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X-Wing, TIE Fighter 95 Fixed, Lego Yoda Revealed

Posted by simoniker on from the not-easy-being-green dept.

Swifti writes "Ever since Windows XP was released, the classic games, TIE Fighter 95 and X-Wing 95 [the X-Wing Collector Series and X-Wing Trilogy versions of X-Wing & TIE Fighter], were left incompatible with the new operating system. The issue refused to be addressed by LucasArts whose basic solution was 'Deal with it.' Luckily, a fix was recently released for these two PC games over at LucasFiles, obviously made by a fan. These great games are now compatible with NT/2000/XP systems." Elsewhere, an anonymous reader points to a movie-annotated fan report on the previously mentioned "LEGO Star Wars game being demo'ed" at last week's Comic-Con, including footage of a whirlin' Lego Yoda.

5 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Better then Lucasarts' modern games by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    These games came out damn near 10 years ago, and still have better game play then some of the more recent Lucasarts games.

    I still remember screaming along on my 386-33Mhz machine.

  2. Ah! Relief! by Rallion · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I hope the fixes work with the versions I have...there are a few versions of each and I can never keep them straight.

    Best three space sims ever, IMO? Freespace 2, TIE Fighter, X-Wing. In best-to-least-best order. And now I can (maybe) play every one of them. I thank whoever did this. I really do.

  3. and better cutscenes by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 4, Insightful
    perhaps it was because they could only do very basic animation (in fact really like animation, move images along each other to create motion) that they really had to think about it. But I enjoyed the cut-scenes in X-wing and tie-fighter a hell of a lot more then in later lucasarts games.

    Oh well just call me an old dinosaur who can't keep up with modern times. Except one tiny little problem Lucasarts. I BOUGHT all the old games. Now I don't anymore because while I now have far more money coming in I think your games are not worthy of me spending money anymore. Should lucasarts care? Only in so far as any company should care about losing a once loyal customer.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

  4. Re:It's time for a new XvT game. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This seems to be as close as we're going to get for a while. Too bad you need a subscription to SW:G to play it.

  5. Why didn't Lucasarts do this fix? by EnglishTim · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I suspect that the reason Lucasarts didn't fix this themselves was because it's quite possible that they could no longer build the game. Certainly I've worked at games companies where we've wanted to do a build of an old game and suddenly foung it much harder than we'd expected. Sure, you manage to find an old version of the code somwhere, but it's not been packaged alongside the art assets. Suddenly you need to work out which version of the art assets go with which version of the code. You then find out that although somebody took care to save the source code, nobody thought to make a copy of all the libraries that you were using at that time. Or perhaps the incompatibility was due to a third-party library, and they don't do a 2000/XP version of it any more, and maybe have gone out of business.

    The thing is that unless you take a lot of care when backing up your old code, it can be very easy to find yourself in a tricky situation, especially if the person who did it originally has left the company.