Frank Talk About XNA

Here at wcnews.com we're always interested in finding out what former Wing Commander veterans have been up to since their time at Origin. Game Informer recently posted an article about the inner workings of Microsoft's XNA studio. You might have heard of XNA as the system by which - along with the new X-Box dashboard update - allows users to create and upload their own games over X-Box Live for other users to play.

Anyway, they flew to Microsoft in Washington state and visited Frank Savage who is a development manager for the XNA toolset. You can read about their visit and experience trying to create a simple game with the XNA studio here.

Here's a previous clip (43 meg wmv) of Frank talking about his work at Origin that you might be interested in. It's part of a much longer video of him speaking about the same Microsoft job and centers on his work with the XNA project. You can stream or download the entire video here.

Wing Commander fans have already been hard at work putting XNA through it's paces. NinjaLA even has one creation available already on the community games marketplace here. It will be interesting to see what kind of fan content will be created for the service in the future.

Making the Games: Wing Commander Prophecy Logos & Backgrounds

I bet you didn't know you needed an incredibly huge 'PROPHECY' logo image. Well, you do - this collection of assorted artwork includes a few neat odds and ends (the strange Kilrathi logo from the WCP Official Guide, the Prophecy team photo) but is largely dominated by logos. These logos were used for all the promotional material - CD labels, boxes, posters, advertisements and so forth. Bootlegging your own Wing Commander Prophecy water never seemed so easy.

Thanks to Captain Johnny for both archiving and providing this material!