Five. Simple. Syllables: X-Wing Is AWESOME!

A Random Nerd Note: I don't care if this video game is 25 years old, but I still enjoy playing X-Wing on my laptop computer! And my favorite starfighter to use in this game is the B-Wing...which I hope makes an official return in next year's Star Wars: Episode IX! The Crait ski speeders (which resemble the B-Wing but were built by a different manufacturer) in last year's The Last Jedi don't count.

Happy Monday!

Images of the Day: Destroying the Invincible...

Happy Halloween, everyone!! Nothing's cooler (unless I actually had my life priorities straight) than blowing up a Star Destroyer during a mission in which I don't need to blow it up in order to achieve the objectives at hand. That would be Tour of Duty 1: Mission 3 in the Star Wars: X-Wing video game. Yes, two years after I've purchased it online, I still play this awesome game on my laptop. Death to the Invincible!

Photo of the Day: About Pokémon Go...

Last week, I stumbled upon this funny pic on Facebook showcasing one landlord's take on the (currently) popular video game. Needless to say, this exemplifies why I've resisted downloading Pokémon Go to my Samsung phone and begin walking into traffic, getting stuck in trees and loitering inside cemeteries just to catch Pikachu and its goofy anime brethren. If I'm gonna nurture my obsession for something old school and geeky, it would be playing the classic Star Wars: X-Wing video game on my laptop for the umpteenth time. That is all.

Image of the Day: Destroy the Relentless!

Just thought I'd share this random screenshot that I took when I played the classic Star Wars: X-Wing video game on my laptop last weekend. This image was captured when I was on the mission where I had to use a B-Wing fighter to take out the Star Destroyer Relentless (Tour of Duty 5, Mission 18). Needless to say, this is one of my favorite missions... In fact, I like flying all of the B-Wing sorties where I have to destroy an Imperial capital ship. This involves B-Wing Historical Mission 5 (where I have to neutralize the Imperial frigate Shrike), the Relentless sortie and Tour of Duty 5, Mission 20b (where I have to help eliminate four Imperial frigates—the Fear, Fury, Spite and Hate—that arrive to attack two Calamari Cruisers, the Yali and Maria, on their way to planet Hoth). Needless to say, I'll never get tired of playing X-Wing! Thanks, LucasArts.

Welcome Back, A-Wing!

If you're a regular visitor on this Blog (I'll assume that you are), you'll know that I'm a huge fan of the classic StarWars: X-Wing video game that was released on PC back in 1993, and that my favorite Rebel craft to use are the A- and B-Wing starfighters (the screenshot above shows an A-Wing mission that I played on X-Wing back in 2014; yes, I still play this game even today). So it was a thrill to see the tweet below posted this morning...featuring a pic of England's Prince Harry chillin' inside the cockpit of an A-Wing mockup (with Mark Hamill standing nearby) on the Star Wars: Episode VIII set at Pinewood Studios near London. The A-Wing's design will obviously be updated from that in Return of the Jedi, but I'm just glad that it makes its return to the big screen once more. Now I'm waiting on another tweet that will let us know that the B-Wing will also see action during Rian Johnson's 2017 installment in the new Star Wars trilogy. Carry on!

A-WINGS CONFIRMED! pic.twitter.com/uttIBQgNVh

— Ali Arikan (@aliarikan) April 19, 2016

Photos of the Day: Atari or Sega Genesis for the Price of $50...

A few weeks ago, I paid a visit to my local Walgreens store when I saw that it was selling vintage Atari and Sega Genesis game consoles...each for the really low price of $50! As if that wasn't cool enough, the Sega Genesis came with the game Sonic the Hedgehog, which I totally wanted to play when I was in 6th grade (that would be in 1991-'92). As it stands, I instead played Super Mario World, F-Zero, Star Fox and other awesome titles when my family had a Super Nintendo Entertainment System while I was in grade school. Yea— Back in the day... Would I play those games if I still had them today, you ask? Definitely! As it stands, I'll just live out my youth by playing the Star Wars: X-Wing game (which I originally played during my sophomore year in high school between 1995-'96) that I bought for my PC about a year ago. That is all.

STAR WARS - X-WING: A General in Red Squadron... :)

Merry Christmas, everyone!!! Just thought I'd mark the birth of Jeebus by posting this image above to celebrate the fact that I am now a General in the classic Star Wars: X-Wing video game. Even though I completed all of the missions a month ago, and finished as a Lieutenant, I found a way to earn additional points to increase my rank (instead of creating a new pilot account and starting the game from scratch all over again)...not only as a General, but also advancing my skill level to that of Top Ace. I'd fully tell you how I did it—but that would most likely make this Blog entry two paragraphs longer than it needs to be. All I can say is, Tour of Duty (TOD) 1, Mission 1 is the easiest way to accumulate points and get the rank that a player wasn't able to achieve when they completed the video game the first time around. This particular mission consists of destroying unarmed Imperial freighters (TIE Fighters don't show up on scene till all of the freighters are destroyed)...and you just need to play this level over and over; using a temporary profile with which you direct these non-threatening targets to your flight leader, Red One (the pilot account that you want to promote to a higher ranking should be assigned to this role), and watch as he uses his proton torpedoes to destroy the freighters and earn TOD points. (NOTE: Red One will only destroy three out of the five freighters in this sortie before he jumps into hyperspace—which is why you should immediately enter hyperspace as well and re-do the mission. The points that Red One earns on each repeat will be saved...thus increasing his overall TOD score.)



You need to earn at least 550,000 TOD points to become a General (this rank is denoted by the five yellow pins visible on the uniform's shoulder pad in the pic at the top of this entry) and 65,535 points to attain Top Ace status. I initially finished the game at 77,004 TOD points and about 21,000 points with an Officer status. So basically, I devoted a lot of time towards playing TOD 1, Mission 1 repeatedly to get the highest promotion attainable on X-Wing. That's Star Wars devotion for ya... Happy Holidays, folks!

U.N. Squadron...

In a tradition that started four years ago with me talking about the old Disney animated TV show Darkwing Duck, just thought I'd start this month off by getting all nostalgic about the Super Nintendo (SNES) video game, U.N. Squadron. This side-scrolling shooting game involved playing as one of three pilots (Shin Kazama, Mickey Simon or Greg Gates) and piloting aircraft ranging from actual fighters such as the A-10 Thunderbolt and YF-23, to the fictional F-200 stealth jet (which was my favorite to use). In all of the missions, you spent the majority of the levels battling it out with other conventional combat aircraft and armored vehicles on the surface. It wasn't till the very end of the level that you confronted the bosses...which ranged from a giant battle tank armed with a rocket launcher, a trio of F-117 Stealth Fighters, a B-2 Bomber and a Yamato-like battleship, to a huge land-based aircraft carrier, a heavily-armed jungle fortress and a large um, underground-lurking mothership that was the final boss you had to defeat in order to complete the game. In fact, what made me like this game was the fact that a few of the missions involved flying your aircraft inside of a mountain or into underground caves. They reminded me of the chase sequence inside the Death Star tunnel at the climax of Return of the Jedi!



U.N. Squadron was such a fun game to play that it tended to make me daydream about what it would be like to be an aviator and fight against these kinds of outlandish foes in real life. The idea that you could pilot a jet traveling at Mach 1 underground (though it never appeared that you were flying that fast in the game) was obviously ridiculous, but to think that there could be an enemy that possessed a giant fortress in the middle of a jungle and a huge aircraft carrier in the desert was pretty interesting. Of course, I was 13 at the time...so I was thinking a lot of crazy things about the games I played on SNES. But heck— If I ever had the opportunity to play U.N. Squadron again, I would. If I could download Star Wars: X-Wing to my laptop and play it like it was 1995, then I can definitely do the same thing with U.N. Squadron. Not only that, but I'd probably download another favorite SNES title of mine to my computer, F-Zero. (I no longer have the SNES; one of my siblings probably sold it!) Speaking of F-Zero, I think I have my next childhood / adolescent thing to talk about this following December... Carry on.

X-WING: Mission Completed!

Less than a month after I purchased and downloaded it from GOG.com, I finished playing the classic Star Wars: X-Wing video game on my laptop computer. There were a few missions that for some odd reason were harder to complete than the last time I played them more than 15 years ago (namely, the Death Star Trench Run...for both B-Wing Historical Mission 6 and the final sortie in Tour of Duty III), but I found a way to achieve all objectives—thanks to watching video clips on Youtube showing how other X-Wing players flew and passed these missions, hah. The pics above and below show all of the merits that I won for completing this awesome video game, though it appears that there was one more award that I should've won that's missing in the medals case below (which is for all B-Wing Historical and Tour of Duty IV and V missions). Oh well. I also finished the game as a Lieutenant, though the highest ranking I earned was becoming Captain. And I said it before and I'll say it again: Y-Wing starfighters are sooo friggin' slow. Carry on!

The Return of X-WING!

Happy Halloween, Everyone! Just thought I'd celebrate this spooky holiday by mentioning how ecstatic I am that I can now play the classic Star Wars: X-Wing video game on my computer once more! Almost 8 years ago, I posted this entry about how I wished that LucasArts would re-release this awesome space combat simulator for modern PCs that run Windows XP (now Windows 8 on my new laptop). Well, thanks to Disney and GOG.com, X-Wing and other LucasArts titles (such as the X-Wing spin-off, TIE Fighter) can now be downloaded for at least 10 dollars from the GOG website. So last Monday, after I came home from work, I immediately went on my computer to purchase X-Wing and began playing it that night. Of course, this game was difficult as hell to play without a computer joystick (it's crappy enough that my cordless mouse needs its battery replaced)...so I went to the local Best Buy store to buy a joystick yesterday. So as of right now, I've completed all but one of the Historical Missions (the only one left being B-Wing Mission 6...in which I'm flying this awesome vehicle on a sortie that involves destroying the Death Star by flying through the trench made famous in Star Wars: A New Hope and firing proton torpedoes into its exhaust port), and I'm on Mission 9 of Tour 1. That's progress for ya.



The only downside of playing X-Wing, at least with this version, is that the graphics aren't as crisp as in the original CD-ROM version. The screen on my laptop isn't as large as the one on my previous computer, so it's harder to spot incoming Imperial fighters when they're more than 2 klicks away on certain missions. Also, glitches tend to take place when I open the game where I'll have a problem calibrating the joystick, and the game would abruptly go from full-screen to a minimized window on my computer monitor...so I have to restart the game since I'm unable to make the window large again. And lastly, I never realized just how friggin' slow the Y-Wing is! It's a pain in the ass to eliminate faster craft such as TIE Fighters and Interceptors that are flying away from me, and it's slower to maneuver in battle than even the bigger B-Wing. My favorite ships to use happen to be the A- and B-Wing fighters. I'd also include the titular X-Wing here, but it's only a slight improvement on the Y-Wing in regards to combat.



So all-in-all, I'm glad that X-Wing is back! The last time I played this game was during my college days more than 10 years ago. But I'm more nostalgic about the time when I first began playing this classic simulator—which, I believe, was during the second half of 9th grade almost 20 years ago. So many awesome memories...of X-Wing, that is. High school didn't get coo for me till sophomore year. Carry on.

LucasArts

Star Wars Artwork... I'm five years late, but I just stumbled upon these awesome illustrations that were for the 2008 video game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. All I can say is, it would be absolutely awesome if J.J. Abrams featured a scene in Star Wars: Episode VII where a character (whether it's Luke Skywalker or a new Jedi or Sith Lord introduced in the upcoming film) uses the Force to bring down a Star Destroyer or another similar-size vessel. In terms of playing The Force Unleashed, I do remember playing a demo of it at a local Target store two years ago. As far as actually owning the game goes, the only Star Wars titles that I bought and played in their entirety were X-Wing CD-ROM, Dark Forces, Rebel Assault and Star Wars: Battlefront I and II. My favorite of all these is X-Wing CD-ROM.


Image courtesy of Creative Uncut


LucasArts

I also found the amusing artwork below depicting a Star Destroyer approaching San Francisco Bay. With this May's Star Trek Into Darkness apparently showing the USS Enterprise crashing into the Bay Area, I don't know what is it with cinema's two major sci-fi franchises (though Star Wars is technically science fantasy) making this NoCal city the target of giant interstellar warships. Not that I care. I guess Frisco's ultra-liberalism makes it an easy metropolis to pick on. I live in Los Angeles, by the way.


Image courtesy of Wall321

A REQUEST FOR LUCASARTS... If they ever decide to re-release the X-Wing CD-ROM video game again, can they make it compatible with Windows XP?? I remember playing this game back during my high school days, and while the graphics aren’t exactly PS3-quality (let alone Super Nintendo-quality!), the gameplay kicked major ass! Newer games like Battlefront and Jedi Starfighter may obviously have better graphics, but feeling like you’re actually piloting an A, B, X or Y-Wing fighter in X-Wing is unmatched by any other Star Wars game. Definitely a great space-combat simulator. Heck, this video game is so damn good it even spawned a series of novels and comic books! Like I said LucasArts... Release X-Wing for Windows XP, please. Seriously. I don’t care if the graphics are still the same (that’s the game’s charm)... I just want to play X-Wing again, darn it! Lucky Windows 95 and 98 users... They’re the only ones who could play the game on their PC’s. Damn you! This is my geek post for the, um, day.