So, On to Tie Fighter!
This game was one of the most complex games I think I ever played on Dos, sure you had the descent series which was cool but extremely confined. This game offered space naval battles on the scale seen in more recently in Project Slypheed, which while a cool game (well.. sorta) it just doesn't tickle the imagination like the experience of crushing the rebellion one fighter ship at a time.
There were a few things that made this game worth playing all the way thru. As you progressed thru the game you acquired a number of different missile weapons you could setup in the fighters missile bay, however these weapons didn't dictate whether or not a given board was possible to defeat. On the other hand they allowed the boards to be played in drastically different ways depending so it tended to be better to select missiles that compensated for your particular weaknesses (or if you had god mode on, which ever ones were the most fun ;)).
Another bonus to the game was that there are a number of different ships you can play throughout the game each divided into it's own set of campaign missions. While the different ships were on a general level relatively similar each iteration had slight advantages and disadvantages (and some simply outclassed others much latter in the game.) What's more you could play thru missions you've already completed with any ship you've unlocked (in modern terms this could be a great source of achievement points).
This is all great but without at least a fun storyline the game, and while this one wasn't perfect it was at least engaging and the individual quests were varied enough to the game enjoyable from start to finish. The quests also were not overtly formulaic so it was not too painful to play any individual map, even if escort quests did crop up now and then (I hate escort quests.).
The Blue Pill:
While this game didn't receive the attention of the descent series (which I'm convinced received most of it's acclaim for just being weird) it certainly trounced all of the other Star Wars branded flight sims of the day (and handily rocked most of the next generation of games as well, but they were terrible). On top of that it pushed the limit of what we could consider possible on less than 10 3.5" floppy disks providing 76 total missions, a number that's unheard of even by today's standards, and we use DVD's to distribute games now.
The Red Pill:
The game is great but a remake / republish coupled with updates provides the opportunity to do more than say Rez HD did with just providing new graphics. The newer systems and technologies that didn't even exist when this game was around could provide for anything from co-op missions to multiplayer space flight death matches (you'd probobly want to consider blocking the use of the Missile Boat or Tie Defender however as those ships are just rediculous, at least compared to a standard tie fighter or an interceptor).
