IGN has posted an interesting editorial: it's a wishlist of classic games that should be ported to X-Box Live Arcade, following the highly successful release of DooM. Sure enough, Wing Commander made the list. Origin games also took three other slots: Crusader: No Remorse (#6), Abuse (#8) and Autoduel (#9). So... where's Ultima?
5. Wing Commander
Origin Studios' ultimate space shooter franchise featured some phenomenal dog-fighting. This game would work both as a multiplayer and a single player game.
Microsoft has also recently licensed Mad Catz to produce a full-featured X-Box Live Arcade Stick. Even if they don't end up porting Wing Commander to Live Arcade, the X-Box 360 is still an excellent platform for Wing Commander fans to use for getting together. The CIC staff frequently runs games of Ghost Recon: Advance Warfighter, and we welcome any other WingNuts to join the fun. There are some other promising games on the horizon, including Rainbow Six Vegas and Star Trek: Legacy. We highly recommend any Wing Commander fan invest in an X-Box 360.
George "Fat Man" Sanger's personal story about video game audio was released a few years ago, but it's still making the rounds and getting great reviews. We only mentioned it once in passing, but Goku reminded us about it after reading this article on important books about the gaming industry. The Fat Man is well known for his music in Wing Commander, Ultima, 7th Guest, Maniac Mansion, Sim City, LOOM and more. He's widely credited as being one of a handful of people responsible for taking video game audio from old beeps and boops to something meaningful that enhanced the overall entertainment experience. Team Fat helped pioneer things such as Wing Commander 1's dynamic audio that changed depending on the intensity of the situation. More recently, Gamasutra mentions that he's experimenting with the sound that casino slot machines produce, and both they and the Austin Chronicle highly recommend The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness (they both mention Wing Commander to boot!).
"The inside secret is that it's a bizarre movie treatment in the form of literature, disguised as a philosophy book, which is hidden in an autobiography which is intimately tied to the history of gaming. Sanger passes this whole thing off as a how-to book, which, seemingly through sheer random luck, is the most effective and to-the-point manual for creating game audio that has ever been made. I'm buying a copy for everybody I've ever met who can read." -- Joe Purchak
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