Micromania Reviews a Mega-Game Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Update ID

Don't you love these international magazine scans? We can thank Maxi de Sokar for another set! This is an issue of Micromania (No. 76) from 1994 - it's feature article is about Wing Commander Armada, but it also has updates on Super Wing Commander and Heart of the Tiger. I can't even read Spanish, but the layout speaks for itself - people all over the world were excited about Wing Commander in the same way!

Star*Soldier Gloss: Page 21 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Update ID

This is the Star*Soldier gloss for the third systems page:

CONCEPT: See the previous post!

REFERENCES-

  • "Corsair System" - Corsair was originally seen in Secret Missions 2, although we don't learn much about it. The game mode here is, obviously, the 'Gauntlet' map with the Midway-class ship centerpiece.
  • "Vanhecke" - KrisV from WCNews, the man behind the scenes who keeps the show running.
  • "New Confederation" - Although I flesh out this one later (and note it!) a lot of these factions are just throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks. The hope here was that it would explain just how broken-down this frontier area has become... and, in this particular case, why the Confederation logo is still seen in so many places.
  • "floating city" - Everyone felt dreadful after the community reaction to the Midway wallpaper and so I was drafted to come up with some theories that could be used if the question came up in a press interview (it never did, of course). I outlined a few possible stories - floating refugee city, modified for transit through Nephilim space, part of the 'block II' Midway design, etc. I obviously focused on the favorite (floating city) here, but I worked in all of the others somewhere too.
  • "mercenary, Privateer and would-be shogun" - I like that last one! Here, again, we note a clear difference between mercenaries and Privateers (with a capital P!).
  • "Chloe" - After my cat.
  • "Battlecruisers" - This is also something that predates the manual concept - I was asked to develop an explanation for the battlecruiser mode because the team thought they were significantly different from capital ships seen in the past. I don't entirely agree with that (we even see this kind of fleet action in the novels and the movie!) but I came up with the idea that their design is specific to fighting the Nephilim.
  • "Texas-class battleships" - My attempt to name the battleships seen in Action Stations (and to connect our story to them.)
  • "Ardai" - System seen on the original Vega Sector Claw Marks map and mentioned in Wing Commander I's dialogue.
  • "Kraken" - The 'big bad' shipkiller from Wing Commander Prophecy, now operating in squadrons to suggest the size of the war.
  • "Torgo" - Confederation HQ (later conquered by the Kilrathi) seen in Wing Commander III.
  • "Kabla Meth" - Kilrathi HQ seen in Special Operations 2.
  • "Dakota" - Human system seen in Wing Commander I (and the Wing Commander movie).
  • In general, I am sorry to say that I don't have any idea what most of these things are. They're settings rather than stories - something familiar mixed with something new that you have to expand yourself. You haev to decide President Harrison was and what Zhrtx's Doublecross was. I honestly did not think out a single one of these 'new' events in my head. I made sure to double-reference things and keep internal consistency... but the stories are up to the fans (or Electronic Arts, someday).
  • "TCS Conquerer" - Another Royal Navy-derived name for the battlecruisers.
  • "TCS Lawrence" - After T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia).
  • "Colonel Casey" - Lance Casey, the main character from Wing Commander Prophecy - here a little bit older and of higher rank.
  • "Farragut Naval Station" - I threw this in to explain which battlecruiser it is you see fly past the camera at the menu screen!
  • "visually similar, owing..." - Technobabble to explain why the Kiranka and Indomitable are very similar looking in the game. Surprisingly, no one complained about this.
  • "Kilrathi Midway" - I lied, this is the one story that I thought through and then didn't do a very good job of explaining. The reference here is the late 1940s when the Russians copied a captured B-29 bolt-for-bolt and then introduced it to their inventory. America was shocked to see Russian B-29s appear in a military parade one day. So, my fun concept here was that the Kilrathi had done the same thing to the Midway - built their own Kilrathi version. Imagine the megacarrier made from tan Kilrathi durasteel and covered in red clan markings...
  • "thousands" - I wanted to remind everyone that capital ships in Wing Commander exist in great numbers (ref. Confederation Handbook).

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