Gaming Classics

This week I decided to reacquaint myself with some of my old favorites. So I re-installed TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance.

Usually, nostalgia is a dangerous thing. We’ve all done it. You put on an old VHS tape of a show you loved as a kid, or played that game you loved on the Commodore 64…and by looking at it through more experienced eyes, you realize that our childhood favorite is a pile of crap.

We I was incredibly pleased to find that TIE Fighter is just as much fun today as when I first played it nearly 16 years ago.

Of course, the graphics are absolutely terrible by today’s standards, but once you’ve played for a few minutes and gotten used to that blocky 640 by 480 resolution, and complete and total lack of any whiz-bang effects…you forget about the graphics and just get on with playing the game.

TIE Fighter has always held a special place in my heart. It’s the first game that completely sucked me in. The first game I decided to play for ‘an hour’ at ten at night, and only stopped playing when I noticed the sun was coming up.

X-Wing Alliance was a different story. It’s still a good, solid game…but when played next to TIE Fighter, it just doesn’t have the same ‘magic’…and here’s why:

The first big selling point of TIE is that you played ‘yourself’. You put in you own name and what rank you made or awards you got were up to you.

It’s hard to explain, but unlike previous Star Wars games, were you were cast in the role of one of the heroes, TIE Fighter let you feel what it would be like to be a pilot in the Star Wars universe. Rather than be Luke Skywalker and match his achievements or fail…it was a game that let you fly with those characters.

Long story short, being put into the role of Darth Vader and attacking a Rebel force is one thing…but playing yourself and flying as one of Vader’s wingmen is a much deeper experience. It’s the difference between reenacting the things you’ve seen on screen, and seeing what a difference you could have made had you been there.

It might seem like a minor thing, but by forcing you into a ‘role’, Alliance loses a lot of its charm. Being referred by someone else’s name and being forced into a particular viewpoint takes something from the experience. Oh, and the droid you’re forced to listen to makes it feel like a kids game.

Basically, TIE Fighter is the original trilogy of Star Wars games…Alliance is the Episode 1 of Star Wars games…not bad in its own right, but just not up to scratch next to the original.

In TIE, there are ‘bonus’ mission objectives. You can try to excel or keep yourself safe…it’s up to you. It’s odd, but you can finish TIE as a mediocre pilot. (In fact, that’s one the things I loved most about this game, going to school on Monday mornings and comparing achievements with friends. Who outranked who, who got what medals, “I’m a Captain!” “Oh yeah? Well I’m a Commander and in the Inner Circle of the Emperor’s Secret Order!”

In Alliance, most of this is taken out of your hands. It still uses a similar system, but rather than extras being up to you, you’re forced to do the ‘family’ missions.

As well as the usual X-Wing/TIE Fighter campaigns, you’re also forced to take part in ‘family’ missions. Your character joined the Rebellion after the Empire seized their business with the help of a rival family, so one minute you’re attacking an Imperial Research post that’s creating advances star-fighters…and the next you’re suddenly forced into a crappy, slow, weak Correlian transport to steal a probe so your family can keep an eye on their business rivals.

It’s like, who cares?

You quickly learn to dread the family missions, because they take you out of the campaign you’re actually enjoying…and when you’ve just done a mission in an A-Wing, your Corellian transport ship seems painfully slow and under-powered.

Long story short, it’s like watching the movies, but with terrible added scenes.

Imagine the following. Obi-Wan has just said “You must learn the ways of the Force if you’re to become a Jedi Knight like your father!”…and then there’s a 30 minute sequence were Luke goes to a friends moisture farm and helps him ‘bullseye womprats’ because they’re chewing through power cables.

It’s like, sure, those womp-rats might wreck some dude’s equipment, but Vader’s in orbit…get your priorities straight.

It feels like Lucasarts tried to fix something that wasn’t broken. All Alliance needed was a graphical upgrade, not a new format. They gave us what they thought we should want, and not what we actually wanted.

Speaking of story, TIE also excelled in the way that it handled it’s story. Lucasarts could easily have gone in ‘pure evil’ direction where the missions were like “Let’s go blow shit up just for the sheer evilness of it”, which quite frankly isn’t all that interesting.

Instead (backed up by a short story in the manual), they made it a much deeper experience by showing how, through indoctrination and propaganda, it would be possible for a totally moral person to fight for the Empire and believe they were doing the right thing. In TIE Fighter, the Rebels aren’t painted as altruistic freedom-fighters, and the Empire evil oppressors…The Rebels are painted as terrorists and the Empire as a perfectly legal and rightful ruler. It showed the insidiousness of the Empire. They’d arrive at war torn system, put a stop to the conflict and say “Look everyone, we ended your war, everything’s better! Wouldn’t you like to join us and help create peace through the galaxy?”

Of course, they wouldn’t mention they’d bomb the place back to the stone-age if they refused…but hey, it’s the Empire.

The absolute worst thing in Alliance, gameplay wise, is that for some unknown reason, they made your fellow pilots far too chatty, and in lots of places, incompetent.

TIE Fighter has your wingmen professionally reporting important events…Alliance has your wingmen tell you everything they’re doing, congratulating themselves on every kill, and putting in smart-ass comments for no reason.

You tell a fellow TIE pilot to ignore your target and he says “Acknowledged (your callsign), ignoring designated target.”

You tell an Alliance pilot to ignore a target and they say “Hey! Are you trying to steal my kill? Don’t you believe in sharing?”

No you incompetent fuck! But we’re supposed to disable that ship and if you shoot it once more, we’re going to lose the mission!

Oh, and expect to hear “Imperial training seems a bit lax!” a few gajillion times per mission.

Something that got right on my nerves very quickly is the other pilots reactions to getting shot at. You see, as a capital ship opens up on you, you get a little warning light in your cockpit. Gameplay wise, this isn’t a huge deal. They start to shoot as soon as you come in range, but their chances of hitting you are minimal.

However, that doesn’t stop you getting about 10 panicked radio transmissions from your allies all screaming “I’m under heavy fire!” “Their turbolasers are targeting me!”

Oh, and the radio message from your wingman telling you that you’ve just been hit is really helpful. You get hit by a missile, there’s a huge explosion and your ship is rammed off course. As you’re spinning around, desperately trying to bring your ship back under control, your wingman says “Careful, you’re taking fire!”

No! Really?

My last big gripe about Alliance is that far too many missions depend on the competency of the AI pilots.

For example, to win a mission, you might have to disable a craft so shuttles can board it…but your craft doesn’t have any ion cannons, so you have to fly cover for the ships that do (Usually Y-Wings).

You do this, and do it well, but the Y-Wings just can’t get their shit straight. You’ve killed all the opposing fighters in record breaking time, you’ve even attacked the ship your trying to disable to draw some fire away from the Y-Wings…but they finally manage to disable the thing way to late, within the range of a station’s turbo lasers.

I’m not saying this didn’t happen in TIE Fighter, but it didn’t happen nearly as often.

TIE Fighter will stand the test of time. A perfect example of the way a game should be made. Alliance is a perfect example of how trying to fix something that isn’t broken can ruin it.

Alliance needed new graphics, new story and new missions. Instead we got that, plus an annoying talking droid, a past forced upon the player, annoyingly talkative and incompetent wingmen and ‘family’ missions that feel as though they were included just to annoy you.

If you’ve never experienced TIE Fighter, get on Ebay and find a copy. TIE Fighter 95 is the CD-ROM version that will run easily under XP (as long as you set it to win95 compatibility mode)…I guarantee you won’t be disappointed, and it’s a game that every PC gamer should own.

Alliance is a good game…it’s just not worthy to lick TIE Fighter’s flight boots.