meet the poster

Sadly (for both Wing Commander and Mass Effect), EA has the broad Star Wars license now.

But there may be a way to save WC yet. Stay tuned! :)
Thanks for all the kind words guys. About to go pick up my tux. And Ben.....WHAT!?!?!?!?!? You can't just say something that powerful and say "stay tuned"!!!!
What do you know man!? Lol. Tell me the secret as a wedding gift??
 
But there may be a way to save WC yet. Stay tuned! :)

Stay tuned?!?!?!?!?!

As in, there is negotiating/deal making/arm breaking going on to get Wing Commander out in front again?!?!

Such words are not uttered lightly around here. If LOAF says it, it must be true...right?

NOW I'm wondering if we'll beat the Poor vote rating this year.
 
To @Hunter_13 @David Wade and @Sylvester - thanks for everything. I always feel humbled in the presence of those who served, and even as a non-American can appreciate the time and dedication you've given towards the defense of our shared values.

...and Hunter is right, I signed up as a Navigator in the Royal Air Force when I was 18, only to be told I was partially colour blind. I was offered another position, I still haven't taken them up on it and it's getting too late now (especially having a different life, and a kid). That's the main reason I went about the private pilot's license, I was determined to fly; even if I couldn't do it to serve.

LOAF, that eye recovery is amazing. Love the way you casually dropped that in there "...then after college, I went blind."

Pilgrim Cross at your wedding? Dedicated!
 
View attachment 8376 View attachment 8377 Awesome idea. Hi, my name is Afrim Kosovrasti. I am 33 years old and about to get married on Friday!! I worked a bunch of my life at my family pizzaria but always favored working on computers than I did pizza lol. I like the eating pizza part though....
Anyhoo, I am starting schooling for my new career in web development in April. Until then I am just livin it up off my savings as I transition from pizza man to website man. Needless to say I have been gaming a ton lately!
So I got into Wing Commander almost on accident. Back in grade school a friend of mine rented WC1 on the snes. This changed my life forever. We were both immediately hooked at the action and story in this game. I remember one mission having a crippled ship without any weapons left and all we had was a full gas tank and having to afterburn our way from our current nav point all the way back to the Claw while those damn cats followed us the whole way. I remember that excitement like it was yesterday. We made it back to base barely and if I wasn't so young back then i would have needed a smoke and a shot lol. Anyhoo, since then I was sold. Got a gaming pc and played every WC game I could until needing to build a new one for WC3 then having to upgrade my ram, cd rom drive, and processor to play WC4.
I never forget even now that it is thanks to WC that I got interested in computers. Now all these years later as I go into a computer orientated career I thank WC for getting me out of the grueling pizza industry filled with 13 hr days on my feet with only a 20 minute lunch break. No thank you!
I was very sad when Chris Roberts retired from gaming. Wasn't a fan of the WC movie and the fact that WC would never see CR again broke my heart. I googled him once a year or so and was stoked to hear about Starlancer. I was soooo happy with that game and here I was again building a new pc for a CR game lol. Those Roberts brothers never fail! Was reeeeeeally sad when CR did actually retire and moved to movies. I figured at that point to just give up on Space combat games. I would google his name once a year and every year would be no gaming news.
Then one day I googled his name and I literally junped out of my chair! Chris Roberts is making another game??? I watched the kickstarter video......wholy shit its WC1 with new graphics!!! I was instantly back in the fold. Sadly i missed the kickstarter excitement by about a month. But I immediately moved on to RSI and pledged.
In excitement I found myself dying to play some of the classic WCs without knowledge of how to get em or to make em work on my pc. So I found this place. WCnews. I read years of news updates in that next week. Absorbing everything I missed in those years. Downloading and playing Standoff, then Saga, and trying out others. Here I am using mods on a pc now lol. Thanks WC for getting me back in the gritty of a pc again.
I was hesitant to post in the forums for almost a year. Then once I started I think I may have gotten annoying around here lol. I check up on this place about twice a day. At first I was posting and commenting a lot over at RSI. The people were nice at first. However the more popular the place gets the more A Hole trolls linger. So I started posting more here where people are actually nice and help each other. Also most people here know exactly what they are talking about lol.
So that's my little story. This is an exciting year for me with marriage and new career. I want to thank all of you for being part of the coolest forum ever. Such nice people here. Ben(Loaf) and Chris Reid, thank you so much not only for your hard work but for also being approachable to chat with. The fact that we are all over the Star Wars thread chatting away is awesome lol.
My other hobby was always music. I play guitar and have been for 17 years. Been in and out of a few bands. Anyone use Spotify? If you do look up my name Afrim Kosovrasti and u can hear some of my solo work. Or if you wanna check out this song:
https://soundcloud.com/afrim-kosovrasti/ghost-saloon
From there you can check out the rest of the songs I have on Spotify.
Last things, on the RSI forums i go by Mindcrime. That has always been my forum and online gaming name. I remember playing Starlancer online and doom2 online as Mindcrime. Old school lol.
On that note, how the heck do I change my name from Afrim Kosovrasti to Mindcrime on here? I have gone over ever profile setting I could imagine and still no luck. Thanks in advanced cuz I'm sure its something easy and I'm just not seeing it lol.

I leave you with a funny pic me and my fiancé got at a rodeo about a month ago in hot sunny Phx, Arizona which is where we live. Also a picture of me drunk and laughing my ass off at my high school reunion a lil while back lol.

Congratulations. You've done well! As have @Jdawg and @Bandit LOAF - you're all fine looking couples.
 
LOAF, that eye recovery is amazing. Love the way you casually dropped that in there "...then after college, I went blind."
Agreed. Went blind, said "F that", regained sight, helps keep WC alive and is with Chris Roberts making Star Citizen happen. LOAF for the win.
 
Figured I would add two more pics. the first is the most recent of my wife and I. and the second is my wonderful, obnoxious, funny, will be the death of me son, lol. He whoops me in video games, my reflexes are not what they use to be.



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I've told the story before but it's been a while since we've had one of these threads :) Born and raised in Northern BC, Canada, I like computers more than a person surrounded by miles of rugged outdoor beauty and access to endless kinds of outdoor recreation should. It's not that I don't like those things too, but they aren't a priority for me, though I do like to get out camping at least a couple times a year.

Anyway, our cousin's picked up WC1 for the PC when it first came out, and it was amazing. I'm pretty sure it ruined every console game for me at the time. However I was too young to really know what I was doing, and it was at my cousin's house so it's not like I could practice very much. We would run through missions and eject every time just to see all the (losing) cutscenes. But it was glorious.

However it was while later when I had my own PC and I was able to fully play through WC2 for the first time that I really got hooked on WC. The amount of story and that I was the main character was a revelation. It wasn't long until WC3 came out and I convinced my cousin to pick it up and we spent many nights playing through it together (as well as WC4, Privateer, P2 after that).

Flash forward to WC Prophecy. I made the plunge into the online WC community by asking about how to change nav points in WCP... The secret ops release was awesome and the online anticipation of the WC Movie was great. There was so much WC stuff to look forward to. When the WC movie finally came to theaters I even went with my cousin and wife-to-be.

Our kids don't know much about Wing Commander really beyond "dad likes space games". But they are very into Star Wars. I'll probably play Star Citizen with them when it has a bit more content. I also hate answering questions like "why do we need 3 copies of the same movie?"
 
I'll throw mine in.

Born and raised in the UK, my parents bought me Wing Commander IV in exchange for taking an entrance exam to a school I did not want to go to.
My cunning plan to answer just enough questions wrong, but not so many as to raise suspicion backfired - I spent 3 miserable years at a grammar school - but on the plus side my Wing Commander obsession was born. I adored WC4 and went back and played 3, bought Prophecy and Privateer 2 on release date and eventually the Kilrathi Saga and worked my way through all the books.

I don't like to think about 16 year old me - but my obsession did lead me to propose Unknown Enemy which the likes of Quarto, Popsicle Pete and HCl helped prevent from turning into a total disaster. I wanted into games, but not in a direction role - I'd had more fun learning to code missions than running the project.

My early years in the industry were inline with some of the more negative stories you may have heard, but at least my disinterest in the day job meant I had time to help out with Standoff. After that I had nothing but increasingly good experiences and had more and more opportunity to do my ideal kind of work - I absolutely adore the job that working on fan mods led me to (most days).

I also had a love of Japanese; one day I was contacted by a recruiter asking if I'd like to work in Japan, I jumped at the chance.

Several years later I'm now married with twin girls who are soon to be 7 months, working as a lead programmer in Japan and have... well I still have to say only passable Japanese skills

Apologies for the photo, its a few months old and I don't have many with me in (don't like having them taken since I put on weight).
 

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Awesome stories! I'm lovin this thread. ....wait why am I reading this when I gotta get married in 3 hrs?! Lol. Told ya all I'm obsessed with this place.
 
Congrats, you are now married. Now stop paying attention to this board and go introduce your wife to Wing Commander for your honeymoon.

HAH!

Can't top Ali's first mission. It was after hours at work and I had loaded up the GOG copy of Wing Commander II to show her. Went through how you play, fly, etc. and then gave her the 'stick. And you know what it's like your first time out, and in her case her first time in a flight sim style game at all... lots of rotating in circles, not knowing to lead the enemy and so on. Anyway two minutes in, Chris walks up and starts watching her play. After a few minutes he turns to me and asks "where's the music?" (since it was muted.) Ali turns around, she had no idea he was there... or that her flight was being observed by the Commander himself!
 
Alright, finally got a moment to add my own here.

I'm Jason, 34, from New Hampshire but currently residing in Seattle, Washington. I'm an adjunct history professor at several different colleges. My area of focus is naval aviation in the Pacific Theater of Operations. I loved WW2 carriers and the carrier battles as a kid and when I discovered Wing Commander, it was just too perfect.

I got into Wing Commander around the time of WC3. We had been a Mac family for years. I grew up using a Mac IIci (what a beast) and then a PowerMac 8500 but then in 1994 my dad bought a Gateway 2000. After always being so mad at all the PC games compared to the almost complete lack of Mac games in that era (save for Bungie's Marathon...obviously one of my favorites), I now had the ability to play. My dad bought some game packs from Gateway and one included the Privateer/Strike Commander split CD and Armada. After watching my dad get the boot disks ready, I fired up Privateer and the rest is history. I'm pretty sure I got WC3 a few weeks later and my dad found a copy of WC2 Deluxe not long after.

I found my way into the online WC world first with the old "Terran Confederate Underground" site. It was basically a ships database. My dad was none-to-thrilled when I printed out the entire website and put it in a three-ring binder so I could read it while eating dinner. He didn't care about the reading but man was he pissed about all the ink I used! Come to think of it, he might still have that three-ring binder in the attic.

The TCU was my first exposure to the original Wing Commander. Until Kilrathi Saga came out, I had never played it. I remember wanting to so badly but for whatever reason just never got a copy until KS. Which I have to say some of the fondest memories are of, first downloading for hours then, watching the KS trailer. And when the game came out, for probably months on end, everybody's nick in #wing-commander was "Nickname-KS" because we were all playing it non-stop.

I later discovered alt.games.wing-commander and eventually #wing-commander on DALnet where I met ChrisReid, LOAF, ace-1, Eagle-1 and lots of other great wingnuts. I'm not sure exactly when that was but I bet LOAF or Chris has the logs from those days and we could probably find it...although I don't want to remember what 14 and 15 year old me said. I used to log into #w-c every chance I got. It was always filled with 30+ people all talking about Wing Commander. We had a lot of fun back then and made some good friendships that continue to today.

When I went off to college in 2001 I dropped off the radar for a bit but probably got back into things by mid-2003 and have been back ever since. Since then, even with the lack of new WC games, I still check into the CIC at least twice a day. If anything, the last decade has made me love this game series even more than when I was a kid. I've made some great friends, had some memorable times (waiting up for WC Arena to come out a bunch of years back and then ChrisReid's wedding two years ago both stick out), and continue to be impressed by the dedication and loyalty of the wingnut fanbase. We are an amazing group.

In July 2013, the 1st Infantry Division Museum sent me to Sicily as part of a joint American-Canadian Battlefield Study. Ten days trudging around the island and battlefields was incredible. This picture was taken at the only American memorial on the island. Paratroopers managed to fight off German panzers (including some Tigers) with the help of some naval gunfire support during the first day of the invasion.

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My name is Tomi (that's pronounced like Tommy with sharper T; like in NakaTOMI in Die Hard). I'm soon 38, from Finland.

My first contact with WC was one of first games magazines I had, the very first issue of Pelit (still Finland's major games publication) in 1992, which had review of Special Operations 1 (96/100). I was immediately fascinated by this thing - I pride myself of having an instinct for good games/movie/books/comics at first sight.

It would be months later that I first got (92 or 93) to play first time WC1 at my cousin's. He's much older and was talking with my parents at the time, just leaving me to play alone and I'm not one to read manuals, so at the very first try I had no idea what I was doing: no matter who I tried to shoot, game always complained I'm shooting allies :/
Once getting hang of it, my next problem was that I didn't understand autopilot - just flew from nav point to next, maybe with afterburner. And even after I learned most keys and functions, I had by that time only had gaming experience from 8-bit consoles, so I didn't do too well...

1994 I finally got my first computer (386-SX) and obviously among the first things I did was to copy all my cousin's games (TBH I have an ugly track record with copyright laws). Along years I would gather number of WCs (often first less and later more legally), but I still consider the original to be best game ever.

WC2 with both SOs holds one record in my gaming history: no other game has taken as large percentage of my harddrive space. That 386's 40 meg drive was pretty tight with 10Mb Win 3.1, 5Mb DOS, what ever else I had back then and 20Mb of WC.

I think WC3 was third CD game I ever bought.
 
Hi all, I'm Arvin, 35 years old, and have been a Wing Commander fan since my relative showed me the intro on his 386 desktop with a Sound Blaster compatible sound card (or it could've been an authentic Sound Blaster, I can't recall). At first, I wasn't that interested in it except slightly impressed by seeing the talking cats (Thrakath and his grandpa on the throne room).

A few years later I stumbled upon a copy of Wing Commander II. Being in Indonesia at that time, most software being sold were not-quite-original... (hard to say, there are diskettes and the Joan's manual were nicely photocopied). I install it on my first cousin's computer... a 486 with a swell MIDI card but no sound card. :(

Nevertheless, my cousin and I fell in love with Wing Commander since.

I later had my own desktop with a CD-ROM drive, and installed WC1, 2 and Privateer... and Privateer was my best Wing Commander experience. The countless hours doing missions and trade runs... so memorable.
The Privateer Enhanced CD-ROM edition was also the first original PC games I ever purchased in Indonesia.

As the years passed on, I bought more WC games and start collecting the game boxes (as they go).

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Btw, I've also been known as Nathan or NathanFraix or simply TheFraix.
Why Fraix? Well, not long after I got 'in to' the Wing Commander franchise, I started to play Ultima as well... and it was just happen stance that my name written in Britannian runes looks a bit similar to the word Fraix.
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Anyway, I've been a visitor of the Terran Confederation Underground and WC Home Sector, and later on an active chat participant in CIC since 1999. It's been cool to chat and with Loaf who turns out to be a couple of months older than me. I also remember engaging this community with a question on how Wing Commander affected their lives and the answers were very incredible! I'm really honored to be among you!
 
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Hey everyone. My name is Chris, callsign Shot. I'm 31 and am from Detroit, Michigan. I am of the extraordinarily lucky individuals to have grown up with a Commodore Amiga (4 stores nearby sold them, people had them and loved them in America, too), a computer 10 years ahead of its time. I feel my experience is a tad different when compared to many others out there in that my father was the computer nerd. My love for him and wonderment over what the hell he was up to is what caused me to spend endless hours in a chair in the basement watching him play oh so many fantastic Amiga games. And no, not those ones you see from the "100 best Amiga games" YouTube videos. The rest of the world has rewritten the truth regarding that machine in this country, people think nobody bought it, in fact sales are very comparable to any single country in the rest of the world. People think all the good games came from Europe, they even tell you to throw out an NTSC Amiga because of it. The thing with the Amiga is the market for games in America was very similar to all other computers here. My father wouldn't have been caught dead playing Super Frog or Zool, side scrollers... I'm sorry but I also had an NES and Genesis during that period, and "I" wouldn't be caught dead playing Super Frog or Zool. Side scrollers were every so much better on consoles... I loved Mario... I loved Sonic...

But nothing could compare to the power of that beautiful machine, the Commodore Amiga 500. A computer with a personality. You just don't get much love for single computer models, sure, some people might love DOS, but that's not a computer... That's an operating system. The love for the Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga are like nothing else out there. The Amiga was our female friend. I watched my father play games like Pool of Radiance, best version on the Amiga, spent months on it.... Eye of the Beholder... Civilization, Battletech, Railroad Tycoon, Earl Weaver Baseball (first realistic baseball games with oh so many stats)... Empire... Breech...Lemmings...Lost Dutchman Mine, Sim Ant, Sim City... A-Train... Those are not only some of the best Amiga games of all time, but they are some of the best games of all time. Some of them started life on the Amiga, some of them had their best version there, some of them were almost straight ports from DOS or elsewhere, but they were all oh so good. And it came on a computer that was oh so much cheaper than any IBM with an incredible 4,096 colors, 16, 32,or 64 colors on screen at once, and in a special mode called HAM all 4,096. 4 channels of digitized and sampled music. A computer from 1985 that can make a realistic sounding piano (MT-32 could never do that).

I would watch my father play these games, and yes, I was allowed to play many of them as well... I'll never forget wondering around Might and Magic II, a completely non-linear game world, massive game world... Had no clue what I was doing but I was having a blast! Playing Death Knights of Kyrnn and having the wolf stalk me, visiting the town with a lich mayor. Yeah, I loved Mario and Sonic, but computer games were so obviously on this whole other level. Then, in 1992, a tiny bit later than my DOS friends, Wing Commander graced us on the Amiga.

My life was never the same. Not only would I watch my dad play it...Oh.. I sure as hell wanted to play that one too! Getting killed what seemed like a thousand times on the asteroids of the first mission... Learning how to dodge them only to come back to the Claw and be utterly dumbfounded that I couldn't land! How the hell do I land?! At the age of 7 the manual might as well been the flight instructions for an F-16. I had my mother read and make sense of how best to land... And to this day there's no other landing sequence quite like that first game! I carried Claw Marks around with me everywhere. Well, here you go, I've got some evidence of it!

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^ Top, me with my well used issue of Claw Marks. Bottom left, my father on our Amiga playing Railroad Tycoon. Bottom right, me in the chair next to my dad.

I think a lot of people kind of looking in on the Amiga version of Wing Commander having known the DOS version might not quite understand, it may be ever so obvious to them how much better the original was. I'm telling you as a person who didn't see the DOS version until the Kilrathi Saga came out; The Amiga version was every bit as special to us looking in the first time as it was for anyone with DOS. Yes, on a 500 it was pretty damn slow, didn't matter. People forget how many slow ass DOS computers were around back then. I'm sure Wing Commander got a few people to upgrade, but no, most people were playing it on hardware that couldn't quite handle its power. Both me and my father played Wing Commander to death and we never once discussed how slow it was. We had nothing to compare it to. And actually, for any interested, Wing Commander should be played in NTSC mode, emulators default into PAL mode. This is for compatibility reasons. Pretty much all NTSC software worked just fine on PAL hardware, where as lots of PAL software had terrible issues running on NTSC hardware (although many real machines let you switch graphics modes). Wing Commander, obviously originally designed in America on DOS, was supposed to be in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The Amiga version of Wing Commander, with the use of modern emulators and on actual European hardware, put the game into an almost modern day widescreen mode. Near 16:9 aspect ratio. When you take into account that the 4:3 original had its own widescreen moments during dialogue, the Amiga version ends up looking like this ridiculous super wide screen, faces are stretched, and... yeah, PAL Amiga's ran slower than NTSC Amiga's. You'd be surprised at how much a difference that little speed boost can make. To this day I can still play Wing Commander on my Amiga 500 and get through it without pulling my hair out.

The music...Oh my god the music... This was space opera to me... And yeah, I've got an MT-32... I still think the Amiga sounds better! The MT-32 may have sounded a bit more realistic with its heavy string focus, but it's too subtle for my tastes. The Amiga version is bold, in your face. The fan fare is incredible, my favorite music in the game is the barracks music.. But only on the Amiga... I think it's pretty bad on the MT-32, and of course, let's not even mention the way 99% of DOS users heard it back in the day, through an Adlib FM sound card.... Yuck...

But not just the music my friends, oh yeah, the graphics were utterly amazing. They blew my mind. Yes, the 256 color original was stripped down to 16 colors on the Amiga. And you know I wish they had used 32 or even 64 colors at least for the dialogue scenes. I think even the 500 could have handled that just fine. I sort of feel it was more about putting it onto 3 disks than anything. Take a look at Monkey Island 2 for DOS and then look at the Amiga version. The two are nearly identical despite DOS being in 256 colors and the Amiga in 32. Why? The game came on 12 disks for the Amiga. People forget how much space had to do with graphics, not just hardware. Look no further than the SNES version of Wing Commander, probably the poorest port, but it had tons of colors on it... Then look at the Sega CD version, looks a lot better than the SNES, why? It's on a CD, lots more space to work with.

Anyway, I have to say that despite using 16 colors, the carefully chosen colors along with the dithering absolutely pull it off. I've seen Wing Commander in EGA mode for DOS, the Amiga destroys it! With the same resolution as the original DOS version (320x200) it also bested the consoles , every pixel that was in the DOS version was in the Amiga version, not all the colors, but the pixels were there. The Amiga version is without a doubt in my mind the finest port of the original Wing Commander. When I got the Kilrathi Saga and started playing the DOS version oh my was I in for a shock, in a bad way. hahaha... I hated the music (which was digitized for the Kilrathi Saga) and I was sure the Amiga version looked better too... Obviously I was wrong about that... Or was I? To me growing up with the Amiga version, those dithered graphics made everything feel so aged... So war ridden... It seemed to fit the actual mood of this 40 year old war so much better. No, I don't actually think the Amiga version looks better than the DOS version, but it looked good while being different, and I imagine that's the reason I kind of felt the Amiga looked better as a kid.

I fully recommend everyone play the Amiga version, not the CD32 version...No... Why on Earth would anyone want to play an identical port where the ONLY difference is the music? I suppose people that love a game as much as we... But no, the original Amiga version is a technical marvel on an Amiga, much like it was on DOS. You all know what the DOS version looks like, get a tiny bit different experience by playing it on the Amiga with its 16 colors. Speed it up if you wish, but play that original!

Oh wow, so much already... I missed out on Wing2 because it didn't come out on the Amiga, got Wing3 in 1995, had to give it back before I beat it because my sister got in a car accident, we needed to send back our new computer. Got Wing 4, then the Kilrathi Saga, Prophecy... Oh yeah, the Privateer games were in there as well. I've played them all way more than I can count. The series meant so much to me growing up, and to this very day.

I happen to make videos on YouTube, I consider it a retro nerd channel, as in, I'll make videos on anything old and nerdy. But my primary focus is on computer and console games from the early 80's to late 90's. I have in fact done a couple Wing Commander videos already, and plan to review all of them... Umm... If you happen to go there, it's possible you might hear some bad things about this very forum... I had reasons for that, but it's behind me now. They are still very good reviews in my opinion, I even have a written review for Wing4. The name, in case anyone cares, is MrShot97 - I won't link it directly, if anyone actually cares, it won't be hard to look up. I've recently given this place another chance and I'm looking forward to giving my opinion from time to time.

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