XWING: Alliance

[schwartzvald]

So... anyone else play this game? Or is it too old?

I'm finally getting around to playing through it, and I'm finding it more counterintuitive than XWING and TIE Fighter... some missions are rather unspecific in how to approach the objectives. Early on they hold your hand, but by mid-game I feel like Alliance is geared towards a veteran of the previous games.

Still awesome, though... especially since it was made before EP1-3 urinated on the franchise.

 

[kainzero]

I played it a long time ago. I was kinda ehhh about it. I really miss the simplicity of TIE Fighter, back when there's no countermeasures and missile launchers on cruisers and stuff. X-Wing was also really good, but TIE Fighter just improved on it a lot more. Then XvT was just... weird.

IIRC, the last mission of Alliance was freakin' hard and impossible. I don't think I ever got there though... the family missions were too much for me...

 

[schwartzvald]

Family missions are annoying... I'm starting to realize most of them are time trials, though... when they say "inspect these", they mean for you to do it in combat, or while being chased by fighters, not later. Waiting just moves all the ships into weird positions that usually bugs up the mission. Although in the ones with near-infinite waves of fighters, leaving the last fighter of a group alive keeps new ones from spawning. That's come in handy.

And SCREW the droid autopilot when flying a freighter... instead of being a Top Ace like he should be, he likes to fly me right at squadrons of fighters, then wait to dodge until after 50% of my shields are gone. And his AI has no concept of large things, like stations, platforms, or asteroids. If the ship I'm targeting is on the other side of a wall, well, he'll try to fly through the wall. Game over.

And yeah, the beam/countermeasure/missile focus is pretty lame, especially since even the dumbest AI can evade your missiles or shoot them down. And yet, that same AI seems dumber than XvT and TIE Fighter in combat.

What annoys me most are "disable this craft, guard it until slow-ass friendlies drag it to the hyper point" missions. Those happen both in family and rebel setups. Or ones where you have to carry cargo, those are awful. They should have allowed you to load the cargo on board your ship, instead of having to carry a shield-less brick around.

I'm probably going to skip the Endor/Death Star thing, too. I've heard it's stupid, long, and buggy.

The game's just not as refined as TIE Fighter, although that was made back when LucasArts games were some of the most bug-free, slickest games around. I'm probably going to go back and play that in DOSbox after Alliance, to see how it stacks up while it's fresh on my mind.

What I miss most from TIE Fighter was the whole primary/optional/superawesome objective setup, where you could choose the difficulty of your mission simply by how long you stuck around. And whether it was a race against the clock or against crazy odds, the game made clear when there was nothing else to do.

In Alliance, there's really no point in sticking around once you've hit primary objectives, and you're usually discouraged from doing so. Weird to have such a step back from TF.

 

[ITDEFX]

This was a great game back in the day. However it is longer than Xwing and TIE Fighter, like about 50 missions.

Agreed that last mission is super hard and I think I had to use a no damage code back then because my flying was terrible.

That reminds me, where did you get a patch to fix the text problem in XP? Also can you still play multiplayer online?

BTW, did anyone say "QUAKE!!" when they showed the outside of the family space station?

 

[schwartzvald]

That text problem only hits NVIDIA cards from what I've read, and I have an ATI card... but I've read there's fixes you can make to the fonts.dat file.

There's supposedly still online multiplayer too, through a server called the "Errant Venture", which is actually a funny Star Wars ref to a privately-owned painted-red Star Destroyer from one of the novels. But I haven't tried it yet... I'd probably get smoked like I did when I tried XvT back in the day. Requires some additional software to make the matches. I hear it still gets players though... players that are probably wickedly good.

And the station... what's sad is, initially, I had loaded these fan-made models, and there's one of the Azzameen Station, which makes it look even better than the cutscenes. Without it, yeah, it's kind of a brown mess, at least up close. But the more I used those alternate models, the more glitches and load times I encountered... and the size and shape alterations led to a ton of starfighter collisions. One of them caused failure right at the end of a mission. A shuttle collided with a capital ship, and it didn't show up as a failed mission goal in the list until the crash. It was really odd.