Damn, I loved X-Wing. My PC at the time wouldn’t work with a joystick (I never figured out why, but if I had a stick plugged in it would always go into a right/downward spiral - must have tried 4 or 5 sticks before I gave up).
I played through X-Wing multiple times with a mouse until I beat every mission, had every award and had killed multiple Star Destroyers with the Y-Wing (3 torpedoes into each shield generator, disable with ion cannons and then blaze away with lasers until it went boom!)
Tie Fighter was great but it never grabbed me like X-Wing. I think the series got worse after these two.
From what I remember, both X-Wing and TIE Fighter had a pretty limited control scheme, compared to what we have now. You could pitch and yaw with a flight stick, but you had to press your secondary trigger to toggle roll on the stick’s x-axis.
Joysticks didn’t really have a separate twist axis back then, and I don’t know if you could purchase consumer foot-pedals. Likewise, I can’t remember if you could use a proper throttle or not. I don’t think many sticks back then had a throttle control.
For people who have picked it up, do these re-releases add better support for modern flight sticks? Can you rebind controls in-game?
I’m curious about the throttle control as well. Worth a few extra bucks for these games? I don’t recall if TIE and X-W uses those extra buttons, but I think it had pretty complex controls for a game in that era.
Throttle control works AFAIK (or was that in X-Wing Alliance ? Dammit, I can’t remember), though it doesn’t really matter ultimately : the only throttle keys you need are “full speed”, “full stop” and “automatically match speed with target” :D.
As for complex keys : one to shoot, one to setup laser grouping, one to initiate a roll, one to switch to** missiles/torps/ion**, three for the power bars (shields, lasers, tractor beam), a coolie hat for the views if that’s your thing, a next target and a closest target, the “match speed” toggle, the emergency shield/laser power shunt and mayyybe a “next sub system of this target” (for missiles) are really all you need to have on the stick - and half of those are just fine to deal with keyboard-side. The bolded ones are those you really want to have on the stick.
The tractor beam I deliberately omitted. That thing is just a straight power boost to other systems as far as I’m concerned
You can fuck around with more complex targeting schemes, memorize targets and so on ; but in the heat of battle I always found myself just cycling to the closest target (barring tricky missions like clearing a minefield, intercepting torpedo runs and the like).
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Joysticks didn’t really have a separate twist axis back then, and I don’t know if you could purchase consumer foot-pedals.
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No yaw control in either game. Too early for that.
As I said earlier, I played X-Wing (and other games) with a Sidewinder PrecisionPro. I don’t really see the point of a separate throttle control (and yes, I realize that joystick has a throttle wheel) and I don’t remember the mapping being that complex on a joystick. Most things could be (or had to be) controlled by the keyboard. Adjusting shields and power distribution, for instance. So I’m going to get the Logitech Extreme 3D instead and hope I’m happy with it.
I’m also the kind of person who still plays Wing Commander with a mouse, so I don’t know what that says about me.
I may well buy these, but I’m disappointed that they were unable to upgrade the graphics by just a few years to the level of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. In terms of looking less dated and not distracting from game play, it’s way, way better than TIE Fighter. The music is also full quality Star Wars scores, which were enormously effective in terms of setting the mood, instead of just MIDI versions (or whatever the sound in the earlier games was).
Actually, I hope they just release X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. With the Balance of Power campaign add-on it was an excellent single player game, and I bet a lot of people would love to play it online, too. Frankly, that would have been a better game to update if it weren’t for the fact that the earlier games have better name recognition.
Now that the obvious joke is out of the way, I’ve taken to using a lapboard (so I guess, between my legs was actually accurate). I used to keep it on the desk, but that gets awkward sometimes.
The original TIE Fighter used LucasArt’s iMuse system, that blended the game’s original midi tracks in a really cool way. The music would change dynamically depending on what was going on in the mission and it sounded pretty cool for the time.
The CD-ROM re-release had some very welcome updates like better resolution, models, and voice acting, but by switching to a canned orchestral score, it lost the dynamic soundtrack. Too bad there isn’t a way to keep the other enhancements, but switch back to the iMuse soundtrack.
According to the Commander, all we have to do is wait for news of the Emperor’s victory at Endor… :dubious:
I remember that, the door guards reminding me that “You must register, you must register” :rolleyes: I didn’t mind flicking through the manual, picking up the name of shipyards and planets along the way, but I can’t remember any other PC game at the time asking me to do so.
I usually had mine on a tray on my lap, stuck on with the little suckers they used to have. Apparently TIE Fighter should work with the 360 pad, but I might pop home and borrow the joystick Dad never ended up using for his flight sims.
I have my TIE Fighter CD, but I think I’m missing one of the installation floppies for X-Wing
There’s also Oolite, for people who want a free version of the game. Granted, while the game is still being developed, the push is more on gameplay than graphics. But it is using modern 3D graphics.
Plus there are a lot of user mods that try to update the graphics.
Bumping because I bought both games and have been playing them. Thoughts:
– The graphics are much better than I feared they’d be. They’re actually very close to the XWvTIE graphics I linked to before, and waayyyy better than the original TIE Fighter.
– I forgot how hard these games are, especially TIE Fighter where you’re usually in an unshielded craft that blows up after a couple hits. None of the hand-holding of modern games, they just throw you right in, with a “Here, go fight against twice as many enemy fighters while you try to complete your seven mission objectives.”
– TIE Fighter is better than X-Wing, if you’re just going to buy one. The latter is quite good, and the actual flying & fighting is extremely similar in either case, but TIE Fighter does everything else better, plus with that game you’re never as safe as you can be in X-Wing, with your well-shielded craft going up against enemies that blow up if you breathe on them.
Yeah, pretty much. They’re not even really wingmen. They don’t follow you around by default or work in tandem with you or each other. They’re just other pilots who you can occasionally ask to do stuff.
I guess they kind of need to suck. The battles often involve a dozen or more fighters on each side, plus a bunch of transports, shuttles, frigates, etc. If all the pilots were competent and deadly, then the player would often have no impact on the outcome. As it is, a typical result is something like: our 12 fighters destroyed 24 enemy vessels, of which Player One tallied 15.
My memory of it was more like, if I tell all 11 other pilots to attack one shuttle, they would at least distract it enough that I could kill all the bombers, then the other shuttles, then the one I told them to kill, and I’d end up getting ALL the kills.
This is in fact a total lie, and representative of so much that is WRONG with TIE fighter; You play -some- missions in fragile craft, yes, but then they go all “Yeah, here, just take the ridiculous superfighter with no basis in the lore, go to town.”
