Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 237: X-Wing

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

By patron request, Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey recruit Kat Bailey and Jason Wilson to scramble all fighters and mount an unrelenting assault of knowledge against the topic of LucasArts' classic Star Wars sandbox shooter series X-Wing (and TIE Fighter).

Hey friends, do you like listening to us talk? Well, good news. You have two opportunities to come hear us talk live and in person this summer. On August 10th and 11th, I'll be teaming up with cool people from the Video Game History Foundation, My Life in Gaming and Hardcore Gaming 101 to present a couple panels at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo in Garden City, New York. And if that's the wrong side of the country for you, well, I have good news. At the end of the month, both Bob and I will be putting in multiple appearances at Pax West. Bob will be presenting a live Talking Simpsons panel, while I'll be team. gaming up with U.S. Gamer to contemplate the Metal Gear timeline. After that, Retronauts will be closing out the show with back-to-back Monday afternoon presentations, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast and debating Metroid mania supremacy by weighing the merits of Super Metroid against Castlevania Symphony the Night. It's a whole lot of us, live and in your face. Come see us. Or you can stay safely at home with the idea of having to deal with podcast personalities and real time sounds unreasonably annoying. Either way, there's no stopping the fact that we're going to be spouting a whole lot of words about video game history.

out of our face. Awesome. This week in Retronauts, we switch to targeting computer. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. And this is an episode about video games. Specifically, though, it's about Star Wars video games. And not just any Star Wars video games, but the Star Wars X-Wing video games. And when I say X-Wing, I mean specifically the games that have X-wing in the title. Not just games that have X-wing in them, such as Rogue Squadron or whatever. No, this is specifically about the X-Wing series. from LucasArts that ran from like 1993 to 1999. And this comes to us courtesy and request of patron Victor Romero who wanted us to talk about this series. Well, good news, Victor, because I brought in some ringers for this one.

And so here accompanying me in this studio, I, Jeremy Parrish, am talking about these games with... Hey, it's Star Wars Superfan Bob Mackey. Bob Mackey is not our ringer. No, no, listen, listen. In the words of Yodel, live long and prosper. Have you watched Return of the Jedi yet? Her name is Yaddle.

Who is Jedi? Is that the main character? No, I haven't watched it yet. I've seen the first two Star Wars. And by that, I mean, six and seven, right? No, wait, four and five. Anyway. And up to a good start.

So the heavy hitters this week. Yes, I've seen Force Awakens and the other one. Oh, the best ones. The Phantomus. I'm just trying to antagonize people at this point. The last Jedi. Anyway. Jesus.

So, yeah. Bob and I maybe are not the biggest experts on the X-Wing games. I played some of them back in the day and sucked at them. But the two people here on the show with us are very knowledgeable, I think, right? Oh, yeah. This is Jason Wilson from GameSpeed and the X-Wing series. It's probably my favorite non-R-PG or strategy game series of all time. Oh, man, it's a good thing I invited you.

And finally, bringing up the tail in, but definitely not will be at last or least. Kat Bailey, X-Wing Starfighter, Super Ace. And also, I would say that Ty-Fighter and X-Fighter and X-Fighter are the most influential games that I've played outside of maybe Pokemon. Like, they've had maybe the greatest impact on my personal interests and also actually my understanding of how games are made. So basically, Bob and I are just going to sit back this episode and let them talk. I mean, literally, I sat down to put together notes for this episode, and I didn't have to because Kat went in about a week ago and made some of the most comprehensive and exhaustive notes I've ever seen on a podcast episode. This is, like, super comprehensive. I have literally nothing to add.

Like, I feel like you could probably just monologue for an hour and a half, and we could ship it and just go. You know, I think a lot of people would like that, wouldn't they? I mean, probably. I feel like this is a case where I just need to shut up and get out of the way. Everything I was going to add, Kat already did, except, oh, wait a second, I added four more pages on my own notes. I saw your notes, and it was like kind of a little bit of a contest to see who could get the most esoteric expanded universe references. Oh, my own notes are far more esoteric. Okay.

Well, I will say that the X-Wing series is a franchise that I tried really hard to like, and I don't dislike it, but for whatever reason, it just never quite clicked with me. And I think it's because I spent so much time, like, flying past something, shooting it, and then missing, and spending, like, five minutes, zipping past and turning around and trying to figure out where it was again. I don't know. I'm not good of these games, but I like the idea of them. You know it has a radar, right? I do know that. Okay.

But the stuff you're looking at on radar is still, like, flying around. You're like trying to shoot tie fighters and they're off like zipping in space and they're tiny little specs because it's got like real distances in here. And yeah, so I don't know. For me, flight sim games always amount to like like 10 seconds of frantically trying to blow something up, then overshooting it, then having to turn around and come back. I suck at these games. But I recognize that they're cool. And fortunately, we have the two of you to tell us why they're cool and why people who don't suck at them. So there's two levels to appreciate the X-Wing series, in my opinion.

So there's two levels to appreciate the X-Wing series, in my opinion, and I'm really interesting to see what Kat thinks. The craft, because they're excellently made games, the way they translate the concepts you see from the movies between their UI, their presentation, and the way the ships act is fantastic. But the way they added to the canon of the old expanded universe is the other way I appreciate it, because it flushed out so much at that time that was built. And he still sees some of those elements in the new stuff today. All right, this is the only time I'm going to be able to talk in this episode. So I'm going to jump in here and say that, yes, the thing that appealed to me about these games and the reason I went out and bought a flight stick for my Macintosh in 1994 or whatever

was because I was a kid, you know, grew up with Star Wars. Loved Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Return to the Jedi, and then those things went away. I mean, you've got a droid's shirt on right now. Yep. You know, even as a kid, I was kind of like, yeah, I don't know about this droids thing, EWox cartoon. I don't know. I don't know about these.

The two EWox movies with Wilford Brimley, I was like, I don't know. Once you're coming back. I don't know. I think he's going to be... Oh, he's going to be raised dad, I bet. Yeah, probably.

Yeah. In the new movie, okay, calling it now. Oh, my God. Anyway, so, you know, Star Wars basically went away in the late 80s, but I never stopped liking it. And I would, I would like, you know,

read role-playing tabletop source books, like the Karelian, you know, syndicate or whatever. Yeah, the West End stuff. I was just like, oh, there's all this cool stuff that I didn't know about Star Wars. I love this. And for a good half decade, that was the only place to get anything new Star Wars was Star Wars, was Star Wars, West End. And so when the expanded universe started to happen when, what was it, Del Rey books published, yeah, they published the Timothy Zon trilogy. As soon as I saw a Star Wars book in hardcover at the bookstore, I was like,

that's so weird I want to read this and I read it and it was actually pretty enjoyable and then I kept reading the Star Wars books and they kept getting worse and worse but you know in that that first few years there was also the Dark Empire series from Dark Horse Comics

which was like what happens if Luke Skywalker finally does turn to the dark side can he be brought back does Leia become a Jedi and it had this really great art by Cam Cam I can't remember the name the guy's name it also introduced the whole Palpatine cloning thing.

Before we knew what the Clone Wars were, we were just like, what are the cloned? And they had to have an even bigger ship than the Superstar Destroyer. Oh, yeah, the eclipse. I will say it's hard to remember this now, but this actually shows how much more advanced the capitalist machine has become, where George Lucas was allowed to not make Star Wars movies, so all of these ancillary materials had to fill the gap for, what, 15 years, 16 years? So, like, that's a failure, it's a failure of capitalism that he was allowed to not make a movie. No one, like, forced him at gunpoint to make, I don't know, whatever else he could have made between 1983 and 1999.

I mean, honestly, the only reason he started doing the movies again was be, wasn't it because he... He saw Jurassic Park. I thought he just needed money because of a divorce. Yeah. Yeah. And he saw, but his story is always that he saw Jurassic Park and saw the digital effects. He went, at last, I can do Star Wars the way that I always envisioned it. Star Wars was coming back before Jurassic Park in the theater.

That was like 93, and I think Air to the Empire was 91. Yeah, the expanded universe was coming in. Yeah, there was, there was already a ground swell. Basically, the franchise had been gone for almost a decade. Like, you know, it had been almost 10 years since the Return of the Jedi. And at the same time, like, so I was quite young in the 80s in the early 90s, but I knew about Star Wars, obviously. I mean, they would play the movies trilogy, especially once it came out on VHS. you know, at after-school care, whatever.

I, the VH, we own the VHS films. There were still Star Wars video games. They were making them for, you know, the Atari and then subsequently the NES. There was a Star Wars game for that as well. And then they weren't very good. Super Star Wars, the Super NES? Come on. Yeah, I mean, Super Star Wars came out of, what, 1993 or thereabouts? I think it was a little before that, wasn't it?

Yeah. I think it was 92. I remember when Super Star Wars came out and thinking. better than the NES game. It was, it looked so cool, right? I was like, oh, my God, this is so cinematic. Like, wow, look at those animations with a lightsaber. I'm going on.

But I discovered the X-Wing series one summer. I believe it was the summer of 1994, 1995, and it was at the same time that I discovered the expanded universe. I borrowed the games from a friend, which is strange to think of borrowing a PC game. and I installed the little discets and everything and suddenly I found myself in this incredible world of being able to fly a tie fighter and I was terrible at it.

I was playing with a mouse and keyboard, which you could do. You could do, it was hard. I did not recommend doing that. So X-Ween came out in 93. Well, maybe we should start from the beginning, should we? So I bought it the first time I saw it. I was talking about how much I missed Star Wars at the time.

Okay, that's fine. In 1977, a movie called Star Wars came out. So let's talk about X-Wing, the original, 1993. Sure, why not? That's a good point to start. Okay. We have had a Star Wars episode of Retronauts, so I don't think we need to cover that ground. But, you know, before we do talk about the game X-Wing, I will say that the X-Wing experience, the Death Star Run, was kind of like the platonic ideal of a Star Wars video game.

Everyone wanted that experience. Atari's Star Wars video game. the arcade 1983 was, or 1982, was, yeah, right? Yes, exactly. That's coming back through them from One Up Arcade. I don't know if that's going to be any good, but it's cool that they're doing it. Anyway, it was the Death Star, trench run. It was, you know, that whole World War II inspired flight of the X-Wings, dodging and

weaving and ducking into the trenches and that sort of thing. But, you know, as technology progressed, we still didn't have like a true X-wing experience. And I think that's what they were trying to do here. Yeah, well, in the – there was a guy named Lawrence Holland, and he was making some World War II games, and they included games like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. And I wouldn't say that they were the most in-depth flight simulators, but they were fairly historically accurate.

They were very historically accurate. Did you ever play them? Yeah, yeah. And they're great games. They're more arcady than what a flight sim person would want at the time. But they were a lot of fun. Yeah. Some of them had, you know, later on, some of the later ones had ports to consoles.

I mean, flight sims were a big deal in the late 80s, early 90s on PC, certainly much more than PC. And the nice things about these games is that you can fly it and enjoy and you get the feeling of flying in a World War II fighter plane. But without the redding out and the crashing and all of that stuff. But in 1991, Broderbound lost the license to Star Wars and it reverted back to LucasArts. And suddenly they have the opportunity to start making Star Wars games. And I think for Bob, this might have been a sad moment because you were more of a fan of the adventure games. Yes. Wait. What?

When Rutherband had the Star Wars license? Yes. In the 80s, if I recall correctly. What did they publish with? An educational. Educational stuff. Like Star Wars, the print shop, that kind of thing. Yeah.

And there was a math game. Yeah. I mean, there were a lot of Star Wars games in the 80s. That machine never really stopped. Learn Arabesh with Chewbacca. Actually, I mean, this, I mean, LucasArts would make adventure games for another seven years. So it didn't really affect things too much because they are always destined to be phased out. But it began.

That was the beginning, was X-Wing and such. But, I mean, they had already started being like, okay, let's make an X-wing game because, I mean, it was obvious. People wanted to be Luke Skywalker, flying down the Death Star trench in the X-Wing, blowing up the Death Star. That was like the fantasy, right? and they give the project to Edward Killam, and Edward Killam says, well, we need Lawrence Holland. He's made these great flight simulators. We've got to get him on board. And I believe one of the people who was working on the Star Wars or sorry, the adventure games for Lucasfilm, I was actually expressing an interest in making a Star Wars game as well.

But when Lawrence Holland hears this, he goes, oh, I got to make a Star Wars game. And that's when he comes on board to start making X-wing. And it was a natural fit, right? Because in the original Star Wars films, they looked like World War II fighter planes, right? They even used the actual footage. I mean, Dam Busters was the inspiration for the trench run. Like, Lucas grew up watching that stuff. So, of course, he was like, I'm going to do my own movie.

Star Wars was like all the stuff he loved growing up put into a big grab bag. And, yeah, that was a direct connection right there. So it was brilliant for them to bring a whole atone. a couple years before Wing Commander had come out. And I feel like Wing Commander was kind of a new phase in the space combat sims. Yeah, totally. Because in the 80s, you'd had Star Raiders in like 1979. Star Raiders was a very cool little thing, but it was very fairly simple. If I remember correctly, even had bad guys that look like Thai fighters done out in those wonderful pixels.

Did they bring Mark Hamill into Wing Commander before or after X-Wing? That was after. That was what, Wing Commander 3 when they started out of the cinematics? Heart of the tiger. Yeah. So we were talking about Lucasfilm games. I guess they were LucasArts at this point. And before they were even doing adventure games, they did have a sort of flight-style game called Rescue and Fractylus, where you were in a cockpit.

You weren't necessarily in space. You were above the surface of a planet. But they kind of started with first-person games before they started making adventure games. So this wasn't straying too far from their roots, I guess, making an X-Wing game. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And so when it came to time to start making this.

This X-Wing game, they took the engine from Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and put it in. And initially they were going to just do 2D graphics and such, right? They weren't going to do polygons. But eventually, to kind of the consternation of the artists, they did, in fact, go with a polygonal engine with Gourad Shading, which was a very new thing at the time, which really it just resulted in kind of very flat graphics. But at the time, it looked pretty cool. Oh, yeah. The Gore-Roud shading kind of gave you a little bit of depth to it. I think Gore-Roud means you have like two vertices and you have a color transition from one point to the other.

So for, you know, flat objects, you know, mechanical square objects, you know, rectilinear, like X-Winges and Thai fighters and Star Destroyers, it makes sense. And freighters and shuttles and frigates and gourits. Maybe not so much the Mon Colomari shifts, since those are all boldest and rounded. But everything else, I think the look was very convincing, honestly. What was amazing about the look was, it was like, oh, my gosh, this is, at the time it was the best-looking translation of Star Wars in a video game E&C. It was fantastic. And it felt just like you're in there. And then when you'd sit down, you'd sit down with your keyboard, you'd have a flight stick or a joystick or whatever you're using, you felt like, you know, I used to, you know, you used to roleplay some of being a pilot.

Yes, I was an adult I role played when I was playing games. Kill me. And it felt like it. You'd be sitting there. We're not unrecognos because we were cool kids. No, no, far from it. And you'd be juking in your scene as you're duking around with the flight. And the Thai fighters look like Thai fighters even had the windows right.

Yeah, no. And it still looks fairly cool today. Yeah. It's pretty stylized, which I like, versus the later games like X-Wing versus Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, which look fairly dated at this point. I mean, admittedly, it still looks pretty dated. Yeah, it all looks dated. But it's, you know, the way they adapted fits in such a whole not change there.

You just take a look at the engines of the Carillion Corvette. And it's really just one big block with some circles in it. But then you take a look at how it evolved in the later games. And it doesn't have those nacell like projections that it has in the movies. But in a way, the X-We want to look better because of that big block. Yeah, I think it's kind of the same way like Virtua Fighter or Toeball number one still look kind of cool. because they have like this very almost abstract style to them. I think that style of graphics works pretty well.

It ages. They also introduced something called the iMuse engine, which was a fairly famous. Did that start here? Actually, it started with Monkey Island 2. Which the idea was that you would have sound cues that would dynamically play based on the situation. So if the Star Wars comes in, you have a specific cue that's like, oh, oh, you're in deep trouble. Yeah, like the Star Destroyer, Dumb, dum, dum, bum, bum,

Well, that's the Thai fighters. The Star Story had an entirely different cue, which I didn't actually recognize. And then the, if a rebel capital ship came in, then it got even more excited, right? So, and when the battle would stop, the music would slow down, when the battle would start,

the typical dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, you would start playing, right? Over and over again on a loop, never stopping. And in fact, that music has been stuck in my head this entire weekend because I've been thinking about X-Wing. You see, it doesn't bother me. Since I love Star Wars music, at home, I have a playlist of all Star Wars music for my kids. But then you shoot down. But you shoot down an enemy, and there would be a little cue going, aha, good job.

You shut down the enemy. So it was cool. Like, it really puts you in the moment. And some years later, when X-Wing Collector series came out, which included, they upgraded the engine and everything. They put in Red Book Audio, I was really disappointed that they removed those dynamic sound cues. And so I won't play it. Yeah, I mean, that is, like, music is such a big part of Star Wars. The movies without the soundtrack, without the John Williams score, kind of like, I don't know about this.

It's when you add the music that it gets really good. And when you change the music and you diminish its impact, I mean, that just is part of what defines Star Wars. I would say the Rogue One soundtrack, you know, from Michael Grudziato, or I can't remember how to say. Giacchino. Giacchino, thank you. It is, you know, it's a step below John Williams, but it's very good and very faithful. Yeah, I totally agree. So when it came to the actual gameplay, so you were flying, you could fly an X-wing, an A-wing or a Y-wing.

X-wings were balanced. They had the four S-foils. That was my personal favorite. They had. I was a Y-wing pilot. I love those. Really? Y-wings are pretty strong, actually.

I was big, fat, and slow and powerful. Of course I like the Y-wing. I like the Y-wing, actually. But the X-wing had a couple torpedoes, which weren't great for shooting down. fighters but were useful for shooting you if you fired all your entire bank of torpedoes you could take out a corvette yeah uh you had the a wing which was speedy and had the concussion missiles which were good for shooting down fighters but not anything else nothing else and it was very fragile but it was one really really good because it had the lasers perfectly positioned to

really just cut through enemy tie fighters were you able to take down a superstar destroyer by crashing into it with an a wing no alas and the superstar destroyer wasn't in the original x-wing oh okay Yeah, the superstar story wouldn't come in until balance of power. This is where I want to talk about the UI for a second. So think about to the Death Star run, and the rebels ships are coming up to the Death Star, leaving Yavin. And you said, and Red Linder says switch deflectors to double front. What does that mean? Well, in the X-Weing games, you hit S, and your shields go to all the front.

You hit S, they mellow out. Yeah, I mean, there's like a visual diagram of your ship. and the shields around it. And you see it right there in your UI. It shows you what that means. And they also incorporated the targeting computer, which wasn't extremely useful, but you could have it if you wanted. They had the useless little numbers that ticked down and didn't actually have any relation to what you were seeing on screen. Well, they put on a really nice little UI, or a little nice little system where you could balance the lasers,

bounce towards shields, or balanced toward engines. And if you bounce toward engines, your laser and your shield power would go down. So you would be in a situation where if you pumped up all of your lasers and all your shields, you would become very slow and probably overwhelmed pretty quickly. So you had to find the right balance. And usually it was one laser up, one shield up for me. Or one laser up and then shields at normal unless I needed to really start dumping power. Because you could dump laser power into shields or dump shield power into lasers using the UI.

That's the thing about X-Wing and Tie Fighter that I find really interesting. So many Star Wars games are set piece-based. Like, they are about capturing the essence of these huge battles and huge moments that are really epic and everything. And they tend to be really tightly scripted. Whereas in X-wing, the missions are much more about a sandbox. There are these weird quiet moments where you're sitting and you're kind of waiting for, you know, the transport to dock with the freighter. Like, try to imagine that in the Star Wars movie. So it's okay, sitting here waiting for this transport.

port to finish off loading its supplies into the freighter. And so in that respect, it felt a lot more realistic. And you don't see Star Wars do realistic very often. No, no. I think this came from, more than anyone, I think it came from Larry Holland with his experience of World War II. And his, well, he wasn't in World War II, his love of World War II, his historical accuracy of how combat worked.

I also think it came from a desire to take the source material and fill in the blanks because we knew very little about the Star Wars. universe at the time, but it felt like a big, fascinating, interesting, very old place, right? Yes, and now we know way too much about the Star Wars universe. It's not interesting. Most of the lore is extremely lame now, but at the time the lore, there's so much to play with there, right? And what was great was they created so much of it that went into it. You know, one of the things that Kat mentioned in our show notes was, you know, this was the first video game of a real storyline that Star Wars had ever made.

Was it? I mean, it wasn't just, they just didn't. they didn't just do the movies again. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. You know, they had their own story like, the Tarkin doctrine. It comes from X-Weet. Oh, I didn't know that.

And what is the Tarkin doctrine? So the Tarkin Doctrine Doctrine is ruling. No, it's ruling through fear. And the first set of missions is called Strike Fear. And it's about, you know, okay, you know, let's get the rebels on the run. And let's start imposing the Empire's will. The Death Star is part of the Tarkin Doctrine. Yes.

The ultimate realization of it. Yes. Whatever. But they had a really cool feely that came with it called the Farlander papers. And the Farlander papers were essentially, they were written by Russell D. Maria with some help from Dave Westman. Dave Westman was a tester and a mission designer along with David Maxwell. Russell D. Maria, who I actually talked to for an interview some years ago, still follow on Facebook, interestingly enough. He took a lot of the West End type.

He basically made a little mini West End. role-playing type guide source book, right? Where, like, you learned about the different characters. I learned for the first time that the emperor was named Palpatine for some reason, which was, I thought at the time it was the stupidest name I've ever heard, but it ended up sticking. It's your secret decoder ring. Drink more Palpatine.

The only thing is his name gets worse. I know, I know. Sheave Palpatine. Shut up. And I learned the name Mon Mothma and Admiral Akbar. I learned that the imperial capital world was called Coruscant, though I always called like Koreskant. Yes, me too at the beginning.

Yep. So you didn't have any of the old Star Wars action figures because there were like Admiral Akbar action figures and even Mon Mothma had a figure that just like stood there and had a stick. I had all of them. Okay. Well, they were out of production by the time. Yeah, I know.

It's interesting because there is that like generation gap, you know, because Jason and I are old men and you're like somewhere in between. Somewhat younger, yeah. Yeah, you kind of missed out of that first wave. So it's actually really interesting to hear how much. of your Star Wars experience was experience like kind of you, the knowledge you have kind of came

many years later through other other conduits. It's so funny you bring up the toys because I take a look, okay, so it introduces a whole bunch of new ships to the Star Wars Canada and what is the Storm Trooper Transport. And it's this kind of like oblong thing with this weird, funny little cafe that kind of like it's got a little truck

on it, but it reminds the first time I saw that I said oh my God, I had a toy like that. Really? Well, Sears made these collection of Star Wars mini-rings and there were little chopped-down ships and cheap little ships for, you know, for the kid. You know, it was a budget line, you know, and I loved it. And there's this one, which is called the, I wrote it down here, let me look at the I-N-T-4

mini-rig Interceptor. And it reminds me so much of that. It was like, oh, my God, they adapted that toy. I don't know if they ever did. I never got a chance to ask. But that's what it looked like to me. My favorite instance of that is actually in the Rebels cartoon, where they took the stupid transporter toy

like the prison transport toy that no one actually wanted. And when I saw that on the screen, I love that toy. It was like, it was like I don't want to just drive around with figures like sticking on the outside of this truck. Who cares? That's not Star Wars. But when I saw that on screen, I was like,

oh my God, I can't believe that they turned this dumb toy into an actual thing in the cartoon. Yeah. It was around for a couple years. Yeah, just know that that kind of like love of the expanded universe. I think that's a big part of what makes, you know, X-Wing so interesting and the best Star Wars works. Like, let's take all the influences and bring them in.

Yeah, but you have, you rescue Akbar from the clutches of Tarkin because he was Tarkin's slave. That comes from X-Week. You learn about what the Mon Colomari cruisers were and how the Mon Colomari joined the Rebel Alliance and how you learn about the Quarins and there's all this stuff. And then he also wrote, Russell D. Maria, also wrote this fiction about this character named Key and Farlander, how he joins the Rebels, and he goes on his first mission, and it's really well done, honestly. And then, crazily enough, they go and do a full strategy guide, and they essentially

turn the strategy guide into a piece of like an expanded universe novel, and it's excellent. Like, each mission was framed as if you're watching it through Key and Farlander's eyes, the after-action report, he's like talking to his commanding officer. There's fiction in between each mission that kind of fleshes things out. And at the end of the, at the end, like it ties into the actual movies. And it became canon for as long as the expanded universe was a thing. Because everything was counted in the expanded universe.

The Farlander was in the Y-wing that escapes the Death Star. You're like, who's in that Y-wing? Well, it's Key and Farlander from X-Wing. So, though, and of course, in X-wing, when you're attacking the Death Star, you're in an X-Wing. Yes. You're Luke. You're not Key in Farlander anymore. But, you know, and And for such many launch points, you know, when he comes to the expansion about the B-Wing, that's where it's established it was created by the Verpite, which was an insectoid race.

Bob's rolling his eyes here. I'm sorry, Bob. No, I'm not. That was not an eye roll. And they also filled in the gaps between the original Star Wars and then Empire Strikes Back because they depict the evacuation of Yavin. Oh, my gosh. The hardest mission ever comes from this storyline. Yeah, the Imperial

Pursuit was a really hard expansion and B-Wing was even harder because you had to do things like defend like little fighters from swarms of enemies coming in often it wasn't a matter of you surviving it was you protecting the dang objective which was the hardest thing ever

David Maxwell apparently thought the original X-wing was too easy and got really annoyed and people who said it was too hard he had a couple missions where he was like no it's obvious what you have to do. You just have to draw the fire from the frigate.

It's like the frigates sitting right in the middle of the freighters, like destroying all of them. Are you kidding me? He's like, no, it's too easy. No, no, no, no. That's the guy you want balancing your missions. Surprise, surprise. X-wing is really hard. Especially Mission 3 and 4.

Mission 4 is one of the, is really notorious. It was so notorious that when Michael Stackpole did his X-Wing books, he made it a whole thing, kind of like the Kobayashi-Maru. It is. And it's a Kobayashi-Maru. It's a Kobay-Maru scenario. So it's the redemption scenario in which you have some medical corps of vets offloading wounded onto a frigate and you're waiting for them to dock. Meanwhile, an imperial frigate is jumping around the sector off dumping Thai bombers. This is not a well-designed mission because you have to know where to be at the right time.

Now, the tactics of having your frigging drop-in drop-fighters take off that come in on the other part of this area and drop-in. I mean, that's cool. No, it's cool. You know, it expended the strategy of what was possible with Star Wars. But it didn't, but it wasn't well designed. It wasn't good for a game. You couldn't possibly know. You were going to fail the first couple times.

And even if you knew exactly, if you knew exactly where the frigate was, you still had to, like, kill the bombers ASAP, before they launched their torpedoes, then dump everything into your engines, get all the way to the other side, and then kill the other bombers, praying that they wouldn't launch their torpedoes. Because you could have shoot those torpedoes down. Once they were out, and once they were out, it's like, well, I might as well quit now because that Corvette's dead, RIP. So, yeah, there's a lot of missions like that in X-Wing, but it could be really fun, especially, like, some of the better-designed missions were sort of like sandboxes in which rebel ships are fighting imperial ships, and there are tons of fighters everywhere, and you've got multiple objectives, which one thing that X-Wing doesn't do very well is that it doesn't always list the objectives for you. Yeah. Now, one thing I really like about StarFinder games or, you know, Thunder games or flight combat games is this is where the escort mission makes sense. Because, you know, escort missions and shooters just suck when you're on flight. Usually, yeah. Yeah, they're awful. But these make sense because the whole point of so many of these missions are, you're on escort and you're protecting the target.

Yeah, but one of the problems, though, with these kind of missions was that X-Wing didn't have a time acceleration feature like. tie fighter, so you would often be in a situation where we're like, well, I've killed all the bad guys. The enemy Star Destroyer is just sitting out there. I'm just going to wait for this transporter to slowly make its way over. And then it docks with a freighter, and it's like two minutes. You're like, are you kidding to me, man? Come on.

I want to go make a sandwich or something. I didn't mind it so much, but I know other people did. And in Star Wars, in X-Wing, if you failed mission, it wouldn't tell you. So you could sometimes just be going through. When you're like, I did I complete the objective? The later games do. The later games do. Yes, they added all that stuff in type.

But anyway, X-Wing storyline traces the original movies. It begins with kind of the first victory. You destroy a Star Destroyer while it's in Dry Dock and like sneak a bomb onto it. The Battle of Tricana, right? Or something like that. And then subsequently, you help steal the Death Star plans, which there are like a million variants of those. There are so many people who have stolen Death Star plans. It's amazing.

So what I like about the second tour duty on the original X-Wing is all the missions lead up to destroying a Star Destroyer. And it's like, okay, yeah. So you want to destroy the ships that supply it. You would destroy the new fighters that are coming in. You want to destroy the engine, the hyperdrive that's coming to it. So it's all about isolating this one big ship. And then at the end of it, it all pays off with, okay, now we're going to go blow it up. Yeah, Dave Westman was saying that they were just kind of making missions.

And then they were like, maybe we should have some kind of storyline. stringing these together, and that's how the storyline ultimately. And it was good. And then at the end of a tour of duty, you would be rewarded with a really cool cutscene. And those cutscenes were excellent. Yeah, they had some of the best cutscenes around for a PC game at the time. I would put them at, or I would say they were definitely above Blizzard's cutscenes for that time

period. What was Blizzard started going? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they were really well animated, a beautiful 2D animation, good voice acting, that kind of thing. Was Blizzard even around back then? I thought they were We're not talking about just X-Weet here. We're talking about... Okay, okay, okay, okay, got it. By 1993, they were making Warcraft Works and Humans, right? Yeah, 93, 94.

Was that early? Yeah. Jinkies. Warcraft is old. Warcraft is quite old. I thought it was something I can add to this conversation, by the way. So Wing Commander existed, right? I don't think we brought that up.

And that was the predecessor to this made by a different company, of course. But I just want to know what you guys think of that, because there had been two existing games before X-Wing came out, In 1994, Wing Commander 3 came out, and they got Friggin' Mark Hamill, Cody Star Killer himself, to star in the game. Sure did. So, chew on that. I did not. I never played. That was what I was asking about earlier.

Oh, really? Yeah. Like, I was trying to figure out if Mark Hamill being in Wing Commander was like a reaction to X-Wing. I forgot if Wing Commander came up. There were definitely rivals. There were, you know, Orgett and Lucas were rivals at the time. Here's the thing. There were different games.

They were different games with different principles, and they both existed fine, and I enjoyed playing. The Wing Commander was a lot more about telling this awesome cinematic story. Especially by the time I got to number three. Yeah, the actual battles often were a lot more straightforward. The missions weren't nearly as complex, especially as Tie Fighter, but it had the really cool cutscenes between every mission. It made you feel like you were actually living aboard the cruiser. You were getting to know your wingmen rather than having them be. generic top.

I think you could have a wingman name just Top Ace 4 in X-Wing. And they were really stupid wingmen. They would just fly into a freighter and die. And they'd be like, well, and if they died, they were dead. They were perma dead. Because in X-Wing, if you died, they basically rolled a dice where either you were dead because your ejection system was destroyed. You were rescued by the rebels and you get to see yourself in the little, the

VAT. The back to chamber. Yeah, the back to chamber. Or you get captured by the empire. And if you get captured by the empire, you're considered missing an action and then you lose all of your medals that you get. Yeah, so I'm wondering about this. Like this is like your safe file is basically borked if you lose?

Yeah. You can reload. I think you can reload if you get captured. But, yeah, I mean, you can keep playing. Yeah. Yeah, you can revive your character. It's not permadeath, permadeath, but you've lost all of the kind of the sort of score medals that you get, which

kind of shows how good you are in the particular game. That's not something that I particularly like. But I suppose the last thing maybe to talk about is how it ends, which is the original game ends. It ends with you attacking the Death Star, which

they did their best, but it didn't come out super well. It didn't really feel like the movies. That's actually very surprising. Is it just impossible to combine the sandbox style of X-Wing with the very intense, focused narrative, you know, cinematic style of the movie? That's what it comes down to.

They didn't have any messages in the original X-Wing, so they couldn't really have the voices and that kind of thing. You couldn't hear it from then. Also, X-Wing itself was the game was slower pace than the depiction of the movies, so the intensity was missing a little bit. And you're just blinded out the trench, and you're avoiding laser blasts, and you're dealing. It's rather hard. It's very hard.

So it wasn't the full Death Star attack, like, where you approach the Death Star and kind of cross the Equator. You approach the Death Star, but the approach on the Death Star is you see the Death Star in the distance, and then you're fighting tons of fighters, which is obviously very different from the movies. And then you get to the actual Death Star itself, and you're fighting Thai advanced fighters, which are in the shape of Darth Vader's fighter, but not Darth Vader. So you never have Darth Vader in your tail. The Millennium Falcon never comes in because it was just too complex. for the tools that they had. And it's very long once you're in the trench. Yes.

The mission itself is very long because you have to, there's a mission where you like clear the Death Star surface, you're shooting down the turrets, which look like the movie. Yeah. And I liked those. Yeah, no, that's cool. Where it falls apart is where you're in the trench. Yeah. The actual trench is really long, kind of boring.

Yeah, and you don't have that freedom of movement. And plus the dynamic music kind of fails it because the music isn't like from the, it's just the usual dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, you know, exactly. So, but then you get a cool cut scene at the end. And then subsequently two really cool expansions and Imperial Pursuit. Each one was better than the original. And then by the time of, by the time B-wing ends, the story has been taken up to, they have established echo base on Hoth and the Empire Strikes Back is about to start. But, I mean, if you look back at X-Wing, it's definitely the most dated of the X-Wing games.

It's hard, it's hard to go back to that one because it's so slow. But in some ways, it's the most essential. Yeah, I mean, it really, it will lay the groundwork for the entire series. It does a lot right. It does a lot right. And when that game is on and it's fun, like, you're like, wow, this game is so much fun. I'm really having a great time. And when it's not so great, you're like, oh, God, this mission is killing me.

I can't do this. So one of my favorite cheats was when you're flying a Y-wing and, you know, Imperial squadrons come at you in groups of three. And you destroy two of them, and then you, you. You use your ions to incapacitate the third, and it doesn't spot a new group. Yeah, if you understand the trigger system in the way the missions are designed, you can totally just abuse it by using the ion canons. That's why the Y-wing is so good, because not only is it's fairly strong, not that much slower than the X-wing. Not that much. It also can use the ion cannons to disable things, and you're like, ha-ha, suckers, so...

I'm curious, sorry for interrupting, but what's up with the B-Wings? Because they've been mentioned a couple of times, but how are they different than the other fighters? So in Return of the Jedi, you would see the B-wings. They looked kind of like little crosses. Yeah, they're weird because they've got like the cockpit on one end. The cockpit's on the top. Well, it depends on how you fly. If you had the toy, then you would know that the cockpit actually rotates according to a gravity system.

So one of the scenes they're never able to shoot properly for, Return of the Jedi was one of three B-wings assuring a Star Destroyer because the B-wings always got lost against the Blue Screens. Oh, is that what it was? Yeah. They're bombers. They're heavily armored. They're better Y-Wing's.

Because in the lore, the rebels initially start out with the Y-Wings. They're kind of old. Which are like leftover from the Clone Wars. But then they get the Incom design team to defect and build the X-Wings for them. I don't know where the heck the A-wings come from. And then subsequently, they need better bombers. so they get together with the verpine and develop. The A-Wing's are clearly modified Jedi Starfighters left over from the Clone Wars.

Oh, I mean, no, that makes total sense. There you go. So the B-Wing has three sets of cannons. It has three sets of ion cannons. It has, what, a rack of 12 proton torpedoes? Yeah, it has a lot more proton torpedoes. So it's really a gunship, not, you know, a heavy bomber slash gunshot. But it's really slow.

Very slow. And I assume it's a bigger target, too, because it's a very, unwieldy shit. It's a bigger target, but the way you fly it, you know. Well, the hip box also is in such a way that where the lasers should probably be flying past it. Because I think in real life, quote unquote, it would actually be a little annoying to hit the thing. Yeah, very hard. But in Thai Fighter, as long as you're kind of shooting in the general direction of it, you're fine. Yeah. So, but speaking of Tie Fighter, so when Lawrence Holland made Are we jumping into the second game now? I think it's time to move on. Yeah. We should take a break

before we jump in this. All right. All right, Kat. I'm sorry for shutting you down. Now it's time. I'm sorry for shutting you down. Now it's time. I did, but that's because I knew that the Thai Fighter conversation's going to be its own thing. It's just going to go. So I wanted to kind of regroup and re-energize before we get into it. But with that said, Kat, take it away. Tie Fighter is the game that I'm really annoying about.

I assume everybody has that one game that they constantly proselytize, that they're super annoying, that people are like, oh, okay, Kat's going on about Tie Fighter now. Tyfighter was the first game I got pissed off at PC gaming about. Really? Why is it? Well, because my computer was a 386, 16 megahertz, and he needed 33 meghertz. I had one of those. That was my first PC.

Yeah. And so it was like, God damn it, I got to upgrade this before I can play Ty Fighter. He comes out, because I had no idea what the specs were going to be. You need a 486. No, you can play 386, 33 megahertz. But it wasn't optimal, was it? It was not optimal. Was it like a little postage size window, like Doom on a 286?

No, I don't think so. No, you couldn't actually make the screen smaller, but you could lower the resolution, if I recall, correctly. And it looked really bad. It just ran slowly and a little jumpy and janky. Yep. But Lawrence Holland, when he was making secret weapons of the Luftwaffe, he had conspicuously included the ability to play as the Germans. Like, he really enjoyed the possibility of being able to play as both the quote unquote evil side and the good side. And they wanted to do that with X-Wing, but that was, like, too much.

Like, they couldn't include that entire experience, but they already had the idea of going over to the empire in mind when they were going over there. And they were a little, they had some trepidation because they were like, oh, well, maybe Lucas Sartis isn't going to go for this. I don't know. But they were like, no, no, that's awesome. Go for it. And did they go for it? That's one of the weird things about Star Wars fandom to me, more so now than it used to be. but the idea that people really love being the empire,

like the whole 501st, like people who are actually cosplaying as Darth Vader's legion of Nazi stormtroopers, basically. Like, you know, especially with the sequel trilogy and the First Order, like, makes it really explicit that, yeah, this is, you know, triumph of the will here. That makes the whole empire thing a lot harder to stomach now. But, you know, at the time, you know, 1990s, when we beat the Nazis, and everything was good and racial harmony was coming into existence and everyone was going to love each other. It was going to be great.

It was interesting to take the, you know, the devil's advocate approach. Well, much as with Gundam, the bad guys always have the coolest toys, don't they? Yeah. Yeah, and the Empire had the coolest toys. And there were plenty of people who was like, I don't want, I'm going to fly a Thai interceptor. And then, of course, there are the contrarians who are like, oh, no, look at the Empire. They got the cool black helmets. and they're flying in those wicked Thai interceptors and such.

But I mean... Well, and Star Destroyers. Who doesn't like a Star Destroyer? Red lightsabers. Star Destroyers are just like a big slice of pie flying through space. Who cares? And Thai fighters, they don't even have... They don't have warp or not warp engines.

They don't have light speed engines. They don't have shields. They don't have internal oxygen. Well, they can't have shields. The idea is that the empire has unlimited manpower. So they're just going to keep throwing pilots in. And if you survive long enough, then if you survive long enough, well, congrats. It's survival of the fittest.

Yeah, that is not the career plan I cover myself. And also, I always thought the X-Wings were the coolest ships in Star Wars. Oh, they are. That's because they are. Yeah, so that's the best toy. Although, the Tie Avengers is pretty bad, too. What is the Tie Avenger? The Tie Avenger is the next level up.

So, Darth Vader's Starfighter, the Tie Advanced, was his kind of was a prototype. Was tie advanced, actually, did that term come from these games? Because I know that is like the common term. I believe tie advanced was the name that they gave to it with the toys. Oh, okay. No, that was just Darth Vader's tie fighter. Or was it for Darth fighters? So Darth Fighter's Typhir first gets a name in West End games.

Oh, there we go. It all comes back to the role playing game. But I don't remember if they, in West End games, if they called it the tie advanced for the fighters they made off it or if that was. Well, in Tie Fighter, they call it the Tie Advanced, but most people refer to it as The Avenger. And so, I mean, I guess this is to say that in Tie Fighter, you had a much expanded selection of fighters to play with. You had the original Tie Fighter, which was always fun to play with. And actually one of my, it's actually my preferred Imperial Thai ship because it's fun to fly around in. You got a little bit of that sense of danger because two lasers will just kind of blow you the heck up.

You get hit by one laser, and suddenly all of your instruments are, like, shattering everywhere, which is always a really cool thing, except when your radar blew up. Oh, God. And then you were screwed. You were really screwed. There was the Thai interceptor, which is the faster one with the bent wings from Return of the Jedi. Four lasers. Tybomber, which is my least favorite fighter. I love the type bomber.

Why? I love the design, because I like how it has. It's unique. Yeah, it has the double holes. The double holes, and one holds all the missiles, and the other hull is where the pilot sits. The lasers are so poorly. Oh, God, yeah, the lasers are awful. It's a nightmare to fly that dang thing.

It flies like a bathtub. Yes, no, exactly. A bathtub full of bombs, though. That's the important part. Well, yeah, it's a bathtub full of torpedoes. But I always enjoy it because I like the bombers. And they're always the favorite in every Starfighter game I've played. And to me, they look really cool.

And then, you know, later on, they do some really cool things with what type bombers are in some of the other properties. There's the assault gumbo, which is introduced in X-Wing, which we neglected to mention, which is kind of weird. It looks like a shuttle. It has shields. Yeah. It's like a shuttle cut in half on the bottom. Yep. And it has lasers and ion cannons.

It's barely mentioned in the Expanding Universe. It's mentioned a little bit, but usually they refer to Skipray blast boats, which are a different thing. Yeah, and those are gunships. But the gunship, the assault gunboat, is a, comes from X-Wing. It doesn't come from anywhere else. It is very much an X-wing thing. It's kind of an unremarkable fighter, but you spend a lot of time. It's a pain in the ass when you're playing against it.

But it's nice when you get shields for the first time. Yes. Yeah, and they're a super pain to kill because they're big fat bombers with a lot of shields that take a while to whittle down and take out. There's the Thai advance or the Thai Avenger, which is a souped-up high interceptor. It's Darth Vader's ship, but it has kind of the little holes cut in the wings instead of the smooth solar panels. And it's fast. It's very fast. It's as fast as an a wing. It has advanced concussion missiles, which are very strong and very fast and target really well,

very effective. And I would say most people would call that kind of the hot rod, you know, because you can fly around that thing and go toe to toe with A wings, which A wings are the of your existence in tie fighter. Especially when you're in a regular tie fighter. Because an A-wing has shields and it's much faster than you. Very fast. This thing is so O-P. What the heck.

And it has a tiny profile. Yes. It's very hard to shoot. But does it feel Opey when you play as an A-wing? Oh, heck. Well, heck, yeah, because you're flying around with like the, you're like, oh, yeah. I've got no hit box and all the guns. The only time I ever felt overwhelmed when I was flying an A-wing was either when there'd be three

different groups of interceptors on my butt or if I was. I had to get in through and deal with a couple frigates and fighters at the same time. If you had to attack capital ships, you were screwed. Yeah. And it was fairly weak. But the one thing that was not weak was the Tide Offender, which ridiculous. Okay. So I want to ask about this because I did not play Tye Fighter.

The Tide Offender has three wings, right? It has three. Little mushroom top like things. There's a whole running plot line. I just watched through Clone Wars and Rebels recently. And, like, one of the major storylines is the TIE Defender. So that comes from these games. It comes from these games.

And also Admiral Thrawn is, like, in charge of the Defender project. Yeah, and so let's start with the game title. Oh, yes, fine. Be that way. It's the most opy thing. Oh, it's so Opey. It's much strong. You can basically cut through a Tide Avenger, like Hot Nights or Butter with a Tide Fender.

You could cut through a frigate. Well, in the, in the, in the game's logic, so an imperial. You spend a lot of time fighting rebel. You initially fight some rebels, but you spend a lot more time fighting pirates and defecting Imperials in this game. Admiral Zarin. And Admiral Zarin has a lot of Thai advances because he spearheaded the Thai Adventure Project. And so you need something even better than the Thai advance to be able to combat him. That Thai defender.

Welcome Thai defender. So Admiral Zarin is like a defector? He's a good portion of the game. You're under his command testing out advanced proto. types and such. And then gasp, it turns out that, in fact, he wants to become a warlord and he's defecting. And at the end of the game, he actually kidnaps the emperor, so you've got to rescue the emperor. Yeah.

And there's one mission where he's asking you to betray and to join him. And he doesn't, so that he sends his Avengers at you. Yes, no. Yes, we'll get to that bit in a minute. But the Tide Offender, it's kind of like the F-22 in real life. They, they, they, it's really powerful, it's really strong, but it doesn't actually, they didn't actually make a lot of them. No, there's a lot of, so it has, it has triple cannons, it has ion cannons, they can carry a ton of torpedoes or missiles, tons of weapons, yeah. Shields, and it's fast.

And then finally there's the missile boat, which is introduced in the Defenders of the Empire expansion, which is just, I think you can have like 10 rockets and like 40 torpedoes. Yeah. And you're just going there and go completely ham on. these capital ships and it's ridiculous and awesome. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I don't even know what the, I mean, it's technically a bomber, but no, this thing takes out capital ships. Yeah, you can take out multiple capital ships. It's amazing.

It's like, it's like being a modern era destroyer frigate with missiles going up against World War II battleships and blowing them up with the missiles. But you only have one cannon, but it's okay because you can carry like 40 concussion missiles and then also rockets. So you're all set. You're just going to do whatever the heck you want. I always felt like that was fan service. This was like, let's give you something that's just so much fun to play with and

who cares about the game balance. Totally, that's what it is. And then there's like, that's the counter to the Tide Defender because the enemy gets a hold of Tide Defender. So now you got the missile boats so you can shoot them down with a... Now I want to go back to the Tide Defender for a moment. So in the Thrawn books that are now part of the new canon and in Star Wars Rebels, Thron is the advocate of the tight defender

and he wants that over the deaf star Tarkin and Krennick both want the deaf star and they went out. Politics. Yeah, politics. Even though Thron says, you know, no, no, no. In every single way, the defender is a much better weapons program.

And so that's how I love how some of this stuff ties into the old and to the new, but you know, it comes from these series of games. Yep. They really pulled a lot from this. And then, of course, Admiral Thrawn has a big part to play in this game. So, yeah, let's actually talk about the game.

We kind of got sidetracked talking about how much we love bad guy ships. So I agree. But, yeah, let's talk about the games so we don't run out of time. I want to get through the whole series. So what makes Tie Fighter so awesome, Kat? Why is it so great? Besides the ships. It adds a lot of quality of life improvements to the X-Wing.

Yeah, I mean, beginning with the fact that you can actually see your objectives. There are secondary objectives And bonus objectives If you fail an objective You will have an imperial commander Come out in the line and tell you that you failed Abort mission, mission of failure Very angrily

Now you can continue playing He's going to continue barking at you Yes, return to base, etc. You have a chat log So you can go through all the messages There are actual messages in-game That are kind of telling a story So the missions are a lot more elaborate

in that respect. I think Dave Westman and Dave Maxwell were pretty experienced by this point. And so they really knew how to build kind of a successful mission. Though I guess Dave Maxwell was still complaining that the missions were way too easy. Tie Fighter is way easier than X-Wing. Well, it's easier in mission construction because they learned how to build good compelling missions that had some balance to them. But some of them were harder because you're flying ships with no shields. They added a ton of ships in this one.

So they have bases called platforms. Oh, yeah. They have victory class Star Destroyers, which are introduced in the Thron trilogy. They have interdictors, which will keep you from escaping. If I remember correctly, Victory Class Star Destroyers came from West End Games. Oh, did they? Yeah. Okay.

So they introduced the Victory Class Star Destroyers. They introduced a whole mess of new fighters. They introduced the Z-95 headhunter. So tons of new ships. Lots of freighters, mines that shoot back and shoot missiles. The mines were an X-wing. Yeah, but not the missile ones. Oh, God, the missile ones.

We didn't even talk about how freaking annoying clearing a minefield could be. It gets even more dangerous when you're in a Thai fighter. When you're in a Thai interceptor. Oh, God. So there's a mission. So as you're progressing through the game, initially you're fighting rebels and then you're fighting pirates. And then starting. I really like that transition to fighting the pirates.

Yeah. Because it's showing you like the empire. is more about the just dealing with the rebels or projecting its power. It's also about dealing with threats that are actual threats that any government could be dealing with. Yeah, the whole idea is sectionally, it's like, okay, the empire is actually in charge. This is what it's like to work for the empire. The empire is dealing with, you know, various conflicts. This is how the empire would resolve a conflict between two planets. They would basically come in and force them to the negotiating table. Yeah, and that's a whole storyline between

the Ripoulos and the Daimach. Yeah. The empire is fighting pirates who are attacking shipping lanes and whatnot. But in the background... Basically, they become the British Empire. Yeah, they're the British Empire or America, whatever. In the background, there's a whole story. Like, you can see that at the end of the first, like, kind of battle, you see a Imperial Admiral fly to the rebels and offer to sell his fleet to them. And so you know that this guy's bad, even though you're working for him. His name is Admiral Harcough. And then there's a great mission where you're sent out in a Thai intercepter with no sheep. with a couple of wingmen, and you're getting really ominous messages, and you're asked to clear a minefield in your tie interceptor with no shields, which you do, and then your wingmen suddenly turn on you and start killing you. Though you can just kill the wingmen, and then they'll go, oh, okay, well, screw you, and then they start launching fighters at you.

And then Thron comes in and rescues you, and now there's the whole, like, defector storyline going on. Oh, so there's like a branching storyline here? There's no branching storyline. It's just the way the missions are designed. It's slayered. Okay. Yeah. If you clear the, if you just go through the normal way, you clear the minefield, then eventually Harcalf will be like, screw up, just kill them.

Yeah. And your wingman will turn on you. They'll start launching fighters at you. And then a huge battle will erupt where the rebels also show up. And suddenly there's a three-way battle going on. It's great. So that's the kind of. And because the missions could support a lot more fighters, the missions could ultimately feel much bigger in scope.

Also, don't shoot capital ships in Tyefighter. They will kill you. Yes. Yes. Yes. If, you know, in some missions you're attempted to shoot capital ships, either you want to draw their fire or you just want to see if you can take one out. Well, they will focus all the resources on destroying you. They have more weapons and placements and where things are going to destroy weapons and placements in this one, which you couldn't do an X-wing.

No, you couldn't do an X-wing. And they have missiles. And if you shoot the shield generators, the shields will go down. So that is nice. Or is that just in the original X-wing? Well, that, and they didn't really have the shield. They had shield generators on Star Destroyers. Right, but you had to fight Star Destroyers, too. So the story traces through two more expansions,

Defender of the Empire and Enemies of the Empire. And you work closely with Thron as he battles another Admiral named Admiral Zarin. There is stuff like cloaking technology involved where, and eventually Admiral Thron is able to outwit. admirals are and gets promoted to Grand Admiral. And you're part of the celebration. You're part of the celebration. And at the end of the game, they're like, good job, you.

Well, we got good news. The rebels are heading over to Entor and we've got a trap for them. We know that we're going to totally take them out and everything will be great. Anyway, have a good day. That's the end of the game. But, I mean, the reason Thai fighter still stands out is that it was levels above the original X-wing in terms of design. the scope, the storytelling, felt really closely tied

into Star Wars. And, I mean, to this day, there hasn't really been a game that tells a story of being a part of the empire in the same way. Yeah. And at this point, in the old expanded universe, you have several novels out now.

And there's callbacks, little callbacks to all of them, be it, be it, you know, the ships, like a Karat-Klaas cruiser, which comes from Truisabakra, or or, you know, Grant Abrammer Thong himself, who becomes such a, he's such a, you know, beloved figure by the community at this point. Yeah, so putting them in there was a great idea.

And also, they released in 1995, they started releasing CD-ROM versions. And so there was one for X-Wing, which had featured improved models, somewhat better music. Tie Fighter really went to the next level, though. It had much higher resolution, had kind of super VGA, and it had a full added expansion pack. They had fully voiced dialogue. It had rotating turrets, which was really cool. That was the one you wanted to get. It was much better than the disc after.

I started on the disc one, and as soon as the first time I got a CD-ROM, that was, you know, I rebought the game. Though I have a tale of woe with the disc version. Oh, no. So this was around the time that I started learning how to make missions, and so I would make custom missions for these things. And often what I would end up doing... And people would download these missions. Some of them were really awful.

Some were great. Yeah, you could download a mission editor. And that was where I started to learn how to be like, oh, okay, so I should be placing the flight, the units here, and they should be like, here, how to use all of the different triggers and everything. It was really interesting, except that I was editing the mission straight from the disc. And which meant that I was completely overriding them. Whoops.

Oh, no. That's not a great idea. So the other thing we haven't talked about here, and it's a very small thing. And, you know, only real deep history nerds like me are going to like this is, you know, some of the capital ships have names calling back to great ships from World War I or World War II. You have the war spite, which is the name of one of the ships. And, you know, that's a great famous British battleship and the Thunderer. Which is funny because it's a galaxy far, far away. The British Empire knows something?

Yeah. And then you have one ship that always turns out, the Nees Now, which is a play on Neesed Now, which was one of the Germanese battleships. Well, it turns out a whole bunch of history nerds were making these games. Yeah, turns out. But I loved how they fit little bits of that throughout all these games. X-Wing was really well received, but I feel like Tie Fighter was where the series really just kind of exploded and became really just beloved. Really? And for the whole series, I still think it's the best one.

I think it's the best one for sure, because it had the best story. I had the best missions. It was, I went, I started playing it again a couple years ago, and I was really pleased with how well it holds up. It holds up fantastic. I would say it holds up much better than either X-Wing Alliance or X-Wing versus typefighter. Yeah, it looks really good still. You can play it on good old games and DOS Box and that kind of thing. So I have to ask, up to this point, how many joysticks, flight sticks did you break, play these games?

Well, the first time, I didn't get an actual flight stick until X-Me vs. Tie Fighter came out. Okay. Yeah. And up until that point, I've been playing with a mouse and keyboard, which is, Again, not optimal. Not optimal. But you finished the game with Femouse and Kibo. Yeah, you know what I was using? It's called invulnerability, which you could actually put on. So I would just sit behind Corvettes while they were shooting.

I mean, like, bo, vo, vo, but it was with Xwing versus Tyfighter, they took out the invulnerability option, and then I kind of had to get serious. So with Xwing, I probably broke three or four joysticks. I broke a joystick with XVT. And I was bad. I bought Cheebo once because it was a college store. That's all I can afford. Did you break it through use or break it because the game was frustrating? No, broke it through use because I'd be going, oh, no, I wouldn't go right.

Because you'd be, like, going back and forth. You needed a thrust master. Those things were heavy duty. But don't buy a Microsoft sidewiner because those were not good. Oh, you know, I used a sidewinder for Alliance, and I was fine with it. I never broke it. Interesting. So do we want to move on X-Web versus stuff?

I think we need to. Time is marching on. It still marches on. No, this is my least favorite of the one. Oh, I thought you said this was your favorite. No, Tyfighter is my favorite. But X-Wing vs. Ta-Fighter. No, I thought Jason said.

No, no, Ty-Fighter is my favorite. And the reason why is because on Pondor release, it was a multiplayer game. Yes. So X-Wes versus Tie Fighter, I was following the series avidly at this point, and I was reading game magazines. It's like X-Wing versus Tyfighter is coming. It's going to be multiplayer. You're going to be able to play as both the rebels and the Empire. I'm like, this sounds like the greatest game ever conceived by a human being.

I must own this game day one. A tale of woe number two. I'm waiting and waiting and waiting. And one weekend, my friend goes, oh, you should be, you should get Command and Conquer and play with us. And I'm like, I cannot get Command and Conquer. I only have a certain amount of money. And I need to get X-B versus Tyfighter.

Oh, well, I heard that it was delayed. Actually, no, it had not been delayed. It came out the following weekend after I bought Command and Conquer. Are you still friends? No, we're not, actually. There you go. That's what you get. True gamer should not have friends.

So at this point... By the way, it's such a pre-internet story. Yeah. So at this point, you know, I'm graduating college. I'm finishing up everything. I'm not paying attention to anything when it comes to game news and stuff like that. You know, real world stuff. And I buy it not realizing it doesn't have a single-player campaign at lunch.

Yep. And I was pissed. A lot of people were pissed. Actually, I didn't realize that it had a... didn't have a single-player campaign either. It was just kind of a series of missions. You can play out as both sides. So this was, sorry, this was like kind of ahead of its time because Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, those came out in the following years.

But I don't think it was really like a big series, a big popular series on PC that was only multiplayer. Was there, like, that made that change in a sequel. Had that happened before? It was ridiculously ahead of its time in that respect in the sense of like. It was ambitious as hell. It came out in 97. It's built around co-op. You're supposed to be playing with your friends taking on these objectives, playing against other people who are similarly pursuing their own objectives.

And even though it's not my favorite of them, there was one of the entire series that I would love to see remade. It would be that. Now, remaking it would make total sense right now because of this. Yeah, because it had horrible net code. There was no matchmaking. You had to go, I played this game like crazy. summer, though. So I go on my browser using this thing called the Microsoft Internet Gaming Zone, which in hindsight is completely insane to be launching a game from a browser in 1997

because it's such a memory hog, right? Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, I'm going into these little lobbies, going into people with ping rates that are like just off the charts. And really, the only way you could play around on a modem was if you were just going head-to-head, just one-on-one. So I would have all of these one-on-one dogpites where we're coming in at one-in-at-one and then we start kind of doing jukeying and weaving. And you had to get really good at being able to aim perfectly to be able to get your shots on. And then you would swoop past each other and then it becomes a turning war.

And then whoever could get the other person first, you're good. And then back to it again. And for some reason, I thought this was really fun. But I was actually extremely good at this game. I'm not very good at multiplayer games in general. But I think I was like top 15 on Cases Ladder at that time. So the first time I played this, I was played. I just got in.

I'd flown for like maybe a minute. Phone rings. Get knocked off. Even today, the net code is so bad that even today you can't really connect with people. Like it's still the frame rate is terrible and everything. It's made for land play. Yeah. Or broadband.

Yes, exactly. Also, they improved the graphics, but the graphics didn't even look that good in 1996. this was kind of right around the time that 3D acceleration was happening and 3D acceleration those graphics were not 3D accelerated so they actually looked in my opinion markedly worse than Tie Fighter

but I will give credit here they listened to fans and yes they added a 3D acceleration patch which definitely improve the graphics and then they added the balance of power expansion yeah which was a single player and they added a huge expansion that had full single player

campaigns for both the rebels and the empire and put the I think they put the B-wing back in because they didn't have the B-wing in the initial release. And it was the first time they introduced the Super Star Destroyer. And then the Y-W were even more O-P in this game because you could literally just keep hitting

W over and over again to switch back and forth between lasers and ions. And you could rip apart enemy fighters so fast because you could just essentially be firing rapid fire with the two. It was great. So B-Wings and Y-wings super overpowered. What do you two think of

the battlefront version of this kind of gameplay. I think that the, it's a lot more like Rogue Squadron, which gets started a couple years later, which I like, but it's not nearly as complex or as interesting as the Thai Fighter games. Yeah, I guess, yeah, you're right. Oh, sorry. I guess Rogue Squadron is sort of the console-a-d version of this, right?

Yes. Yeah. And they're good games. Yeah, they're built around set pieces, again, heavily scripted, much more arcade, like, and they're very enjoyable. I think Rogue Leader is outstanding. One of my favorite missions from those games. You remember you have the Star Destroyed and Head Crash?

You're taking out all the little ATDP walkers that come out. Yes. Yeah, that's one of my favorite missions from the Roe. Well, in Shadows of the Empire, they had Hawth, and that was the first time they got the Battle of Hothright. And then people loved that mission so much that they went and made Rogue Squadron. And was it in every single one. But going back to what Bob was saying. battlefront too I really enjoy it's Starfighter assault mode

Is it is it this no No it's not Tyfighter at all It's totally arcady But it's so much fun because you have swarms of enemy Controlled players plus CPUs coming in at you And so you're in this giant dog bites And there's objectives Yeah no there are definitely objectives

That really are tailored to the missions are really good And you have the cockpit for you You don't have to just sit seeing a Thai fighter fly You can actually be looking through the cockpit which I fly better at. I don't know about you, Kat. I prefer the third-person view, actually, in those games. Yeah, see, I prefer the first.

And they're fine. Give me VR, though, and that would be awesome. Yeah. Now, would I rather have something like Tie Fighter? Totally. I'd much rather have that. Is this fun and do I enjoy it? Yes.

Am I good at it? No. So the reason that X-Wing versus Tie Fighter was so formative for me was that this was the first time I joined an actual online community. It was called the Emperor's Hammer. It was a online club that was. was quite successful in the 90s. It had hundreds of members, actually, people.

And the idea was that you were assigned to a squadron. You would do play custom missions. You would try to hit high scores. You would write fiction. You would turn in fan art and everything. And it was a really kind of neat club. And I spent a lot of time learning how to make missions and such. And that really kind of informed my understanding of what goes into, I suppose, good game design.

Right? So I put hundreds upon hundreds and hundreds of hours into X-Men versus Typhine in particular because I found that engine the easiest to work with and easiest to actually just insert missions straight into the game. Now, in your opinion, do you think anything that Lucas learned here through about multiplayer made it into the old Battlefront games? Nah. I mean, for one thing, the Battlefront games were designed by somebody completely different. The thing that's interesting about X-Wing versus Tie Fighter was that it was kind of a last-minute thing from when I'm able to understand. It sounded like another project kind of fell through that they were working through. Like it wasn't going extremely well.

And so they just went, screw it. We'll make the multiplayer X-Wing game. And Dave Westman said, yeah, it was kind of my call not to include a single-player campaign. We were just focusing on multiplayer. And I got a lot crap for that. X-Wing versus Ty-Fighter does do one thing better. I like how much faster the lasers go. I like how much harder, how much better the AI is.

And I like that they added a component where if you slow down, you turn much faster, and that added another layer of complexity to the actual flying. But then X-Wing versus TIE fighter, that was a thing for a couple years, and then X-Wing Alliance comes out. Which... That's the end. It's the end. Now, Alliance is, I like so much of it.

All of this happens in six years, by the way. Yeah. It should have been the best of all of them, but it wasn't, in my opinion. Well, it was kind of, again, kind of rushed, right? Because they needed to hit a certain deadline. This is when the prequels are coming out. And so this is kind of an interesting time because you guys referred to Rogue Squadron. Roak Squadron came out almost exactly at the same time as X-Wing Alliance.

Yeah, it was late-98. It was like late-98, early 99. So late-late 8 was Rogue Squadron. Early 99 was X-Wing Alliance. And they were basically saying, you got to get it out by this time deadline or else you're going to, it's going to be held all the way into the holiday season. Yeah. After, after like March, everything is the prequels. Yeah, they're like, we don't want to confuse the original series with the prequels. That's how it's going to be.

So they were really rushing to get this thing out. And in many respects, it was the most ambitious version to date. Totally. Yeah. Fully 3D engine. You could look around the cockpit and everything. You're inside a fully 3D hangar bay. It's a family story, which I love.

Yeah, you're flying a Millennium Falcon for the first time and these big fat things. Is it actually the Millennium Falcon or is it just a YT100? Initially, it's a YT-1200, but later on you're flying the actual Millennium Falcon in the Battle of Endor. And it's a story of betrayal and politics and everything. But eventually your family does end up joining the rebels and you get to fly in the next wing again, which is a lot of fun. Yeah. And it does have some brutal difficulty to it. Oh, yeah, for sure.

It's still not as hard as the original X-Wing. No, but the mission with the taking out the experimental ties. Yes. There's a whole sequence where there are these weird experimental tie fighters that you have to kill. Didn't the Shadows of the Empire or does Rebel Assault 2 fighters get put into this game, the one second cloak? I don't remember them. Okay. Because Rebel Assault 2 was horrible, but it did introduce the,

the Thai shadows or whatever those were. You know, one thing it does have with these experimental fighters is, again, going back to how the empire is, you know, they have these great mainland fires, but they're still trying to make things better to kill things with. Really kooky designs, really, none of them make a lot of sense. As is typical with a giant bureaucracy, there's a lot of giant R&D budget that's kind of being thrown into a black hole for no apparent reason. Admiral Zarin was really good at that. Yeah. You know, there's some callbacks to Prince Zizor from Shadows of the Empire. Oh, yeah.

There's a whole Shadow of the Empire storyline because you fly along with Dash Rendar. Ooh. Yes. Now you got my attention. No, Bob's like, oh, man, Shadows of the Empire. Now, Star Vipers were supposed to be in the game, but they got cut. Oh, did they? Yeah, that was a time thing.

Yeah, you're flying along with Dash, who was cut rate Han Solo and Luke Skywalker in one mission. Because they made a big deal out of flying wing with Darth Vader in. tie fighter. Which was, I loved. And they were like, don't give orders to the dark lord, which was a lot of fun. But in X-wing Alliance, there are some other things. You could fly basically any ship in multiplayer. Yeah.

They had multiplayer in this, and it was kind of a stripped-down version of X-wing versus Thai fighter. Even in single-player, you could change loadouts. You know, it's like, oh, you know, you can fly next wing or you can fly in a wing. The capital ships are even harder to take out than before because in the original X-Wing, it was really easy to avoid the shots. By X-wing Alliance, if you even look sideways at a capital ship, it was going to slice you into little bits with its super high-firing turrets and missiles. And if you launch warheads at it, it could launch missiles to shoot them down. Yep.

So it could be quite tough in that regard. So another thing that was really good here, where they're expanding on how they tell story is you get little mementos for the missions. Yes, because you had this little droid guy named MK with you. And he was, a couple years later, BioWare would create HK, who is much better remembered for being a psychopath, but MK was the opposite of C3PO. He's really excited to be into the adventure. He's like, oh, boy, let's go kill!

Kind of a scrappy in that regard. But you have a little room with all of the little mementos that you collect from your missions, which is kind of fun. Yeah, and you get messages from your family. Yes. Sadly, they never resolved the family story because at the end of the game, Uncle Anton betrays you,

and you're like, oh, what's going on with this? And they're clearly setting up for an expansion that never happened because the game sold like half of what Tie Fighter did. And it's clear that space combat simulators were dying. I think, if they had moved it to the holiday, all the old Star Wars fans who were pissed off by Phantom Bettis would have bought it.

Nah, space combat simulators were dead. Free Space 2 was, and not only that, Free Space 2 looks so much better than that game and was honestly a lot better. It was. And it tanked. It tanked badly. I mean, realistically, I don't think it's a good business plan for Lucas to be like, well, let's bank on people hating our blockbuster new movie that we've poured everything into.

Well, it reflected the transition of the PC era, right? Because in the late 80s, early 90s, a lot of strategy games and a lot of flight sims, right? So X-Wing fit really nicely into that. By the late 90s, first-person shooters, real-time strategy. Like, those kinds of games were kind of dying. A new one this time, the MMO. Yes, the MMR-R-PG, like EverQuest and that kind of thing. So, yeah, no, sadly, that's how it went.

But it did go out with a bang because the Battle of Endor actually compared to the original Xwing. Battle of Endor was pretty well done. Yeah. Yeah, because it's a, again, I'm only. multi-lake mission, but because the Starfighter count is so much larger this time and you have multi-lake missions where you're jumping from hyperspace to point to point to point, it feels a lot more cinematic, right? And then.

And you have missions, you have messages. So you have a, you know, a backup actor who's trying to pretend to be Cantlando Calrissian going, that thing's operational. So it feels like the movies. Yeah. And then when you're flying inside the Death Star. I think you actually see the Liberty get blown up by the Death Star as well, which is pretty cool.

Especially since the Liberty is, at one point, is your base in some of the earlier mister. And it's controlled by a guy who like defects from the empire. It gets nuked by the Death Star. But you fly inside the Death Star and it looks much better than the Trencher and the original X-wing. You get to the power plant, which looks amazing for 1999. You actually blow it up and you have to escape and the fire is coming out from behind you.

So, yeah, great finish. Yeah. Yeah, great finale. It doesn't have that long slog to it that you feel like you do in the trench of X-Wing. Yeah, and ultimately, X-Wing Alliance, definitely the most modded of the X-Wing games because it had a lot of different craft packs. There was a thing called the X-Wing Alliance upgrade project, which improved the graphics quite a bit. Which is still online. Yeah, no.

Though it's kind of annoying to try and get the good old games version and then try and install all the mods. and everything. And last I checked, somebody is actually in the process of making something called the X-Wing special edition, though I've heard about this. There hasn't been any word of it of late, but it is a basically X-wing with modern graphics. And I'm like, please, please, give it to me. I want this game so much, but I haven't heard anything in like three years. Do you think there's a market for these kind of games again?

I think at least for nostalgia. And I think especially with VR, there's a decent reason to try and make one of these games. Because who doesn't want to fly a freaking X-Wing in VR? Yeah, I think this is one of those things that's kind of like, you know, like a Mega Man 9 or something. There is enough nostalgia and desire for one of these to do really well and then a lot of diminishing returns after that. So they should do one.

Yeah. And let it live. Let that be the definitive X-wing. Like, bundle all the best of these games into one package and just let it go. The original development team is obviously long gone. Lawrence Holland. Well, he went and made Star Trek Bridge Simulator. and then subsequently he kind of moved into console games

and then he moved into mobile games and now as far as I can tell totally games is gone. Yeah, yeah. I mean, EA is an evil empire so they could easily make Tie Fighter, yeah. But they wouldn't do it because they can't monetize it properly. Though, I mean, I make X-Wing versus Tie Fighter. But that's the other thing is X-Wing versus Tie Fighter

doesn't fit well on console. No. Right? Like, because there's just too many commands and that kind of thing doesn't translate well to a game page. So it's just like... Although I think there are enough design concepts floating around, like using shoulder triggers to bring up a menu wheel or something where I think you could make it work. You can make it work.

I mean, hell, Path of Exile is Diablo 2 online and they make it work. And there's only one command I don't like playing that on console. The thing that makes me sad is that we haven't really had many games like X-Wing since or W. commander to be honest. A lot of the space combat games that have come out in that period since have been kind of online games or they've been much more in the elite model where

it's like you're a traitor and it's a lot more realistic. Elite Dangerous is a fantastic game for what it does. Oh yes, but it's hyper realistic. Yeah, it's not what I want and Star Citizen, oh God. I don't even know what it is anymore. Nobody does. But the original

X-Wing stood out because it was much more complex than your average console game, but it wasn't as complex as, say, a game like Falcon 4.0. It straddled that line really nicely and made you feel like, oh, this is an interesting and deep game and I'm actually flying a ship, but without getting two up its own rear end. And then on the other end of it, it added the canon in a way no video game had, really until Battlefront 2, if you think about it. Yeah, and even Battlefront 2 was a disappointment because midway through, spoiler alert,

you actually defect to the rebels. Yeah. Which I was like, oh, come on, you know. If you're going to tell an empire story, tell an empire story. You know, you have a game that did it and did it good. Yeah, no, Tie Fighter did the best job maybe of putting you in the shoes of the empire. It also was the bestseller of the four, if I remember correctly. I mean, we didn't even talk about the fact that it had an entire subplot that you could pursue where if you did the secondary objectives, you could join the secret order of the empire, which was another thing from the book.

where you would rise up the ranks until you eventually became the emperor's hand, which was, I mean, it's so perfectly captured what it would be like to be in the empire with the backstabbing and the dark side stuff. But it also captured what Star Wars was at that point. Because you had your rebel stories and you had your stories of coming up, but there were still this great empire story. Yeah. And that had come from Thrawn.

It also came out at a time when the Star Wars universe still felt kind of new and vibrant and interesting. The expanded universe stories were still generally pretty strong. There was no such thing as the US Hopvong. We had not seen Darth Vader say, Yippee!

Yeah, the prequels hadn't come out. In fact, I remember when seeing Phantom Menace in the theater and going, oh my God, Corristened, at last. I get to see it on the movie screen. And that'll still crap like that alone

made me so excited. And now I'm like, oh boy. Yeah. But the prequel's beginning of the end. But if there is one game, one game that I can have a sequel to or a remake or anything, anything like that in my life, it would be X-Wing. That is my last frontier. Now, we do have a good adaptation of it. I think that's Star Trek.

We do have a good adaptation of it. What's that? Which is the miniatures game. That's true, but it's a board game. Yeah. It's a board game. But, I mean, there's a game coming out as of this recording this month, I believe, Rebel Galaxy 2, which looks kind of wing commandery slash. privateeri slash ex-wingy.

Did you ever play Tachian? No. Okay, this came out, I think, I want to say 2004, and it's a Starfighter game. It was okay. And it tried to have some more of the realistic physics of Starfighters, but it was like that last gasp between that. And do you ever remember the Babylon 5 bod that puts you in a Star Fury? Everybody had a Babylon 5 nod.

There was one that was just, it was like their own standalone game. Was this a total conversion or something? Yeah. Okay. Yes, I remember this. Yeah. But that was really the last gasp until elite dangerous. Sierra was trying to make a Babylon 5 game, and that didn't go so well.

Yeah. So that's a sex wing right there. All right. Well, Jason and Kat, thank you for podcasting for us today. We really appreciate it. Saved me and Bob a lot of energy and effort. Oh, no, I know a lot about these games. I was just running the board over here.

I know. You were keeping it in reserve for your follow-up episode. I know. I totally understand. But, yes, we were able to kind of sleep and catch up with our rest for the weekend. I appreciate it. No, but seriously, it's been great listening to you too. Like, sometimes people come on to the show and really get into something that they're enthusiastic about it.

And I'm like, oh, is that what it's like when, you know, people hear me and Bob talk about something that we're really into? Okay, it's like the outsider perspective. So thanks for letting me finally experience retro-onauts the way other people do. This is the first time I've come on and I've talked about something that wasn't an RPG. I mean, you are playing a role of a next, okay, anyway. No, thanks again to both of you and thanks to Victor Romero for requesting. Thanks, Victor. And sponsoring this topic.

I hope that this discussion was to your satisfaction. I would be shocked if it's not. But, yeah, it's been an interesting conversation as kind of an outsider on this one. So thank you. and whenever they finally make a sequel to this series, we'll have you come in again and talk about it tomorrow. Never say never. Screw you, EA.

We've got trials of mana now, so anything's possible. I guess. Okay, whatever. It's up to you, your call. All hope is dead. Anyway, that's it for this episode. Thanks everyone for listening. Let's do the round-robin of introductions,

and I guess it's not introductions at this point. It's exits. Man, I don't know. Outroduction. Yes, outroduction. I, hi. Yes, I'm Jeremy Parrish. And this is Retronauts, which you're listening to.

You can find it on iTunes and Retronauts.com and other places like that. We're on Lipson. And we're also on Patreon. If you want to support cool conversations like this, perhaps sponsor your own conversation like this. You can go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. And for $3 a month, you can support us for $3. a month, you cannot request an episode topic and get a conversation like this, but it is an option

at a higher tier. So you might want to check out that possibility. If you do subscribe for $3 a month, you get the episodes, every episode six or seven a month, a week early at a higher bit rate than you find on iTunes and with no advertisements. So that's, I think, a great deal.

Anyway, Jason, tell us about yourself. Hi, I'm Jason Wilson, the managing editor at Gamespeet. You can find me there. That's Venture Beats Gaming Channel. You can find me on Twitter at Jason underscore Wilson, all lowercase. Having recorded this episode, I am now retiring from the games industry forever because this is my final testament. This is it. I finally got to do the retronauts about these games.

You've been waiting for years. Yeah, I've been waiting for a decade to record this episode. I'm sorry, everyone. I didn't realize this was in the game. I did not mean to take cat away from you. Anyway, I'm on Twitter at the underscore catbot. My day job is running U.S. Gamer, which Jeremy and Bob used to work for, and we cover all of the video games, and I think we're pretty retro-friendly, so you want you to come over and come read some of our cool stuff. I also run a podcast. It's called Acts of the Blood God, which is U.S. Gamer's RPG podcast, and if you are a retronauts fan, which I assume you aren't because you're listening to this podcast, can I recommend the console RPG quest in which we go through every console?

and basically talk about its RPG legacy and kind of its history and everything. It's been a fun little project that's taught me a lot about things like the PC engine, which I didn't realize I knew so little about until I actually started doing research for it. So what's the legacy like for RPGs on the R zone? I mean, some of these consoles do not have a great legacy, like the NeoGeo, which as far as I can tell, has exactly one RPG, which is a Samurai Showdown spin-off. So they, I heard they were going to make a Crystallus 2, but they never got a run to it. Oh, man.

Heartbreaking. Can you imagine a sequel to Crystallus action RPG with NeoGeo level graphics? Oh my God. That would have been amazing. Yep. Yep. Everything's bad. Anyway, Bob.

Hey, speaking of everything's bad. You can find me on Twitter, which is bad, at Bob Servo. That's my name on there. And if you like me talking about old video games, you'll like me talking about old cartoons on my other podcast, Talking Simpsons and, What a cartoon. And you can support those at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. And if you do, you get access to all these bonus podcasts, including our limited miniseries. The most recent one we did is Talking of the Hill.

We went through the entire first season of King of the Hill in excruciating detail. So check it out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. We'd appreciate it. Thank you. And that's it. That's all we have to say about X-Wing. Well, that's all that I have to say about X-Wing. I don't know about those other two.

But Kat, Jason, Victor, and Bob. Thanks, everyone for this lovely episode. We're done now, but we'll be recording more episodes and posting them to the internet in as few as four days from episodes. ...you know... ...withal... ...and... ...their... ...the...

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