Episode 25 – X-Wing
March 17, 2013Hi Blockers!
This week, we’re talking about the incredible space sim series, X-Wing.
Before we talk about that, the news:
The team that brought us the original Planetscape: Torment are kicksarting a new game, Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Lord British told us what he meant to. Check out his new game on kickstarter, Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues.
Finally, the developers working on the new Shadowrun Returns game, which raised 18 million dollars last year, released 20 minute of alpha gameplay footage. Looks like they’re on track.
Next, a quick email talking about Humungous games and where you can get them today.
Finaly we get to X-Wing. We talk about the story, gameplay and tech focus. In dev story, we go through the history of the series and a bit about each of the sequels. Then we hear a few listener memories of the games.
Next time, not only is it the podcast’s 1 year anniversary, but we will also be discussing the awesome Fallout series!
Enjoy!
Stream the show live:
Direct download:
http://umbcast.com/podcast/025-UMBCast-X-Wing.mp3
X-Wing is a favorite game of mine also, and I wanted to play it before sending you some mail about it in advance, But I couldn’t get mine working. More on that in a minute….
My first exposure to X-Wing was when I was a garbage collector, I saw that someone had thrown their copy in the trash. I rescued it and brought it home. When trying to install, I discovered that there was damage to some of the floppy disks, and I kept getting errors while installing. I just kept pressing “ignore”, and hoping for the best. What I got worked somewhat, as in if you chose some options, it would crash, but I did get to fly the maze, enough to realize that it would go much better if I had a joystick.
Within a few months, I saw our local Babbages had a special, X-Wing CD-Rom version, Tie Fighter CD-Rom, and X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter Flight School for a low 30$ for the collection. It took a few weeks, but my wife finally approved the expense, as well as buying a cheap joystick, since the CD-Rom version wouldn’t let me play with a mouse.
I never regretted that purchase, even though I was a lousy flyer. Ultimately, the only completion I got was for qualifying on the maze with an A-Wing, the fastest of the ships. I also completed a few of the historical missions, and failed at quite a few more.
While it was difficult, I actually appreciated the difficulty. I would fail at some historical mission, and then go back to the training grounds for a while, and then go and be successful at completing that mission. This wasn’t because I had learned the tricks of that particular mission, but because I was actually becoming a better flyer. I never played much Tie Fighter, because I felt I hadn’t plumbed X-Wing sufficiently, and so never played any of the others – X-Wing Alliance, Or Rogue Squadron, or I don’t know what else. X-Wing is one of my 5 desert island games, since I figure being shipwrecked is the only way I would ever have enough time to become a good pilot.
When You announced the coming of an X-Wing episode, I went and got my CD-Roms, and the old Joystick from a corner of the storeroom, intending to install it on my WinXP laptop. I quickly discovered that there was no place to plug in the joystick. It had been plugged into the old Win98 machine in the corner of the storeroom, but we had cannibalized the keyboard and monitor from that machine to replace breakdowns elsewhere in the house, and none of our other computers has a gameport.
So, while I’m still working on it, I haven’t as yet played in the last 5 years. to console myself, I downloaded the free “Battle Of Yavin”, and Battle Of Endor” from http://www.bruneras.com. These are in now way Space Sims, more like arcade games, but they are fun.