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I thought I was immune to Star Wars nostalgia until I saw the Squadrons trailerSucked right back in
Sucked right back in
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
I love TIE Bombers. They’re like goth binoculars. Absolute piss as warships, but just really pleasing to regard.
As I twigged this, the X-Wing shot through a tiny gap between two large heavy objects - because it’s the law that this must happen in every Star Wars. And as the pursuing TIE slammed into the objects, busting its wing butnotfully exploding, I remembered the time I wrenched my brand new joystick right off its mounting in a desperate attempt to avoid the same fate. Such is the fate of TIE pilots. It was all coming back to me.
The game seems to be set right after the end of Return Of The Jedi, which is a great place to choose, at least in terms of evoking the wonders of TIE Fighter. It means there’ll be potential access to the same roster of ships (ah, for the return of the weird trilateral TIE Defender, and the lumbering dunce that was that Assault Gunboat thing), and it won’t get caught up in the raft of post-Disney canon that I’m not really that familiar with. No: this game will be set at a point in fictional time where I still, tragically, knew every starship model number and weapons loadout, and it’ll be like putting on an old slipper. A slipper that screams, and shoots green blaster bolts.
Zoom. Whoosh.
If EA can just manage not to royally balls this up, this’ll be the TIE Fighter successor that me and a million other boafuses have been waiting for for a quarter of a century, with barely even any false starts along the way to have let us down. It’ll mean a game with the technology to deliver so much more than TIE Fighter’s blank heaps of polygons were ever capable of in terms of space battles. It’ll mean I can finally stop trying to convince myself it’s worth going through the warlock nonsense required to make a copy of TIE Fighter work on my PC, and finally consign it to the past. Hell, it might even mean I finally go through the ballache of setting up a VR rig. For another TIE Fighter, I’d do a lot of things.
So please, EA, get this one right. Just this one. For me.
Whatever you call it, hit ourE3 2020tag for more from this summer’s blast of gaming announcements, trailers, and miscellaneous marketing. Check outthe PC games at the PlayStation 5 show,everything at the PC Gaming Show, andall the trailers from the Xbox showcase, for starters.
