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Wing Commander: Standoff has been available for some time now, and it's pretty great - unlike Saga, it uses WC: Prophecy's engine (and consequently needs Prophecy: Secret Ops to run - just need to download that too). Check it out - http://standoff.solsector.net/

Yes, especially regarding Privateer, StarCon (1 or 2 - I'm fine with remaking either of 'em, or just restarting the whole franchise) and Master of Orion.

For what it's worth, Privateer and StarCon 2 are still alive in open sauce form:
Privateer Gemini Gold - Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, though, at least in my experience, Compiz ("enhanced desktop effects") breaks full screen on Ubuntu. Your mileage may vary, and turning off desktop effects isn't hard. It's very much an "update the graphics" port, though.
Ur-Quan Masters - It's StarCon 2, but they don't own the name. They did own the original code, though, and have since updated it for more modern platforms. Like any good open-source project, it runs on damn near anything.

I'm not sure if there's a MoO remake out there. Honestly, I felt the franchise just kept going backwards with each release, which was really sad. MoO 2 was, in many respects, just a dumbed down version of MoO 1, and MoO 3... I honestly don't know what that was about. Then again, I could say the same thing for StarCon 3... I mean, muppets?!

Howdy.

http://standoff.solsector.net/

http://www.wcsaga.com/

Fan mods, the second one is newer and I haven't tried it.
The first one is *by far* the best wing commander game I've ever played from a combat pov.

Yeah, every new space-sim I play is measured up against Gemini Gold (successor to the Wing Commander Privateer Remake project). Universally, they are found wanting. It isn't just nostalgia talking; Privateer is still the funnest space-sim available.

Nice call on that. Just wanted to say thanks for reminding me of Privateer. It very well might have been my gateway to the world of the command line. Damn thing would refuse to run on my old 486Dx2 (mind you when I did get it to run, it felt like I was cheating the gameplay was so smooth) because the game "Required 564kb of Conventinal memory". I had hit the 640k limit hard. So I self-learned my way through the dark world of EMM386, Himem.sys, Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. Played with memmaker a lot and watched how it modified config.sys. Read through the help(man?) pages. and after what was loterally weeks of messing around, one time I typed priv.exe and by god it worked. And it was so worth it (Privateer is an awesome game, I highly recommend checking out the remake if interested). But since I somehow managed all that when I was 4-5 years old, I developed a keen intrest in the 'cool' things I could do with DOS. I eventually moved onto QBasic and got to play with things like screen modes. (13 is the funnest for making random screansaver type programs). When I first heard about this linux thing when I was 14 I was really interested and my science teacher thought it was kind of neat too and he let me set up a version of Corel Linux that I had bought at stables (this was before CD burners were common) on one of the classroom computers (I imagine this would be very rarely allowed today, if at all). Anyways, it was actually a pretty big hit with a fair slice of the school population, and getting to be able to use the 'penguin computer' was a treat. (No doubt also because it came with some pretty fun games). Anyways, just thought I would share in my little 'the root of how I became a shell user'. Thank you Privateer for being not just a great game, but for forcing me to learn the prompt. :)

Have you tried the free games, Gemini Gold and Privateer Remake (an expanded version)?

Those games will soon have multiplayer releases (probably later this year).

http://oolite.aegidian.org/
http://retrospec.sgn.net/users/tomcat/miodrag/xEli te.zip?
http://www.rebelstar.cd2.com/cgi-bin/dc.cgi?file=r emakes/elite_-_the_new_kind_v1_0.zip

May I also recommend:

Privateer...
http://priv.solsector.net/
http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net/

The Japanese version is a port of the original version. During the late 80s it was ported to PC98 series ...

Arrrrgh! The Japanese got some good ports.

Just today I ran into a look at FM-TOWNS version of Ultima VI. That's full speech. The rest of the world had to wait for Ultima IX to get our share of awful voice acting. (The samples on the above page are absolutely brilliant compared to U9's garbage.)

As for what this has to do with the article... um... oh yeah, I'm glad Ultima III got 7 places out of top 10, and there was an Actually Good Game on rank 10. =) =) =)

This fan-created remake of Privateer might just make your day.

http://deeplayer.com/spiritplumber/wcu-devel.0.2.3 .zip
http://www.wcnews.com/
http://priv.solsector.net/

Never fear, at least Wing Commander is alive and well!

Jon Wood: There are a number of flaws in the concept of companies developing MMORPGs based on major pre-existing franchises. I can clearly see why it is done. It creates a pre-made customer base and almost guarantees a strong launch. Unfortunately, from a gamer point of view, these games are doomed to fall short. All you have to do is look at game like "Star Wars: Galaxies", which has been on the receiving end of a never-ending barrage of criticism because the game doesn't live up to the epic expectations of either Star Wars fans, or MMORPG fans.

Dana Massey: It is the responsibility of developers to pick IPs that has fans as excited about the worlds as the individual stories; which is to say appropriate worlds for development. Perpetual Entertainment's choice of Star Trek has that potential.

This sounds like Napster all over again except with legal precedents in place it'll happen much quicker.

Nonsense. With Napster the problem was that it was a device for exchanging illegal content. The judge found that the small amount of legal content was nothing more than an excuse to allow for illegal wares.

In the case of BitTorrent, it has a LOT of uses that are perfectly legal. That is what this search engine is targetting. Want the entire Mozilla source tarball? BitTorrent it. Trying to get the latest 180MB release of Privateer Remake? BitTorrent it. OpenOffice, Mozilla, FreeBSD, Linux, America's Army, Doom III demo, Star Wars Fan Films, Star Trek New Missions videos, the list just goes on and on. BitTorrent is a response to the ever growing size of these files more than a method of distributing illegal wares. It just happens to work well for the illegal stuff as well.

The result is that a judge will no more condemn it than he would condemn the entire Internet.

I welcome the news, but I'm still suspicious of the motives. I currently am stuck with an onboard
VIA KM400 based video after my old MX440 blew up taking out the AGP slot in my old motherboard. I've been using the OSS Unichrome drivers http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/ as VIA's own drivers had a limited selection of distros and kernels.
The current config here is a 2.4.30 kernel with the r30 Unichrome release, Mesa and DRI from CVS and X.Org 6.8.2 I had to hack in the AGP support from a patch designed for an older kernel, as the chipset isnt supported in the main branch. Most everything works well enough, The Goom plugin for XMMS is ok, though Lemuria is dog slow. Q3Arena works as well as on Windows or better, NWN works better. There are a few issues with the Privateer remake http://priv.solsector.net/ and with UT200x that remain to be fixed. I'm hoping that the crew working on the Unichrome project can fill in the missing pieces now with the source available, as there has been a constant struggle to get necessary information from VIA

No clue whether this has been posted yet, but Privateer also has a remake based on the Open Source project Vegastrike.

http://priv.solsector.net/

Oooh, almost forgot Flight Commander. A *from scratch* fan made engine. In some ways better than the Vega Strike engine, in some ways worse:

http://flightcommander.solsector.net/

Sorry, wrong link for the remake. It's at http://priv.solsector.net/, not at http://privateer.solsector.net/. (What's this? New auto-links from Slashdot? Me like!)

Sorry, wrong link for the remake. It's at http://priv.solsector.net/, not at http://privateer.solsector.net/. (What's this? New auto-links from Slashdot? Me like!)

Then play it again, Sam. :-)

It's interesting how tons of Wing Commander clones have come and gone, yet not a one has managed to capture that same "magic" as the true series. Starting with Jagged Alliance, then going to Allegience, Descent: Freespace, StarShock, all the way through X:2, they all manage to look nice but somehow lack gameplay. Even Chris Robert's Freelancer didn't manage to compete with his own series!

So, if you've got a craving for Wing Commander, go grab the original titles off of EBay. Then when you're done with those, go grab the free Wing Commander: Secret Ops starter kit. (Yes, it was official Wing Commander!) You may need to mess around with the XP Application Compatibility Toolkit to get it running. (Hint: Install ALL the shims for the Heap.) Once you've got that installed and played, you can try these great fan-made Secret Ops add ons:

Unknown Enemy
Standoff
Secret Ops Missions

And if you STILL can't get enough Wing Commander (*burp*), yell at EA that we need another title! See you at WCNews. :-)

Then play it again, Sam. :-)

It's interesting how tons of Wing Commander clones have come and gone, yet not a one has managed to capture that same "magic" as the true series. Starting with Jagged Alliance, then going to Allegience, Descent: Freespace, StarShock, all the way through X:2, they all manage to look nice but somehow lack gameplay. Even Chris Robert's Freelancer didn't manage to compete with his own series!

So, if you've got a craving for Wing Commander, go grab the original titles off of EBay. Then when you're done with those, go grab the free Wing Commander: Secret Ops starter kit. (Yes, it was official Wing Commander!) You may need to mess around with the XP Application Compatibility Toolkit to get it running. (Hint: Install ALL the shims for the Heap.) Once you've got that installed and played, you can try these great fan-made Secret Ops add ons:

Unknown Enemy
Standoff
Secret Ops Missions

And if you STILL can't get enough Wing Commander (*burp*), yell at EA that we need another title! See you at WCNews. :-)

Then play it again, Sam. :-)

It's interesting how tons of Wing Commander clones have come and gone, yet not a one has managed to capture that same "magic" as the true series. Starting with Jagged Alliance, then going to Allegience, Descent: Freespace, StarShock, all the way through X:2, they all manage to look nice but somehow lack gameplay. Even Chris Robert's Freelancer didn't manage to compete with his own series!

So, if you've got a craving for Wing Commander, go grab the original titles off of EBay. Then when you're done with those, go grab the free Wing Commander: Secret Ops starter kit. (Yes, it was official Wing Commander!) You may need to mess around with the XP Application Compatibility Toolkit to get it running. (Hint: Install ALL the shims for the Heap.) Once you've got that installed and played, you can try these great fan-made Secret Ops add ons:

Unknown Enemy
Standoff
Secret Ops Missions

And if you STILL can't get enough Wing Commander (*burp*), yell at EA that we need another title! See you at WCNews. :-)

Then play it again, Sam. :-)

It's interesting how tons of Wing Commander clones have come and gone, yet not a one has managed to capture that same "magic" as the true series. Starting with Jagged Alliance, then going to Allegience, Descent: Freespace, StarShock, all the way through X:2, they all manage to look nice but somehow lack gameplay. Even Chris Robert's Freelancer didn't manage to compete with his own series!

So, if you've got a craving for Wing Commander, go grab the original titles off of EBay. Then when you're done with those, go grab the free Wing Commander: Secret Ops starter kit. (Yes, it was official Wing Commander!) You may need to mess around with the XP Application Compatibility Toolkit to get it running. (Hint: Install ALL the shims for the Heap.) Once you've got that installed and played, you can try these great fan-made Secret Ops add ons:

Unknown Enemy
Standoff
Secret Ops Missions

And if you STILL can't get enough Wing Commander (*burp*), yell at EA that we need another title! See you at WCNews. :-)

May I forward you to the Privateer Remake site. I have been burning off weeks playing it, and sure the animated heads are a bit cheesy, but the game still rules, and if a game like that released from an independent (minus the copyright issue of course) I would spend 30 bucks on it easy.

?Take Fallout... crappy graphics, amazing depth.

And, what, 10 years out of date?

Minesweeper... no wacky effects, just a short learning curve with a long time to master.

And no one lining up to purchase it...

F-Zero... no real story or eye-candy, just fast.

The original *was* eye-candy for its time. It did spectacular. The sequel was low on looks to provide the feeling of speed. It was lots of fun, IMHO, but it flunked on the market.

Silent Hill... not pushing the envelope graphically, but scary as hell.

Silent... what?

I suppose I should have clarified my point. If you want to make a fun game to release for little or no money, then player expectations will be lower. Privteer Remake is a perfect example of this. The game is merely an update to a retro title, has a variety of gameplay bugs, and has true-to-original graphics. I (and many others) love it to death. :-)

But if you want to make a game for profit, then you *must* compete. Not as easy as it might seem. :-(

There's a remake project for WC game "Privateer". Seems open source.

Wing commander 1-3 have been remade (but long ago) by Origin into the Wing Commander - Kilrathi Saga product. Seems they did not much more than slow down the game for less ancient machines though.

The non-interactive movie-style trailers to the best interactive movie / flying games ever. Wing Commander III and IV.

Mark Hamill. John Rhys Davies. Malcolm Mcdowell. Space fighters. Great special effects. Cheesy writing made cool and memorable by quality actors. These trailers are the best things ever.

Oh, did I mention that you can download them?!

If you don't download them, just look at the pretty pictures on the page there. Quality stuff.