#X WING ALLIANCE SERIES#

He goes through absolute hell in this story, and while the plot only unfolds one way, you nevertheless find yourself exploring all manner of tough decisions in an environment that could not be further afield from the typical light side/dark side dichotomy of games like Jedi Knight and Knights of the Old Republic.

#X WING ALLIANCE SERIES#

XWA tells the story of Ace joining the Rebellion and eventually finding himself in the FalconвЂ™s flight crew at Endor, but intermingled with your military missions are a series of missions involving the rest of the Azzameen family, as they deal with competitors, pirates, and eventually, betrayal from within.ДЄll this is to say that for a featureless player character with no lines of his own, Ace was by no means a вЂњRookie OneвЂќ-style cypher. Instead, you are Ace Azzameen, the youngest member of an influential family of traders. While mercifully avoiding the battle itself, the plot of X-Wing Alliance hangs like a hammock between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, opening with the evacuation of Echo Base and ending at the Battle of Endor-another film moment thatвЂ™s seen its fair share of play-throughs.Д®ndor was definitely billed as the big payoff of the gameвЂ™s long and winding narrative, but unlike many other games, itвЂ™s not just there to be there, and while youвЂ™re technically piloting the Millennium Falcon, youвЂ™re not just plopped randomly into the role of Lando Calrissian. If youвЂ™ve paid even the smallest bit of attention to Star Wars gaming over the years, youвЂ™ve likely noticed what has become the ultimate running joke among hardcore fans-the near-constant revisiting of the Battle of Hoth. In this piece, IвЂ™d like to explore some of those reasons in the hopes that theyвЂ™ll be no less true of the dawning Disney era. Indeed, the more I look back, the more IвЂ™ve come to appreciate why this particular game sits at the core of my decade-and-a-half obsession with Star Wars. The culmination (some might say apotheosis) of the X-Wing flight simulation game series of the 90s, XWA is now almost fifteen years old, and barely even functional on a modern computer, but it remains an essential part of my fandom and a periodic touchstone to my seventeen-year-old self, who had only discovered Star Wars a couple years earlier and was still learning the difference between a Skipray Blastboat and a CloakShape fighter. Despite having read well over a hundred books and playing maybe twenty games in the Star Wars franchise, the one thing I have to relive every so often is X-Wing Alliance. Firefly, West Wing, Harry Potter, that kind of thing. EveryoneвЂ™s got pieces of media-probably several, really-that they have to drag out every once in a while and binge on, despite already knowing them backwards and forwards.

X wing alliance