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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

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

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

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Here's some old graphics card history: in 1996, 3Dfx developed a line of high end cards for the professional market. These Obsidian cards were the stuff of gamers' dreams at the time: for thousands of dollars you could get a 3dfx card with 24 megabytes of memory instead of the 4 to 6 retail cards were sporting! Would this actually make any difference to Wing Commander Prophecy or your 3dfx game of choice? It's not really clear, but you certainly imagined it would! The next year, 3Dfx spun off a consumer graphics card company called Quantum3D to take advantage of the gold rush they had started. They promoted high end consumer cards as "the affordable reality company", whatever that means.

Quantum3D retained the Obsidian trademark and put out a line of Voodoo 2 cards which largely focused on offering SLI configurations on a single card. But here's the cool part: they included the Wing Commander Prophecy

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"Hey, leader, why us?" someone called sarcastically. Hawkins chuckled sadly, "Because we're here, lads, because we're here."

Well, the Wing Commander movie club was there and we had to watch From Justin to Kelly. Which is not a good movie by any measure of the idea. But it was stupid fun that reminded us of our misspent youths, so we'll chalk it up as a good time. Did we mention that the climax of the movie is a hovercraft fight? A surprisingly boring hovercraft fight.

The only real Wing Commander connection going into this was lead actress Kelly Clarkson being the namesake for the Clarkson-class transports in Wing Commander Arena… so here's that:

Kelly Clarkson went on to great success as a singer and a talk show host and it's not at all surprising that she never acted again. But remember what a great song Since U Been Gone was? With a great video! Eh, I'm old now.

Also, the 2003 text messaging bits are