GameSetPics: Wing Commander Arena's 'StarSoldier' Magazine
Like us here at GSW, Mr. Crecente over at Kotaku got hold of StarSoldier Magazine, January 2701 issue - apparently beamed from the future by Electronic Arts, who are advertising the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade multiplayer shooter Wing Commander Arena with this promotional device, sent to the press today.
But the swarthy piratical cove ended up scanning in some the instruction and info pages, so I thought I'd go in another direction and feature some of the odder pages in the 60-page mag, which was obviously compiled by someone with a hardcore love for Wing Commander lore - way beyond my limited knowledge. Seriously.
So here goes (click through for bigger scan, and there are lots more neat pages I didn't have time to scan, sorry folks):
While initial buzz on Wing Commander Arena was mixed, partly thanks to it being a reimagining of the series as a 2D multiplayer shooter - when a lot of fans were burning for something in 3D, of course - it's really great to see documents like this going above and beyond in making the world real. Let's hope the game matches the attention to detail shown here!
[UPDATE: The nice folks at Wing Commander News have a massive thread about these scans which explains a lot of the Wing Commander canon references far better than I am able, not having a PhD on the subject. And they're rather excited, yay.]
Comments
Strike Commander, another Origin title based on the Wing Commander model of the cinematic flight sim, came packaged with a fictional publication and manual called "Sudden Death", which was an exhaustive (and really awesome) introduction to the game, the protagonists and antagonists, as well as a lot of anecdotal and tangential information about the world it took place in. It really added to the richness of the game itself, especially as things you read about in it began to slowly come into focus during play.
Shame about Origin, really.
Posted by: Kaiser Knuckle | June 25, 2007 9:23 PM
It's funny you should mention that... the masthead of Star Soldier actually says that it's "From the Publishers of Sudden Death"!
Posted by: CatBomb | June 26, 2007 4:10 AM
Let's just not forget that the truly great games of the Wing Commander series were in (almost) glorius 2d...
Posted by: gnome | June 26, 2007 9:38 AM
so what does this have to do with hudson's star soldier games?
Posted by: dessgeega | June 26, 2007 3:34 PM