X-Wing is video gaming's Greek Fire | Hacker News Reader

X-Wing is video gaming's Greek Fire

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36 pointsserverlessmom33 comments

I've always held TIE Fighter as the pinnacle. The story is epic and the dog fighting is very intense, not only early on when you're in an unshielded TIE Fighter (going up against TIE Interceptors and the Escort Shuttles with that rear facing turbo laser) but also later on when you are in a TIE Advanced going up against TIE Defenders.

> Nobody in their right mind is going to say the crusty ol' Baldur's Gate II is better than the theatrical extravaganza that is Baldur's Gate III.

Them’s fighting’ words

The RTS example is even worse - Starcraft: Brood War and Age of Empires 2 are still unmatched in terms of multiplayer. The Relic games he mentions are fun but they're not exactly timeless classics and Relic have generally struggled to balance their games.

Everyone plays with thumbsticks. The only people dumb enough to try to control a real vehicle with humans in it with dual thumbsticks were disintegrated somewhere in the vicinity of the Titanic wreck last year.

XBox and Playstation killed the joystick, and now flight mechanics in all games suck.

Not to mention you can't play X-Wing without using the keyboard. Since gamepads usually require two hands, it gets really awkward to do things like re-balance your shields, power allocation, etc. while trying to steer the fighter.

When I was a kid and this game and Tie Fighter were around I got a joystick with 100 buttons/controls on it.

Didn't even know such a thing existed. We could only afford a pretty basic model (3-axis, 2 button) when I was a kid.

100 was an exaggeration, I'm pretty sure it was one of these https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i75k_i_-240 Gravis phoenix with 46 programmable buttons.

46 is still a crazy large number to me, so your exaggeration is still fine :)

No one sells these anymore cries in wants to play old Sims from gig

I got a Microsoft force feedback joystick to play them... Sadly I got rid of it before I got more interested in electronics.

We are in an absolute golden age of PC flight sims, especially with the immersion that we can get from VR, so when you say "all games" you mean "console games"

I feel there is still a lack of "realistic casual" flight Sims like "strike commander", TFX and "US Navy fighters" that fit the spot between the extremes of Ace Combat (not even a flight Sim) and DCS (too hard core, sorry) though.

It's VR-only but VTOL VR is incredible and I think matches what you're talking about here? I haven't played those older ones you mentioned though

To be clear, Tie Fighter takes everything good about X-Wing and makes it markedly better: Graphics, gameplay, mission design, story, …

But I don’t mean to detract from the author’s point that the original developers caught lightning in a bottle in a way that hasn’t been replicated since.

I never got into TIE Fighter for some reason... I guess when I was that age, I didn't want to be the bad guy. Maybe it's time to revisit it!

Bad guys?! Those rebel scum, killing our brave TIE pilots, are the bad guys!

The TIE Fighter animated intro sequence is forever etched into my memory. I watched the whole thing at least 50% of the times I fired up the game before playing. What an absolute beast of a game. Plus the dynamic music (iMuse) was just so damn cool. With LucasArts, you always knew you were going to have an amazing ~game~ experience.

A million times yes. I spent hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of hours of my teens and some time in college playing X-Wing (and X-Wing v. TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance) that I probably should have spent outside playing with friends or attending classes.

It was such an amazing game. I begged my parents to buy me a joystick so I could play it properly, after breaking a mouse attempting to play it that way (frantically sliding the mouse and lifting it and dropping it down to slide it again took its toll after a while). I keep meaning to pick up a new joystick so I can play it again properly. You can technically use a gamepad, but there are so many functions on the keyboard, too many to map to gamepad buttons, and gamepads usually require two hands. Using a touchpad sounds painful.

I was even part of the modding community; I remember writing (with the collaboration of someone else I met online) a program in Visual Basic(!) that could binary-edit the X-Wing Alliance .exe so you could do... gosh, things I don't even remember. I think we called it XWAExeEd or something like that. This was in the very early days of Google, and I'm not even sure how we hosted or distributed it at the time; I can't find any references to it on the web, at least. I have a ton of old backups from very old computers from that era, need to sift through those sometime.

X-Wing required a joystick.

But you could use a mouse. It was a totally different, extremely horrible game if you did, tho.

Huh, weird. I just launched XW, XvT, and XWA via Steam and you're right; they all bailed out immediately saying a joystick was required. So I'm definitely misremembering something. I do recall breaking a mouse on a game where a joystick was recommended, but it must have been something older.

Or back then I'd found some sort of hack/mod that allowed you to play via mouse; not sure if that's plausible, though.

I found a random Steam forum post where someone claims they played the original XvT without a joystick, not sure if that's a reliable anecdote, though.

I remember playing with the keyboard. My memory might be playing tricks with me, but at that time joystick were certainly not a standard feature of pcs.

Edit: I did use the keyboard/mouse http://wiki.rebelsquadrons.org/index.php/Xwing_Keyboard_Comm...

Edit2: there are two versions : the original 1993 version I played (dos based, doesn’t require a joystick) and a remake I didn’t know existed (1998, windows based ) which does require a joystick

I don't think that's true. I am almost certain the DOS version requires a joystick. And it has a huge keyboard binding list of all sorts of essential things you had to do.

It absolutely was pretty unusual to require a joystick. I had to beg my parents to help pay some of the cost & I think they helped me get a classic Sidewinder 3D (Pro?). I don't even know if we had a sound card that it could plug into or if I ended up getting a sound are too for it? Plus the cost of the game... It was incredibly expensive & difficult for me to get X-Wing.

But it was, like, my mission to make it happen, & eventually I did. Tie Fighter came out not long after I finally got X-Wing going & after another year or two I did manage to buy that game too!

Hey! Cool to see people have fond memories of these games.

X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter was the first game I ever worked on at LucasArts. I was a QA tester and pretty much played hundreds of dogfights to test missions and multi-player.

I've played a lot of flight sims since that time and nothing feels as responsive as the Totally Games engine from back then.

Yup. One of the first games I ever played. I got Squadrons in the hope of reliving some of the joy and the flight mechanics are so fucking trash, the whole game is really.

WoW Classic is also in a very similar category. I recently started playing again and it's mind boggling how much better the game is than anything we've had before or since (I might argue that BC was on par, and I never played Ultima and EQ). I think it's especially telling to try SoD (a modernized version of classic) and find it so deeply disappointing that the team is making it bad in the exact same ways that they made retail bad. It truly feels like they have no understanding of what makes the game so compelling in the first place.

Wandering around Shadowglen, mouth agape, when I first tried the WoW open beta load test was indeed simply mind-blowing in a way I don’t think Blizzard or any other studio managed to recapture.

It feels like they chased “epic” to the detriment of “magical”.

If you want to relive some the joy of X-Wing, X-Wing Alliance Update (XWAU) modernizes the XWA game (including VR support). For TIE Fighter afficionados, there is even a TIE Fighter Total Conversion project that rebuilds entire TIE Fighter campaign in XWA, including a reimagined campaign that takes advantage of the engine improvements in the mods to build larger engagements. Definitely took me back to that summer spent at the computer with my trusty Wingman Extreme.

I looks really cool, I wish I had a way to run it on a mac.

A quick video on the Tie Fighter Total Conversion project, to supplement the above post :

10 Differences Between the TIE Fighter Total Conversion and TIE Fighter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvCXTTtELy8

I felt like Squadrons mostly nailed it. It was $2 recently on all platforms.

Squadrons in a VR headset is a premium X-Wing experience.

Meh. Xwing and those old space fighters games were fun but mostly rough. I played nearly all of them through WC Prophecy. Things got better as quality of life improvements were developed. Not sure why there is all the hate on later games. Nostalgia is likely a big factor. Or maybe I'm just not a space shooter connoisseur.

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