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Hard Boiled was certainly a treat... but this week, the Wing Commander movie club is going in a very different direction. That's right, we're off to see the wizard with a screening of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz! And the night should be exactly as corny as this prose (no Dark Side of the Moon needed). You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

The initial Wing Commander connection here is slight: Wing Commander Armada names a star system after Oz creator L. Frank Baum. Or perhaps an entire star system isn't so slight! That puts him in the company of creators like George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa. The Baum system is one of a handful of special systems in Armada that the game reserves only for the randomly generated Armada-mode matches and so it doesn't appear in a set location in any of the Campaign-mode maps. Which makes it a bit hard to find or remember! Luckily, we've got a

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Everyone's favorite future historian is back! Mac recently started working with TrueSKY 3 and has been putting the tool through its paces with some wonderful renders of Wing Commander ships over the past few weeks. The first set of four, posted to his BlueSky are a religious experience; don't they look amazing all lined up?!

And he followed up that stunning collection with some pretty intense Excalibur renderings. I think I echo the entire community's sentiments when I say... more please! More, more, more!

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While working with Privateer 2, I've found a couple of small-but-interesting unused game assets still present in the release version. The first are two VDU images for what seem to be bases that aren't present in the game. It's likely that these were additional mission-specific spacelabs because they're stored right before and after Spacelab 1 and Spacelab 2.

One of these stations looks a lot like a relative of the Kiowan pirate clan's Kastagan station (which is present elsewhere and has a unique VDU) while the other reminds me a little bit of NASA's Skylab space station... which further suggests the dropped spacelab theory.

While researching these, I also came across this sheet of pre-release VDU images from an earlier build which is pretty fascinaitng. You can see earlier versions of several of the ships (presumably the first ones build) and the placeholder for the fregihters is very different from any

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The Wing Commander movie club had a good time with Flash Gordon (1980)! It's a joy of a film that for the lack of a better description is full of things you haven't seen anywhere else. It's hard to figure how Dino De Laurentiis believed this was going to be the next Star Wars… but it's certainly something. We also noted that it really seems like the missing link between Jodorowsky's Dune pitch and the 1984 David Lynch Dune, produced by this same group. For all we blame the "weirdness" of that first Dune adaptation on Lynch there's actually a great deal in Flash Gordon that suggests much of that comes from De Laurentiis in the first place. Interesting stuff!

Our big Wing Commander connection was that the Wing Commander III team listened to Queen's Flash Gordon soundtrack while the game was being developed. And it's easy to understand why, the theme is catchy. If you were present on Friday night I

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Hard Boiled (1992) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

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We've got a brand new guide! For the past couple of weeks we've been working on a massive overhaul of the WCPedia's mission guide for Privateer 2: The Darkening. Most Wing Commander games have between 40 and 60 scripted missions... but Privateer 2 has a whopping 167 divided between the main plot, the cinematic missions and then BBS and rotating SOS missions. And for the first time ever we played every single one of them. No one player is likely ever to play them all in one go... which is a shame because they often tell fascinating little stories through their e-mails and diary entries. Which you can now study! Each page now includes:

• Updated mission layouts that include things that weren't in the guide, like space stations, cargo pods and satellites.
• Screenshots of every single uniquely named ships.
• Transcripts and screenshots of every single piece of correspondence.
• Writeups of how the game assigns