God did I love X-Wing when it came out. It is still my favorite action game. I didn’t like TIE Fighter as much because, well, I’m a good guy and I can’t fly for the empire.
I still dream of owning an A-Wing and flying it through Manhattan.
Typical sheeple buying the Rebel propaganda. The Empire brought peace and order to the galaxy ! The rebs are the ones initiating all of the violence !
Joke aside, I love how this is brought about in the TIE Fighter campaign - the first few missions are basically Coast Guard stuff, inspecting ships along trade lanes for contraband, that sort of thing. Then out of nowhere, rebel Y-Wings hyperspace in out of fucking nowhere to blow shit up ! What a bunch of assholes, right ?
I kinda dislike TIE Fighter myself though, but not because of that - but because the title is such a lie. I just love the 3 canon TIEs so very much, and in the game they’re basically a prologue to fighting TIE Defenders and Missile Boats that have hyperspace drives, shields, tractor beams, life support systems, survivability… ANATHEMA ! The very principle of the TIE is to be an inexpensive, wholly expendable zooming weapon system with about 5 seconds of life expectancy out the hangar. I just love flying those retarded deathtraps.
But in the game they bring in the gimmicky prototypes that somehow are better than anything the Rebels can line up. Weak sauce.
Well, I would hope that the galactic empire’s cutting-edge R&D program would be able to produce something better than the mass-produced vanilla that the rebels were forced to make do with. But you’re not being very fair, a large chunk of the game was spent in the Fighter / Bomber / Interceptor craft, with the Advanced and assault gunboat coming in as the shielded varieties for the heavy attack missions. Both of those had enough flaws to make getting back in an Interceptor a welcome thing, which is saying something for how vast the survival difference was. The Defender was a secret skunkworks-type project that, if I remember right, was going to be shut down because of its extreme cost, causing the corrupt admiral running it to push up his plans to stage a coup, and the campaign involved the destruction of the production facilities. It fits in the setting and is certainly a lot less offensive than what Lucas himself would later come up with for the series.
The missile boat was definitely out of place, but it was the expansion’s trump card, much like the B-Wing was for X-wing’s expansion. Gotta have something to get people to buy the expansion, after all 
It was mainly out of place because it actually made sense: given how we saw the tech behave, there was no reason at all to make fighters focused on energy weapon dogfights when something could sling that much firepower around instead. Heck, the missiles themselves were pretty much non-canon to begin with. You see proton torpedoes used on exactly one target, and the concussion missiles, rockets and bombs never get a mention at all. It’s hard to get too picky about canon when the canon itself is based simply on directorial fiat. 
It’s not so much that I expect the rebel R&D to be better, it’s that Imperial tech focus when it comes to fighters is and has always been around the lines of “we have reserves”.
The basic design of the TIEs doesn’t lack shields because the Empire doesn’t know how to make them, but because they don’t consider them worth the cost, effort and space on the craft. Their whole doctrine calls for ISDs to be the backbone. Pilots are a dime a dozen, but space on a Star Destroyer is at a premium ! A single ISD must be able to control the airspace (err… space space ?) of an entire system with its swarm, and vice versa a TIE will never be too far from its gigantic fuckoff overkill machine - which on paper negates the need for hyperspace, life support and so forth.
And conversely, the reason the reb’s have self-sufficient crafts with inbuilt hyperspace and shields is because a) they care for their pilots and b) they don’t have the resources to field too many capital ships or spacecraft carriers, giant interstellar shipyards being somewhat conspicuous and all. So they make do with stuff that can be built underground. The Mon Cal cruisers they deploy at Endor are pretty much it and the whole of it.
So really, the TIE Advanced and Defender are not just overpowered (especially once you get the tractor beam. Which you obviously are never ever going to use because it’s horrible and useless but hey, free power when you shut it down !), they just don’t make sense from the Empire’s standpoint.
Wow. Literally everything I could have said in this thread has already been said, including:
#1) Of course they should’ve iterate the formula. It works for Madden/CoD
#2) Reasons why TIE fighter was awful (especially the tractor beam)
#3) Freespace 2 is awesome
I am, however, going to sneak in some actual new content, namely, a mention of the existance of Sol: Exodus, which might tickle the fancy of some of the people in this thread.
I haven’t been following this closely, and don’t know where it comes down on the “just blow stuff up” vs “teamwork” vs “trade and open world blahblah” spectrum, but it’s worth a look.
Hell yeah, I miss space sims. That stuff consumed my childhood.
I don’t mean to brag or anything, but as a teen, I happened to be one of the best X-wing-series multiplayers in the world. I used to play in the Emeror’s Hammer/Tie Corps, and I would regularly trade our club title back and forth with one other guy. I had it down to a science, going so far as to get out a stopwatch and time my turns and maneuvers. I did the trig required to figure out the proper rotational speed to master the Tallon Roll.
Then I grew up.
Good Old Games are selling Wing Commander 1 & 2.
A recent one that I enjoyed is Darkstar One. Its replay value is high because you can customise the ship, and if you’re so inclined, can create custom missions.
Darkstar One is kind-of-neat because you can upgrade your ship to have different ‘spell-like’ abilities. However, I found the missions to be repetitive for me.
I would recommend Freelancer, but the game’s campaign is way too short.
I’ve decided to go through into the X series dames. I got x3 Gold. Tried briefly playing.
My first issue is finding a way to change the keyboard settings. Outside the game it gave me no options and in the fame every button I hit acts as if I’m hitting it rapidly. I hit escape and it opens and closes the options menu several times. Same goes for scrolling with the arrow keys in the menu. Trying to find adjust anything is like playing a slot machine, I hit the arrow key and hope it stops somewhere I want.
I didn’t find anything in the manual to cover this.
Anyone ever play Privateer? Wing Commander Armada was p sweet too