One Week Left - Get Your Votes In

Since there's so many great choices in this year's annual Web Site & Fan Project of the Year award contest, some fans might have held back on their votes to contemplate the decision. With just one week left in the year, now's the time to start thinking about which nominees to settle on. If you haven't cast your ballot yet, head over to the voting page and help pick the winners!

Fan Project of the Year Nominees
• Das Erwachen grew in 2007 with the completion of its second fan novel. In addition to coming up with this exciting story, the team behind it has conducted parties to read selected passages and has had success with printing collectable copies of the books.
• Flight Commander was upgraded to version 1.5 in 2007. New features continue to be added to this flexible Wing Commander modding engine, so it's more powerful than ever. The project has been so successful that it's spawned its own annual contest to recognize some of the best FC mods in work.
• Privateer Ascii Sector is an innovative project that takes all the excitement of Privateer and translates it into two-dimensional ascii characters. The game capitalizes on its unique environment to add new features to the Privateer mix and quickly went from announcement to playable game in 2007.
• Privateer Gemini Gold works hard to recreate the original Privateer experience as authentically as possible. A new version was released this year that adds upgraded ship models, graphical tweaks and many bug fixes.
• Queeg's Wing IV Movie quickly went from idea to three-hour production in early 2007, thanks to Queeg's experience making the Wing Commander III version in 2006. Downloads of the film generated over a terabyte of traffic in just the first week!
• Standoff is one of the most popular and long-running projects. It's a mod to 1998's Wing Commander Secret Ops and continues to impress fans with its attention to classic detail and continued expansion of the Vision Engine. Episode 4 was released this year.
• WC4 Homeworld 2 Mod's graphics are top notch and AI is getting better. This project was a surprise hit in 2006 and won last year's award. The mod received continued tweaks and upgrades throughout 2007.
• WC Saga's Prologue was released of New Year's Eve 2006 to kick off a year of activity. They have continued to release test material for their upcoming full game and have fostered the creation of fan-made missions as well.
• Wing Commander TacOps is an exciting tabletop/board game ruleset that debuted in 2007. As the year's gone by, additional markers and aids have been made to help fans play on their own. The rules continue to be refined and Wingnuts are currently testing out ways to play the game online as well.

Web Site of the Year Nominees
• gulikoza's page is the home of the dxmci patch for the Wing Commander 4 DVD version. Not content to sit back after giving fans the ability to play WC4 DVD without its original hardware decoder board, gulikoza continues to tweak the patch and provide additional help to fans who might encounter unique problems. He's also experimenting with DOSBox tweaks.
• HCl's Wing Commander Editing Site is the home to some of the most exotic and amazing patches, tweaks and tools for Wing Commander games. After ten years of unbelievable breakthroughs, HCl continues to dig deeper into his code and create new advancements.
• Jetlag's WC CCG Site gives many fans a look at part of the series they might have missed. Even those lucky enough to pick up a few boxes of cards on eBay have a ways to go before they can complete their set. Jetlag's easy-to-navigate site lets everyone look up the stats or artwork that they need, and it even provides high resolution scans of each card.
• Pericles' Paper Inside is the home on the web for an expert 3D paper artist. His physical sci-fi ship models are very impressive. Although he also builds ships for other franchises, most of his work revolves around Wing Commander.
• WC Saga's website is frequently updated with news, sound samples, polls and concept art relating to the WC Saga game. It's also the main download portal for the Saga Prologue and test missions that have been released.
• Wedge's Wing Commander is a huge reference site organized by Wing Commander game. It has a ton of original content and also links to other resources on the web. The site received a big overhaul in 2007 and moved to a new domain.

Point of Origin: Vol. III, No. 43

The July 30, 1993 issue of Point of Origin marks the release of Wing Commander Academy... in a very low-key fashion. Will the mission editor sell as expected? We'll find out in the near future! In the meantime, awards and reviews continue to be very positive about Serpent Isle, Strike Commander and... the original Wing Commander?

A very special thanks to Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum for making this resource available and to Electronic Arts for sending them to him in the first place!

• In Print has some surprising award news:"talk about a blast from the past... The Readers' Choice Awards have been tallied at Multimedia World magazine. The winner for Best Arcade Game--Wing Commander II ((applause)). As runner-up--wing Commander ((gasp)). Moving on to Best Simulation, the winner is--Wing Commander ((thunderous applause)). Runner-up--Wing Commander II ((shock)). If you can keep all that straight (moreover, if you can believe it), then you won't be surprised to hear that Wing 2 was also a Finalist in teh Best Multimedia CD-ROM Title category. It just goes to show you that a quality title can keep 'em coming back for more and more. Congrats to everyone involved in both games as well as everyone who's sold and supported them. The honors will be published in Multimedia World's October issue."
• Pulse Check is a great source for the status of various games: "Privateer also moved into Alpha. Perry Stokes is heading up this project. Toby Shelton, Dan Orzulak, Dee Starns, Bill LaCoste, Todd Wacchaus and Jerrold Harrington are the Aces on this one. So far they haven't been able to get a complete play through. Beth Loubet is writing clue books for both Shadowcaster and Privateer. She has recently relocated to the QA area to play both of these. We think it is great to have her here. We hope that being so close to QA and CS will help give her more customer input and make these two clue books the best ORIGIN has put out to date. WAY TO GO, BETH!!... The Silver Seed and Wing Commander Academy have signed off. They are both expected to ship in August. Guess we'll be oilin' up the phones."

Point of Origin
Vol. III, No. 43 - July 30, 1993 Contents In Print
Re-org!
"What's Next?"
Dear Point Man
Arrrg, Matie!
New Hires
Pulse Check
Ticker