Back for more. Despite my interest in air combat type games, I never ended up playing any of the Ace Combat series until Shattered Skies on PS2. What the hell was I doing in the meantime? In space, yo. I am going a bit more in depth with these because 1) I remember them better, and 2) they are far better games. I personally think worth playing even today.
Tie Fighter
X-Wing
Both of these games are among the best combat flight sims out there, with a good balance between arcade speed and extra systems. In the Star Wars universe, no less, with several ships you never got to experience in other Star Wars games or movies at the time. It fueled an obsession with planes and ships that has continued to this day. These game's complexity when it came to gameplay spoiled me for the rest of my life.
My favorite and most memorable gameplay mechanic was the power controls - you could reroute power to Engine, Laser, and Shields as you saw fit. You could go heavy on shields, but that meant you need to slow your ship down or reduce the damage/recharge rate of your lasers. Or you could go high risk and reward and reduce power to shields and be lightning fast and powerful. If you ran no power to lasers or shields they would actually slowly decrease over time. You could also toggle your shields to balanced, forward, or rear facing on the fly, so maybe you have full frontal shields as you zoom in during an attack run and then flip them to rear to cover your ass while you sped away. Even the lasers had different firing modes, you could shoot individual shots or link them to fire two lasers at once (in an X-Wing you could even set it to quad lasers firing all simultaneously). This all mattered as well because you were able to highlight different parts of enemy vessels with your targeting computer, and if you destroyed certain parts it could actually effect the enemy. The same could happen to you, if your shield went down and your hull took damage it would actually knock out parts of your ship (and you'd see the damage). No more targeting computer or radar, you are flying blind.
Mission variety was incredible, some you would escort convoys, others you are assaulting frigates and missile platforms. Others were straight up dogfights. They gave you all kinds of cool weapons too, from super agile missiles (think QAAMs) to heavy duty rockets, ion cannons to disable enemy shields or non-lethally eliminate ships. You even got a tractor beam. And they debuted two of the best ships in Star Wars history: the Tie Delta and Missile Boat.
Both games also had simple but immersive point and click interfaces while you were outside your ship. I really enjoyed Tie Fighter's, you were able to chill with the Emperor, Vice Admiral Thrawn, etc - the game had voice acting throughout and it made you really
feel like an imperial pilot. There was you usual briefings and loadout screens, missions with multiple objectives, and medals to earn as you progressed. Not only that, the cockpits were fully designed and you could change your view to look out the sides or rear and see the cockpit HUD for yourself, in addition to the first person HUD-only and third person ship view.
I could go on all day about these games, but point being they are very special - anyone who played them would know. And despite them being so old, there is value in playing them even today, if you can get them running on your PC. Highly recommended.
