GoG are running a literal giveaway where you can pick up a copy of Freespace 2 for exactly nothing. The giveaway is running for the next two days.
The giveaway is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the release of Freespace 2 on 30 September 1999. Freespace 2 is, succinctly put, the greatest space combat game ever made, achieving some kind of towering apotheosis in the genre that caused it to effectively implode shortly afterwards. The slightly different space trader genre continued (via Freelancer, the X: Beyond the Frontier series and the recent Elite: Dangerous) but after a few noble efforts (Starlancer, Tachyon: Beyond the Fringe) the space combat genre spluttered out of existence. Attempts to resurrect it have had mixed results, with the first big challenger likely to be Squadron 42 (part of the wider Star Citizen project), which does not have a scheduled release date at present.
The game's strength is in its instinctive flight model, it's still-impressive graphics and its moody, atmospheric storyline, which pits humanity and an allied alien race against the enigmatic Shivans and a fifth column of human traitors. The game is a sequel to Conflict: Freespace - The Great War (1998) and its expansion, The Silent Threat (1998), both playable in the Freespace 2 engine via mods. The game's mod scene is phenomenal, updating the graphics, adding new campaigns and allowing players to play total conversion mods, including one set in the Battlestar Galactica universe.
For absolutely nothing, the game is well worth picking up.
Blizzard Entertainment and GoG have joined forces to re-release the first two games in the WarCraft fantasy franchise.
WarCraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) was the game that kicked off the whole shebang and forms the basis of the storyline of the WarCraft movie. It has been updated (via DOSBOX) to work fine on modern PCs, although it's still something of an old-skool and slightly clunky game.
WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), which also includes the expansion WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996), has been given a fancier update to run natively in Windows 10 with some graphics improvements.
Blizzard are working on a much bigger and more fundamental remastering of WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion The Frozen Throne for release later in the year.
In 2001 Rage Software released a strategy game called Hostile Waters. Due to a copyright issue, it was given the slightly less-wieldy title of Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising in the United States. The game was released to a rapturous reception, with universal critical acclaim and high review scores. However, these did not translate into high sales. The game sunk pretty quickly and Rage Studios had to close its doors a couple of years later.
The appeal of Hostile Waters has never really gone away though. Retrospectives (like this one) surface every couple of years and the game has gained a new lease of life through re-releases on GoG and Steam. And it's both easy to see why the game is so beloved and why it also didn't resonate with a mass audience.
Hostile Waters is a strategy game inspired by the 1988 video game Carrier Command. It has an all-new story written by comic writer and novelist Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Crooked Little Vein). Set in the year 2032, it depicts a world utterly at peace. In an alternate-timeline 2012 humanity created the "Creation Engine", a nanotech reassembler which can take garbage, pollutants and other materials and recreate them as anything: food, clothing, electronics. The Creation Engine resulted in the collapse of the old order of capitalism and warmongering, as the abrupt arrival of a post-scarcity society made such things obsolete. Some of the old order did not like this and tried to ban Creation Engines, even going to war to obliterate them and all knowledge of how to build them. They were defeated in a brief, brutal and bloody conflict.
Hostile Waters opens with the peaceful, semi-utopian society that resulted from the Creation Engine coming under attack: missiles fired from a remote island chicane in the South Pacific are striking the major cities. An "adaptive cruiser" - a warship fitted with Creation Engines so it can build a complement of strike craft on the fly - named Antaeus is sent to the chicane to investigate. Sure enough, it turns out that the "old guard" of dictators, generals and now-redundant business tycoons are behind the attacks, using Creation Engines and genetic engineering to unleash a new threat, a biological WMD that they can use to blackmail the world. The early part of the game sees you - playing the commander of the Antaeus - investigating the threat, taking on Cabal military forces (who start off using traditional vehicles like Apache helicopters and Abrams battle tanks) and becoming aware of the more devastating weapons the Cabal is working on. Later on in the game the Cabal launches their bioweapon, which promptly turns on them and becomes a much greater threat than anyone was expecting.
What is interesting about Hostile Waters is the control scheme. It's real-time tactics game which anchors the in-game camera to one of your military units. There is no gods eye view of the battlefield like in, say, StarCraft or Command and Conquer. There is a strategic map (accessed via the F1 key) but this pauses the game. You can issue orders to your units in this mode, but you have to come out of the map to see them unfold. This makes for an engrossing variety of gameplay: at one moment your units are engaged in a furious real-time battle and then you pause the action for a leisurely appreciation of the battlefield and what orders you can give. You can also take direct control of a unit and fly/drive it around the battlefield like an action game before allowing the AI to take over again. This allows Hostile Waters to be both incredibly intense and also extremely relaxed at the same time.
Adding to the complexity here is the fact that you can't create infinite numbers of units. Instead you have a set number of "AI chips". Like in the novel and TV show Altered Carbon, people have their personalities captured on a chip at the moment of death (in this game the chip is called a Soulcatcher). You can assign one chip to one vehicle. You can't use copies as this causes the AIs to have massive existential crises mid-battle. Without a chip, the vehicle cannot operate autonomously and needs to be directly controlled by yourself. Even more brilliantly, the AI chips all have different specialities: Ransom likes to be in an attack helicopter, Patton in a tank with a big gun, Borden in a hovercraft and Korolev in a utility vehicle, either scavenging or repairing other units. Put them in other vehicles or give them weapons they don't like and they do not perform as well. The AI chips also have an amusing amount of banter they engage in during the game. Although their catchphrases do get a little repetitive, this eerily reinforces the fact these aren't people but electronic copies of their personalities at the moment of death.
The game's presentation is exceptional. As a seventeen-year-old game the graphics are obviously dated, but still eminently playable. The story, written brilliantly by Ellis with dialogue and narration far beyond the quality of video games even today, is narrated with gravitas by the mighty Tom Baker (Doctor Who, Little Britain). Church and Walker, your two advisors, are played by Glynis Barber and Paul Darrow from Blake's 7, and both do a fantastic job (especially Darrow). The voice actors for your units are also very good, packing a lot of personality into their audio barks and occasional commentary on what's going on. The minimalist musical score is also very enjoyable.
The game is also remarkable for how dark it gets, moving from a military wargame to, later on, The Thing-style body horror. There are hard moral questions asked in almost every mission and the game's morality gets pretty murky later on when you are asked to commit genocide.
The reasons for the game's failure are also unfortunately clear. As a PC-only game self-published by a small British company, it didn't have the marketing clout to get much advertising out, particularly in the United States. More damningly, the game did not ship with multiplayer. The pause-action-pause dynamic did not seemingly allow for any kind of multiplayer at all, and in the age of StarCraft, Total Annihilation and (a few months later) WarCraft III, this did not fly. Frustratingly, the creators did complete a multiplayer patch but the company collapsed on the very day it was finished, so they never issued it.
The game's cross-genre appeal also did not allow it to be categorised easily. It's a frantic action game and a slow-paced strategy game at the same time. It's a very cerebral, thoughtful science fiction story and also a pulpy, schlock military horror story simultaneously. For those who love their genres blended together, tonal variation done well and things to be unpredictable, Hostile Waters is one of the best games ever made. For those who like their games to fit into snug, well-delineated boxes with no flexibility, the game does not work as well.
Hostile Waters was released at the same time as several other strategy games which rejected the Command and Conquer/StarCraft paradigm in favour of doing something more interesting and original, such as Homeworld, Battlezone and Ground Control (and, although a lot less successfully, Star Wars: Force Commander). Ultimately, the middling sales of all these games and the outright failure of Hostile Waters seems to have led to the conclusion that all people wanted in the strategy space was more C&C clones, even today, which is a shame.
Hostile Waters is a fantastic game, if you can get into its headspace and how it does things. It's a remarkable, never-likely-to-be-repeated mash-up of transhumanist, post-Singularity hard SF, biological horror, military fiction and frantic action. It's influences are Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, Command and Conquer and The Thing but it generates an atmosphere all of its own. It's a game screaming out for a modern remake, or even a HD remaster. It remains strongly recommended.
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs. SF&F Questions and The Cities of Fantasy series are debuting on my Patreon feed and you can read them there one month before being published on the Wertzone.
GoG also has Grim Fandango Remastered up for free for this week. Originally released in 1998 by LucasArts, Grim Fandango is comfortably one of the best video games and certainly one of the best adventure games of all time. The remastered edition adds a revamped and much-improved mouse control system and enhanced graphics.
Mafia, subtitled The City of Lost Heaven in the States, was a game from Illusion Softworks released in 2002. The game saw you play a young man named Tommy Angelo as he moves up from being a cab driver to a high-ranking member of the Lost Heaven mafioso. The game features a long and complex storyline in which Tommy is drawn inch-by-inch into the world of the mafia until he realises what sort of people he's aligned with, at which point he starts looking for a way out.
It's a familiar story, told before, but in this game it is told with tremendous skill, subtlety and atmosphere. The game is remarkable both for its high-octane action set-pieces and slightly comically slow car chases (the game is very true to its simulation of 1920s and 1930s vehicles), but also for its slower moments of characterisation, scoping out targets for heists and scenes of just hanging out and talking to people. Released the same year as the excellent (but extraordinarily dark) Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Mafia got a little lost in the mix but is frankly the far superior game, with less insane mayhem but far more nuance, character and a much better-developed storyline. It's also worth keeping an eye on the cast lists, with actors from both The Sopranos and the then-brand-new The Wire both showing up in surprising numbers.
This new release from GoG has a slight flaw in that the original, licensed music had to be removed from the game. However, there is a fan workaround to restore it available via the GoG Forums.
The classic, era-defining Homeworld and Homeworld 2 got an impressive re-release in 2015 in the Homeworld Remastered collection, followed last year by a splendid (if low-key) prequel game, Deserts of Kharak. Missing from these celebrated events was Homeworld: Cataclysm, the stand-alone expansion for the original game.
Developed by Barking Dog Studios and released in 2000, Cataclysm has widely been praised as the best game in the series, with a tense, escalating storyline seeing the galaxy consumed by a cybernetic terror known as the Beast and the crew of a single mining ship desperately trying to find a way of defeating it. The game expanded on the original title's mechanics, introducing much-needed timeskip features and a lot of new ship designs. Homeworld 2 (2003) ignored many of the developments in the game, with a feeling among fans that the original designers at Relic (now at Blackbird Interactive) didn't really consider Cataclysm part of the official Homeworld canon.
Remastering Cataclysm proved impossible as the original source files had been lost, with the alternative - rebuilding the game from the ground up in the Homeworld 2 engine - considered too complex and time-consuming for what would probably be a limited return. Instead, Blackbird and Homeworld IP owners Gearbox have focused on getting the original game compatible with modern PCs and overcoming a major legal hurdle, namely that Blizzard bought the trademark on the Cataclysm name for a World of WarCraft expansion. The technical stuff done, the game is now available on GoG under the name Homeworld: Emergence to overcome the legal hurdles.
As one of the very best space strategy games ever made, I strongly recommend it.
Bethesda have joined the GoG bandwagon by releasing some of their older, classic RPGs and some other games inherited from other companies onto the service.
Of interest to fans of Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls Online will be the older games in the Elder Scrolls series. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is by far the most critically highly-acclaimed game in the series and the most unusual, with taxi services provided by giant stilt-legged monsters, very few traditional fantasy cliches and the constant threat of being killed by annoying cliff racers. Far more obscure are the two action-oriented spin-offs, the dungeon crawler Battlespire and the third-person action game Redguard.
As a bonus, anyone buying any of these titles also gets The Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall added to their collection for free. These games have been free for years on Bethesda's website, but it's nice to see them being put out on GoG. Certainly playing Arena in 2015 - 21 years after it was originally released - is an, er, interesting experience when comparing it to Skyrim.
Bethesda have also released Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics on the service, likely to help set the scene for the release of Fallout 4 in November. In addition, they have also released some of id's back-catalogue, via special editions for Doom, Doom II and Quake.
The Rebel Alliance has been dealt a severe blow with the destruction of its base on Hoth. In the aftermath of the disaster, numerous factions sympathetic to the Alliance have been exposed and the Empire has taken vengeance. Caught up in the chaos are the Azzameens, a trading family supplying the Rebels. With the Empire closing in, the youngest pilot in the family elects to the join the Rebels and help in the fight. However, his loyalties to his familes remain strong...
X-Wing Alliance was originally released in 1999 and is the fourth and final game in the X-Wing series, following on from X-Wing (1993), TIE Fighter (1994) and the multiplayer-focused X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter (1997). The game opens during the events of The Empire Strikes Back and concludes with the epic Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi, with the player helping flesh out events in the background of both movies.
X-Wing Alliance is, technically, the most accomplished game in the series. The graphics are far superior to the earlier games and the fighter cockpits are now all fully-modelled 3D environments which you can look around in. The game has the widest variety of ships and stations in the series and bumps things up a notch by allowing you play small freighters, such as the YT-1300 and 2000-series Corellien freighters and, in the final mission, the Millennium Falcon itself. The game also unfolds over a larger scale, with many missions requiring multiples jumps through hyperspace to other star systems. The engine can handle far vaster battles than the previous game, with the concluding Battle of Endor involving over a dozen capital ships and hundreds of fighters. The game also makes excellent use of the movie soundtracks and sound effects to form the perfect backdrop to the game.
It remains controversial over if this is the best game in the series, however. For my money it is. It has the best pacing, the best difficulty curve (one or two insanely hard spikes aside) and a growing sense of menace and scale as the assault on the second Death Star approaches. There are 50 missions, which is a lot for this kind of game (the others only reached this size with their expansions included), especially since many of these missions are longer than the very longest missions in the previous titles. It's certainly a big, satisfying game which takes the previous mixture of spectacular space combat, in-battle tactics and larger strategy (through the ability to give wingmen orders, which they handle better than ever before thanks to much stronger AI) and tightens everything up a notch.
The biggest weakness - and it is not a major one - is the storyline involving the Azzameen family. Ignoring their silly name (and you even sillier designation as "Ace"), this storyline does get you involved in the game a bit more than in its forebears, which gave your character no backstory at all. However, the game forces you to sit through several fairly tiresome family-oriented missions before you get to the join the Rebellion and hop in an X-wing. The addition of freighters to the game is a good one, but these end up being a bit overpowered due to their auto-tracking turrets. This is especially notable in the YT-2000 Otana, which has two gun batteries and requires you to merely be pointed in the enemy's vague direction to scythe through entire squadrons - even of TIE Avengers and Defenders - with impunity. These missions can be a bit more fun as they involve characters not associated with the Rebels, such as your crazy sister Amon and even crazier brother Emon (not the most exciting names), and your psychotic droid co-pilot MK-09 (a slightly less homicidal forerunner of HK-47). They bring a bit more personality to a game series that was, until this title, rather lacking in personality.
One slight problem with this story is that it's not entirely concluded at the end of the game. The Azzameen storyline ends on a cliffhanger with a traitor being exposed in the family and doing a runner. Clearly, his pursuit would have factored into any expansion to the game. However, X-Wing Alliance suffered badly in the Great Space Combat Crash of 1999, selling disappointingly, and no expansion or sequel was made. Fortunately the game's core storyline finishes fairly decisively with the Battle of Endor, which provides more than enough closure for the whole game.
X-Wing Alliance's other big problem was one of timing. The X-Wing series had comfortably usurped the Wing Commander franchise's crown as Best Space Combat Series and worn it well through the 1990s, but just a few months before X-Wing Alliance came out another game was released. Conflict Freespace: The Great War was, despite a dodgy name, an altogether hardier and better game, with superior, more visceral combat, better visuals and far weightier handling. It left the X-Wing series looking a bit tired. Even worse was to come when Freespace 2 was released about six months after X-Wing Alliance. Freespace 2 was space combat perfected and pretty much killed the entire genre stone dead by not giving it anywhere to develop.
Freed from contemporary issues, X-Wing Alliance (****½) emerges as a still impressive, top-notch game. It is available now from GoG. Unlike the earlier X-Wing games, which were made before the modding scene took off, X-Wing Alliance allowed modding and the results include the impressive X-Wing Upgrade project, which improves the visuals massively of the whole game. I strongly recommend it as it both upgrades the in-game models to something far palatable for modern gamers, and also adds widescreen support for current monitors.
The Galactic Empire is at the height of its power, its reach and control extending across most of the known galaxy. Even the destruction of the Death Star at the Battle of Yavin has not proven a fatal blow. But with the Rebel Alliance gaining new allies and followers, the need for the Imperial military to recruit new pilots for its TIE fighter squadrons has never been greater.
TIE Fighter was originally released in 1994 as the sequel to the previous year's X-Wing. X-Wing had been a big hit and a success, so a sequel was inevitable. However, the decision to have the player join the "bad guys" and fight against the heroes of the Rebel Alliance was somewhat unexpected. It was an idea that LucasArts took and ran with to great effect.
Technically, TIE Fighter is a big improvement over X-Wing. The flight model is a bit better, the wingman controls and AI are superior and the game's missions are more varied, with more in-mission events and unexpected events making things less predictable. There are far more ships and models (including proper space station models, thankfully) and you can now target sub-systems on big ships, allowing you to take out shield generators or turrets. Graphically the game looked a lot better on release, although for this re-release you are limited to the original graphics or the 1998 Collector's Edition, featuring the far more detailed and impressive X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter engine. The latter is certainly still reasonable enough to play today.
As you would hope, your CO (and most of the Imperials) has an English accent.
The game has a much more prominent and focused narrative. You play an Imperial fighter pilot who also has a secret agenda as an agent for Emperor. In some missions you have secret orders which go against your main mission but which will benefit the Emperor, standing you in his good graces and opening up further promotions. Part of the game revolves around an internal threat to the Empire, resulting in a mass defection of part of the Imperial Fleet to the Rebels, and you play a pivotal role in exposing the conspiracy. The narrative is pretty decent even today, featuring as it does bad people doing bad things to even worse people, making for a morally murky tale.
The game also does a great job of placing you as a cog in the Empire's military machine. X-Wing's wonky AI often required you to rush around doing everything yourself, but TIE Fighter's is much stronger and requires you to more often fulfil your mission objectives and stick to your role rather than being a stand-out hero. Without intending to, this allowed LucasArts to nail the difference between the Rebels and the Empire between the two games, and adds a lot to the atmosphere. TIE Fighter's early missions can also be tough, with you in a fragile, unshielded TIE fighter, interceptor or bomber going up against much tougher Rebel fighters.
If TIE Fighter has a problem, it's that it doesn't stick to its guns for very long. Within a few missions you are regularly flying the Assault Gunboat, a powerful ship with shields and heavy weapons that can easily go toe-to-toe with an X-wing (and with some judicious power management, can match A-wings). As the game continues you gain access to the TIE Advanced, which is more powerful than any ship in the Rebel arsenal. You then get the TIE Defender, which dials this up to eleven. At this point you may as well switch on a god mode cheat. Then, just to make sure it hasn't made you overpowered enough, you get access to a "Missile Boat" which has gatling gun missile launchers and allows you to lay waste to entire enemy squadrons before they can get anywhere near you.
"Get out of the frigging way!"
This is all enormous fun and does address the problem of why, in the films, the Empire seems to be technologically inferior to the Rebels despite having much vaster resources, but it's also a bit silly and undermines the tension of early missions where a single mistake can mean a horrible, flaming death. It could also be argued that by making you a "bad guy" and then making you fight even worse people for most of the time rather than having to do anything really awful (like shooting down civilians), the game pulls its punches when it could have opened up into a more interesting study of morality in warfare.
But for a large chunk of its length, TIE Fighter (****) is superb. Combat is fast and furious, there is a much greater sense of tactics and strategy at work, the story (complete with cameos by the likes of Vader and Admiral Thrawn) is solid and the game does a great job of making you feel like a pawn of the Empire. It is a huge amount of fun, hasn't aged too badly at all and is now available from GoG.
Ground Control was originally released in 2000 and was groundbreaking in its day. It had a full 3D map and camera, had no base-building or mid-mission reinforcing and - controversially - no mid-mission saving. It was a challenging game that rewarded tactically ingenious play, but was also furiously action-packed and has some visuals that were jaw-dropping at the time and remain pretty impressive today. Its minimalist UI also puts most modern strategy games to shame. It's absolutely brilliant, the equal of the likes of Homeworld and far superior to the likes of Dawn of War, and is highly recommended.
The sequel has better visuals and allows mid-mission saving and reinforcing, so is a bit less hardcore. It also has a better story and more unit variety with asymmetrical factions (the original game is more balanced between the two sides, although the mercenaries in the expansion bring a bit more variety to the table). Both are among the very best RTS games ever made, and are very highly recommended.
GoG have added yet more Star Wars titles to their store, just a few days after the last batch.
Up today is the incredibly slow and ponderous mega-strategy game Supremacy (titled Rebellion in the USA), which I found so boring that just looking at the box put me to sleep. However, other gamers swear by it due to its slow-boiling, long-term planning. Also the fact that you can have multiple Death Stars running around blowing up planets.
Considerably less dull, although still not great, is Empire at War. This RTS was released in 2006 and enables the player to pit the Empire and Rebels, Separatists and Republic against one another. It wasn't a great game, mainly down to some very stilted ground combat, but some of the space battles were passable. This version includes the Forces of Corruption expansion, and there are many mods out there to improve the game experience.
More well-known is action game Rogue Squadron. Whilst not a patch on the X-Wing series, Rogue Squadron is a much more accessible arcade blaster.
GoG will release four more Star Wars games on the 27th. These are the brilliant Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (presumably with the Mysteries of the Sith expansion included), the so-so Starfighter and the superb tactical FPS Republic Commando.
GoG.com has released an additional six Star Wars games to its library. X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, Galactic Battlegrounds, Dark Forces, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and Battlefront II are the new additions.
A non-optimum situation.
All are worthwhile purchases. Battlefront II is a multiplayer-focused shoot 'em up, with somewhat dated visuals but still fun gameplay. Knights of the Old Republic II is the far more conceptually interesting (but also far more broken) sequel to one of the greatest RPGs ever made. Incomplete on release, mods have repaired a lot of the damage and allowed the game to flourish. Dark Forces is Doom with a Star Wars skin, but still awesome. Galactic Battlegrounds is Age of Empires II with a Star Wars skin, but still pretty good.
The two X-Wing games are probably going to be the key draw here. X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter is multiplayer-focused and the multiplayer is a bit flaky on the GoG version of the game at the moment. However, the single-player Balance of Power campaign is included and is very worthwhile. More impressive is X-Wing Alliance, the final game in the series. Released in 1999, the game is the most epic in the series and the largest, featuring a lengthy campaign culminating in the full-scale assault on the second Death Star at the Battle of Endor. It's the most visually impressive of the four games (and also the easiest to update to modern standards through mods), although hardcore fans will argue only the second-best, behind the more morally ambiguous TIE Fighter.
Apparently more Star Wars games are still to come, likely to comprise some or all of the remaining Dark Forces series (Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy), possibly the well-regarded Republic Commando or the more acquired taste of Supremacy (aka Rebellion). We may also get to see the flawed-but-ambitious Force Commander, with Rebel Assault also an outside possibility. Beyond that we are likely to see some more serious scraping of the barrel. It's also possible we will see some of the newer games, like the Empire at War strategy title or the two Force Unleashed titles.
It looks like between these old games, the release of Battlefront III later this year and of course the arrival of Episode VII: The Force Awakens in December, it's a good time to be a Star Wars fan.
The Galactic Civil War is at its height. The Sullustans are negotiating to join the Rebel Alliance, but the Empire is rumoured to be constructing a weapon of incredible power. Into this chaos steps Keyan Farlander, a fresh recruit for the Alliance. He is assigned to the cruiser Independence as an X-wing fighter pilot.
Way back in 1993 - improbable as it seems now - Star Wars merchandise was thin on the ground. Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy of novels had just started a renaissance in the popularity of the franchise and West End Games had been producing a successful pen-and-paper roleplaying game for several years, but there was still a gap in the market for an iconic Star Wars video game.
X-Wing proved to be that game. Riffing off both the starfighter dogfights in the movies and the then-extremely popular Wing Commander series of games (which later upped the ante by recruiting Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, to appear in later titles in that series), X-Wing hit a sweet spot of game design. It didn't just put the player in the seat of a fighter and let them get on with it, it also gave them control over the various ships' weapons and power systems. This was a vital move as it moved the game from being an arcade shoot 'em up and instead more towards the realm of serious simulation, or at least as serious as it could be when it came to simulating fictional spaceships.
The game is played from the cockpit of one of the Rebel Alliance's iconic fighters: the X-wing superiority fighter, the A-wing fast interceptor and the Y-wing medium bomber. The B-Wing expansion (included in most editions of the game) adds the B-wing heavy bomber to the roster as well. Each ship has a different role. The A-wing is lightly-armed and armoured, is relatively fragile and has a small missile load-out but is also lightning fast and highly manoeuvrable. The Y-wing is slow and lumbering, but has hardier shields and armour, a large warhead magazine and has a secondary ion cannon which can disable enemy ships rather than destroying them. The X-wing falls between, being fairly fast and having a reasonable torpedo payload, but is also quite manoeuvrable and its four laser cannons make it an excellent dogfighter.
Each fighter has three energy systems that the player needs to manage: engines, weapons and shields. Keeping your weapons charged is necessary if you want to fire them, shields need to be kept up (or recharged after being hit) if you don't want to explode and the engines need to be charged to allow you to move fast. This sounds complicated but in practice all that is needed is two buttons which control how much power is diverted from the engines to the other systems (along with a third for rapidly dumping power from one system to another). This adds a more tactical element to the game, since you can retreat from nasty fights (by dumping all power to the engines and speeding clear), recharge your shields and weapons and then rejoin the fray. As the game continues and you gain additional ranks, you also gain the ability to give commands to wingmen in battle. Some later, complex engagements depend on your forces engaging several enemies at once. This is all handled through some pretty logical and instinctive keyboard commands.
The latest version of the game allows you to play in two flavours. The original 1993 version of the game has much more primitive graphics but better music which adapts to the changing fortunes of the battle. It also allows you to play with a mouse. The 1998 version has vastly superior graphics but a simple looping music track. It is also only playable with a joystick or gamepad. I prefer the latter for the stronger visuals, but some swear by the original.
Almost twenty-two years on from its original release, X-Wing holds up remarkably well. The gameplay is fast, enjoyable and surprisingly deep. The game's systems are relatively primitive - the energy balancing and wingman mechanics are handled through just a few button presses each - but in combination with one another provide a variety of different responses to dire situations. Dogfights are fast and furious, but the game does a good job of providing you the information you need to manage even complicated situation effectively. All in all, the game has withstood the test of time very well.
There are, however, several problems. One of these is that it's simply not as good as its sequels. X-Wing feels like a prototype for a style of game only perfected in the later TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, particularly mission structure and in-mission story events. The storyline is fairly bare-bones (all of the character stuff is handled in the manual and strategy guide) and missions tend to become fairly predictable, especially towards the end of the game. Although there is a reasonable variety of craft on hand to both control and fight, X-Wing has the smallest roster of ships in any of the games and it won't be long before you have seen all the game has to offer on that front. The game also arguably fails to live up to its billing of allowing you to recreate the iconic X-wing vs TIE Fighter battles from the first film: all too often you are controlling a fragile A-wing or lumbering Y-wing and fighting Imperial Gunboats (which are more durable than TIEs due to their shields). Enemy AI is also not fantastic in this game, with the computer only having a small number of manoeuvres it can pull off which rapidly become predictable. Most irritatingly, whilst the game unleashes the main Star Wars fanfare when you've fulfilled your objectives, it doesn't provide any such notification for a mission failure. Concluding a half-hour mission only to find the ship you were escorting got blown up ten minutes ago and you need to start again is not fun.
That isn't to condemn the game fully. It's shorter and more focused than its sequels, and its opening tour of duty serves as a reasonable introduction to the series and its mechanics. It's also surprising how fully-formed the compelling gameplay of the series is in this first title
X-Wing (***½) is available now on PC from GoG. The GoG release includes both the 1993 and 1998 versions of the game, along with the game manual and strategy guide. Both expansions, Imperial Pursuit and B-Wing, are also included. Its immediate sequel, TIE Fighter, is also available now with the multiplayer-focused X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and the much more epic conclusion to the series, X-Wing Alliance, due to follow soon.
GoG have teamed up with LucasArts to re-release the classic space combat sims X-Wing and TIE Fighter. The games will be available from GoG within the next day.
Released in 1993, X-Wing was a blatant attempt by LucasArts to cash in on the success of Chris Roberts's Wing Commander series by deploying the heavy firepower of the Star Wars universe. Employing then-cutting-edge 3D graphics and a finely-tuned power balancing mechanic, X-Wing managed to be better than its rival and was a superb - if extremely tough - game. Released a year later, TIE Fighter was even better, with a gripping storyline casting the player as an ordinary pilot unfortunately employed by the bad guys.
The series continued in 1997 with the multiplayer-focused X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, although it did feature an excellent, story-based expansion called Balance of Power. In 1999 the series concluded with the epic X-Wing Alliance.
At this stage, only the original X-Wing and TIE Fighter are being re-released from the series. Both games have been updated to work with modern PCs and the GoG editions include both the original versions and their 1998 re-releases, which are the same but use the much more advanced graphics engine from X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. X-Wing will include both its expansions (Imperial Pursuit and B-Wing) whilst TIE Fighter will include its Defender of the Empire expansion.
Both games are excellent and I can recommend getting them both. However, they require joysticks (or, at the very least, gamepads) to play properly.
In additional news, LucasArts classics Sam and Max Hit the Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Knights of the Old Republic are likewise being re-released tomorrow. Knights of the Old Republic is highly recommended, as the previous PC version required a little bit of tinkering to get working properly (its sequel generally works absolutely fine). This version should work with modern graphics cards and operating systems out of the box.
GoG have said that they will ultimately be releasing thirty LucasArts titles over the coming months, suggesting that the overwhelming bulk of the LucasArts archive will eventually be available.
Rumourville: PS3 turn-based classic Valkyria Chronicles is also, curiously, getting a PC release many years after the original release.
