The MK Podquest is an undertaking after our own heart. They're a dedicated podcast founded to focus on the 22-episode 1998 television show Mortal Kombat Conquest. They've also branched out to other elements of the franchise, which led them to the Mortal Kombat cartoon, Defenders of the Realm. You know where this is going: the Saga of the Warrior King.
In 1996 Michael Dorn voiced a space viking that chases after an orb across the Street Fighter, Savage Dragon, Mortal Kombat and then Wing Commander Academy universes in an epic and inexplicable crossover event. The MK Podquest duo have spent the past month examining every chapter in this story, and Wing Commander is their finale event. They went in with low expectations and zero experience with the WC series, and the team was pleasantly surprised. It's their overwhelming favorite, and it's entertaining to hear them learn about and explore the WC franchise. The episode is an hour and a half long, so buckle down for the ride! Check out the podcast on Spotify, Google, Apple or Stitcher.
It's time! Part 4 of The Warrior King Crossover is here and honestly it kicked ass. #ORB
We've reached the end of ORB MONTH and the Warrior King's journey this week with Wing Commander Academy Episode 8: Recreation, easily the best episode of the crossover hands down. Neal is now fully a Wing Commander guy. Also we messed around with a soundboard on this one so expect a ton of airhorns.
If this makes you want to go back and rewatch Academy yourself, check it out on Peacock or DVD.
Welcome to the CIC's 23rd Birthday Party! When we opened our doors here at WCNews.com in August 1998, we never imagined we'd still be here now. The pandemic still looms and did directly affect a few items we had planned. This has not been the year of recovery that we'd envisioned, but I'm happy that we managed to still pull together a few fun things to share. Like you all, we're still making the best of it and having a blast hanging out (digitally, per social distancing guidelines) with friends. If you're not already there, stop by Wingnut and join the party!
Form up, Wing Commander fans! Tonight we're taking a look at some spaceships that never were: the ones that were being built for Privateer 3 when it was cancelled in 1998. Thanks to years of game archaeology, we know quite a bit about them!
The CRUSADER (sometimes called FURY) was shaping up to be the big hero ship, equivalent to the Centurion:
Here's a shot of the Crusader in the game engine (a development of Prophecy's Vision technology):
The Crusader is actually 'canon' since EA reused its artwork for a recruiting ad in Star*Soldier. The concept artist, Ruben Garza, also submitted it to an art book called Spectrum 6 where it was printed as "Privateer--Black Star". (Available on Amazon!)
I should also mention the origin of the name! Privateer 3 was being developed by Origin's Loose Cannon team which had previously develoed the Crusader series of games.
Next up we have the VAKTOTH which is slotted here as a Kilrathi light fighter. This ship was by Art Wong and the final render with the planets is called "Space Odyssey".
It's certainly different from the Vaktoth heavy fighter from Wing Commander III, though! Part of that is the fact that the playable ships were intended to visibly change as you customized their equipment (something the first two Privateers did not do).
Here are a pair of concepts for a modular Border Worlds fighter by Ruben Garza. You can see how different sections could be easily changed out.
Speaking of the Border Worlds, here's their ALTAIR class light fighter. You know I love the twin cockpits and you can really see the Banshee influence.
This bulk freighter is alternatively called the DRAYMAN or the SARTHORI in different drafts.
It wouldn't be the first time Wing Commander redesigned the Drayman, though!
KERPOW!
Here's the NEMESIS heavy fighter which would've been roughly equivalent to the Crusader seen earlier.
Some of the potential customization options for the Nemesis, including different liveries!
And what were those Nemeses attacking? The mighty Confederation MANOWAR battle carrier! (Fans would have absolutely been obsessing over whether or not this was 'Omega' from Fleet Action...)
Here's HYPERION, one of the game's space stations. That's the last ship we have lore for but we have surviving concept art of several others...
Here's the Kilrathi DEMON fighter along with livery and weapon customization options.
And here's how the mesh would change based on what type of engines you have installed (ion, pulsar and SD pulsar in these examples).
A single render survives of the DRALTHI V, which would've joined probably the most storied series of ships in Wing Commander history. We don't have space for every previous Dralthi here but you can find them all in this post.
Rounding out the Kilrathi fighter force, this is the TRAKET heavy fighter:
The furballs also get a carrier/battleship called HADES which would've been part of the game's story missions.
This Kilrathi science station, KRONOS, would've been central to the game's plot as it was (sigh) where a Kilrathi warlord was trying to use a Steltek time machine to resurrect Kilrah.
You can spot this one in the background of several of the other renders. It's called the AURORA and it seems to be a light freighter similar to the Galaxy from the original game.
Finally, the ships here under attack by Trakets in this in--engine shot remain unidentified. Some sort of nimble light fighter, by the looks of things!
I lied! The smaller transorts in this composition (two astride the center Drayman) also haven't been identified. You can see they were also reusing the Piranha mesh from Wing Commander Prophecy.
That's the post! If I could leave you with one closing thought it would be: Privateer 3 looked amazing and I hope the jerks that cancelled it get eaten by birds. I leave you with one crazy Drayman render:
Here's another slate of fantastic ships (and more!). These originated the Wing Commander Movie's conceptual style book. It was sent out to merchandisers potentially developing WCM-related products. We've pulled out a few of these images here and there over the years, but here's the full book!
Summary and background:
"Good Guys" cast:
Patches, weapons and Pilgrim Cross:
Kilrathi armor, bodies and equipment:
The Rapier (model and sketch):
The Diligent (model and sketch):
The Broadsword (model and sketch):
The Tiger Claw (model and sketch) and missile sketch:
The Dralthi (model and sketch):
The Snakeir (model and sketch):
Ship identification chart:
One of the less visible - but perhaps most important - updates we have this year is a massive server upgrade. The previously dedicated hardware and connection date back to early 2014 and were starting to show their age. KrisV has been laboring nonstop over the past couple weeks to get the CIC moved over to a brand new host and system. Individual elements have been briefly brought down and restored nightly, and the disruption has probably gone unnoticed by almost everyone.
The highlights are listed below, but the net effect is that the end user capability is some ten times as powerful in the areas that count hardware-wise. The operating system side has also seen a nice boost, which supports general web browsing plus services like the Forums and Wiki. It's hard to convey just how critical this kind of maintenance is, but we couldn't keep the CIC going without all of Kris' technical expertise in this area!
Hardware:
- NVMe storage (was SATA HDD)
- 32GB memory (was 4GB)
- 1Gb/s uplink (was 100Mbit/s)
- Improved CPU
Software:
- A fresh OS install with a long support horizon
- HTTP/2 should make for faster pageloads
- IPv6 (soon)
It's not often that we make a new piece of CIC merchandise, but birthday parties give us a good opportunity to finally pull something like this together. It only took us four or five years to make these finally happen. We'll be giving some out at the party tonight, so we wanted to share the link for anyone that might want a set. We make no money whatsoever on these or any other items. They're just presented here as a novelty for folks who want a set of their own.
The photo on the left is from a pre production batch that was testing out sizing. The actual size is depicted on the right (picture courtesy of DaveO!). The coasters are available on Zazzle here for about $25. There is a 20% off coupon code ("AUGUSTSAVING") good for this weekend that brings the price down to $20 plus shipping. And thanks again to DefianceIndustries for the graphics!
This year Lacey and the kiddos made CIC-colored cupcakes!
And now it's time for our annual poll! Our history in the Wing Commander news business stretches back some 25 years, with 23 of them here at WCNews.com, and looking at all those date ranges is pretty mind boggling. How long have you been with us?
The old poll asked which ship had your favorite briefing room. The Tiger's Claw was the unsurprising winner, but the Victory came in a very strong second. All of the options managed to pull in a pretty decent minority of the votes this time around!
And that's a wrap! It's a bit on the lighter side as far as front page updates go, we know, but we're having a great time in the party happening in #Wingnut right now and hope you are too! In prep for today's festivities, we talked with a number of talented Wing Commander fans and they have lots of fun stuff in the pipeline that just wasn't quite ready to share today. Lots of folks are still dealing with the direct impacts from the pandemic, and our thoughts continue to be with everyone on that front. But stay tuned for a great year going forward into the future. We're optimistic that we'll finally start to shake off Covid, and we'll be here to bring you the Wing Commander news along the way!
Today we've got a spot-on Lego Minifig by JR. There guys are so much more detailed and varied than I remember from the '80s and '90s, so you can really get some accurate depictions of well known characters going. He's even got the oversized Confed C-244 handgun. It's a pretty great approximation given the options available!
I've seen some older posts on how to put together a Lego Rapier or other fighters from the Wing Commander series. But I don't think you've seen this before. It's simply a Lego pilot I made to resemble the pilots from the film. Body is from one of the two versions of the Lego Star Wars Skyhopper Pilot, and helmet is from the Lego Star Wars female Sandspeeder Pilot.
It's not an exact match but it's the closest outfit I could find from legit Lego products.
Jeff
This one's certainly up there with some of the best minifigs we've seen over the years!
I heard something about boosters being needed soon. We've got your boosters right here! #CombatInformationCenterforDiseaseControl
The Taliban have unfortunately been all over the news this past week, and it's our duty to bring you the Wing Commander angle on all topics. Today's connection links to the G'wriss System in Wing Commander Prophecy. As the crew of the TCS Midway escapes from their initial encounters with the Nephilim in the H'rekkah System, they escape to G'wriss and find themselves low on supplies. The solution is to rendezvous with a Confed convoy en route to "the Taliban colony." Of course, the line carried no significance when it was first written back in '96/'97, but it seemed increasingly anachronistic when they were overthrown in the early 2000s. And now? Maybe not so much.
That's not where the story ends, though! When Prophecy was ported to the Gameboy Advance by Daylight back in 2003, the line really stood out! "Taliban" was replaced by "Eielitian" at the time.
LOAF: There’s a throwaway line in Wing Commander Prophecy about intercepting a supply convoy bound for “the Taliban colony”. No one thought about it in 1997 but in 2003 when we did the GBA port we were aghast and changed the name. Sad to think the original is possible again!
The replacement line for the Gameboy version was “the Eielitian colony” which I believe had the virtue of not referencing anything at all.
And that poor convoy? Quickly taken out by the bugs. Only the TCS Redeemer supply shuttle survived to rearm and refuel Lance Casey and his buddies.
Here's a playthrough by BCSBuster if you'd like to see the whole mission:
Today we're sharing a fairly rare budget release of Wing Commander. LOAF picked this one up a while back and we're finally getting around to sharing it with you! Most of the WC series was repackaged into numerous rereleases, compilations and bundles, but it's not that often that we come across new and unknown variants - especially in English-speaking regions. This one appears to be from a small 1993 run in the US cross-published by GT Interactive. It comes in a smaller box with a different form factor than most. While it's outwardly quite similar to the original WC1 design, the back features several differences such as more round corners on the screenshots and the removal of several lower images. Speaking as someone who owns at least 15 or so variations of WC1, you can never have too many!
Here’s a eBay mystery! This copy of Wing Commander I came in a smaller, single piece box... a budget edition published under license by GT Interactive?! I had never seen this before. It sounds like this was a budget version published under license in 1993 that everyone just forgot about. There’s an Ultima VI, too... but I’d never seen a Wing Commander! I wonder what else might exist...
In an interesting reversal of fortunes, GOG has added back Ultima Underworld 1+2 and the Syndicate games to their catalog. These packages were delisted back on June 28, at the "publisher's request." The games reappeared yesterday, and as a bonus to celebrate their return, they're being made available for free until September 3. If you missed them earlier, now's your chance! The price is right too.
This isn't the first time that there were puzzling contractual misunderstandings between Electronic Arts and GOG. When Privateer was added in June 2011 and WC1+2 in August of that year, they were missing the expansions. Despite conversations to add them looking promising in the summer of 2011, they didn't actually appear on the service until December 2012.
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