WOO!! I loved these games
The flight controls were amazingly responsive and the battles felt so huge!
X-Wing got me started, but I soon goot TIE Fighter, which for me is still one of the best space combat sims EVER MADE!
It's got it all - The graphics (were) great at the time, the controls were pretty much perfect (Responsive, accurate), but the clinchers were the Story and the Sound!!
The Story was classic - You start off as some nobody guarding a backwater space-station in a friggin TIE Fighter (2-hit kill!), but eventually rise up through the ranks, helping the empire against it's enemies and surviving a deadly conspiracy (I REALLY hated that Harkov guy after he stuck me in a bloody unshielded T|I then told me to clear a MINEFIELD!!!!), until you are kicking ass in a TIE Defender, and then a Missile Boat (The two most sweetly over-powered craft ever made
SLAM!)
The sound is the final thing that made those games better than anything else out there. The almost authentic lasers and R2-beeps being flung every which way were damned good, but the MUSIC!!
Unlike the tired recycled crap out these days, the TIE Fighter MIDI music was actually CUSTOM WRITTEN by Clint Bajakian, and he did a great job - it actually SOUNDED like John Williams himself had written it - the scores ranged right the way from calm and peaceful to the full oh-****-we're-gonna-die atmosphere, and all with a very Imperial flavour to it.
And on top of that, Clint's masterwork was melded with LEC's awesome iMUSE tech - At the time this was the ONLY dynamic music system, and it rocked!
Calm peaceful music while on patrol, then a rebel cruiser jumps in far away and the music picks up a bit, then it does a mini-jump and appears right next to you, and the music segues seamlessly into the adrenaline pumping oh-****-we're-gonna-die mode
More games need iMUSE. FS2 had a semi-kind of iMUSE but it wasn't as good as TIE Fighter's because it reacted far too slowly and as nowhere near as seamless. Well, to be fair, it'd be VERY hard to make music as seamless using WAV audio.
I've got the original X-Wing, the original TIE Fighter, and also the original X-Wing Enhanced Collector's CD (Includes B-Wing and Imperial Pursuit), and the original TIE Fighter Collector's CD (TIE Fighter & Defender of the Empire)
X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter was pretty rocking as a multiplayer game, and the mission editor that this Australian guy called Troy made called XvTEd was ****ing awesome (It was, and still is WAAAY easier (and better) to use than FRED. The Event driven systems are a lot more reliable and easier to use than FS2's sexp's, but it's not as flexible. I managed to make some great missions in it 'tho that I gave up trying to re-create in FS2.)
The X-Wing/TIE Fighter collectors CD that used the XvT engine was a bloody travesty - It was one of the most blatant money-grubbing hack-jobs I'd ever seen!
It felt like the missions were run through a (buggy) convertor, without any thought for game balance. In XvT, acceleration and laser travelling speed were a MUCH faster than in the originals but they were not altered in this hack-job, and the careful game balance in the originals went right out of the window.
And to top it off, they dumped the iMUSE for a ****ty repetitive CD Audio track!!!
Luckily, they kinda redeemed themselves with X-Wing Alliance, but it was too-little too-late. Top-notch story, and the iMUSE was put back, but the 3D cockpit was a pain in the arse and the control system was totally screwed over.
I still bought it, but FreeSpace 1 had come out earlier and blew XWA out of the proverbial water. FreeSpace 2 just finished it off with a few BFGreens
And that is basically my space combat sim history
My main regret is I've never played all the way through any of the Wing Commander series. I can't help thinking I missed some great stuff...
