Wing Commander in the Age of XS

Super XS was a UK gaming magazine that covered Nintendo systems for six issues between March 1993 and January 1995. It billed itself as "Britain's only Nintendo players' guide" and luckily for us, it existed at exactly the right period of time to have covered Wing Commander and The Secret Missions for the SNES! In fact, the magazine opens with a pretty neat Wing Commander guide… and then replicates it again for Secret Missions! It's full of made up information (Angel is from Paris? Salthi have four lasers?), weird commentary (Iceman and Bossman have stupid names) and great SNES-specific bits like the correctly described 'green Salthi' in the ship guide. It's not a great resource but it is utterly charming, a perfect example of how some obnoxious graphic layout and jaunty prose can create something very special. Special challenge: try to identify three ships from the movie Alien used as background art… and count how many times they reuse the Dralthi from the game's box painting! We found seventeen. Here's the article in all three incarnations:

Issue 1 (Preview)

Issue 1

Issue 6

Issue 5 also included a review of The Secret Missions, which the magazine alternately calls Wing Commander 2 and Special Missions:

Starting with Issue 3, the magazine published debug and Datel Pro Action Replay codes for Wing Commander in every edition. The cheat codes are the same in all four isues but the Pro Action Replay codes are updated as more are discovered!