That really showed promise!

...

About the recent Wing Commander 4 update, I just wanted to inform that the game now runs on OpenGL
(some wrapper, I think) and it also runs on your Desktop Resolution (no more 640x480). Movies are widescreen
and the rest of the game is on 4:3 aspect ratio with bilinear filter. And it plays at optimal speed.

If you happen to have speed issues, you might need to create a profile for the game in your graphic card control utility.
If it's too fast or you have micro stutters, force Vsync On and enable Triple Buffer.
If it's too Slow (on older, weaker PCs or notebooks) then Force Vsync Off.

Also IIRC, Dana Delaney (famous at that time for China Beach) as another cadet, callsign Archer I believe. I had really hoped she would reprise her role in either WCIV or Prophecy (not remembering when the cartoon came out in relation) as the same character older and more mature veteran officer as Blair and Maniac (mature??? Maniac???)

I'll have to check those out again. I'm pretty sure they exist on a VHS tape in a box in my basement somewhere.



I recall so much, and still sometimes hit up YouTube to watch the intro movie with Seether. That is just so chilling...The voices, sounds, everything. Really set the mood for the game. Hell I think I'll go watch it now.

It may be cold in space, but nothing was colder than what Seether did.

I haven't heard that name in a while. I remember watching China Beach, but I'm always bad with details of the shows though. I do recall I had fun watching. It wasn't a comedy like M.A.S.H right? I seem to vaguely recall it was a more serious show.

It is always nice to see these feature articles on GOG. Keep doing them, they are apreciated

That's just what has happened to Hollywood at this point, really. Just a few details on Star Wars:
The people who were responsible for Star Wars abused their powers to discard all canon and the fans, outright attacking and insulting them publically on social media even, and Kathleen Kennedy fired many, many directors over "creative differences" throughout filming. Because they told her it wouldn't make for a good story. But she knew better than all of them, obviously.

It got so bad, George Lucas refused to attend the red carpet event of Star Wars after he had originally been brought back on board to fix the whole situation, and all of his work and his own cut of the movie had just been thrown out. Actors were massively upset for a ton of their work and according to them, "best performances" to have ended up on the cutting room floor, their characters being reduced to just token charakters. By now, I think most of the main cast actors have spoken out about how they've been treated, and good guy Mark Hamill even tried to blow the wistle and warn fans from the very start, as he's (well, used to be) very invested in the charakter of Luke Skywalker.

The main issue is / was Kathleen Kennedy, who outright betrayed Lucas and strong-armed her own personal agenda into the franchise rather than care for it as promised. They had no plans, literally just made shit up as they went along. Intended plot points of the first movie undone in the second, and again attempted to be undone-undone in the third. It's been a mess from the get-go because the people who had the last word outspokenly didn't care about the franchise, continuity, its creator, nor the fans. She's the one who, basically, disrespected and kicked out Lucas. Who once cherry-picked her himself to be the new curator of his baby, because he trusted her, only to be backstabbed by her repeatedly once she had the power to do so.

By now, Lucas has been brought back on board (again), and his first cause of action was to remove her from being able to have full creative power over all of Star Wars, as the new CEO of Disney isn't shielding her like the old CEO did. She and her "creative liberties" have been "confined" to her own Star Wars show for now, and she still intents to make the most bestest ever female Jedi now (because "The force is female", after all), who is of a newly invented highest rank, superior to the entire previously established Jedi order hierarchy, and will reportedly even time travel using the force. Yep, 'cuz, why not.

Sigh. I feel like many movies and established franchises nowadays have been bastardized and undergone a hostile takeover, just to be abused as stages for a personal agenda because they were big enough to have (had) the guaranteed reach. Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Ghost Busters, and even a good portion of Marvel by the looks of it. Look up Marvel's "New Warriors". No really, you'll probably get a good laugh out of it, until you realize they're for real.

While there are still good people out there, trying to tell good stories with good writing, just trying to make some good entertainment - far, far too many are out looking for their personal podium to preach from, whatever the cost may be. They have deliberately been alienating hardcore fans over their powertrip, rather than respect over half a century of existing pop culture storywriting and canon. Destroying the old, rather than making their very own new franchises to be creative with all they like.

It's a bit of a sore spot for me by now, because those were all brilliant franchises I once was a huge fan of. So, please excuse my tired little rant.

M.A.S.H. was irreverent, subversive, smart, hilarious, and put the finger on a few sore spots that needed to be addressed. China Beach was a conventional drama about army nurses

About shows being smart.

I certainly miss the times when shows were written by intelligent people who were capable of creating an interesting story around an important topic, treating their audience as intelligent enough to understand said topic and the questions posed by it, and on top of that even trusted their audience to make up their own mind to come to a conclusion - even for topics that may have been entirely new to their minds. Rather than being blatantly on-the-nose and preaching -at- their audience, implying they're either too dumb to make up their mind on their own and need to be explicitly told what to do, or are just looking for an echo chamber.

There are still shows like that - Westworld, Luther, Sherlock (2010) ... they are few and far between, but they are here.
And even in ye olde times majority of the shows were average (Friends, Step by Step, Baywatch) and only few of them were exceptionally good (Six Feet Under, Wire).

Which shows you had in mind writing your previous post?

Well, if you mean the Star Trek reboot (from 2009), I actually like that movie and direction they took it in, although many of the old fans didn´t and I can see why. The second movie (with "Sherlock" Cumberbatch as Khan) was weak, then subsequent is back at it again.

What do you say at the new Pickard TV series?

When it comes to Doctor Who, I have to agree - I think the best ones were the ones with David Tennant and Matt Smith (series 2-4, 5-7)

And I read the long post you linked - and there´s nothing to apologize for, it seems to me you prefer quality over quantity and coherent writing building on what was established before instead of destroying it - and I fully agree with you.

These were made by someone who explicitly stated he never liked Trek. I still gave it a chance, and I nearly walked out of that movie in the cinema back then and refused to watch any more of his Star Wars movies wearing Star Trek skins. Even though, if those hadn't been the starting point for everything that came after, I wouldn't even care too much about those today.

Indeed.

It's not Star Trek. It's a disgrace to what TNG stood for and portrayed.
It really got my hopes up when it was announced. Shot me down so hard.

Only Kurtzman Trek can come up with the idea of the multi-cultural Federation somehow becoming isolist and xenophobic, its technology somehow devolving, synthetics having no rights, slavery being a thing, ...each of these topics have repeatedly been dealt with in Star Trek before, with entire smart episodes dedicated to these concepts, all of which made decades ago. And in b4 "that's the point and what they're fighting for", well it should not have been possible to come to this situation unless everything about humanity and the Federation that was canon before was just a hilariously massive facade, devaluing everything.

TNG made people think. It inspired young and old alike to study for and get a job in science and engineering, it was philosophical and intelligent entertainment. 4x21 The Drumhead, 2x09 The Measure Of Man, 5x25 The Inner Light, ... I can't even list all the brilliant episodes TNG had because there were so many. And the same goes for DS9 episodes and characters. I mean. Garak, anyone...? Garak just rolled a hard 20 on charisma whenever present, despite never stating anything outright or literal.

Picard on the other hand is nothing like these shows. It's an entirely different universe with different characters. Actively going against everything TNG did as if none of it had ever happened or held any meaning. And, technically speaking, that's exactly what it is - a somewhat similar, but different parallel universe / timeline. They may try to muddy the waters and suggest it's all the same, but canonically and even legally speaking, it's not. The new movies (JJ) and Discovery legally had to be "25% different" to be made, even to the point of requiring extra licensing fees for each original Enterprise appearance in Discovery - and by now, it's a deliberately confusing mix of that new universe they created with the old universe, creating a third. It's... really complicated.

Picard is brutal, it's tribal, vulgar, postal and dystopian, it's big explosions and edgy violence - it's so utterly backwards. Especially in current times, you'd assume we'd need something more hopeful, uniting and more scientifically sound, rather than taking a once smart show and devolving it into just another show full of senseless violence.

Also, how exactly does an entire consciousness "live on" from one single positron...? The showrunners don't even seem to know that positrons are literally just the antimatter counterparts of an electron. Which is a subatomic particle, nothing more, nothing less. I don't even know where to start with that utter nonesense, and that's just one of the countless other issues that show has, for that being such an integral element of its main plot. The writers either didn't care, or didn't know. Neither of which is good.

Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks... each of these shows are made by people who don't care about Star Trek, for people who don't care about Star Trek. Both JJ and Kurtzman repeatedly went on record saying they never understood why Star Trek was considered to be so good and had so many fans.

Yeah those were awesome. There were blunders throughout, but very few ones. I greatly enjoyed that show, even a fair share of Capaldi's episodes, despite the writing dwindling here and there, and token characters showing up, indicative of what was to come.


...
Man, stop making me rant so much about these things.
I can only rewatch TNG and DS9 so many times, you know.

Actually the SegaCD version does have speech, I recorded some of it a view years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gr84I7MT4 It's different to Super Wing commander in the following ways:
- It looks like DOS Wing Commander
- It's only the main game (no expansions)
- Speech was done by a different company, so unlike SWC it sounds vaguely professional (Paladin is scottish, not a pirate...)

It is probably the best experience for WC1, if you discount the lack of expansions, and the limited controls on the SegaCD.