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The World Cup is here and the whole world has football fever! Except for the United States, which has football fever (and another much worse thing). And the only cure? Obscure Wing Commander references! Luckily, Privateer 2 has exactly what we need: a football… I mean soccer… I mean "sakkuhr"... themed mission! It's called SPORT.SAKKUHR.ROMPERS-ADMIN@CRIUS.NET and it asks Lev to rescue a football team from angry pirates after it unexpectedly lost the 'Bexian Cup'. Like a World Cup, but for Bex!

The ending is also great and appropriate given the amount of money grubbing FIFA and company seem to be engaging in: there are multiple ads in the 'mission successful' e-mail. While the losing version has some genuine poetry: "Their twisted, flash frozen bodies will float in orbit for months as a grim testament to both their own lack of skill and yours."

Privateer 2 has another major football reference: two of

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With the recent accusations about GOG, some have asked: is there another way to buy Wing Commander games digitally? The answer is yes, but only some of the games. What was once called Origin and now... the EA App... maybe?... Electronic Arts' game platform isn't as well known as GOG or Steam but it does offer several Wing Commander games! You can purchase Wing Commander I through IV and Privateer from EA for $4.99 each; they have never listed Prophecy, Secret Ops, Academy, Armada or Privateer 2. A number of other Origin games are also available, including the Crusaders and much of the Ultima series. Unlike GOG, the games are sold individually and there are no 'free' releases. Note that there is a second entry for Wing Commander Privateer not listed below; it's not clear why! We're preserving all of the ephemera from the EA shop listings below, including the not-great AI-assisted screenshot

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The Wing Commander movie club's consensus was that The Lord of the Rings (1978) was a pretty interesting affair. It is by no means a perfect movie… but it is very artistic, has a super distinctive look and is an extremely good adaptation of Lord of the Rings (at least in so much as is included in what was intended to be part one of a two film series!). It's also hard not to compare it to the 2001 Peter Jackson adaptation and it seems pretty clear that it actually inspired a lot of that take.

Our biggest Wing Commander connection was Gandalf's famous sword Glamdring, aka "Foehammer" (the name of a Murphy-class destroyed in Secret Ops). Glamdring is actually shattered during the fight with the Balrog in this adaptation but it seems to return alongside Gandalf when he emerges as Gandalf the White at the end of the film.

And here's the entrance to Khazad-dûm, aka Moria!

Finally, compare the rotoscope

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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 The Song of Roland (1978) 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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Last week, news circulated that Electronic Arts had filed new trademarks for the Ultima series. A YouTube channel called Inside Games reached out to Ultima creator Richard Garriott to see if he knew what was going on. He didn't, but he did mention something he's been theorizing about for quite a while!

In short, he hopes to regain certain copyrights to Ultima next year based on Section 203 of the Copyright Act. This is a provision which allows authors to regain control of their works' copyrights from publishers after 35 years in certain circumstances. This has since been widely reported as fact in the days since and while it would be pretty exciting, you should view this a little more trepidation than the mainstream media is offering.

Sadly, it's very unlikely that this plan will actually work. Electronic Arts has plenty of laywers that can easily argue that this is not the intent of the law (meant to

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The white whale! Every bit of Wing Commander II SNES that we discover is another piece of an extremely sad puzzle... but it's certainly thrilling to come across a new one! Today's example is from issue 038 of Spanish magazine Nintendo Acción where an eagle eyed reader spotted... a box for Wing Commander II SNES in one of those great 1990s 'grid of games' store ads. Check it out:

The last major Wing Commander II SNES discovery was, in fact, the box art. The painting that was comissioned for use was discovered in an auction. Interestingly, that's not what's being used here... the Spanish ad box uses the original Concordia rendering from the PC version!