Wing Commander & X-Wing
 

I've always known people who either love x-wing or wing commander but never seemed to play the other game. I've played through a lot of Wing Commander 1 and 2 while I was a kid, but I never played the x-wing games. I was talking to a friend that was telling me about it and it sounded really fun.

But I was curious about how it compares to Wing Commander in story, gameplay, and cutscenes.

Well, I didn't play X-wing (Star Wars collectors edition) much, only the proving grounds and some historical missions as an Y-wing. I don't know much about it, but most people say it's really hard.
As for Wing Commander (1), it was too easy, even with Maniac as a wingman, so...
Try X-wing out at Abandonia!

Well, it's "protected" so I cannot :) I probably have the CD somewhere, I know I have a few boxed copies of the game in the garage. I did find it at another place though last night and played the first mission, it's pretty good. It runs so much better in dosbox than Wing Commander did :) In just playing the first mission, there really wasn't a cutscene story thing going on, but it may have that in the future when the story actually progresses.

X-Wing isn't hard at all once you get the hang of it well enough. It's even easy to take on a lone star destroyer on your own. The enemies are too dumb--I played a remake where they were smarter and that was a very welcome improvement for me. (It's called Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance and I recommend it.)

I haven't played Wing Commander that much, a little and actually after I had already played X-Wing, so I could easily detect that X-Wing is technically far superior. That's understandable since Wing Commander is older, it's a very good game.

For graphics X-Wing uses real polygons while Wing Commander uses sprites. There's less stress on the story in X-Wing, but you do get to destroy the Death Star if you clear all the previous missions. There are cutscenes both during normal play (takeoff, landing etc.) and after you clear some missions.

For me X-Wing was a perfect game. (Can't tell that Wing Commander was or not, I don't know it enough.)

I have been playing Wing Commander 4 a bit, only the beginning, and the entire X-Wing parts together on one CD, still got that one.
Loved X-Wing, did not hate Wing Commander, but the latter was too slow on my 486DX2-66, so I gave up shortly after trying it out. The graphics in X-Wing were a bit too poor on details, that was improved in Tie Fighter (CD), which I loved also, and even more so than X-Wing. Since I played Tie Fighter, I never again played X-Wing, as Tie Fighter is better in almost every aspect (except of the side of the battle).

One thing I really loved in Wing Commander was a branching story. If you failed a mission or a specific wingman was killed in battle, it could arc the story in a different order and give you different missions later down the line. That is very cool as you're not always concerned with passing EVERY mission EVERY time and encourages you to just take the hit on your record. I think that is missing from X-Wing\Tie from what I've played so far, and to me, sorley missed :(

Yep that's true, in X-Wing if you fail a mission you just go back in time. XD Well Wing Commader was apparently conceived as heavy on story etcetera, not just shooter gameplay; whereas X-Wing is more genre-oriented and narrow, but in this narrower place it's perfect.

The change in missions depending your achievements in Wing Commander was lovely for the time the game was released. Even if it was more to be regarded as some sidebranches you took in the general mission tree. At the end you followed the general story line.
And of course the freedom of flight in WC, flew houres and houres around, just for the fun of it.
You even could decide for yourself from what side or angle of approach you decided to attack, just took some extra flight time.


Do I make much sense here?
Whatever, it made it an interesting game to replay. Contrary to X-Wing.

There's a big rule regarding X-Wing: Dont try to play it without joystick. Using a mouse works at least on Tie Fighter, but If you want 100% out of these both games, use a joystick.

Well I always played X-Wing and Tie Fighter with simple joypad, but while in X-Wing I could also additonally effectively use direction keys on the keyboard to smoothly adjust the flight direction, in Tie Fighter the direction keys didn't work anymore so I used mouse for the smooth adjusting instead.
Both worked actually pretty good. I also tried a real joystick once in X-Wing, but it didn't work for me as good as joypad / keyboard combination, so I gave it up and never used a joystick in any game again.