News Collection: On This Day in WC News

2019.150 (May 30, 2019)

All Wings Considered - Episode 15 - LIVE!

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: Going for an ORION in Privateer Ben vs. Ali in the Gauntlet Challenge Kissing in Wing Commander - a history Privateer 2 ship of the week: the KarnenanMissed the stream?

2018.150 (May 30, 2018)

New Book Covers Development of Ultima Online, Privateer Online and More

Former Origin veteran Raph Koster has just published a new book titled Postmortems: Selected Essays Volume One. Mr. Koster was lead designer for Ultima Online and went on to develop Privateer Online before its unfortunate cancelation. He then was hired by Sony as Chief Creative Office for Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest and many others.

Wing Commander Meme of the Day: Rob Burgundy

2017.150 (May 30, 2017)

Warbirds Redux

The Wing Commander Orchestral Recording Volume 2 Kickstarter has crossed the $7,000 level! That's good progress, but we'd like to see it double that amount in the next five days to meet the next metric for a healthy crowd fund project. Today, Mr. Oldziey has updated with a sample track from the Vol.

2016.151 (May 30, 2016)

Kilrathi Workhorse Arrives On Scene

Klavs has built another Kilrathi model, and this time out it's the Kilrathi Kamrani class corvette. Throughout the vast majority of fan projects, it's the destroyers, cruisers and dreadnoughts that seem to get all of the artists' attention. But enemy corvettes are everywhere in Wing Commander 3 and they're a surprisingly formidable opponent for the size. That darn tachyon gun in the rear made it harder to approach than ships with twice the armament.

2015.150 (May 30, 2015)

Chronicles of the Claw Returns To Vega Sector

Sylvester recently noted the lack of new Wing Commander fan fiction and set out to do something about it! He began a story titled "Chronicles of the Claw" back in 2006, and he's dug up the manuscript to share with fans today. This version is significantly expanded and enhanced compared to what he came up with originally, so it's worth a look for all fans with an interest in this type of thing. Fan fic sometimes gets a bad rap on the internet at large, but the reality is that there are many talented writers out there dreaming up stories in their favorite universes.

2014.150 (May 30, 2014)

Music Album Orchestration Work Continues

Here's a quick update from George Oldziey on the status of the Wing Commander music album. He's currently putting the final touches on the music from Wing Commander IV's winning endgame. The Czech Philharmonic Orchestra is now scheduled to record the highly anticipated reorchestration towards late October / early November, so the album could be ready in time for the holiday season. If you're just getting into WC4 through the GOG release, the quoted text below contains major spoilers.

2013.150 (May 30, 2013)

Wing Commander in Concert Details Emerge

The Austin Symphony has released further details on the upcoming pops concert which will include music from George Oldziey's Wing Commander scores. The event is, unexpectedly, superhero themed:“Superheroes”October 18, 2013 8:00 PMWHERE: Dell Hall CONDUCTOR: Peter BayThe Austin Symphony will open its Pops season with a night of iconic music from your favorite superhero film and television shows. Your spidey senses will be tingling and you will be at the edge of your seat when you hear music from some of your favorites, such as Batman, Superman, Captain America, The Incredibles, X-Men, and much more! In addition to the music there will be visuals on a big screen to enhance your experience.

2012.151 (May 30, 2012)

More Micro Mock-ups Manufactured

Here's another preview of Klavs' miniature ships. Although current technology still doesn't make large designs really feasible, the scale here is half of what was intended. Compare the tiny Super Rapier to the larger craft for real 1/600 scale. The great thing is how much detail is present in the accidental 1/1200 scale models.

Academy Is Here!

Hopefully many of you are already enjoying Wing Commander Academy on DVD. If not, here's a couple shots to salivate over! The second image adds in the two major American releases of the Wing Commander Movie DVD, plus the DIVX, movie soundtrack and old fan-made Academy DVD for good measure. The set does appear to be coded for Region 1, so Wingnuts in other areas may need to get creative to view it.

2011.150 (May 30, 2011)

Happy Memorial Day

The Combat Information Center wishes everyone a happy Memorial Day. Please stay safe and make sure to take a moment to remember those who have given their lives so we can enjoy Wing Commander today.

Bid on Ginger's Pages

Wing Commander III and Prophecy actress Ginger Lynn Allen is selling two sets of her Wing Commander III script pages--the pages she used in the role, with her lines highlighted! Each auction includes an extremely cool signed photograph from the game's funeral scene--which also shows a uniformed Chris Roberts making a cameo as a Victory crewman! She has a nice paragraph describing her involvement in the game:I’m a lucky girl who’s had the opportunity to work on and in some amazing projects in both the adult film industry as well as mainstream Hollywood projects. Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is the first of two computer games in which I appeared as Rachel Coriolis; the ships weapons officer.

2010.150 (May 30, 2010)

"The assault team accomplishes their mission..."

"...but only at a terrible cost."Highball is still taking the fight to the Kilrathi and has successfully succeeded in the Vega Campaign. The Secret Missions and SM2: Crusade have been thoroughly reviewed, rated, commented, screenshotted and digested as part of his Wing Commander Project.

2009.150 (May 30, 2009)

Need a Price Check

There are some great deals on EA Replay for the PSP and the Wing Commander Movie if you still need either of those. Replay's list price at Amazon is still $19.99, but it's available for much less than that through third party sellers. At $4.

Making the Game: Simulator2

Today's mission is Simulator 2, which trains the player on escort missions. This is also a good tool for learning how Prophecy's mission scripting works... I dig those comments! " Now, wait for the player to come close...

2008.151 (May 30, 2008)

Plastic Yorktown Gets Virtual Escort

After completing his plastic model Yorktown, Stefan Schoenhoff has turned his attention to the Tallahassee class cruiser. Although he's run into some difficulty with the model edges, these preliminary design shots have been released. The current plan is to smooth these issues out over the summer and see about physically recreating this and other new designs when he returns to school (and their 3D printer equipment) in the fall. The last shot gives a good side-by-side scale comparison for the final creations.

Making the Game - Part 25

The July 26 Component Manager Meeting agenda shows less progress than other updates but still features some interesting points. One is a reference to the "Maniac code," suggesting that more work was done on Maniac Missions than even these documents had yet implied. The other is the continuing relationship between Richard Hilleman, an EA executive once charged with saving the team after Roberts' departure, and the rest of the group. Story Concept Document Download (2.

2007.150 (May 30, 2007)

That's Just Super

Korruptor has found an obscure Wing Commander reference. A ScrewAttack video about the "Top Ten Super Games" quickly flashed the Super Wing Commander box while introducing its concept. SWC doesn't rank a spot in the top ten, but it's neat to see someone remember that it existed. If you aren't familiar with the game, it was a 3DO and Macintosh port of the original Wing Commander which included all new graphics and full speech.

WC4 Movie's A Hit

Since the CIC mirror went up Friday, hundreds of people have grabbed Queeg's moviezation of Wing Commander IV. If you haven't seen it yet, you can grab the 2.1 gigabyte file here. The xvid clip comes in at just under three hours.

2006.150 (May 30, 2006)

Gaze At The Stars And Hear Paladin's Music

After some careful searching, we've dug up the operatic Trio from Mozart's 'Cosi Fan Tutte' featured in the Wing Commander movie. It's available as a promotional stream from the Ole George Music website. CIC staff music analyst ace has converted it into a nice mp3 so Wing Commander fans can add it to their collections. The complete Trio Soave sia il vento comes in at 2.

Get Wing Commander Music In The Music Section

If today's Trio has you searching out more sounds, visit the CIC Music section. There you can find nostalgic background tracks from most of the Wing Commander games, familiar tunes such as the WC1 scramble and audio sound effects extracted from all over. There are also unique variations from Wing Commander ports and deleted scenes. Even amazing items such as Team Fat's Surf Theme take on the Wing Commander title song are available.

2005.150 (May 30, 2005)

Wing Commander Had Quite A Run

Today we have a couple more scans from Jonathan Stone that illustrate just how long the original Wing Commander enjoyed retail success. GamePro reviewed the Sega CD WC1 almost four years after the original PC version was released. Super Wing Commander and Armada had just been completed and Wing Commander 3 was only months away. Sega CD was far from the only special edition of WC1 that made it out however (though one of the very few with full speech!

EA Wraps E3 2005

Electronic Arts has concluded their announcements for the E3 Expo a week ago. They have a wrap-up page with show floor impressions of each new game. The EA Games site is also running a poll that asks which of the new systems you're most anticipating. Since it's a nonscientific web poll, the results have been skewed quite a bit.

2004.151 (May 30, 2004)

Mark Hamill About Comics & Wing Commander On G4/TechTV

ZFGokuSSJ1 recently caught an interesting Wing Commander feature on G4/TechTV.Mark Hamill was just on G4TechTV's show 'Players'. He mainly talked about comic books, but there was about a minute's worth of video about Wing Commander.Episode 302: May the Crunk Be With You contained the interview.

Old Privateer 2 Mod Project Examined

Bob recently found the website for Quadrant Epsilon, a project to expand or improve upon Wing Commander Privateer 2. Of all the mods I've seen over the years, this might be the first for this game. It seems their work slowed down to a trickle a little while back, but if this sounds like an exciting idea to you, contact their team and see if you can restart things. This project is aimed to create a sequel/clone to the almost-famous Privateer II.

2003.150 (May 30, 2003)

Prophecy Appearing in Stores!

We've confirmed now that certain GameStop locations have gotten Prophecy Advance in stock today. Be sure to call first, because not all stores have received it. The GameStop website appears to have gotten more copies as well, since the game is once again shipping from here.

Destination Prophecy Interview

During the recent E3 Expo, the CIC's very own Chris Reid visited the Destination Software booth where Prophecy GBA was running. While he was there, he conducted something of an impromptu interview with some Destination employees.. and he got it all on camera! The video is 2:40 in length and weighs in at 11MB.

Screenshots of Prophecy Credits

Thanks to Raylight, we now have screenshots of Prophecy GBA's credits which roll when you die. I assume they're also displayed when you complete the game. It's actually quite a short list, even for a GBA game.

We Have Lift-Off!

Dozens of games come out each week for a variety of systems and computers, and it's a special class of game that gets its launch mentioned throughout the major media outlets. We're happy to see Prophecy Advance taking off in this manner. GameSpot, IGN, and GameCubeLand have similar announcements stemming from the original press release. Although the game is still a few weeks away in most of Europe, the press there has already taken an early liking to it.

WCPolaroids: Zero (5/11)

The whole crew escorts Zero through the stylish briefing room doorway.

2002.150 (May 30, 2002)

Prophecy GBA : Technological Excellence

Prophecy GBA won a runner up award in Pocket IGN's Best of E3 2002 Awards. Better yet, according to this, Prophecy GBA will include something a lot of us have been hoping for :Raylight Studios is known for their BlueRoses 3D toolkit on the Game Boy Advance, and the team was recently signed to produce a GBA port of the PC space flight sim Wing Commander Prophecy for Destination Software. Just wait until you see this game in action, folks...the 3D engine does the game extreme justice on the small screen...

Holding the Line: Chapter 130

Here's Raptor with the introduction to the latest in the series :HTL continues with the third chapter of "Further Down The Spiral" Part Three. As you saw in the previous chapters, the Forge's pilots and crew had taken on the enemy dreadnought in a pitched battle, while the Captain had been imprisoned on charges of murder. Now, events come to a head both on and off the ship, as the Valley Forge plunges towards the disaster that Jed Wright alluded to in his meeting with the reporter. This chapter is written by all the Valley Forge writers, so please send any and all comments to them.

2001.150 (May 30, 2001)

Thanks...

... for the ideas! We've gotten some excellent suggestions for new news features -- and we're working to implement several of them very soon! For now, enjoy a Privateer 2 mission each day, while we get our gears turning...

Stuff that Looks Like Things, Part 48

*cough*Fralthi*cough* (A Kusari capital ship, from FreeLancer).

From: Hephaestan Medical Research Centre

A transport ship full of medical supplies has been stolen from a Hephaestan research centre at Nav Point #1, and is being carried now by a band of brigands to Bex, most likely to be sold on the black market. The drug is extremely addictive, so it needs to be destroyed.It will be somewhere between Nav Point #1 and Nav Point #2. Identify the cargo in all shuttles along this route, and when you find one marked "Med Supplies: Hephaestus", blow it up.

1999.150 (May 30, 1999)

P3 Guide Ramblings

Although I have my doubts, this does seem rather odd -- Amazon's Privateer 3 Guide has the following description, which is unusually unique. Here goes...What challenge do you want to take today? Hunt down a wanted criminal?

Hard at Work

Korax is hard at work on a fan-based Wing Commander movie type thing... check out this AVI and these 3D images he's been working on! He wants me to be sure and point out that the pictures were done quickly and as thus aren't perfect...

Venezuela Release

LocoMan reports that Wing Commander posters have appeared in Venezuela, and that the movie itself should be out in about a month. Apparently it's been re-titled Escuadron Espacial (Space Squadron)... how odd.

Privateer 3 Guide For Only $15.99!

Not really, don't believe everything you read. We should all know about the rumored Privateer 3 Official Guides that have been advertised since the Privateer 3 game was cancelled over a year ago. Amazon.com plans to get theirs "in stock" on April 14, 2000.

Our Daily Bread

Wouldn't it be nice if there actually were a Privateer 3? I don't really put much faith into these new rumors, and I'd reccomend everybody else do the same -- that said, I'll try and do some checking and see where all this guide information suddenly came from.