I've been playing Star Wars PC games since ... well, before I even considered myself a Star Wars fan! Recently I've been thinking a lot about these old and great games. There are many modern SW games that I love - like Republic Commando and Kotor - but there's something about the old ones. Some quality that hasn't quite been seen since. So I decided to dedicate a series of entries to the games I loved in times past.

TIE Fighter. Released in 1994 as a sequel to the game X-Wing. Universally praised as being way ahead of its time, and even the best space combat simulator ever. Had two versions: TIE Fighter and TIE Fighter CD (because CD-ROMs were the exception rather than the rule back then). My brother owned and loved X-Wing CD (we had to buy a CD-ROM, a joystick, AND a new video card in order to play X-Wing). I played it as well, but X-Wing was really his game. TIE Fighter was mine. In fact, I think TIE Fighter was really the first PC game I loved. And all this before I really considered myself a SW fan... I had seen the movies, but considered them "ok" at best. I would have been 12 or 13 years old when my brother got TIE Fighter (he didn't get the CD version, so it came on 7 or 8 lovely 3 1/2" floppy disks ).

TIE Fighter follows the "bad guys" of Star Wars, the Empire. I was never hot about the bad guys in anything back then. I was all good guys, all the time. Yet I played TIE Fighter anyways, because it was that good. The missions were varied, unlike X-Wing where it seemed every mission involved a squadron of X-Wings (you) going after TIE Fighters, while your Y-Wing allies tried to destroy a Star Destroyer. Killing TIEs got old fast. But the Empire... they fought against everyone, not just the Rebels. Various groups of Pirates, Independents, and even themselves. I still remember having to play and replay missions trying to stop Admiral Harkov from defecting to the Rebels, and the satisfaction when we finally caught him and I saw Vader Force-choke him in a cutscene. And the variety of ships in the game was amazing. There was not just one type of freighter and container. Ships would actually have do stuff during missions - they'd dock at stations, deliver cargo, etc. Missions had primary objectives (the main mission), secondary objectives (extra things to accomplish), and secret objectives (special missions from the Emperor himself). When you complete secret objectives, you become a higher ranked member in the "Secret Order of the Emperor", eventually even becoming the Emperor's Hand! The gameplay, plot, and missions were top-class. The only thing I think X-Wing had going for it was its training simulations... the platform training was very difficult and I really think made you a better pilot than the very easy (IMHO) tunnel training in TIE fighter.

TIE Fighter, like the true Star Wars simulation games of its time, did not try to be 'easy to learn' like the often arcade-ish games nowadays. The game was difficult, and everyone knew it. It took hours of practice to master flying. And some people just could not do it. I was not amazing at the game - my brother would have flown circles around me had the game been multiplayer (and he did in X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter) - but the challenge and the fun of being able to improve made it all worth it. Arcade-ish flying games have their place, but there's nothing like a simulation game to make you feel like you're there. I think part of the reason simulation games are so scarce nowadays is you cannot play them without a joystick. Which basically means the game cannot be released for console, and nowadays that's pretty much a faux-pas. But that's a whole 'nother topic...

One of the other great things about TIE Fighter is the fact that it's the "bad guys" who are featured. Everything is from their perspective. And remember that this was LONG before the prequels, which made a lot of the good/evil stuff in Star Wars seem more grey (with Anakin being good and then going bad, and all). TIE Fighter was amazing in the way it treated the Empire. Ok, so there were some things that you could tell who was good and who was bad - for example, in X-Wing, if you were captured by the Imps you were killed. And in TIE fighter, if you're captured by the Rebels (which rarely happened, as the Empire had more ships and almost always had a capital ship in the system to pick you up, especially at the start when you fly all the starfighters without hyperdrives) you are only sent to a prison planet (with this cool bird! I loved the bird, hehe). But other than that, the Empire was depicted very fairly and from a believable perspective. Not all the pilots and soldiers of the Empire were evil - they were just following orders and doing their jobs. That's what the game shows. You kill the filthy Rebels because they're that - Rebels. It was a very cool perspective, and I'm sad to say that that hasn't really been done since.

Random memories I have of TIE Fighter:
- The one mission where you have to defend a bunch of containers from pirate Y-Wings. There was one container that I could not save for the life of me. The hardest mission ever, and I don't even know why. I could not beat it on even Medium, even though I could eventually beat all the missions around it on Hard. Y-Wings can take a lot of pounding!
- Flying an Assault Gunboat, searching for something (a ship? maybe?) in four different places with your "squad" of three other gunboats. The scripted events in the game in general and this mission in particular did wonders to increase the realism.
- The later missions, which consist of you all by yourself in a missile boat, surrounded with a HUGE number of enemies. And you have to destroy them all. But you can, because missile boats are so powerful it's not even funny.
- Admiral Thrawn!
- The opening movie, where the TIE Fighters and Bombers attack a Rebel platform, and one wing of the platform explodes sideways and it looks silly.
- The trap Admiral Harkov sets to destroy you specifically, and your narrow escape.
- My favourite mission ever: Battle Five, Mission Five (yes, I looked this up because I didn't remember enough about it to describe it). You have to disable a shuttle, a transport, and a Corellian transport (and when you're in a gunboat, those guys are FAST!). And help disable and capture a platform. That mission is the definition of fun.

The other thing I still love about TIE Fighter to this day is its music. The music is all based on the Imperial March theme and the Sith theme. But it's all new, and fits the situations in an amazing way. I loved it then, and I love it now just as much (because there's also the nostalgia factor! Ah, TIE Fighter, how I've missed thee...). The music you hear when you're on the bridge... as soon as that stately second part to the Imperial March starts, I feel like I could just leave everything and sign my life over to the Empire. It's that awesome.

I recently dug out my TIE Fighter CD (this is the Win95/98 version that was released with updated graphics that runs on operating systems other than DOS) to see if I could grab the music, and it turns out that it's all just WAV files. So I grabbed them and had a listen. I have to say that I love the game intro cutscene music... it's kind of a medley of the best themes, and... you know how much I love medleys, right? The only problem is there's some dialogue in that cutscene, so the music fades out very randomly a few times. I took it upon myself to undo the fadeouts, so to speak, and make everything a consistent volume. It's not perfect, but I like it. If you want to download my modified version of the TIE Fighter Intro music, you can click here (MP3, 3 MB). I should probably warn you - it sounds like MIDI played through a really crappy synthesizer and then pumped through a subway speaker. But it's TIE Fighter. Listen for the Imperial themes. Enjoy!

This has been the first entry in my old games nostalgia series. Next on the menu: Mysteries of the Sith!