[HN Gopher] X-Wing is video gaming's Greek Fire
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X-Wing is video gaming's Greek Fire
Author : serverlessmom
Score : 27 points
Date : 2024-01-24 22:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aftermath.site)
(TXT) w3m dump (aftermath.site)
| kelnos wrote:
| A million times yes. I spent hundreds -- maybe even thousands --
| of hours of my teens and some time in college playing X-Wing (and
| X-Wing v. TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance) that I probably
| should have spent outside playing with friends or attending
| classes.
|
| It was such an amazing game. I begged my parents to buy me a
| joystick so I could play it properly, after breaking a mouse
| attempting to play it that way (frantically sliding the mouse and
| lifting it and dropping it down to slide it again took its toll
| after a while). I keep meaning to pick up a new joystick so I can
| play it again properly. You can technically use a gamepad, but
| there are so many functions on the keyboard, too many to map to
| gamepad buttons, and gamepads usually require two hands. Using a
| touchpad sounds painful.
|
| I was even part of the modding community; I remember writing
| (with the collaboration of someone else I met online) a program
| in Visual Basic(!) that could binary-edit the X-Wing Alliance
| .exe so you could do... gosh, things I don't even remember. I
| think we called it XWAExeEd or something like that. This was in
| the very early days of Google, and I'm not even sure how we
| hosted or distributed it at the time; I can't find any references
| to it on the web, at least. I have a ton of old backups from very
| old computers from that era, need to sift through those sometime.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| X-Wing required a joystick.
| bradgranath wrote:
| But you could use a mouse. It was a totally different,
| extremely horrible game if you did, tho.
| kelnos wrote:
| Huh, weird. I just launched XW, XvT, and XWA via Steam and
| you're right; they all bailed out immediately saying a
| joystick was required. So I'm definitely misremembering
| something. I do recall breaking a mouse on a game where a
| joystick was recommended, but it must have been something
| older.
|
| Or back then I'd found some sort of hack/mod that allowed you
| to play via mouse; not sure if that's plausible, though.
|
| I found a random Steam forum post where someone claims they
| played the original XvT without a joystick, not sure if
| that's a reliable anecdote, though.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Yup. One of the first games I ever played. I got Squadrons in the
| hope of reliving some of the joy and the flight mechanics are so
| fucking trash, the whole game is really.
|
| WoW Classic is also in a very similar category. I recently
| started playing again and it's mind boggling how much better the
| game is than anything we've had before or since (I might argue
| that BC was on par, and I never played Ultima and EQ). I think
| it's especially telling to try SoD (a modernized version of
| classic) and find it so deeply disappointing that the team is
| making it bad in the exact same ways that they made retail bad.
| It truly feels like they have no understanding of what makes the
| game so compelling in the first place.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Wandering around Shadowglen, mouth agape, when I first tried
| the WoW open beta load test was indeed simply mind-blowing in a
| way I don't think Blizzard or any other studio managed to
| recapture.
|
| It feels like they chased "epic" to the detriment of "magical".
| lantastic wrote:
| If you want to relive some the joy of X-Wing, X-Wing Alliance
| Update (XWAU) modernizes the XWA game (including VR support).
| For TIE Fighter afficionados, there is even a TIE Fighter Total
| Conversion project that rebuilds entire TIE Fighter campaign in
| XWA, including a reimagined campaign that takes advantage of
| the engine improvements in the mods to build larger
| engagements. Definitely took me back to that summer spent at
| the computer with my trusty Wingman Extreme.
| jemmyw wrote:
| I looks really cool, I wish I had a way to run it on a mac.
| twoodfin wrote:
| To be clear, _Tie Fighter_ takes everything good about _X-Wing_
| and makes it markedly better: Graphics, gameplay, mission design,
| story, ...
|
| But I don't mean to detract from the author's point that the
| original developers caught lightning in a bottle in a way that
| hasn't been replicated since.
| kelnos wrote:
| I never got into TIE Fighter for some reason... I guess when I
| was that age, I didn't want to be the bad guy. Maybe it's time
| to revisit it!
| kaidon wrote:
| The TIE Fighter animated intro sequence is forever etched into
| my memory. I watched the whole thing at least 50% of the times
| I fired up the game before playing. What an absolute beast of a
| game. Plus the dynamic music (iMuse) was just so damn cool.
| With LucasArts, you always knew you were going to have an
| amazing ~game~ experience.
| snake_plissken wrote:
| I've always held TIE Fighter as the pinnacle. The story is epic
| and the dog fighting is very intense, not only early on when
| you're in an unshielded TIE Fighter (going up against TIE
| Interceptors and the Escort Shuttles with that rear facing turbo
| laser) but also later on when you are in a TIE Advanced going up
| against TIE Defenders.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Meh. Xwing and those old space fighters games were fun but mostly
| rough. I played nearly all of them through WC Prophecy. Things
| got better as quality of life improvements were developed. Not
| sure why there is all the hate on later games. Nostalgia is
| likely a big factor. Or maybe I'm just not a space shooter
| connoisseur.
| pbj1968 wrote:
| I felt like Squadrons mostly nailed it. It was $2 recently on all
| platforms.
| ozten wrote:
| Squadrons in a VR headset is a premium X-Wing experience.
| bradgranath wrote:
| Everyone plays with thumbsticks. The only people dumb enough to
| try to control a real vehicle with humans in it with dual
| thumbsticks were disintegrated somewhere in the vicinity of the
| Titanic wreck last year.
|
| XBox and Playstation killed the joystick, and now flight
| mechanics in all games suck.
| kelnos wrote:
| Not to mention you can't play X-Wing without using the
| keyboard. Since gamepads usually require two hands, it gets
| really awkward to do things like re-balance your shields, power
| allocation, etc. while trying to steer the fighter.
| jemmyw wrote:
| When I was a kid and this game and Tie Fighter were around I
| got a joystick with 100 buttons/controls on it.
| kelnos wrote:
| Didn't even know such a thing existed. We could only afford
| a pretty basic model (3-axis, 2 button) when I was a kid.
| jemmyw wrote:
| 100 was an exaggeration, I'm pretty sure it was one of
| these https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i75k_i_-240 Gravis
| phoenix with 46 programmable buttons.
| sorum wrote:
| > Nobody in their right mind is going to say the crusty ol'
| Baldur's Gate II is better than the theatrical extravaganza that
| is Baldur's Gate III.
|
| Them's fighting' words
| stonith wrote:
| The RTS example is even worse - Starcraft: Brood War and Age of
| Empires 2 are still unmatched in terms of multiplayer. The
| Relic games he mentions are fun but they're not exactly
| timeless classics and Relic have generally struggled to balance
| their games.
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