Star Wars: TIE Fighter/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • In the final mission of the original game, how is it that the bad guys managed to capture the Emperor, yet when their shuttle is disabled they do nothing to kill him off (it is not like they had anything to lose)?
    • See the Wild Mass Guessing theory that this was All According to Plan. Anyway, the canon explanation is Palpatine was briefly incapacitated by Arden Lyn, an ancient Proto-Sith that was serving as his Hand. It's possible that Zaarin could have gotten hold of Timmy Zahn's force-suppressing lizards or a Universal Energy Cage as well.
    • As for the second part of that question (why not off him?), he may have been messing with the shuttle crew even if this wasn't All According to Plan, either through the Force or just by being a Manipulative Bastard.
  • What really bugs this troper most is his inability to get this game to run under Windows XP.
  • What really bugs this troper is that despite this series (along with X-Wing) being the best of all space-oriented Star Wars games, they never bothered to re-release it or make new versions on the same engine. Nope, all we get instead are games that basically treat space as though it is a 2d plane. What is the reasoning for that? It could be assumed that the devs are trying to reach a larger audience by making the game easier than breathing, but because of that nobody wants to play it as it's easier than breathing.
    • They did make a couple of sequels to TIE Fighter. The simple fact is that the space simulation genre, along with the 'Mech simulation genre, is effectively dead. The space shooter genre (treating space as a 2d plane) isn't dead. So naturally, when you want to make a Star Wars space game, you go to the genre that isn't dead.
      • What is the sequel? (X-Wing vs TIE Fighter is more of a multi-player variant than sequel really, is there even a sequel to that?)
        • There is, if I remember correctly, an expansion to X Wvs TF that adds a single-player campaign. Then there's X-Wing Alliance.
  • Something that always drove this troper up the wall was the speed of most non-fighter ships in that game. Remember the Star Destroyers closing in on the Falcon in the first two movies? Those things are fast. But in TIE Fighter, they move like a cow with its legs cut off! Not to mention that a heavy number of missions and secondary objectives require a specific ship to move to a certain point. TIE Fighter was ahead of their time: the Windows XP "time remaining" counter was based off of the one that tugs used....
    • I believe there was an option to speed the game up to like x8; useful for when you had destroyed all hostiles and just needed the bloody transports to finish capturing everything.
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