Post by Cohaagen on Feb 18, 2008 11:48:31 GMT -5
I'd like to share my love for the old X-Wing series.
I got the original X-Wing back in about 1993. It came on about four or five black floppy disks, bundled with B-Wing and Imperial Pursuit on another two. I find it incredible that a game of such depth and complexity could be stored on a half dozen shitty 1.44mb magnetic disks.
When I first heard my wingman yell "Red Two - incoming missile!" in scratchy 8khz mono, it sounded like the future itself screaming at me. Later, when TIE Fighter came out (on CD), all the mission briefings were fully audio, with the camp Nazi lieutenant with the little tank from 'Allo 'Allo doing the voice-over. I loved the fact that you didn't have silly shit like gravity, friction, or torque to get on your tits, yet the ships all still handled like WWII fighter planes. I don't think there has ever been such a fully-realised movie tie-in franchise, except perhaps Alien vs Predator 2, which was even better (and more faithful to the series canon) than the last few films.
I skipped X-Wing vs TIE Fighter. It was one of the first games to neglect the single-player campaign in favour of multiplayer, near ubiquitous in contemporary games (CoD4, BF2, Quake III, Unreal, etc). It goes without saying that it sucked a big dick, and has no dedicated internet community following today, unlike the all other series entries.
X-Wing Alliance was great fun. I really appreciated the care that went into the storytelling, and the flight engine still looks pretty good in a high enough resolution. And you can always force things like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on through your hardware.
