I am tempted!

I played through a couple levels of Dark Tide recently, but got stuck on the Tusken Raider level.

I have the GoG of DF version for Linux (which crashes on some custom levels), but I suppose I'll only need the game assets.

So I finished Rogue Squadron with all gold medals. Haven't been playing much lately so I've mostly just been running bots I wrote for a Facebook messenger game. I know, you don't have to say it. EVE Online is now free to play so I may work on the bot I have when I get time.

I wish I had the stones/willpower to sell bots, but that **** is getting into bad areas legally.

It seems it's fair game to do anything on anyone on Facebook, at this point honestly.

Woohoo, just finished level 1 of JK. And I even remembered all the secrets. I wonder if I can do that for the rest of the game. And I'm already dreading the falling ship, as I'm playing on hard.

Just played through on medium. Couldn't cut it on hard, too easy to die. But then when you get force pull and persuasion, everything becomes trivially easy.

As for the falling cargo ship, there is a secret route I believe that gets you there right away.

Speaking of force pull, I have been wondering: when I slaughter my disarmed foes (like animals), am I losing lightside points, just as if they were civilians? `Cause I feel there was some stinginess with the force stars later in the game and can't help but think this is why.

Huh, is JK that hard on hard? I remember it being pretty easy if you abuse sqrt2 strafing speed and force speed.. and just run past everything. But I guess that's a cheese tactic.

I hardly remember how to beat level 6 without abusing the force speed jump to get to the upper level platforms early. I think there were like two switches that extended platforms and you had to force speed before they retracted?

Lol, no, I did not try to beat the game by running past all the enemies. I wanted to enjoy the experience, not record a speed run.

That's an interesting question, which I don't have the answer to because I always had force speed by then.

My guess is that it is just barely possible to make it in time, and thus maximally annoying.

(In case people are wondering, by "level 6" Reid is talking about 06bbarons.jkl, i.e., "Barons Hed")

MotS, OTOH, now there's a game that requires you to use the Force.

(Wasted hours of my teenage life not realizing that I had to use Force Sight in an obscure situation....

Javascript developer detected.

Speedrunning is enjoyable, if you have autism.

No you are.

On what platfom? I have the PC version from GOG but I can't figure out a way to make the mouse controls not be garbage

PC, just use the keyboard.

I don't exactly see how we've progressed as a society since ~1995 if my fellow Americans can no longer be bothered to go out and buy a flippin` parallel port joystick to play a flight simulator on the IBM PC.

I played TIE fighter using the mouse once. It royally sucked. People, we can do better than Facebook games. We are better than what we've become!!

You can launch TIE fighter without a joystick? Last time I tried it wouldn't let me. Though I wonder if there are drivers for PS3 controllers that would work?

This actually deserves some explanation: the joystick was plugged in, but it was broken. (It was a cheap model from back in the day that would go limp on one axis if you yanked it too hard and broke a spring.)

X-Wing and the TIE Fighter alpha both worked without a joystick, for sure. I'm not positive about TIE Fighter retail because I had a joystick by the time it came out.

I remember buying a used copy of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter in early 1999 or something, not realizing that joysticks were a required thing because I thought XvT was just more of the same SotE Hoth level type flying. The moment when I tried to run the game, got a warning saying "GET A JOYSTICK, FOO'" and the Emperor's Theme played in the background was quite haunting.

Actually, the whole game was kinda haunted because I tried installing the demo in mid-1998 and it broke my OS so bad I had to reformat the computer. So I reinstalled the demo and had to reformat everything again.

Sadly, I never got into Rogue Squadron (despite getting it for my birthday (also) in 1999) because even at 512x384 it was too much for my P166MMX with ATI Rage II+ to handle, and I never really tried replaying it afterwards. I think I tried reinstalling it at some point in the WinXP era but it just didn't work at all. Oy.

I actually thought that finding all the secrets was mandatory, because I vaguely remember getting to Level 4 (where you have to use Force Speed, IIRC) without having any Force Stars so I thought I had to start the game again and find all secrets (which I did for levels 1 and 2, IIRC).

In retrospect, I probably just used the "skip to next level" cheat code in Level 3, thus not triggering the end level COG script or something.

And speaking of JK level 1, Zell, where the hell are you? This level needs some releasing!

This is what happens when I try to launch. *shrug*

The Special Edition is the missions put in X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, basically. It requires a joystick because XvT requires one.

Also, the special editions are crap. What you want is the Collector's Edition. I mean honestly TIECD even has better graphics than XvT, so there's like no reason to play the Special Edition instead of the Collector's Edition.

Ah, well that would explain it. There's an option box for the Collector's CD-Rom which is what I had growing up. And it works so woo. I feel stupid for not trying that.. but I didn't think the versions would be so different.

I agree that the Collector's editions are generally the best version of X-Wing and TIE Fighter (and that TIE Fighter is probably the best game in the series, with the possible exception of X-Wing Alliance).

However, I will say that when they redid the intro cut-scene, they ****ed with the original artwork and also added stupid things like lens-flares that have not dated well. Also the cockpits were redone for higher resolution, which may have been a welcome change, but it's not what I grew up with.

Oh, yeah TIE98 was horrible.

They removed the IMUSE soundtrack entirely. The only original music left was in the cutscenes, but they rendered it with the worst sound font I've ever heard in my life. The in-game music was the 30 minute generic Star Wars sound track medley loop from the XvT CDs, mono and everything.

I think a bunch of the cockpit voice audio was missing, too. At least some of it was replaced with the generic call outs from XvT, but totally missing the flavor and detail of the TIECD voices.

The port was just generally botched, besides that. Several of the missions are unwinnable because the victory conditions are not possible in the XvT engine. And they ****ed up and accidentally gave all of the enemies Adv Concussion Missiles instead of regular Concussion Missiles, which can one-shot unshielded TIEs and also move way faster.

Basically, it's a waste of time. TIECD is much better by far.

(This post also reminded me of the XvT release. The CDs were misprinted! And the minimum system requirements were way lower than they should have been. Also, the game as a whole was basically unplayable online. Yeah, that whole generation of the X-Wing series was kind of a disaster.)

Finally, I will say that my nostalgic sensibilities are hugely sensitive to the MIDI synthesizer being used. For example, a lot of videos on Youtube are clearly using some generic midi package, whereas I clearly remember my SoundBlaster 16 sounding a million times better. You can see the difference between the two in the two videos I linked to above (the second one uses superior MIDI synth).

This difference that a high quality MIDI synth can make is is especially apparent in this.

What's really important here is

1.) it's not TIE98, and
2.) it doesn't have the original X-Wing corvette model in it.

I actually wasn't even aware of TIE98 existed (I never played TIE Fighter on a 32-bit machine), but that sounds pretty bad.

The floppy edition and the collectors edition sound close enough, with the collectors edition probably even a little better (and more available) with the minor nostalgic gripes about the cutscenes (and this is a little subjective even).

Hey here's some ****in weird ****



Right at the start you can catch a glimpse of the majestic Corellian Waffleiron.

And at the end, you can see an ad for a Chrysler Neon. Brand synergies

What, why was there an ad in the game?

Here's some non-MIDI TIE Fighter music in non-TIE Fighter format to trample on Reverend Jones' childhood.

HA!

ZING!

LINK-ING!

But seriously, the TIE Fighter OST is bloody awesome, and even though I only played through TIE Fighter once in 2001 with heavy, heavy, heavy cheating, I still cherish the soundtrack to this day.

Also that video that Jon posted from the alpha (that apparently existed, I had no idea) is simply using the music from X-Wing. Which makes the whole thing feel very wrong, since it reminds you of that one time when you were fighting on the opposite side.

Why is Yoda on Hoth?

And yeah the soundfont used in the MIDI software synth in that video sounds different from the SoundBlaster 16.

4-OP FM

Brand synergies

Technically it's TIE95

When they made it, they left the MIDI resource in the game files, they just tacked on the WAV. There were certainly some "broken" missions, though I completed everything on Hard. The XvT engine had some quirks that the TIE missions weren't meant for.

TIE95 is the only version I've ever played.

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Just a reminder that Doom II looks far better than JK these days.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/total-chaos

Not really interested in zombie mod, but very good stuff regardless.

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... okay, fine, that GMDX mod hasn't been released yet but I had to make a head-start.

(Unless it gets delayed to 2018, in which case I'll have to re-schedule this!)

In fact, here's a video of some of my MotS cutscenes (+ "gameplay") from 2001-2004:

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https://vimeo.com/222838679

I bought Rocket League and a knockoff 360 controller a couple days ago, luckily it runs on my laptop. Looking forward to finally playing it this weekend.