
No love for SW: Knights of the Old Republic?
Star Wars - there was no 'A New Hope' or 'Episode IV' back then - shot onto cinema screens on 25 May 1977, which means the franchise celebrates its 35th birthday today. A day for celebration, then, that might be enough of an excuse for you to revisit our Star Wars gift guide and snap up some Tatooine tat, much to the dismay of …
No Love for:
1. Tie Fighter - with all due respect the Imperial incarnation of the original X-wing classic was way better than the rebel one. You should not underestimate the power of the dark side (especially if you manage 60k point scores from some of the more complex missions). In fact, after the original Tie Fighter the Tie Fighter vs X-wing installment came as "downer" (though in a hindsight I simply did not have a proper machine to play it).
2. Rebellion. One of the most complex RTS-es ever (if played properly at max complexity or human against human). I still play it from time to time in a virtualbox on an XP which I keep only for that purpose (Tactical mode unfortunately breaks under Wine). Compared to that Galactic Battlegrounds was an outright joke.
Episode I: pod Racer
i loved that game how you could go at full speed around corners side ways and some big jumps as well but plenty ways to mess up and only end up with one engine if you clipped an wall or corner
to bad the lame coders locked it so you can only play it on an video card below Nvidia MX4 card (something like that )and drivers that are 2 numbers long did not work with the 100 Nvidia drivers
Total agree, Tie Fighter was far better than X-wing. X-wing always made it feel like it was you and your co-pilot against an entire army of Tie's whilest in Tie Fighter that was you!
Also no mention of Battlefront???? Battlefront 2 was the best starwars game ever! It had everything!!! There is nothing better than taking out an entire army with an AT-AT walker!
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why there were never any further outings for the space flight sim Star Wars games after, I think, Rebel Alliance. I used to love the dogfights in X-Wing and Tie Fighter games and the stories were usually pretty solid, too. Definitely a place for them in the marketplace these days.
> why there were never any further outings for the space flight sim Star Wars games after, I think, > Rebel Alliance. I used to love the dogfights in X-Wing and Tie Fighter games and the stories
> were usually pretty solid, too. Definitely a place for them in the marketplace these days.
Because, I think, rebel Alliance is where Lucas Arts began to screw up very badly.
It was full of bugs and missions that couldn't complete, geez, what a load of bollocks,
even after the last patch. I still have it, but this was the last Lucas Arts product I ever purchased.
Company went straight to the toilet drain as far as I'm concerned, after that terrible game.
Tie Fighter was the last one really good from Lucas Arts, indeed superior to X-Wing.
Lucas Arts is history now, good history, but history.
There were missions which would not complete in both Tie Fighter and X-wing.
If you were good enough to knock out some of the key mainline ships (IIRC the STD Invincible in X-Wing) on one of the recon or early missions there was no way to complete the campaign because the ship was not there for the key mission against it. Ditto for one of the frigates.
If memory serves me right there was a calamari cruiser annoyance somewhere in Tie Fighter that had the same problem.
Now what level of skill, patience and crazyness it takes to take out an escorted imperial star destroyer all alone in a X-Wing (or god forbid Y-Wing) to trigger the bug.... That is another story...
Never hit that bug - I must have destroyed the so-called Invincible half a dozen times in the same storyline.
The STD Badi Dea was a bit tougher - Relentless waves of TFs, TDs & TBs. If you destroyed 5 out the 6 of each squad, the last would suicide so a new wave could spawn.
And one STD would hyperspace out once you knocked its shield generators down. Tried it with a Y-Wing, but never had time to disable it with Ions
Still, 16 out of 18 (I think) ain't bad.
But Tie Fighter bored me. Too much defending stupid allies, useless wingmen, not enough shooting everything that moves.
What no Star Wars Galaxies, that was actually a great game before Sony/Lucas screwed us all over?
Good timing though as the SWG Emulator Project is just launching it's Alpha phase of the code, most of the basic game is back, a few professions are still missing and balance is being tweaked. But the game is still very playable and getting 1000 people online most nights now.
Visit swgemu.com to come back to the game again.
The simplicity of this title actually made it quite addictive. As for the pod racing game being based on events in the film, I think you will find the events in the film were actually designed around making money from a racing game. Loves money, the Lucas does!
I second your praise for "Empire Strikes Back" on the Atari VCS (2600). I still distinctly remember begging my mother to buy me that game when I first saw it on a "clearance" shelf at a Sears outlet store back in the 1980's. To my father's dismay my mother caved in and bought it for me, and it became one of my all-time favorite games for that console. Man, I played the heck out of that game while I was growing up! Some of my friends and I were also extremely addicted to X-Wing for MS-DOS and its two expansion packs, "Imperial Pursuit" and "B-Wing." And I can't even tell you how many quarters I pumped into the Atari Star Wars arcade game over the years, especially once I discovered that there was one that was located at the local late-night Mexican restaurant that was a couple blocks from my college dorm room!
Yeah, Star Wars was the best, at least until the late 1990's came and George Lucas decided that he was going to create "special" editions, prequels, and generally just screw with everything to drain the pockets of us fans. I wouldn't have minded so much if he had created some *good* movies from which to do it with, but alas we got Greedo shooting first and Episodes I through III. *sigh*
I definitely want to second (sixth?) the comments on Tie Fighter, whihc improved on the already good X-Wing, but what about Dark Forces: Jedi Knight? admittedly not the first FPS for Star Wars, but a terriffic game, goof FPS, getting to properly wield a lightsaber AND force powers for the first time, choice of light and dark paths throughout the game, etc. etc.
Lego Star Was is just awesome and I am 36. Has had me buy every lego game going and there are now a lot, can't wait for LOTR.
But Empires at War? Knights of the Old Republic.
Battlefront as well was okay - bit odd at times. Republic commando was a much better (if shorter game)
And I am glad you didn't mention force commander. That was awful.
And there was that planet busting one which was vastly too complicated but awesome called start wars supremacy (rebellion in the states)
I preferred X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter - all the joy of X-Wing and TIE Fighter, but with a friend to fly in formation and inspect freighters with. I remember firing up XVTED when I was a nipper and constructing massive battles to play. Given that it only allowed 64 ships in the map at once, some were so large that they would always play randomly depnding on which ships died first. Plus the Balance of Power introduced the Super Star Destroyer...
Thinks its a pretty good round up. I do think KoTR should have made the list as a lot of you commented.
Pleased to see a mention of Star Wars Galaxy (SWG) by another poster which actually was a fantastic game until they decided to dumb it down and make it like WOW. It had a few issues (like medic + anything was too powerful) but it really didnt matter.
My son is a Star Wars fan from early years. At the age of around 6 he was playing Battleground which to this day still brings a smile on my face.
Empire Strikes back also brings back fond memories. Not that actual game but Jeff Minter's parody game, "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" on the C64.
I see they omitted the other Star Wars arcade game, "Return of the Jedi". Actually its fine they left it out as it was pants.
I cannot begin to imagine how much of my precious youth I poured into X-Wing and its expansion packs. It must amount to months. Several joysticks were broken in the process. Easily one of the best PC-Games ever. Only Wing Commander Privateer could finally lure us away from it.
Then you had to scrape together your last pennies to get the fastest CD-ROM you could afford for Rebel Assault – which meant double, triple or quad speed and actually made a hell of a difference.
I also liked Return of the Jedi for Amiga, although it had shoddy graphics and was ultra repetetive. But: you got to ride a speederbike.
It's so good a game I've played it numerous times and installed the high resolution models and texture pack.
At the time Dark Forces was a great game and was one of the last Lucasarts games to feature iMuse (the musical score that adapted to the game action) but Jedi Knight's game design was awesome. It also had a light sabre which emitted light - Jedi Knight Outcast looked an awful lot better, but the engine couldn't support held light sources, and the level design wasn't as good (have never finished it, mind, I fail every time Luke Skywalker shows up).
KOTOR is also fantastic and should definitely have been included.
I'm not sure if it merits inclusion, but the Gamecube had a few decent Star Wars games. They're a bit hard though.
The best is Knights of the Old Republic (Not the MMO)
KOTOR 2 could have been so much better (You can mod it to be mostly finished now) I would have been really happy if they churned out more of the same with the same frequency as stuff like Call of Duty.
Dark Forces 2 : Jedi Knight / Jedi Academy was allot better than the first one.
Jedi Power Battles on the Dreamcast was great 2 player.
The Star Wars game I ever played was :
Return of the Jedi on the BBC Micro - I think I played it before I had even seen the films.
(I had not seen the Arcade game either).
I *loved* the Star Wars vector-graphics one. It generally cost more though, bcos it was a booth and not a stand-one. Until it got a bit old though, and then most arcades moved it to somewhere down the back and dropped the price, at which point it became a total bargain.
Also X-Wing consumed far more time of my time than was sensible when I was at uni.
Shame they didn't mention any of the Doom WADs/mods though. Some of those were pretty cool.
Hmm no mention of Jedi Knight II, methinks this reporter hasn't got a complete SW game collection, although the original RoTJ, and ESB games are almost as rare as rocking horse poo.
Battlefront II was okay but not that great, Republic Commando was better and didn't require vehicles or classes to get an objective completed (needed a heck of a lot of ammo though).
X-wing was good and it was my first PC game, but Tie Fighter was better.
I'd go with Jedi Knight Dark forces II, and its bolt on Mysteries of the Sith. I was off work recovering from a big operation and I spent weeks playing these. I still get nightmares on the MOTS level where you had to swim underwater for what seemed, and usually was, an impossible length of time. Of course it got easier when i found the cheats. One of the best things about it was that you really had to think about how to solve things.
OTOH Battle for Naboo which no-one has mentioned was absolutely dreadful.
Dear Lucas Arts I would pay for an updated Dark Forces with modern graphics quality.