Page 3: The imperial vehicle fleet

Contents

Of course, you start your career in the eponymous "TIE Fighter" - a flying death trap without shields and a hull that reacts with a dramatic explosion even on contact with a laser pointer. Even the tutorial teaches you that two hits from an X-Wing are enough to turn this Trabbi of the Empire into black confetti. However, the thing is much faster and more maneuverable than most of what the rebels have standing around in the hangar.

A short time later, you can switch to the "TIE Interceptor": faster than the normal model, slightly better armored and with four thick lasers instead of two - a significant improvement over its predecessor. However, it still has no shields, which makes it very vulnerable to enemy superior numbers. Number three is the "TIE Bomber": very slow, without shields and almost as elegant to control as a filled bathtub - but thickly armored and heavily armed.

From the "TIE Advanced", also known as the "TIE Avenger", things get interesting: this is an advanced version of the ship that Darth Vader uses to fire at Luke Skywalker at the end of Episode 4. Good speed, good shields, good armor, good armament – the TIE Advanced is what happens when an Imperial ship designer sits down and asks "What if one of our ships came back?" Result: A damn good piece! But not as good as the "TIE Defender". A brand new insane fighter from the design pen of Lord Vader himself. An absurd, completely overpowered battleship with which you can flick the ragged rebels out of space like irrelevant crumbs. Which is also the reason why the TIE Defender is only used directly before the end of the game or in the subsequent add-on.

The technology of the future

Technically, "TIE Fighter" was not a gigantic leap from "X-Wing", but it was a significant one: just like before, a pure polygon graphics model was used, slightly more detailed than before, but still completely without textures. But with clear lines and the then still hot "Gouraud Shading", which gives all spaceships and stations pleasantly round-looking surfaces. The only annoying thing was that the developers had failed because of the size ratios. The huge ships in space, both those of the Emcase, and those of the rebels, are far too small compared to our own machine. Which, of course, had very mundane reasons – in this case simply the mass of memory that a correctly scaled Mon Calamari ship or Star Destroyer would have required.

What there was nothing to complain about was the wonderful soundtrack from the synths of Lucas all-stars Peter McConnell, Michael Land and Clint Bajakian. It relies on an excellently dark mixture of well-known John Williams themes and great original compositions and, thanks to iMuse, also adapts dynamically and smoothly to the gameplay. As soon as something exciting happens, the music immediately turns up. Rebels, Imperial forces and neutral units are clearly distinguishable from each other acoustically, there are small and large jingles for all kinds of events that you hear again and again. As a result, after a few hours of flight conditioning for certain things, you no longer need to look at the status display to know what is happening, as your ears have already told you.

"The greatest game ever made"?

So it's no wonder that "TIE Fighter" was a smash hit that made testers and players pleased. This was followed by an official expansion ("Defender of the Empire", end of 1994) as well as a CD version at the beginning of 1995 with another add-on ("Enemies of the Empire"), continuous voice output, bug fixes, compatibility with Windows 95 - as well as, and this was the real kicker, SVGA graphics in 640x480 pixels. As a result, there was suddenly much more detail to see on the 3D models and the picture was crisp and sharp. No wonder that this version was also buried under a ton of awards; in May 1997, the British magazine "PC Gamer" called the CD version of "TIE Fighter" "the greatest game ever made!"

If you want to replay the complete version of this game today, you can do so for very little money on Steam or GOG. Of course, accessing it today is a little more cumbersome than it was 30 years ago, not least because the joysticks needed to control the TIE machines are no longer very common. But once you get into it, you quickly realize why this game was such a hit back then: It feels so wonderfully big, so epic! With capital ships, where you can target and disable individual on-board systems. With different enemy types that exhibit different flight behavior and break apart dramatically after being successfully shot at. There is always something going on everywhere, you are always just a small part of a larger battle. Something that the American print advertising at the time summarized with the following slogan: "The rebels think the force is with them. Explode the myth!"

(mack)