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MAPS! Is there a more thrilling concept in the universe than fantasy maps? There is not, which is why our ongoing atlas of the Tri-System has produced never before seen complete maps of the seven planets that receive PAD transit maps in the game (Karatikus doesn't have anywhere to visit). During normal play, the 'special' locations connected to the plot and unique missions don't appear… so there was a little work involved in getting the complete versions!

And did you know that each of these transit systems uses a different kind of vehicle (with a respective 3D cutscene for each)? Here's the cheat sheet:

Anhur = bus
Bex = blimp
Crius = train
Hades = elevator
Hephaestus = subway
Hermes = yellow taxi
Janus IV = town car

While plotting these out we made an interesting little discovery (beyond that nothing is very close to anything else in the Tri-System): an unused thumbnail representing a location on

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Here's one for the archive: an article from the November 1994 issue of British magazine PC Games (#4) which features an article about Mark Hamill. The focus is on his career as a "vactor", a term for virtual actor which luckily did not catch on in any way, shape or form. His upcoming appearances in Gabriel Knight and Wing Commander III are discussed with some interesting details. The most exciting part, however, is this otherwise uncirculated photo of Mark, Chris Roberts and the Emperor's skin:

MARK HAMILL MY LIFE AS A VACTOR

AFTER BATTLING THE EMPIRE IN STARA WARS, MARK HAMILL RETURNS TO DEEP SPACE IN ORIGIN'S WING COMMNDER III. EVANS WENT TO MEET HIM AND GOT HIM TO SIGN HIS STAR WARS VIDEOS.

The last time I saw Mark Hamill, he was younger, slimmer and running around on television waving a green, fluorescent stick. The film, of course, was Star Wars, and Hamill was playing Luke Skywalker, a

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StarLancer! You know it, you love it… but no one else does. And one of the reasons for that is because of just how awful Microsoft's advertising campaign for the game was. I became interested in cataloging it because of the tagline, "From Erin and Chris Roberts, creators of the Wing Commander and Privater series"... and when I saw the "minimalist" UK versions of the ads I was horrified.

They continued this same theme for a bunch of related nonsense:

The United States version was much better, with a pair of cool propaganda-style images that sold the game with a sort of World War II vibe. They share the same tagline connecting the game back to Wing Commander and Privateer:

The Dreamcast port had some nice spaceships and the tagline was a bit more subdued. It simply mentions in the copy that StarLancer is "from the award winning designers of Wing Commander."

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Can you believe summer is here? And it isn't really summer without a deep dive into some very esoteric references in 1994's Wing Commander Armada! Before there was a Wing Commander Universe map, Armada had 11 pre-set maps of human and Kilrathi space for its campaign mode… plus a number of other star systems that it uses to randomly generate Armada sectors. Are they canon? Yes, stop asking. We've poured through these star systems and picked out several that reference a whole lineup of TV shows from the 70s, 80s and 90s… and then we've used that to create today's marathon! And if Armada systems are your thing we've put together a spreadsheet of all 704 star systems if you'd like to learn more!

The Mary Tyler Moore Show (s6e07): This month's pre-show is a famous episode of The Mary Tyler Moore reference that Warren Spector quoted back in 1991 in Wing Commander I & II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide's making

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The Wing Commander movie club has determined where we were in '62! Next week is another birthday choice, this one from bob. Happy birthday, bob, and thank you for choosing Flash Gordon (1980)! It's a hell of a film and Flash Gordon's legacy goes all the way back to the roots of popular science fiction. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The big connection to Wing Commander is that Queen's outstanding Flash Gordon soundtrack album was listed by the Wing Commander III team members as one of their inspirations in the game's notes file! You can read more about the music that inspired that team here. Of course, it's likely they were thinking about this guy when listening to the theme…

Flash Gordon also famously stars Privateer 2's Brian Blessed as Prince Vultan, ruler of the Winged Bird-Men… a character he performs not too differently from Uncle Kashumai! Trust us, he's worth the price

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Questions remain unanswered following last week's unprovoked attacks on starport facilities across Lhou Mans.
Security analysts stated that the attacks bore remarkable similarities to last month's coordinated attacks across military installations in the core systems.
"These patterns are usually reserved for military trials and reconnaissance operations," a senior security observer told Vox Galactica.
"Simulated attacks are used to probe response times, defensive weak points and the speed with which system security can coordinate with independent pilots."
Similar data malware packages bearing the hallmarks of twin axe motifs have also been witnessed across Lhou Mans networks.
Crime correspondent Mira Bukowski has revealed evidence from underworld sources allegedly linking the motif to a rogue pirate admiral going by the nom de guerre 'Lady Zi' and a coalition fleet directed by a single criminal