| X-Wing Alliance
by Gavin Bennett |
||||
|
In fact I would ask Lucasarts to go one step further, and release some sort of "X-Wing Anthology" which allows you, from a new front end, to fly any of the missions from X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and XvT as multiplayer campaigns, with all the new Alliance enhancements. They should also include a proper Mission and Campaign editor, and allow the loyal fans to support the series on their own. XvT, X-Wing AND Tie Fighter have all had wonderful, fan made, 3rd party mission editors over the years, and it seems silly that Lucasarts did not release their own, integrally supported editor. Historical.. Accuracy? Finally, as in X-Wing, the climax sees you doing something that you shouldn't be doing. You are flying the Millennium Falcon inside the Death Star. X-Wing saw you as some loser Joe Pilot doing much the same. Now, as every Star Wars buff knows, no one but Luke stood a chance in the first instance, and nothing but the Millennium Falcon, probably with a bit of left over magic from its Jedi transporting days, could have managed to get inside the Death Star. Yes, they make for nice endings of campaigns, but it's jarring. Perhaps it would have been better if you were commandeered to help fly with Lando in the Falcon, rather than in your own space ship. That would have been a better touch. The way it's done is cool, but it's also an example of the good old "licensed game" curse, which always spoils the illusion somehow. Performance
Test Machine One:
I ran the game first on this machine at work. I had not figured out how to get 3d acceleration going, so I ran it in software only mode and it was very nice and had a good frame rate. |
 The ATI Rage card is supposed to be a D3D card, but they are lying. YES, it will render in 3d, only it won't do it very fast. I get 10 FPS tops in F4 on machines with this thing in it. But in software mode XWA was cool. It looked very grainy, but still an improvement over XvT. In 3dmode I had lousy frame rates but it looked okay. Unfortunately I started suffering from Wing Commander 3 cramp, as I used to call it. Because of the low frame rate, the enemy aircraft skip around the screen, and continually compensating for this means your joystick arm will be very sore. Turning off the music is also a plus: it increases the frame rates, eliminates pausing and you won't get a migraine. Both instances were run in 640x480. Test Machine two:
Very smooth, very beautiful at 800x600, and it runs at resolutions even higher. If you have the horsepower and a large display, this is jaw dropping gorgeous. Buy it. Test Machine three:
With the music, this game paused and kicked and jerked and coughed. However, it detected the Voodoo card without any configuration changes from me. Without the music, the game ran a LOT faster. And it ran fairly smooth, even in a fairly hectic space battle. At 640x480, with many details turned down, it runs well. Go to Part IV
|
|||
|
Copyright © 1997 - 2000 COMBATSIM.COM, INC. All Rights Reserved. Last Updated May 10th, 1999 |
||||