Star Wars games today.

[SCRawl]

It's funny: I pulled out my old copy of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter just a couple of weeks ago. I set up a Win98 emulator, installed it there, and it runs way better than it ever did on the P2 I used to use. The online community for it is all but extinct, of course, but even just the solo stuff is still playable.

[Stark]

I tried to play TIE Fighter and the horrid fly through tunnels crap was enough for me. The no sense of speed and low lethality didn't help either.

[VF5SS]

It's funny: I pulled out my old copy of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter just a couple of weeks ago. I set up a Win98 emulator, installed it there, and it runs way better than it ever did on the P2 I used to use.

Oh is there a Win98 emulator? I'd love to get some games going myself.

[TC Pilot]

I tried to play TIE Fighter and the horrid fly through tunnels crap was enough for me. The no sense of speed and low lethality didn't help either.

What tunnels?

[SCRawl]

It's funny: I pulled out my old copy of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter just a couple of weeks ago. I set up a Win98 emulator, installed it there, and it runs way better than it ever did on the P2 I used to use.

Oh is there a Win98 emulator? I'd love to get some games going myself.

The one I use is VirtualBox. It works for me, though it took a bit to set it up properly.

[OmegaChief]

I tried to play TIE Fighter and the horrid fly through tunnels crap was enough for me. The no sense of speed and low lethality didn't help either.

What tunnels?

There were those training/practice leves where you had to fly around tunnels with obsticales and targets in them as I recall.

[Stark]

Yeah the simulator thing. The rooms that showed you just how amazingly slow you were moving. :v

The emphasis on missiles in combat was hugely thematic for SW, as well.

[VF5SS]

Well that one missile in AOTC was kinda important even if a space CIWS coulda nicked it no prob.

[TC Pilot]

Oh, those tunnels. Never did play the tutorials.

Actually, now that I think of it, I always played with infinite ammo on, so I didn't have to worry about a lot of that stuff.

[Stark]

The last few are like 'fly through the little hole in the rotating cog' stuff. Pretty awful, and the first bunch of real missions are as a traffic cop so.... ?

[TC Pilot]

Man, what were you doing in the training room then?

Yeah, first mission you inspect a convoy of freighters, although you don't actually have to play that mission first, for what it's worth.

[Darth Quorthon]

I loved Tie Fighter back in the day. It is entirely possible however, that I'm remembering it through rose-colored glasses. It has been a long long time since I played it, although I still have my Collector's Edition CD lying around somewhere. I tried re-installing it to try it out a few years ago and I think I got a stack overflow error. Probably just as well, as what usually happens when I try and replay and old game that I remember loving back in the day is that my fond memories get ruined.

On another note, anyone remember the Shadows of the Empire game? Propbably not, since the only console it was on was the Nintendo 64. Oddly it takes place in roughly the same time frame as Tie Fighter (between Episodes 5 and 6). I never played it myself, but I did watch some friends play it, and it seemed to have a pretty cool Star Wars feel to it, and capture the scope of the movies pretty well. Again, that may very well be just remembering it through rose-colored glasses.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I had the demo of it on my old PC, and you could only play the Hoth mission which was pretty fun. Got old fast though.

[HMS Sophia]

I bought it 2-3 years ago on the N64 (mine still works occasionally)
I remember it being... pretty awful to be honest. Poor controls, and really not very star warsy beyond having pew pews and spaceships...
Still, I have to admit I didn't give it much of a chance, so maybe I would have a different opinion these days...

[VF5SS]

The biggest problem with the X-wing series is that Star Wars space combat up until that point was fairly brief and focused on close range WW2 style dogfights which doesn't exactly scale up to "true" space combat. In fact the original X-wing was based on the same engine as two WW2 games. In order to make it more space like, they borrowed aspects from Wing Commander which is ironic since Wing Commander is heavily inspired by Star Wars. Both franchises had relatively slow gun based combat, but one may forgive Wing Commander for that as it is more or less an original property designed to be a game rather than some developer's attempt at turning Star Wars combat into a game based on a handful of battles.

[PainRack]

No love for arcade shooters? Too many Death Star stimulator runs out there but they were cheap thrills, and as campy adventures, were star wars. There was this classic in the nineties where you played as an X-wing pilot(ANH), Snowspeeder and ground trooper at Hoth base(TESB), an interlude with Boba Fett(Skiff scene) and ROTJ Endor (Ground) before you eclipse into a duel with Vader on Cloud city and the space battle of Endor.

It was cheap, campy, had cheap thrills to the EU with its wampa/Hoth base and snowtrooper scene and appropiate use of movie lines. Restricted arcade shooter of course, but well.... fun,.

[TheFeniX]

No love for arcade shooters? Too many Death Star stimulator runs out there but they were cheap thrills, and as campy adventures, were star wars. There was this classic in the nineties where you played as an X-wing pilot(ANH), Snowspeeder and ground trooper at Hoth base(TESB), an interlude with Boba Fett(Skiff scene) and ROTJ Endor (Ground) before you eclipse into a duel with Vader on Cloud city and the space battle of Endor.

Cheap thrills my ass, that thing was like a dollar per credit at my arcade. Fucking awesome though. There was also a 1993 version, but I never even saw one.

As for Shadows of the Empire, that game was hit or miss. The controls really weren't that bad and it was one of the earlier game of it's type to use a 3rd person view. It's real short-comings were the blocky animations and that nothing felt like it had any weight to it. This was an issue with a lot of N64 games. It also suffered from terrible amounts of bland. Many of the levels didn't feel fleshed out. Once again, N64 developers had issues with this.

[CaptHawkeye]

I thought SotE was great if anything for the sheer variety of gameplay types in it. Some levels (like the motherfucking sewer) dragged while levels set on the trains in Ord Mantell, the speeder bikes, and the flying missions were so sick.

[Rahvin]

No love for arcade shooters? Too many Death Star stimulator runs out there but they were cheap thrills, and as campy adventures, were star wars. There was this classic in the nineties where you played as an X-wing pilot(ANH), Snowspeeder and ground trooper at Hoth base(TESB), an interlude with Boba Fett(Skiff scene) and ROTJ Endor (Ground) before you eclipse into a duel with Vader on Cloud city and the space battle of Endor.

It was cheap, campy, had cheap thrills to the EU with its wampa/Hoth base and snowtrooper scene and appropiate use of movie lines. Restricted arcade shooter of course, but well.... fun,.

How the hell did I forget that one?!

I had that for PC, and played the hell out of it. The pre-rendered graphics and use of the original score (CD-quality, not MIDI remakes like XWing and TIE Fighter) were major selling points, even if the controls were sometimes clunky (the first-person scenes) and the whole thing was an arcade rail-shooter. Good stuff when I was a kid.

[Steel]

No love for arcade shooters? Too many Death Star stimulator runs out there but they were cheap thrills, and as campy adventures, were star wars. There was this classic in the nineties where you played as an X-wing pilot(ANH), Snowspeeder and ground trooper at Hoth base(TESB), an interlude with Boba Fett(Skiff scene) and ROTJ Endor (Ground) before you eclipse into a duel with Vader on Cloud city and the space battle of Endor.

It was cheap, campy, had cheap thrills to the EU with its wampa/Hoth base and snowtrooper scene and appropiate use of movie lines. Restricted arcade shooter of course, but well.... fun,.

How the hell did I forget that one?!

I had that for PC, and played the hell out of it. The pre-rendered graphics and use of the original score (CD-quality, not MIDI remakes like XWing and TIE Fighter) were major selling points, even if the controls were sometimes clunky (the first-person scenes) and the whole thing was an arcade rail-shooter. Good stuff when I was a kid.

Wait a minute... Are you sure you're talking about the same game? Not rebel assault or something?

I looked at the page for the SW trilogy arcade and it says no ported versions. I remember trying to get a copy ages ago but finding none.

[PainRack]

Cheap thrills my ass, that thing was like a dollar per credit at my arcade.

It was fun... Save the last Endor mission. I think one day, I finally scraped together 5 bucks worth of pocket money to go play and I blew up the second Death Star after expending 2-3 credits on the Death Star mission alone.

I think that was also the first time I beat Darth Vader:D

Had a huge love hate for the ground Endor mission though. It was super fun to watch Ewoks drop on stormtroopers head(Drop bears anyone?) but it always drew my shields down to nothing.

[Rahvin]

No love for arcade shooters? Too many Death Star stimulator runs out there but they were cheap thrills, and as campy adventures, were star wars. There was this classic in the nineties where you played as an X-wing pilot(ANH), Snowspeeder and ground trooper at Hoth base(TESB), an interlude with Boba Fett(Skiff scene) and ROTJ Endor (Ground) before you eclipse into a duel with Vader on Cloud city and the space battle of Endor.

It was cheap, campy, had cheap thrills to the EU with its wampa/Hoth base and snowtrooper scene and appropiate use of movie lines. Restricted arcade shooter of course, but well.... fun,.

How the hell did I forget that one?!

I had that for PC, and played the hell out of it. The pre-rendered graphics and use of the original score (CD-quality, not MIDI remakes like XWing and TIE Fighter) were major selling points, even if the controls were sometimes clunky (the first-person scenes) and the whole thing was an arcade rail-shooter. Good stuff when I was a kid.

Wait a minute... Are you sure you're talking about the same game? Not rebel assault or something?

I looked at the page for the SW trilogy arcade and it says no ported versions. I remember trying to get a copy ages ago but finding none.

No, you're right - I was talking about Rebel Assault, and you were talking about the arcade game (which I did also play, just not as much as Rebel Assault, for obvious reasons).

I mistook one for the other.

[DudeGuyMan]

My first playthrough of KOTOR, as a complete dark side prick, was totally Star Warsy. In a "Bwahaha I wanna be Palpatine!" sorta way.

My contempt for that sanctimonious Jedi council, my disgust at their weakness given the way they were letting the civilian population of their very own enclave be brutalized. I stood there in front of them listening to their empty speeches on Dantooine thinking "I am going to get you fuckers. You will know my wrath, when the time is right. And if the game lets me do that."

And then the game DID let me do that. With their precious Bastila at my side as my Sith slut apprentice, I betrayed the Republic and laughed as I watched their fleet be destroyed. I'm not sure, but I think I might have flipped off the screen when the cruiser with that Yoda wannabe on board exploded. God they gave him just enough time to realize he'd been fucked before he died. It was so great.

Sure there was a lot of hamfisted "PET PUPPY/KICK PUPPY" morality stuff and nonsensical lightsaber-on-polearm combat to wade through along the way, but some of those puppykicks were fun and ultimately the story managed to grab me. Oh Carth, you sonofabitch, I was so mad that I didn't get to kill you. You were supposed to save poor little Mission from me.

[CarsonPalmer]

I remember absolutely loving Rebel Assault II as a kid of about 8, but I haven't looked at that game in years and it probably isn't very good at all. But there was one particular level where you got attacked by TIE Interceptors and that was the awesomest thing in the world...at the same time, even through rose-tinted glasses I remember some things about that game being very, very, very uncreative and derivative.

[PainRack]

Rebel Assault was fun to play....... but it had very huge nostalgia glasses for me. I reinstalled it back again something in 2002 or etc and the gameplay or even vids were just so-so.

Its another railroad arcade shooter, with its typical EU insert of big superweapon and heroes save the universe campaign nearly. At least X-wing vs TIE and etc were iconic for its day, even as screwed up as the games were. Anyone remember Balance of power and the PROPER rendition of the 8km long SSD?

Man. It was fun though to fly an A-wing through the bugged superstructure and then die to engine wash afterwards:D(I forgot to set my shields aft)