Move Wing Commander Weaved into Today's RSI Updates

Roberts Space Industries has posted a new commlink article that corresponds with a poll asking what kind of game fans would prefer. While our current poll asks about specific franchises, the new RSI survey is more focused on the different subgenres of space combat sims. Here are the options (and don't forget to go vote!):

What setting would you prefer?
• A linear, cinematic story like Wing Commander
• A multiplayer-focused game like Armada
• An open world like Privateer
• A quasi-persistent world game like Freelancer
• One huge MMO like Eve Online
• Something else entirely

There's also new fiction from the Time Capsule about mankind's first contact with Alien life: 2438: Hello. Note the references to "Explorers" and "Jumpers." Titles like these were used to reference "Compass"-type Pilgrims in the Wing Commander Pilgrim Stars novel! Plus, the Museum area has a feature on Chris Roberts' Strike Commander:

In a letter included in the game’s manual, Chris Roberts famously called Strike Commander the “Apocalypse Now” of computer games. At the time, Strike Commander was far over budget and a year overdue. Getting the game out had been a Herculean task, taking far more blood, sweat and treasure than anyone had ever imagined. But what a game the finished product was! Strike Commander took the original Wing Commander’s promise that you were living a movie and turned it up to eleven.

The game used every trick in the book to allow the limited personal computers at the time to play a Hollywood-style blockbuster with you as the lead character. Patterned after the great military action movies of the 1980s, Strike Commander tells the story of mercenary jet fighter pilots living in the then-future year 2011. Players battled in the skies flying F-16s against other familiar modern aircraft. And the story was full of Hollywood hallmarks: a father figure to avenge, a beautiful seductress with a hidden agenda… and rendered cutscenes that strove for the proper atmosphere as much as they did high tech polish.

One of Strike Commander’s innovations was the inclusion of a ‘virtual cockpit’ where the player’s head and the environment could be controlled separately. You could adjust your view in any direction rather than just left, right, forward and backwards. The only problem was that while Strike Commander featured an unprecedented amount of detail in its graphics it was also a faithful F-16 simulator… which meant that most battles were fought with long range missiles and so the lush graphics representing the enemy planes often went overlooked!