True, but she's not afloat anymore (in drydock, I think?). The U.S.S. Constitution is the oldest comissioned warship still afloat. My mistake...I had gotten confused and thought the movie Concordia was a "Gettysburg class Supercruiser". So where did the "Gettysburg class cruiser" come from...

Incidentally, I'm very amused by the tangle of class designations and ship names that have arisen in the WC universe. The Concordia we see in the games was not a Concordia-class ship, but the movie Concordia WAS...but neither was a Concordia class carrier. However, the Lexington was a...

The Plunkett looks too much like an Earth Alliance Destroyer from Babylon 5 for my taste. The Waterloo will always have my vote. A substantial fighter capability (including the capacity to carry advanced light bombers like the Crossbow), powerful AMG's that let it go toe to toe with it's...

What do you do about the missions (I know for a fact that there are such ones in both WC3 and in Prophecy) where there are infinite enemies? I.e. they keep respawning until the mission ends? (E.g. the Behemoth down mission, or the battle at the Wormhole Gate)? And what about missions where...

It presumably would be the DOS version of WC4, so it could be run via DOSBOX. I imagine the Windows version *would* be quite a bit harder to get to run on modern systems. A lot of those early Win95 games are devilishly hard to get to run on a modern 64-bit Windows 7 system. Specifically, I...

Boy, you're going to really love the Rostov system, then... (grins evilly). The Rapier is an excellent ship, but it's not perfect. You've already discovered one of its chief flaws--it is so fast and maneuverable, with acceleration so much better than other ships you've flown, that you will...

Not to mention if you want to play the *losing* path of Episode 5 (which you should...it's AWESOME. The missions are in my opinion much funner than the winning path ones). But trying to jump in cold to a mission like Grand Entrance or Rearguard Duties, let alone Too Much Company (arguably the...

Awesome. I'm a (relatively) new dad, so I have *very* little time to play games anymore, and have to ration the titles I choose to play carefully. However, I think Saga just made the list (the last ones were the GOG WC3 and Starcraft II, and before that...Standoff). Looking forward to the...

Love these articles. Thanks. One point, though... Technically, didn't the U.S. forces ALSO have a warning (and from much the same source as the Confed warning...a partially broken code)? The U.S. knew the Japanese were about to try something, although the intercepted transmission to the...

I find it interesting when they say the cmobat engine hasn't aged well. My theory is that it hasn't aged ENGOUH. In the early days of full 3D polygon graphics (say, around the era of WCIV), the thinking was that WC1 and WC2, with their little pre-animated cells, hadn't aged well. Now they're...

I want to go back to LOAF's comment about ships from other sources being in the early game. I had always thought that the Raptor did indeed look just like a Rylan Gunstar, but I had never noticed a Firefox...is that the Morningstar? Any others? The Salthi resembles the player ship from...

I agree with many of starfox's general points, but have a few quibbles: Not sure what you're driving at here, but it's not correct. The Dralthi in WC3 is a Dralthi IV, which is *not* the same class of ship as the Dralthi I and II we saw in WC1 and SM1+2 (that was the Dralthi II). The...

LOAF already covered this, but, as mentioned in the spreadsheet readme, the stats (other than the ones observable in-game) all came from four sources...Victory Streak, Warbirds, the Origin Official Guide, and the Authorized Combat Guide. All four come bundled with the GoG version of WC3 (along...

Anyone else notice that the Banshee in the third image is unpiloted? Either the Hellcat pilot has really bad aim and can't hit a stationary, unmanned target, or the Banshee we see is actually a secret Black Lance drone meant to incriminate the UBW.

FFVII was a little spoiled for me, because I had a roommate who was more into console gaming than I was and talked endlessly about the big tragedy. In general, however, the Final Fantasy game line wasn't shy about actually killing a major character. The aforementioned VII, Shadow in VI, Galuf...

I suppose it's possible he contributed to Iceman's death...he could have sabotaged Iceman's fighter the same way he sabotaged Spirit's...or leaked information about Iceman's patrol route to the Kilrathi, or something like that... Just speculation, though... Maybe on the losing path, the...

Actually, I was thinking more about this. Is it reasonable to believe that Knight was killed prior to the Second Enigma campaign (i.e. WC2)? When I said so, I was going off the implications in WC2 that Knight was not among the surviving 'Claw pilots. First, in the rec room, when Blair...

I was just thinking about something. The mortality rate among pilots we see in the Wing Commander universe, especially in the Kilrathi war, is amazingly high. This post is necessarily going to contain game spoilers, so don't read if you don't want... Think about all the pilots we meet in the...

I think it would be Vaquero for me. Excellent pilot (only one on the Victory that I had a hard time keeping up with on kills when I took him out with me), always follows orders, and his comms are awesome (Andale! Let's Dance! Eat s*** and die, gato!) Vagabond, Hunter, and Primate are close...

Two quick comments. First, about the nursing shortage. You're right--it IS hard to get into a nursing program right now. I have two friends that just tried (one succeeded, one failed). But that doesn't mean there's not shortage. In fact, that's part of the cause of the shortage. The nursing...