Download Star Wars - X-Wing Collectors Edition

Star Wars games have never been on the forefront of game-play innovation, games like Dark Forces and Rebellion are in essence no more then adaptations of other games within the Star Wars universe. Dark Forces was inspired by Doom, Rebellion by games like Master of Orion. This does not mean however that these games are not enjoyable to play. Lucas arts has always had a knack for making Star Wars games that lived up to their legacy. X-Wing is the first in that line of games.

X-Wing was a natural choice for a Star Wars game. The culminating moments of Star Wars IV revolve around them after all. The story for the game writes itself. Wing Commander had already shown how to make epic games in a Sci Fi setting and many Star Wars fans were asking for a game that would allow them to fly an X-Wing just like Luke Skywalker. X-Wing gave them that opportunity.

There are three distinct play modes in X-Wing. You can play training missions, fly the pilot proving grounds or play the campaigns. The pilot proving grounds is a timed race in which you need to fly through arches avoiding turret fire. I myself tried this only once or twice as it gets boring quickly. The training missions are nice. There are six each for every one of the four different rebel craft that you can fly. These slowly take you through the basic of what each craft can do and is used for. Most of the spacecraft in X-Wing are taken straight from the movies but what they can do has been developed for the game. For instance both the A-Wing and the B-Wing can be seen in the movies but the distinction between fast but light interceptor and heavy bomber was never discussed in the movies.

The campaign is what it is all about. The story behind it begins shortly before the events of A New Hope. You will not be amazed by the depth of narration. In all fairness it isn�t much and is not important to the game. Hardly surprising as we all know how the story will unfold eventually. The mission themselves however are varied and gripping. In Wing Commander mission where almost all the same. You had to destroy all the enemies that came on your path and that was it. X-Wing successfully varies the types of missions you get. There are even missions in which you will not fire a single shot. With Wing Commander you played the game to see how the story develops, with X-Wing you play through because you like flying the missions.

Graphically X-Wing was something of a revolution. The game engine uses a very early 3D approach to make its gorgeous universe come to life. The models used have no textures because no contemporary PC would have been able to run the game if they had. Even without textures the game looks far better then anything ever seen before. It established the name of Lawrence Holland as a graphics guru. The screenshots in contrast are largely disappointing. They work well with the game but there are very few of them and they are not as good as those in Wing Commander.

A lack of a story is one flaw in X-Wing but it is not its biggest failing. When the game was first released fans soon found that saving the universe from the evil Empire was not as easy as watching the movies. X-Wing was a tough game. Certain missions in particular proved to be more then the average gamer could handle. Eventually Lucas Arts was even forced to patch the game, something they do not like to do and don�t do very often.

When first released X-Wing was an instant classic it begged for a sequel. In a not often seen turn of events the second game in the series became the most well known and loved of the series. Two more games were released, the very disappointing, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and, the slightly less bad, X-Wing Alliance. No new games have been announced or are rumoured to be in development. Never mind that as both X-Wing and TIE Fighter are still well worth playing.

The version we have placed online is the Collectors Edition. It contains all the expansions and speech files as well as the slightly easier �CD Mission� which makes the game playable for those of us who are not Luke Skywalker. 

Important!! The archive contains two files, with .bin and .cue extensions. To play the game, you will have to download and install Daemon Tools from our utilities section and then use them to mount the files in question as a virtual CD-ROM drive from which you can then install the game.