The Lonely Hacker." Nice catch!

2020.037 (February 6, 2020)

All Wings Considered - Episode 37 - LIVE!

We are BACK! The latest episode of ALL WINGS CONSIDERED is live now! All Wings Considered is the CIC's first ever streaming variety show which features news, conversation and gameplay relating to our favorite series. This week's Nav Points include: Wing Commander III - Loki System - 3DO Version Righteous Fire - Sandra Goodin A Never-Before-Seen Italian Wing Commander book!

2019.037 (February 6, 2019)

Bigger and Better Hornet on the Flightline

AircPirateNinsei has completed his enlarged flying Hornet fighter. This update has a larger wingspan to fit more effective control surfaces and a larger powerplant. He'll be getting it airborne soon, and we can't wait to see! There's a lot of talent and skill that's obviously going into this.

2018.037 (February 6, 2018)

SpaceX Nails Falcon Heavy Launch

Elon Musk and the SpaceX team once again made history today with the successful launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket. We don't post nearly as much real life science and space news as we used to, but today's remarkable achievement deserves all the recognition it can get. It's hard to believe that just three years ago, there were many headlines about how SpaceX was failing and we just weren't ready to jump the technological hurdles that the company was proposing. Now they've landed nearly two dozen rockets vertically and make it look routine.

2017.037 (February 6, 2017)

Don't Get Caught By This UBW Patrol

DefianceIndustries is well known for taking classic Wing Commander art and jazzing it up to modern standards. It turns out this also applies to his own creations, and the wallpaper below is the result. He's taken the scene from last year and added 100% more explosions and 200% more laser blasts. The Border Worlds doesn't just chase pirates away - they finish them off for good!

2016.037 (February 6, 2016)

GOG Discounts EA Games by 60-85%

Good Old Games is having a unique EA Completionist sale this weekend. While individual games are 60% off, if you opt to buy all of the EA titles missing from your library, the discount jumps to a whopping 85%. The GOG catalog is up to 42 different titles from Electronic Arts, but because the discount is so high, the full slate is $41.43 - less than $1 per game!

2015.037 (February 6, 2015)

Enhance Your General MIDI With Timbres Soundfont

If you're into classic gaming, you'll know that MIDI music sounds rather underwhelming, unless you have some fancy, expensive hardware decoder like the Roland Sound Canvas. Over time, people have developed their own software synthesizers (soundfonts) that sound much more life-like than the default MIDI device on Windows. Getting this to work with your favorite game used to be tricky, but VirtualMIDISynth conveniently solves this by creating a virtual MIDI device for games to use. Just point the program to a soundfont and select the virtual MIDI device as your preferred output, and any game that supports General MIDI will instantly sound awesome.

2014.037 (February 6, 2014)

Classic Confed Corvette Completed

Klavs has put the finishing touches on another fun model - the Venture corvette. Although the ship is an uncommon sight in the games, its exotic rarity and an awesome story set aboard the TCS Johnny Greene in the End Run novel have cemented the design as a fan favorite. As usual, there are also plenty of small details on the model that'll make you want to zoom in and scrutinize up close. There's also a bonus image that compares the ship to a B-52!

2013.037 (February 6, 2013)

Capships Lined Up; New Raptor Takes Flight

Here's a correction to something we mentioned last week. The collage of ships made by ScoobyDoo don't represent all the vessels that he's made - those were just the fighters! He's produced a new image that shows his capital fleet, except for the mighty Behemoth. There's a really awesome sense of scale when comparing these larger warships.

2012.037 (February 6, 2012)

"The ’sport jumped right on schedule. You covered her well."

Tim Peel has followed up his Venice Assault with another classic scene from Wing Commander 1. In "Convoy," a squadron of Draymen are shepherded through space by a determined Exeter and some Hornets. This is the kind of thing people imagined in the original game when the autopilot cinematic played during an escort mission. Brings back good memories!

Wallpaper Honors the Escort Carriers

This wallpaper isn't Wing Commander-related, but it was made by a talented Wing Commander fan. "Sunset Over The Bay" is Klavs's take on WW2 carrier aviation, and it's a pretty sweet scene! Hi guys, it's not strictly Wing Commander, but since it's WW2 History related I figured I could squeak by. Here's my latest piece.

2011.037 (February 6, 2011)

Watch Out, Enemy On Your Six!

Wing Commander TacOps Online has added several new features in the last couple weeks. From a gameplay perspective, the "tailing" feature has not been implemented. Selection of stacked objects has also been improved in the interface. Test Game 4 is currently in progress to test out these and newer features as they're implemented.

Sim Developers Look to the Future

Victorinox found a cool article at SimHQ about the Future of Simulation Games. It's a 'roundtable' article with input from about ten current developers of sim type games. There's a lot of good question and answer conversation about where the genre is going. The last page also includes some discussion about what inspired these developers to get into gaming, and Wing Commander definitely played a role.

2010.037 (February 6, 2010)

Vendetta Paint Job

JasonRocZ is putting Privateer 2's Kindred Vendetta in Wing Commander Collateral Damage as a neat cameo. Jason has largely finished retexturing the model. These latest pictures are a big change from the straight conversion.

2009.037 (February 6, 2009)

Fan Favorite Included in WCCD

JasonRocz is working on an Excalibur model for his Wing Commander Collateral Damage mod. Since the game is designed as a bridge between Secret Ops and Arena, Jason is using Gaia's early concept art as a reference. So I've been getting back at the Excalibur which will be inclusive to the WC:CD Mod. It will be based off of some of the Arena preliminary screenshots which I am including the screenshot of here.

Making the Game: Alien Fleet Descriptions

It's hard to figure why this document was originally created, but it's sure to please numbers geeks. This plans out the martial makeup of the Nephilim fleets seen in Wing Commander Prophecy -- how many cruisers, destroyers, transports, etc. each should contain. Note the original names for the ships - Leatherback, Tsunami, Osprey, Marlin, etc.

2008.037 (February 6, 2008)

Bengal Gets New Claws

Here's an updated set of shots showing off Howard Day's amazing Bengal class carrier. The placeholder laser turrets have been replaced with guns that match the rest of the ship a bit better, and some of the turret and window sizes have been tweaked a bit. Notice in the first and last shots that the side-mounted weapons are larger anti-ship cannons. Howard is still trying to figure out what to name the carrier.

Point of Origin: Vol. V, No. 3

Bioforge is GO in the March, 1995 issue of The Point of Origin. Will Origin's second big-budget 'interactive movie' do as well as Wing Commander... or will the concept of CGI and gameplay-based cinematics be abandoned for another decade? The answers, right now: no and yes.

2007.037 (February 6, 2007)

Bridge Commander Mod Beta 2 Released

BES has released a second beta version of his Star Trek: Bridge Commander mod. This is actually just an interim test, since he is hard at work on further enhancements to the project. There are a handful of known bugs and issues with this release, but BES would appreciate the feedback to improve future versions. The issues mainly pertain to things like textures and model scaling, but some ships will cause the mod to crash.

Saga Prologue Still Coming To Linux

With the Macintosh launch following so fast after its Windows counterpart, Lunix users held out hope for a quick release of their WC Saga prologue. It's still coming, but new problems have caused delays. Here's Sphynx with a few more details. A few bugs that have slipped into the SCP version 3.

2006.037 (February 6, 2006)

Watch The Best Of Both Worlds' Endings

Plywood Fiend's latest music video might be his best yet. The background music is improved with REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It" setting the pace. A wide variety of situations from Wing Commander 3 are synchronized with the lyrics pretty well. Listen quickly to match each scene to the words of the song.

German Strategy Game Features Familiar Fighter

TheFraix recently recommended Smugglers 3 as a space trading game that Wing Commander fans might be interested it. We don't really cover very many 4X style strategy games, but one thing caught people's eyes. The game's Stormcrow fighter bears a striking resemblance to Privateer 2's Heretic. There are a ton of different Wing Commander ships in existence, so some games are bound to have overlapping designs, but you can judge for yourself here.

2005.037 (February 6, 2005)

HoTT Continues The Cartoon Theme

Following on from Heart of the Tiger's insane photoshops from last month, HoTT has continued the picture depicting Sosa as Belldandy from Ah, My Goddess. Sadly we haven't been able to identify all of the costumes this time around, but Chris thinks that Dekker's costume is from Final Fantasy, and Panther's outfit from the second picture appears to belong to Asuka from Evangelion. If you can fill in some of the blanks, just click the Discuss link below this update.

X-Plane Space Combat 1.4 For Free

akula65 tipped us off about Space Combat, a free space flight simulator by Austin Meyer of X-Plane fame. X-Plane is renowned for its realism in the flight sim area, and its creators have created Space Combat for free to test out some basic physics principles in space. The program is available here for Windows, Mac and Linux and clocks in at just a few megs. Could the X-Wing really manuever like that?

2004.037 (February 6, 2004)

Pick Your Favorite Novel Character

Apparently people were eager to vote for which character they'd like to see return in a future game, so this week we're looking at which character you'd like to come back in a future novel. We've narrowed it down to popular novel characters still alive in the "current" frame of reference, though I suppose prequel novels and other things make many more people possible. Maniac won our last poll, with Paladin, Panther and Bondarevsky coming in after that.

Battlecruiser Generations/Universal Combat Ships

The latest Derek Smart space sim is out the gates and on store shelves now. Originally entitled BattleCruiser Generations, it has been prediscounted to $19.99 with the new name Universal Combat. The game features regular spaceflight and lots of exploration, and even lets you go down to planets for first person combat.

What's An EA Super Hero?

Electronic Arts has just announced that they will soon be partnering with Marvel Comics to launch a new fighting game franchise featuring Marvel characters versus original EA super heroes. The game will probably end up along the same lines as Marvel vs Capcom or Capcom vs SNK which have been fairly popular over the last couple years. That just leaves the question: what exactly is an EA hero? This is a tremendous opportunity for EA to create new characters for fighting games that can be exploited through our global merchandise licensing machine to fuel sales in many other product categories.

2002.037 (February 6, 2002)

More Tiny Ships, Yay

So I was just having lunch with Joe Garrity, and he asked me what became of the guy who'd been sending in pictures of neat little WC ships he'd made. "Hey, yeah!", I replied -- having no idea where myself. Now, a week later, though, DRAsvitt is back!

Lamentations on the Void

Filler found THIS Shockwave file while trolling Google. To quote Colonel Blair, I don't have a clue.

2001.037 (February 6, 2001)

Pilgrim Truth Synopsis Available For Download

What a week.. and it's only Tuesday! Peter Telep has graciously released an outline for Wing Commander Pilgrim Truth. He can't release the full novel of course, as Harper Collins is still sitting on the rights and may yet publish the entire book.

Night Angel 9 Just Released

With the release of the the synopsis, I thought it'd be an ideal time to mention Mr. Telep has just released his latest book, Night Angel 9. It's a medical drama that follows a night paramedic crew. It was written in the same style as his Wing Commander novels, with extensive detail attributed to his talking with actual paramedics (or actual Wing Commander fanatics as the case may be).

Wing Commander's Lead Widens

Over at the Gamespot Question of the Week poll, since it was first reported here, Wing Commander has gained several percentage points on its runners up. With the question, "Which editors' choice is a game that influenced you to upgrade your PC?" some fifteen percent have voted for Wing Commander, with twenty and thirty percent going to Quake and Unreal. Jedi Knigts II is in fourth place with ten percent.

2000.037 (February 6, 2000)

Origin "Company Info" Page Updated

We're not sure if this was a recent update, but in case people haven't seen it, it's an interesting thing to read. It pretty much sums up what we've been hearing from.. just about everything. You can find the page by going to origin.

Russian Peter Telep Website Up

Richard Bowden and McFly from Russia have finished up final work on the Russian conversion of Peter Telep's Wing Commander website. You can find McFly's site here and the new Russian Peter Telep section here.

CGO Posts Best & Worst Sci-Fi Combat Sims

Over at Computer Games Online (man, they have a real clunky website), there's a new top sci-fi article. Naturally Wing Commander gets a big fat mention just under Elite. Privateer gets its own bit too. Unfortunately P2 didn't fare as well, but overall it's a decent article.

Wing Commander on Cinemax, not HBO

This explains the schedule mystery yesterday. AtomM56 and Fighting-Falcon both pointed out that Wing Commander will be on Cinemax instead of HBO. Both are owned by the same parent company. Below are some of the upcoming scheduled times.

Academy Television Show Debuts in South Africa

Steve made us aware that new Wing Commander Academy television show is now showing in South Africa. It premiered on Saturday, January 22. We're working on finding out the exact channel and scheduling. WCA showed on the the USA Network in the US and began showing in Australia a few months ago.

Gravel Rash Denied Official Status

Report by Gert Tegray. Gravel Rash enthusiasts were disappointed after their application to have the sport given official accreditation for next years System Games was rejected. The sport, which involveds the competitor surfing down slopes made of gravel and other abrasive substances on bare buttocks, was considered 'unsuitable' for mass audiences. Reigning champion Arfa 'Soprano' Bellgon said 'I'm very upset by the decision.

1999.037 (February 6, 1999)

A Date With A Doll

Eight dolls.. Super Software (owned by Software Etc./Babbages) reports that they'll be receiving the Wing Commander movie action figures on February 22. Unfortunately they'll only be getting the figures (no vehicles).

Odds And Ends

After four days of downtime, my phone lines are back up. US West promises to have new lines in my neighborhood and into my house in about three months to permanently fix the problem. On another note, in regards to yesterday's report that mentioned the 'Confederation Oath of Service', the cover was indeed not designed by the author of the book. However, Mr.