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):

The cover of the magazine - this isn't just an instruction manual.

This one I know! Tom 'Biff' Wilson grins from the cover of 'Maniac' Marshall's autobiography.

Douglas Aerospace are important Wing Commander spaceship builders - hence the ad.

Ah, classifieds, and all kinds of insanely obscure Wing Commander references.

The back cover of the mag, and the Privateer protagonist is still in trouble!

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.]