Electronic Arts' community guru, EAJamesPond, has posted the long-awaited pricing announcement for Wing Commander Arena to the official message boards:
Just to let you know!
EA’s Wing Commander Arena, scheduled to go live this summer on Xbox Live Arcade, will be available for 800 MSFT points.
That's $10 US, for those unfamiliar with the MS Point system. This is great news - EA had an opportunity to premiere some new kind of pricing scheme with Arena given its larger scope compared to previous original content releases. That could have created an unfortunate backlash among the ordinary XBLA users who we need to make the release a hit. As it stands now, Arena is an incredible bargain.
Barely three months after releasing his third and final version of his WC3 movie and two months after announcing the project, Queeg has released the first complete version of his WC4 movie project. The project aims to create a full movie experience by tying together high quality FMV scenes taken from WCIV DVD, along with in-game spaceflight scenes. You can download the 2.1 gigabyte, three hour long movie via BitTorrent or alternatively from our local HTTP mirror. The spaceflight scenes also feature new nebula graphics in the background. Don't forget to post your thoughts on the movie here.
A reader named John Brown recently e-mailed us to ask: why are we so excited about Wing Commander Arena? Why are we so positive when there are fans who aren't happy about the release, and when other news sites insist that Wing Commander fans will be 'disgruntled' over the title? I wrote him back with an explanation... and he suggested that I convert it into an editorial so that everyone could understand our point of view on this issue. With some apprehension I've done just that - and you can read it here.
With regards to other news sites, remember that they do not know the Wing Commander community. They haven't spent a decade catering to its every whim, to making sure that it stays together, to putting it before anything else. Kotaku didn't race across the country tracking down Prophecy DVD and The Mercury Post didn't beg and plead with a dozen ex-Origin guys for rare documents to scan. If you have believed in us before, then do so now. General gaming news sites don't understand us, they simply want a negative story to help sell advertising.
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