A Look at Star Wars: TIE Fighter - Or "Even Poe Kind of Liked These Things"

What do you do as a follow-up to one of the best Star Wars games of all time, a game that finally, truly allowed players to let loose their inner Luke Skywalker or Wedge Antilles, scream down the Death Star trench in an X-Wing, and kill Imperial TIE Fighters in job lots?

If you were Larry Holland and the team behind X-Wing, you follow it by making one of the greatest games in history, one that’s perennially at or near the top of every “Greatest Games of All Time” list. You make incremental improvements to everything that bugged you in X-Wing, while keeping everything that works. Most importantly, you put players on the other side of the cockpit, and have them play out a story takes place from the end of Empire Strikes Back to the beginning of Return of the Jedi, as the bad guys!

Yes, if you ask me, the most brilliant thing about TIE Fighter is simply that it exists at all, and instead of simply making some improvements, writing some new missions and making X-Wing 2, the dev team put you on the side of the Empire.

One of the most impressive things, particularly when playing TIE Fighter almost immediately after X-Wing­, is the sense of vulnerability you get. From your first training mission, you realize quickly that a single stray laser hit is all it takes to end your mission. Gone are the days of switching your shields double-front, going head to head with a trio of Eyeballs, coming out the other side with two kills, and looping around to take out the third while you rebalance your shields to compensate for the hits you took. No, now you’re the TIE pilot, and you frantically juke and weave to avoid the red death coming in from the enemy X-Wing, hoping that your wingmen will take the brunt of his attention long enough for you to get into a firing position and chew away at his shields and hull.

Oh, certainly later in the game you get fighters with shields. The TIE Advanced, Assault Gunboat, TIE Defender and Missile Boat all serve to turn you into a nigh-invulnerable lord of space by the final expansion campaigns, but your first few campaigns are almost all frantic dodging and weaving. There’s no hand holding, hour long tutorial campaign here!

In the pantheon of Star Wars games, TIE Fighter stands practically alone as a game focused solely on fighting for the Empire. Not until Star Wars – The Force Unleashed came along fifteen years later, would another game focus heavily on the Imperial side of battle. And even then, well, that’s a post for another day.

Weekly Schedule - March 28 - April 3 2016

Well, made to post a second week. That's... a slight bit of consistency, at least. Anyway, to this week's events!

This week:
Youtube: My Star Wars: TIE Fighter play through continues with the TIE Advanced training missions



Twitch Channel: Mechwarrior Misadventures continues, as does my side game of Poker Night 2, most weeknights around 9:30 - 10pm CDT (depending on when my kids get to bed). It's beginning to seem that my two-year-old is more interesting that my various failures as a mech jockey. Actually, that's not really a surprise.

Friday night will also see more Star Wars: TIE Fighter action, as I continue to work through the training missions and maze runs on the various fighters.

Here: Following up last week's post on Star Wars: X-Wing, this week I'll be taking a look at Star Wars: TIE Fighter. Maybe the first in a series, who knows?

Have a good week y'all!

A (Very) Brief Look Back at Star Wars: X-Wing

I recently completed a full play through of the classic Star Wars: X-Wing game and its two expansions. Originally released in 1993, the game saw updates in 1995 with a collection release, and again in 1998 with a major upgrade to run on Windows 98, and an engine upgrade to match the graphics of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter.

But how did this classic ever come to be? Oh, sure there had been Star Wars games before 1993, most notably the vector graphics arcade game where you flew an X-Wing down the trench to simulate the end run of A New Hope, but there hadn’t been a true space combat sim like X-Wing before.

Here’s where a fascinating bit of history comes in. In the early ‘90s, LucasArts was still LucasFilm Games, and didn’t even hold the license to create video games based on Star Wars. That license was held by Brøderbund. LucasFilm Games, meanwhile, had been creating a number of highly successful adventure games, and an excellent series of WWII flight-sims culminating with Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.

It was this experience creating flight sims that would stand them in good stead when the Star Wars license became available again. The Wing Commander series of space combat sims had demonstrated both critical and sales success, but with the Star Wars license and name behind it, LucasFilm Games was had the power of massive name recognition.

It could have been a disaster. It could have been a casual, “me too” licensed product, that no one other that serious Star Wars fans would have remembered. But it wasn’t. Led by Lawrence Holland, who had been the designer behind the WWII flight sims as well, X-Wing proved both a critical and sales success, paving the way for two expansion packs and a huge sequel, Star Wars: TIE Fighter.

Following the path of a Rebel pilot through the time leading up to A New Hope, and tracing the events after the destruction of the first Death Star leading up to the Rebellion’s move to Hoth, X-Wing allowed players to live out their Star Wars pilot fantasy in a big way. Playing it again twenty-three years later, the gameplay still remained solid, even if a few of the seams of the scripting showed up here and there.

Most importantly, the game is still fun, and with the rereleases on Steam and Good Old Games, accessible once again. There’s really only one reason it’s not the best Star Wars sim of all time, and that’s because TIE Fighter exists. But that’s another story, for another week.

The author did not receive any compensation for this article. Links included for reader convenience. To see videos of X-Wing in action, please check out my youtube channel.

Happening This Week: March 21-26, 2016

What?!? Actual content? Well, kind of.

Welcome to Sticks, Stories, and Scotch,with a Monday of this week's action, both on the blog here and elsewhere on my Youtube and Twitch channels. And occasionally other places too...

This week:
Youtube: My Star Wars: TIE Fighter play through continues with the TIE Bomber training missions



Twitch Channel: Mechwarrior Misadventures continues, as does my side game of Poker Night 2, most weeknights around 9:30 - 10pm CDT (depending on when my kids get to bed). Let's see how many times I need to put my daughter back to bed this week?

Saturday will also see more Star Wars: TIE Fighter action, as I continue to work through the training missions and maze runs on the various fighters.

Here: I'll have a post up on Thursday with a bit of history about X-Wing, the game.

Have a good week y'all!