tie fighter

While John Williams’ original soundtrack plays in the background, the player gets to fly a variety of space craft, which include: TIE fighters, TIE bombers, TIE Interceptors, TIE Advanced, TIE Defender (awesome!), and assault gunboats. Personages you interact with include Emperor Palpatine, Grand Admiral Thrawn, Grand Admiral Zaarin, and, of course, Darth Vader. If you complete the game and save the Emperor you can expect a closing ceremony reminiscent of the one at the end of the original Star Wars movie, except this time it’s all in the Imperial motif.

Editorials

J.A. Laraque

What is the best classic space shooter and why?

I can’t help but to re-iterate how significant the first accomplishment was. This was in the days before DirectX, before any abstraction layers, back when Men were Men & Women were Women & game programmers had to write universal binaries for what hardware MIGHT be running their code. That feat is the equivalent of walking into the UN Building and trying each language until you’re talking to everyone.

Company Representatives

J.A. Laraque

Nery Hernandez: MonkeyPlum Media

Tie Fighter stands out for me as one of those games that has that rare quality of being an experience. From the story, the initiation into the Emperor’s Inner Circle (Secret forearm tattoo and all), the ship models, it was a game that you could tell was made with L.O.V.E. for the source material, while still maintaining an originality of its own.