Breaking News: Eight is Great!

The guys over at Raylight report that Puissance Pocket, a French GBA site, has an excellent article about Raylight and Prophecy GBA... complete with eight new screenshots! The new screenshots and a translation of the Prophecy-relevant portions of the article follow:

But Raylight is not satisfied to simply create video games: in March, the company announced the development of a new 3D engine, BlueRoses. This technology is very impressive, and it shows the power of the Game Boy Advance's hardware. This is truly 3D, and the character animation looks fantastic.

All of this is memory intensive: Wings will need an 8 megabyte cartridge, while Wing Commander will need 4 megabytes. Why are the sizes so different? Massimiliano di Monda, Vice-President of Raylight, explains: "Wing Commander uses a 4 mb cartridge because it makes use of our 3D Blue Roses engine, while Wings uses a sprite-based engine." The difference is clear!

From Star Giants to Wing Commander

Raylight Studios will use their own engine in several of their games, like Wing Commander Prophecy, which we showed you in January. Bicouli presented a game called Star Giants, which was very "Wing Commander-ish". Since then, we have learned that Star Giants has become Wing Commander. Crazy, yes?

The game is a beautiful example of what Raylight is able to do: use the existing technology without becoming a slave to it! Raylight has tried to bring new life to a game which 386DX owners discovered eleven years ago, adding new music to an ambience that will always be... special.

The game of the last century has thusly found a new youth, with ships and environments designed with the style of the day. There will be about thirty ships available, twenty fighters and ten capital ships.

50 missions will be available, with many varied objectives: capture an enemy base, defend your own base, defend yourself, the missions will not fail! As in the original game, you can discuss your missions with other pilots in the bar, and the scenario will change according to your results.

Raylight is happy to add an original feature: a multiplayer mode is included with the program, making it possible to play the missions with four players! Most importantly, though, it remains faithful to Wing Commander by having rich, complex scenarios where your actions will have major consequences on the outcome of the game.

Got WC2 Demo?

Apparently our local copy of the Wing Commander 2 demo is corrupt! Does anyone out there have it backed up somewhere? The WC2 Demo is awfully neat... it's basically the WC2 intro with different artwork (you see a closeup of the Kilrathi guards) and different voices. If you've got a copy, please send it to the CIC; we'll post it for everyone and then we'll go on and on about how great you are. Thanks!

-- Updated -- Kris: We've got a working copy.

WCPolaroids: Blair (5/11)

We're about to go over the Blair-hump (staring Ginger Lynn and Jennifer MacDonald)! That said, here's Blair in his flight suit: