So I was reading Reddit, like you do, and came across this post in which the author lays out some mods for X-Wing, Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, and I realized I’ve not played these games in some time, and began to get super nostalgic for them.
I had some of my most amazing gaming experiences with X-Wing and Tie Fighter – most notably Tie Fighter, thanks to two missions in particular (assaulting a Mon Calamari cruiser and clearing a minefield with a Tie Advanced fighter) – and now am gonna likely reinstall all of these games and these mods and play them all through again.
Did any of you guys have any great memories of these games you’d like to share? I’d love to hear 'em. :)
Yeah, I’d actually forgotten all about that mod, but remembered it was pretty cool. The only thing that bugs me about these games are how they handle throttles. You can only do increments, which annoys me.
If I remember correctly you can use the + and - keys to fine tune adjust the throttle if you want. There are also shortcuts to match speed (as of TIE Fighter anyway), 1/3 throttle, 2/3 throttle, full throttle, and stop. What else could you want?
I dunno, the lack of fine control – as you’ll find in games like Freespace 2 and traditional flight sims – is jarring to me now. Not sure why. It’s a minor complaint though, and totally won’t prevent me from playing the games…just ranting a bit is all.
I found a sealed copy of X-Wing Alliance in one of the boxes of old PC games we shipped down from TechTV years ago. Does that game work well/acceptably/at all on Windows 7?
I’ll try it tonight and let you know unless someone chimes in first. BTW, what else did you find? ;)
I totally miss this entire genre so much it pains me. It’s my favorite gaming genre, and I still don’t get why it pretty much died at the end of the 90’s with Freespace 2 – the best the genre has to offer still to this day – selling so poorly.
I got it from GoG too, even though I own the disk version. I wonder how well it’s selling on GoG. And yeah, with the source code project, it looks amazing.
Yeah, me too. My favorite genre. I gave Freespace 2 the highest rating I’ve ever given a game (and wrote the lengthiest review I’ve ever written). But I miss all the space sim series: Wing Commander, Star Wars, Independence War. In the last 10 years I’ve replayed all the games in each of those series, despite having a massive backlog of other games.
The only space sim I haven’t played yet is X3 - I swear I don’t want to play it because then the genre will be officially over.
We should play the Freespace 2 multiplayer campaign for some nostalgia - I never did really play it, other than messing with the first mission a few times (and getting screwed up by the beam weapons that weren’t beam weapons, because it was set in a time frame that predated them).
I just don’t get how this genre hasn’t been reborn on the consoles - it seems ideal.
I still have my floppies of X-Wing somewhere along with MoO and X-Com. Mmm, such goodness.
Wasn’t Colony Wars on the PS1 a good seller? It had at least a couple of sequels though I don’t think either were for the PS2. Other than that the only thing like it on consoles I can think of were the Star Wars Prequal games which were pretty sucktacular as I recall.
Can one still play FS2 over multiplayer? I’ve honestly never tried, but I’d be game.
X3 is…kinda boring, actually. I wanna get the new Evochron game though, I like those a lot. And Space Miner looks interesting, and hopefully Jumpgate Evolution will do well if/when it’s released. So the genre isn’t entirely dead, it’s just a pale, pale shadow of its former self.
Oh, and Colony Wars seemed to be good games, what little I’ve played with them. I could see more simplistic space sims do well on consoles and still be a ton of fun. I know I’d buy them.
