TIE Fighter is possibly the greatest DOS game ever released - or at the very least it's on a par with Doom. It has a cracking plot, neatly interwoven with events in the films, and if you stick around for the detail of the story you will find yourself sucked into that galaxy far, far away! Dogfights are intense, tactical affairs where the decisions to push power to engines, shields or weapons is a continuous battle, one where the outcome is rarely certain. One oddity, given the Empire's reliance on mob tactics, managing wingmen is rarely as important in TIE than it ever was in X-Wing. Missile warfare tends to dominate later stages of the game, necessitating a good quality joystick to have any chance of targetting sufficiently quickly! The final Windows re-release has (arguably) better graphics, although the fall back to redbook audio is a disappointment. Note that this release does not contain the CD from 1995, but does cover all the extra ships and missions. If I remember it is possible to copy the campaign data and cutscenes from later versions into the DOS version hence enabling the ability to play them with the cracking iMuse soundtrack. This is what was so special about the 1995 CD release. iMuse flexes with the action and does a much better job of mood setting than the raw John William's score (however good that may be!) If the programming gurus at GOG can come up with a way to run the Windows version, with the textured graphics AND the iMuse soundtrack, that game would immediately get 10 start from me (and would be a reason for me to re-buy the game, despite owning no less than 3 versions of it here already!)
