STAR WARS™: TIE Fighter Special Edition

I remember getting my hands on this game when I was around 11 years old, back in 96, after my parents got us our first "home computer". The nostalgia is through the roof for me. I remember for years, I wish I could play this game again. So, as it was announced on GoG, I bought it in a heartbeat. Back than, I had a joystick, and was able to get my hands on the 95 CD ROM Edition, which was a great combination as one reviewer stated, with the double resolution and with the full audio for voiceovers. It would've been great to see that in the release package, or a release in itself. Anyways, I digress, the game is, to this day, one of the most enticing, frustrating, rewarding, mouse-clenching(atm, I don't have a joystick), keyboard pounding I've ever had the luxury to play. The missions are hard. No doubt about it. It can be very unforgiving if you miss an text-queue to disable a transport that left the research station, which is very easy to miss when you're in a dogfight of your life against multiple A-Wings and X-Wings that have missles with your name on it. But the reward of getting the missions completed are so vigorating that you hold your head up high and stick your chest out with a big ass smile. This is the epitome of the feeling of success from a difficult mission(s) in games. Great to see it re-released. I cannot thank GoG enough for the opportunity for me to replay this gem, and hope that newer generation gamers get the chance to play a game that shaped a lot of our gaming careers/life styles. If you enjoy flight sims in general, or are a big star wars fan, you owe it to yourself to get this game. It's cheap. It's rewarding. It's great fun. Also, on a side note, during the later missions, I highly, highly recommend using a joystick (94 version, 98 requires a joystick to even run), as it is very frustrating to try keep on a tail of *MINOR SPOILER* Tie Advances/Defenders, even A-Wings, regardless of what ship you're flying.

So all the games in the pack are fun and a great blast from the past for all of us who came of age in the early 90s. But there is a ton of confusion surrounding what versions you are actually purchasing--here on GOG.com and elsewhere. The GOG versions of X-Wing and TIE Fighter are the original 1993 and 1994 releases, respectively. They are labeled "Special Edition" and include a few enhancements (SVGA graphics vs. VGA, an additional campaign for TIE, etc) but they are more or less the original games. The "Collector's CD-ROM" which came out in 1995 is a radically upgraded version of the original games that had and has to be purchased entirely separately. The confusion, I think, stems from the fact that The Collector's edition was built in 1994 and therefore you will sometimes see both this product and the *1993* X Wing referred to erroneously as "X Wing CD 1994" or "X Wing Special Edition 1994" or some other variant with the year 1994. As if that wasn't confusing enough, LucasArts released in 1997 a completely new product (though I think it recycled much coding from the early 90s games) entitled "Star Wars X-Wing VS. TIE Fighter" and, in 1998, a new scenario add-on "Balance of Power." X-Wing vs. TIE was intended as a medium for multiplayer game play and, as such, had only a limited number of stand-alone missions and one (relatively weak) campaign. The multi-player world was in its infancy and games like this never had staying power. It's a nice change of pace, but you have to decide if even that one campaign is worth $10. The Alliance game is a totally different animal and, while a generation ahead of the XWing and TIE Fighter games, not something I remember at all from the 90s. So . . . you'[re not really getting the best LucasArts had to offer from the 1990s . . . probably not worth $40. For $25, I'd say go for it. I believe all four games are available at old-games.com where you pay $10/month for unlimited downloads.

The game requires a joystick to function, yet modern joysticks suffer from continual read errors leading to constant drift, making the game completely unplayable. Forums have time consuming work-arounds for the Windows versions of the game, which are no help for the Mac version. Why even release on Mac OSX if issues known on the forum since 2010 are not corrected?

It's (one of) the best games ever made. Buy it, play it... be the Empire's loyal servant.

Best space simulation series ever, and worth playing through even today (if you're not hung up on graphics...). Why it has taken THIS long to get both X-Wing and Tie fighter (classics) out I may never know, but I'm glad they're here now. Now take this one step further Disney: update the graphics engine to today's tech (DX11/DX12) and release it as a NEW product. As any great space simulation should: watch it 'fly' off the shelves.