STAR WARS™: X-Wing Special Edition

Incredible game that brought untold hours of joy to my young teenage heart. What better way to immerse yourself in the universe of Star Wars than to be a Rebel Alliance pilot?! You start off as a green horn trying to just survive basic tactics. But as with any great game, the difficulty increases with each mission. Oh, but not just any missions... missions that guide you on a story of your OWN within the Star Wars universe. Sure, they could have made you Luke or Wedge, but then you'd already know the story. The great thing about this game is that the story is yours, and yet still entwined with the rest of the characters. From super-fast and agile A-Wings to slow yet powerful Y-Wings designed to disable/capture ships to the almighty X-Wing, the fighters of the movies become your reality. Waves of Tie Fighters, Tie Bombers, and Corvettes are going to try to stop you in your missions. But you'll persevere, and triumph, and cheer knowing you just saved yet another admiral's rebel ass. And if you get good enough, you'll have the thrill of taking out a Star Destroyer with just an A-Wing. Or even better, capture an entire fleet of them with just your Y-Wing and its disabling Ion Cannons. Or of course you can just run, gun, and get the mission done as quickly as possible. Sure, the graphics are definitely dated and the missions are linear. But the combination of universe, story, underdog mentality, and the sheer fun of playing in a truly 3-dimensional space battleground is unbeatable... well, maybe unless you move on to Tie Fighter. :) Not to be missed by anyone even remotely into Star Wars!

Best game as a kid. My love of Star Wars came from this game, long before I enjoyed the movies. I remember it was always a little jumpy. That didn't change when I just played it. Ha! Made me laugh. How do you allocate more memory to the game or DOSbox emulator? I remember always needing to reduce the graphics to very minimal so I had better control. Hoping I can play it with good control and good the better graphics - but the first try wasn't promising.

This is a marvelous game easily tied for my second favorite flight sim ever along with Freespace 2 number 1 of course being Tie Fighter which is now newly available again from this same site. I can't wait to get to try out these rereleases, I have to dig my old flight stick out and relive these classics.

This was definitely the best Star Wars flight simulation ever (TIE Fighter was next). It did take a lot of my hard drive space (by that time's standard). Missions were engaging and with just right difficulty levels (i.e., be careful this is addictive). And I often found myself admiring how good my dogfight skills were by viewing the mission video recordings. I personally didn't find B-Wing missions as engaging as the original ones, though, although I completed every one of them nonetheless. I found a copy of X Wing a couple of years ago, installed it on my laptop and played a couple of missions (admittedly it was pirated and not fully functional). Surprisingly (or perhaps not), I didn't find the graphics and game play obsolete! The same can't be said about, for example, Sid Meier's F117-A. Keyboard was sufficient to complete all of the missions, except, if I'm not mistaken, a few of the hardest levels of the maze training. Oh, and it wasn't that easy to take an accurate aim on a small object such as a space mine with keyboard control. Today, of course, everyone will have access to at least a mouse and hence this should not be a problem. As an aside, I found that the password could be identified easily in the largest file in the game's folder. Using PC Tools, I just replaced those passwords with spaces and removed all the hassle of opening the game manual every so often. So, take this top ace admiral's words, on behalf of the rebel alliance, own and play this game once more!

When I first bought this game (Way back when) it was on a Friday night and I remember spending pretty much my entire weekend playing it non stop. It really drew you into the universe from a flight simulator perspective. The updated version plays really well and despite it's age and look, it is worth buying simply for the fact that even newer games are still trying to capture what this title had.