Another fun fact: one of the Rogue Squadron books (I think it was '96's "Rogue Squadron" by Michael Stackpole) mentions a character training in a simulator, recreating one of the very difficult missions from the X-Wing game. I remember reading the book and having sympathetic flashbacks for the characters. That one was a killer.
Yep, turns out Jedi are only mediocre pilots after all. The mission was hard, but the key was to master the long range "jitter shot", when the targets are so far away that they don't lock up under your crosshair properly, and you watch the laser lock indicator rapidly cycle blue/green because the polygons making up the TIEs were being recalculated. Switch to single link and blaze away, with practice you could kill entire incoming 3-ship formations before they even fired at you, giving you the time to chase the carrier dumping new groups on the map, and keep the medical frigate safe relatively easily
@@talltroll7092 The hitbox for the Ties isn't polygonal, it's actually rectangular. (A world aligned cube.) The trick is to ignore the Ties, and focus on the bombers. Engaging the frigate will allow the bombers to reach their target. You need to take out wave after wave of bombers until the mission completes.
I didn't have X-Wing, but I had Tie Fighter then got Tie Fighter/X-Wing where you could fly both sides. The multiplayer was awesome on Xwing/tiefighter..... I remember this Russian guy I played with...... he always flew a bomber, and "fly" isn't the word for it..... he pretty much sat in one stationary spot and no matter WHAT you did.... he was facing you unloading his shit at you..... it was crazy shit lol
@@rustykoenig3566 I couldn't stand X-wing vs Tie multiplayer. I jump in, launch all missiles and kill them. They jump in shoot all missiles at me, I die. Then back to me jumping in and doing the same. If you didn't do this, they would and you lose. It was just too poorly executed but a nice thought.
@@francischambless5919 I didn't have much of a problem with it.... There was this one Russian guy that I never could beat... and he used a tie bomber and literally just sat stationary or a VERY slow speed and basically used his bomber as a missile turret. Its the only "strategy" I never beat and he was the only one I seen ever do that particular strategy. Other than that, I took down missile boats all the time :)
While you didn't mention Top Ace I did see him pop up in your video. Refresher for the youngins: the game allowed you to assign other pilots from your roster to any allied fighters in the mission. So I could take my brother's pilot from his own campaign, and include him as a wingman in my own. I think it was the first expansion Imperial Pursuit that added Top Ace, a supposedly superior AI squadron mate that performed better. Now, your wingmen could get shot down in a mission and possibly die. If so, they would be unavailable from then on. This included Top Ace. So the instructions described how you could resurrect Top Ace if he happened to die. I'm not kidding, it actually required that you exit the game and go to the DOS prompt and reload the Top Ace file manually by copying the Top Ace master file from one folder and pasting it into the folder containing the roster of pilots. So one time I went to reload Top Ace and I accidentally misspelled it Toip Ace when I pasted it. I loaded up the game and find Top Ace is still dead but now I have a new pilot named Toip Ace. That's when I realized you could have an infinite number of Top Aces as long as you renamed the file as you pasted it. So I immediately made an entire squadron of them. I have no idea if they were any better or not, but at the age of 15 I felt like an elite hacker for discovering this.
Last playthrough I did I duplicated top ace about ten times and when one died I resurrected them manually. There's a byte to alter in the file that says if they're dead or captured
my family did not have a windows/DOS based computer until 1996, so I got X-Wing a few years late, then a few weeks later, long before I had completed it I found the excelent novel Star Wars: X-Wing: Rogue Squadron (despite not being canon any more the X-Wing series is still well worth a read, I've had to purchase second coppies of them because I wore out the origionals), so I duplicated my topace save 12 times, and renamed it as the entire roster from the books, I had Rogue Squadron covering me, albeit a post Endor Rogue Squadron in a pre Yavin campaign.
You had to go into DOS mode and copy the top ace file to any pilot. Thus you cloned him and he never died. And you had all wingmen being top aces ... Cheesy, but it worked.
I loved the power management: you had to peel off from attacks and recharge your lasers and shields. Sometimes you had to divert all power to your rear shields while you were doing it.
iMuse made Xwing, Tie Fighter and Dark Forces great. When the first 2 re-released with looping, non-interactive soundtracks the games lost part of their soul. It was also helpful to hear the musical cues when a batch of friendly or enemy starfighters or capital ships arrived. I'd take the reduced midi sound quality over the CD sound quality any day to keep the interactive music.
@@Frontmanfrg I guess I'm the only one that (on the rare occasion that I did play with music on) would prefer the orchestral score. MIDI just sounds so primitive to me and I absolutely cannot stand it. I never needed musical cues to know when something arrived - I mean, the game tells you if a friendly or hostile ship is entering the area via a "New Craft Alert" text cue. How do you need anything else?
Oh goodness can people ever just appreciate old Star Wars without bashing Disney or the prequels (or can people just appreciate any old thing without bashing newer things)?
@@adrienlaubard I had to use the guide book, which was really well-written. I also made batch files to backup and restore my pilot in case of failed missions. I still have "Wedge" on a 3 1/2" floppy somewhere. Tie Fighter was a much more user-friendly game, but getting all the way through X-Wing was more satisfying.
@@davidvincent380 Holy Shit!!! Yes please!! I'll be figuring out how to install all that on my next day off. :D In the mean time, I hope they fixed the audio glitch that plagues the game on newer systems... All that beautiful John Williams music, and I had to turn the music off because it would only play for a couple of minutes before getting stuck in a loop which you couldn't get out of without restarting the game. :(
@@c182SkylaneRG Haha the infamous music freeze bug. It was the last bug remaining for years (because apparently and surprisingly it was hard to reproduce). And finally it has been fixed only a few months ago by the talented coders over xwupgrade : www.xwaupgrade.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=12668&p=171028&hilit=music+freeze+hook#p171028 Look at what they have done of a 20 years old game : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9BBFVMD-PrU.html
3:00 Wow, SWOTL is game I remember I was playing back in the 90's and I still have the German and US menu music in my head, but hell I could no longer recall the name. I have never spotted the similarities with XWING at the time I was playing it. Thanks for giving back this piece of memory! :D
X Wing is almost 30 years old and will play like a champ on a old 486 DX33 with a 16 bit soundblaster...It was the best Star Wars game ever made, I had 2 roomates flunk out of college because of this game and Falcon 3.0...
My preferred config: all power to weapons, all 4 guns linked, and whatever was left over goes to engines. Manually dump gun charge into shields as needed for repairs.
There was also a mission where if you kill everything and hang around, a pirate frigate jumps in like 100K away. You can fly over there and watch it do a rendezvous with a shuttle or something. You can kill it too if you want. X-Wing was the most fun I ever had playing a video game. I'm very grateful to the creators - real Star Wars fans!
hi, Another fun fact about X-Wing. In the book named "Rogue Squadron", The first mission Lt Horn is doing in simulation is the replica of the first mission from X-Wing. And all Combats systems are described in the game play style (Energy balancing, laser, Engine, Shields, Fireing range) Also, most of the battle ships encountered througt the books are from the game. Transports, Golan Stations, Lancier frigate, interdictor etc... all from the games !
One thing you missed. The 1994 CD-ROM version added six new historical missions that don't earn medals. And a bug made that last bonus mission possibly unwinnable because sometimes the Cruiser you're protecting can't make it to hyperspace before the mission clock runs out.
Bonus, missions, yes. As for the bug you mention, that's something new to running the game in Dosbox. the game ties capital ship speed to framerate, and when the CPU cycles are set too high in DosBox, weird things happen. Turrets not firing, that sort of thing.
I got my first PC when I was 10 from my parents. It had only two games, X-Wing and Command & Conquer. Now they are both getting remastered. Couldn’t ask for more 🥰
I only played though the original X=-Wing but it was absolutely superb, and quite incredible when you consider what it ran on and how small the software was. I still have the inch-thick book that was published which gave a complete walkthrough, as soem of the missions were extremely challenging and required the player to do precise tactics. I seem to recall that was one where you had to prevent every last bomber getting through to your hoem base ship, and an even worse one where you had to rescue Admiral Ackbar! Eventually I got all the ribbons and medals and it felt like a real accomplishment!
I still have my diskettes for XWing and for Tie Fighter. These games drove me to upgrade my 486DX to a Pentium, max out my RAM to something like 32MB, add a Microsoft flight stick, fiddle with SoundBlaster and Adlib cards, and lay down serious cash for a desk-hogging 19 inch CRT. I played them so much that my wife bought me headphones so she didn't have to listen to "incoming missile" every 2 seconds.
Item 12 - Hidden trench: Said trench is exactly 60 kilometres away from the Nav Bouy. Just checked. The turbolaser turrets there are a trillion times stronger. Four hits and you're dogmeat!!!!!!
This game represented my early childhood, especially the floppy disk version of X-wing. I played it in a old and bold 486 processor pc.... maaaan was it slow xD
The 5.25" disks were floppy disks, because they were literally floppy. The 3.5" disks were sometimes called "diskettes" because they looked so much smaller even though they held more data. Of course they were floppy too, just the floppy parts were contained inside the hard plastic shells. And of course some people even called the 5.25" disks "diskettes" because they were comparing them to the 8" disks that came before that, though all of them are "floppy" on the inside.
One of my favorite things about the original version was that you could create pilots and assign them as your co-pilots during missions. The game kept track of their stats and ranks. It was fun to try to keep them alive and see how many kills they could rack up.
I never understood why these series of games had that strange flight mechanic when holding the joystick left/right. Yet once I got used to it I never thought much about it. For those whom never played: Moving the joystick evenly right or left didn't move the craft directly right or left - instead the craft would slowly roll in the direction chosen and it would slightly yaw in that direction while also pitching down. Pretty much the best way to dog fight was to center the enemies radar icon and just pull back/hard 'climb' regardless of it's position.
I had ALL of the series and its expensions, as said in video its regaurded (in memory) as one of my favorite flight sims ever rivaling the original Red Baron game. I even had a full Thrust master Joystick/Throttle/rudder set and a "emperial pilot" statue at my dedicated PC used just for playing these sims. I would go NUTS if someone released a updated version of the game
At the time, I played X-Wing like everyone does, on their computer with dinky computer speakers. I was visiting some friends, and one had the crazy idea of hooking his computer up to his stereo system. He played X-Wing, and I was changed forever by the bass I had never heard.
Awesome video! I know it's a few years old now, but it's great! One thing I always wondered was how come in X-Wing it's the TIE Interceptor that escorts shuttles, and not regular TIE Fighters like in the films? Were TIE Fighters harder to animate or something? This question has plagued me for about 30 years!
It would be just as easy to animte TFs. They didn't seem to use TF in cutscenes. Maybe they didn't like the 3d model they had? You can see it in the strat guide, and it's kinda sucky.
That makes sense - thank you! Also another thing I realised whilst watching this video was how rubbish I was at X-Wing. I did pretty well in TIE Fighter and X-Wing: Alliance, but I don't think I ever got particular far in any of the campaign missions, so I had no idea that Mon Mothma does a saucy wink when she gives you a medal. You never got that with the Emperor in TIE Fighter!
@@Raistlen007 Most of the new stuff for me was the pre-release demo graphics, SWOTL inspirations for later games (I never got around to playing SWOTL, but I'm aware of its legacy), and the Historical voice files for Ackbar.
I noticed that in one of the missions there was a freighter called Shantipole, the Shantipole project was one of West End Games adventure modules for the old d6 RPG they did
TIE FIGHTER EASTER EGG: In a particular mission after all the goals have been completed, if you hang around long enough in the area, a transport hyperspaces in.....when you ID it, it's a STARSPEEDER 3000 carrying "Tourists". That's right, tourists from Disneyland from STAR TOURS. You can either blast them into a million pieces or let them jump to lighspeed and escape
One of the ways the original games are superior to the current x wings squadrons is that the mission Heidi be a had important details that you felt like you needed to know. And missions that were not necessarily about shorting everything in sight. Where as squadrons just seems to gloss over it and dumps you into the scene where you feel less in control.
I loved X-Wing Alliance, it was my favourite. I created custom battles that recreated the big battles from the X-Wing novels about rogue and wraith squadron.
The Force is strong with this one! - Nicely done! What a legendary game series and legacy. This was a fascinating history and dare I say well-researched, excellent job Ras! Back in the day (2000) I remember getting my first joystick and combat flight simulator game, soon to follow I would discover X-Wing, and also Tie Fighter! It was amazing. The game was especially immersive for me because Star Wars was life for us as kids ahaha! Aww nostalgia. These games were SO fun to play once you got a feel for the controls and gameplay. I'm going to have to give them a spin again, see how they hold up. It's really cool GOG has preserved this classic for all to play! X-Wing '94 version for the win!
_'X-Wing'_ 98 gets *_WAY_* too much flak, in my opinion. I played and finished it and the 2 expansions a few years ago and it was great. The graphics are good for it's time and the gameplay is fun and challenging. Most of the criticism comes from the removal of the wingmen and the audio - 2 "issues" that while unfortunate (according to some) really aren't as bad as they are made to seem. On the other hand, I think _'TIE Fighter'_ gets way too much praise compared to the other games in the series. For me, _'X-Wing'_ was much more enjoyable (though I did like TF). I hope the XWVM project is completed and released soon without any hassles from the Rat House and Kennedyfilm...
I get where you're coming from. I played XW98 too when it came out, and it was a smooth enjoyable game for the most part, especially with how much easier it is to intercept torpedoes. But I just couldn't get over the removal of the iMuse and the launch landing cutscenes which I just adore so much. The UI being so clunky and dark didn't help either. I agree somewhat about Tie Fighter. If you look at it as an evolution of X-Wing, it is really an amazing step up in every way. Graphics, nerrative, gameplay, scope. It's great. But looking back objectively at the series as a whole, Alliance is really my favorite.
OMFG! I've been trying to figure out what the game I played so very VERY long ago was.... it was Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe :O. OMFG! Decades I've been trying to figure it out! Thank you!
Check out the sequel Secret Weapons Over Normandy, made by the developers of SWOTL and X Wing Alliance. Its more of an arcade game but its very enjoyable and features some great missions (also features an Xwing and Tie Fighter as easter eggs)
I spent so many hours on these games like on no others. I still have the X-Wing CD, in my bedroom in my hometown. Too bad I don't even have a cd player anywhere anymore. I always wished there was a online thing to play this game with a big community and play a mission with like a hundred spaceships actually driven by human players instead of AI. PS: I've always played with the mouse only :-D
You can buy it from GoG, and it runs like a dream, even with mouse control. later games in the series, XvT, XwA, technically require a joystick but there are programs that bypass that and let you fly with a mouse with varying results. XWVM will support mouse control through and through.
Prima Games published the X-wing strategy guide in 1993. Although it wasn't printed in color, it's a pretty good guide for the game although the original didn't include the expansions. What's pretty unique about it is the story and background of Keyan Farlander, who has now become part of Star Wars lore (he was piloting the Y-wing during the segment when the Death Star was about to explode). Even more interesting is the guide is packed with CGI rendered photos, most of which had never been seen until then or since. Great memories, great video....thank you!
One of the writers of the strategy guide was Wessman, featured in this video. You can tell from the writing that they tried to explain in game behavior and other oddities the testers encountered.
@@michaelandreipalon359 : It was when Star Wars was actually good. And Timothy Zahn books expanded upon it, instead of some Hollyweird virtue-signalling Mary Sue version of it.
Bought all those editions along with the Tie Fighter series and still have the floppy disk version, all the manuals and both the Xwing and Tie fighter guides. Thanks for bringing back some fun memories of great games! If only Squadrons was half as good.
I ruined my fair share of mice. Those ball based mice were not suited for the constant picking up and dropping to get the sharp maneuver in. I ruined quite a few joysticks, though, too.... from overuse.
@@Raistlen007 yeah, glad to know I wasn't the only one. Also glad they've innovated away from those old ball mice. Thankfully I didn't wear out the joystick too.
These games were the best... but when the Thrustmaster joystick came out, they became legendary. :) The N64 game was very good as were Rogue Leader and Rebel Strike. :)
I would definitely make one. Need to gather a lot more inside info on it before that happens and right now all my focus is on xwing and will probably be there for a while yet
@@Raistlen007 I love both x-wing and tie fighter and found this video super interesting. I would absolutely support a tie fighter video. Really great stuff you did here!
Man, so many hours spent playing this game in high school and shortly after. Tie Fighter is by far my favorite after the two. The Tie Defender simply dominated anything and everything it went up against.
I loved the detail that the pilot profile ramdom choose the pilots who died in the movies, my big brother was the red leader of new hope, my other brother was Biggs And I was the pilot who crash with the star destroyer in return of jedi
Would die to see a modern remake of X-WING. I don't care how much it cost. I would buy that shit and play every single mission like I did back in the 90's.
Woow really excelente job man! That was so cool. Makes me so excited remembering those wonderful moments playing x wing campaigns and tour, identifying those freigters. Greetings
Stumbled upon this video, and it is awesome! Remember talking out all Star Destroyers in any mission, each takes about an hour to do so with TIEs all around... BTW, is there any enhancement out there that still keeps the "pilot assignment section" before we launch into a mission? I mean, a true tweaked/upgraded ORIGINAL X-Wing version of 93/94? Thanks!
You can catch the replay of my Twitch stream yesterday where I go out of my way to destroy nearly every Star Destroyer in any mission I came across. It shouldn't take an hour. Pilot selection only existed in XW93 and XW94. XWVM will also feature it, but the feature isn't in yet.
I loved this series. There was a game store that had 8 computer set ups with joystick and throttles. We would play 4 on 4 Xwing versus TIE battles on them. My favorite was the A wing!
TIE Fighter made a lot of positive UI improvements (esp to the HUD) that make going back to the original X-Wing difficult, but it's still a great game. All the games in the series were. It's a shame we'll probably never get something of that caliber ever again. At least not set in the Star Wars universe.
@@Raistlen007 TIE Fighter also included a % shield and hull indicator, knowing the ISD you have been shooting for the last 10 minutes is at 1% hull strength is a lot more useful than knowing its hull has been damaged which was all you got in any of the versions of X-Wing I played
Anyone else still enjoying them today via original hardware and or DosBox? Updated in 2024 I now have the complete series base games/add on's and all releases
I really wish there was a way to see all the old pilot profile images that were in the original game for every profile you’d make. They were a mix of images of pilots from the films themselves digitized, but also pilots mixed and matched as well, to make new or unique images. Some were aliens as I recall. I remember making as many profiles as I could just to see all the images, and it seemed like quite a few unique pilot images were available for your profiles. Btw the mundane was some of the best aspects of these games... foodstuffs as cargo, grain shipments being sabotaged, etc. I loved the immersion. I was a young teen and this game was my introduction to computers because I bought one just to play it.
Been playing TIE Fighter the past couple of weeks. for X-Wing I prefer X-Wing 94 over the 98 version just because the music is better in mission and not the Star Wars theme on a loop. Also started playing Alliance again as well.
I prefer 94 over 98 also for the music, but also for the landing/launching cutscenes, and the pilot selection feature. also, some models just look better, like the ISD and Shuttle.
30 years ago now. And the sights and sounds still transport me back to that time, even if I haven't played in decades. To just think what Star Wars could of been.
Me and my buddies would meet years after the war, grab a beer, and tell war stories from our tour of duty for the Rebell Alliance. Those were the days!
It will always be lamentable that X-Wing did not feature an interactive campaign like BoB: their Finest Hour and SWOTL though the linear campaigns were fun.
Awesome video champ. I never noticed all the non star wars caricatures on the concourse back when i was a kid. You just made me legit LoL twice in that scene when u pointed them out, thankyou!
Great video. This brings back memories when I bought my first PC in 1992 and my brother gave me this game for Christmas. I love it very much. It was 8 years later that I got the CD-ROM version of the X-Wing/TIE Fighter/X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter game. I love the flight simulators and combats. It's been years since this game was released. I hope they will re release it again on regular platforms someday.
Oh wow! I loved X-wing, was my favorite game.. at least until I played Doom :) but x-wing is still up there with Mechwarrior was my favorite simulator game.
I remember what a pain X-Wing CD was to get running. Required EMS memory, and a lot of conventional memory available (592k as I recall). As for Easter Eggs, I remember in TIE Fighter a Strike Cruiser named Lonsigar (Long Cigar). Always found that one funny.
Meow! Lots of starship names concealed Easter Eggs in the X-wing series. Here are a few: - Freighter names in the first mission: Orcim, Esorp, Arreis, Nigiro, Murtceps. Read them backwards! - A Freighter named "Diputs" in a later mission. - Star Destroyer named "Badi Dea" - Star Destroyer commander "T. Ryagain" for TIE Fighter - Interdictor "Suleu" for a TIE Fighter combat mission is a direct reference to Star Trek - The entire Sepan Civil War saga: "Dimoks" stand for democrats, "Ripoblus" stand for republicans - Corellian Transport "Geddawai" for the mission "Capture Harkov" - The Container named "THX-1138" for the "Load Base Equipment" mission is a direct reference for the George Lucas movie
I know I'm a bit late, but here's an Easter Egg in X-Wing that a lot of people don't know about. If you name your pilot a name out of the movies, like Luke, it will use a picture of that character instead of the generic pilot images.
Not quite. The game has a database of pilot portraits but the assignment of portrait to pilot is semi randomized but tied to the pilot name. A pilot named Luke for instance, selects a portrait of Biggs. a pilot named Rasi will select an A-Wing pilot.
Star wars squadrons has a decent single player but it wasn't as good as the original games. It would have been better if they had a story based missions for the multiplayer instead of the generic one they made.
I remember B-Wing yet not the first expansion. guess he wasn't really pushed as much. I played the hell out of this game and Tie Fighter back in the day. Personally I preferred Tie Fighter for same things you mentioned.
Thank you for this. I've spent hundreds of hours with all of them...it was great to see again...also the"secrets" made the whole thing special! Very nice vid. Subscribed!
Here's a little bit of an X-wing trivia: - By default, crafts with the same allegiance could not harm each other. Imperials could not harm imperials, neutrals could not harm neutrals, and rebels could not harm rebels either, with the exception of you of course. Friendly starfighters could not collide with each other either. Of course, if friendly starfighters rammed their own capital ship, or two friendly capital ships collided, they blew up. - No matter what the mission or craft was, you were always assigned to the Red squadron. - You could basically get unlimited points at every mission involving shielded crafts. Since every laser hit gives you 3 points, you can just chase a shielded craft for years racking up points. Hitting asteroids or Death Star surface counts as a miss, tho. - Space objects always counted as kills. Mines were always hostile. - If you shot unshielded crafts with ion cannons, they became destroyed, but the game still treated them as being disabled. This led to many mission fails.
Few notes because I'm pedantic: -Starfighters can die if they crash into a friendly capital ship, so a tie flying into a star destroyer and crashing will die. -when a ship comes in to dock or land in hangar it is unable to collide with the ship it is docking with -being in red squadron is a choice in the mission file, which the developers always followed. you can alter your squadron in the mission file, and your fighter will have the colors of the squad you picked, but the cockpit graphics were static bitmaps, so your A-wing will always look red from the inside. -you can technically set a mine to be on your side, it will just shoot you anyway. -Only the Ties would blow up when disabled, and that was a self destruct mechanism, which is why when the mission needed you to destroy them it didn't count as destroyed. Very very few missions required you to destroy ties while you're in an ion equipped fighter. Historical Y-Wing 3 comes to mind.
SWOTL Was one of my favorite games I would still play it if I could find my disc I still like having the manuals. The first Broderbund 1988 Star Wars game for the Commodore 64 is still fun to play. I don't think I'll ever stop flying star fighters every day.
Regarding hidden names, there was one mission, in Imperial Pursuit, if I remember correctly, the name of a star Destroyer was Badi Deah. I only know that because in one particular session, I would destroy every and any star Destroyer in every single mission regardless of what I flew. I lost track of how many I that was,, but I got nearly 1K of TIE Fighter kills. So... a lot.
Excellent video, as it actually does include stuff most people wouldn't know! X-Wing is easily my all-time favourite DOS game and I now can't wait to set up a period-correct system on which to listen to the MT-32 soundtrack.
Excellent video. I lost count of how many hours I played this game many years ago. I got all the budgets minus 1. The one for the B wing. I did not use tricks to pass the training phase to get the mark of the fighter on my shoulder. I think the maximun level the game records was between 11 or 12. I can not remember the exact number. I was able to reach higher level but the machine never put higher than 12 (assuming that was the max number for the doors level. By the way, I passed the trench mission to destroy the Death Star at first try. I was extremly happy after that. I think after finishing the game I was shut down 60 times more or less and more than 1000 ships destroyed. Ahhhh, old times......................Good video
