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Video Game: X-Wing Alliance
A Star Wars space fighter sim released for the PC in 1999 by LucasArts.

While X-Wing and Tie Fighter had covered epic campaigns, their successor X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter had initially not included a campaign at all, and when was put in place for the expansion, it was deliberately set in an out-of-the-way part of the galaxy to avoid impinging on the main events of the film trilogy. It was not until now that LucasArts decided to once more cover the epic storyline, now from a different angle.

There's No Campaign for the Wicked as you play only as the character Ace Azzameen, halting the AFGNCAAP attitude of the previous games (the X-Wing and TIE Fighter protagonists were named, but only in the manual). Ace is the youngest scion of the Azzameen family of traders, some of whose members have ties with the Rebel Alliance. Their enemies are the Viraxo family, who similarly have ties with the Empire. Your father has decided you're old enough to stop laying in sims and start helping out with the family business, sending you on training and trade missions under the watchful eyes of your siblings (neatly shoehorning in the tutorial), but soon the Galactic Civil War starts impinging. Though your father tries to keep the family neutral, the Azzameens end up getting dragged into the war, their home station is taken by the Empire, and Ace joins the Rebels as a starfighter pilot.

The rest of the campaign consists of battles mostly with ties to the film trilogy or at least the Expanded Universe, with the occasional family mission. It culminates in the Battle of Endor, at which you fly the Millennium Falcon.

X-Wing Alliance allowed a far greater range of craft to be piloted than previous games, especially X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter, and had an extensive multiplayer mode.

Contains examples of:

  • Achilles' Heel: Shield generators on various larger craft.
  • Artificial Stupidity: The capture of the Suprosa is made exponentially harder by your absolutely stupid wingmates. Despite DIRECT ORDERS to only use their non-damaging ion cannons, they just blast away at the thing with their standard lasers. Most of the difficulty stems from trying to disable it before they destroy it.
  • Breakable Weapons: Turrets can be destroyed by shooting them. This also applies to the turrets on the ships you fly in family missions, as you can find out by fighting said ships in Skirmish mode.
  • Cool Ship: This is Star Wars, don't be so surprised. The YT-2000 (the Otana) is an introduction to this great tradition.
  • Deadly Training Area: The salvage yard, and it is awesome.
    • Played with in a later "family" mission, when the protagonist emerges from hyperspace in the middle of an Imperial training area.
  • Evil Uncle: Uncle Antan turns out to be working for the Empire.
  • Heroic Mime: A step up from AFGNCAAP, but all you really know of the player character is from the context of his family.
  • Karma Houdini: Uncle Antan after his betrayal.
  • Killed Off for Real: You know things are real bad when the ship your father and older brother are aboard succumbs to the Imperials.
  • Mighty Glacier: The Super Star Destroyer has insane shields and health. It takes more than half an hour to kill it even if you destroy its shield generators first.
  • Moral Dissonance: The Azzameens, although at first portrayed as innocent good guys just trying to run a shipping company, prove themselves several times to be just as trigger-happy and blood-thirsty as their rivals the Viraxo. The first example being the protagonist and his brother attacking and destroying several Viraxo starfighters they meet by chance, killing whatever pilots who do not manage to eject from their ships in time, as punishment for two Viraxo ships firing on them in the first mission.
  • No Campaign for the Wicked
  • Oh, Crap: Several instances. Two happen during the battle of Endor ("It's a trap!" and "That thing's operational!"), and a host of smaller ones happen before that. A memorable one involves your ship getting out of hyperspace in an Imperial weapons testing range being used by four Star Destroyers due to your robotic co-pilot entering the wrong coordinates.
    "What the—EMAKY?! WHERE THE HELL ARE WE?!"
  • Robot Buddy: Emkay.
  • Shout-Out: At one point you end up surrounded by an Imperial fleet whose ships' names are all taken from The Thrawn Trilogy, implied to be Thrawn's personal flotilla. There are plenty of smaller ones, including blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearances by Boba Fett's ship and the famous smuggler ship Wild Karrde.
  • Subsystem Damage: Ion weaponry used on enemy ships (and your own) gradually picks away at the target's SYS percentage, with the affected systems ranging from minor (such as radar or targeting not working) to critical (I.E. "lol now you can't turn") as more SYS damage is taken.
    • In addition, as long as a given ship's SYS stays above 0%, the affected systems will eventually recover given enough time, with the repair time estimates appearing in the Ship Status HUD menu.
    • Also occurs to your own ship if you don't have some form of invulnerability enabled as you take excessive hull damage, but since such situations are usually followed shortly by death it's less obvious if you aren't monitoring Ship Status.
  • Trophy Room: Virtually every plot mission rewards you with a memento adorning your quarters on board of Otana.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Sometimes when you smash an enemy ship, someone on it survives. For smaller craft like fighters, you'll find the pilot drifting in space in their sealed flight suit; in the case of pretty much everything from small cargo transports up, it's in the form of an escape pod of one form or another. Neither of these class of craft can in any way hamper your ability to survive or succeed- they can't attack, they don't block weapons fire for their allies, they don't even have shields. Nevertheless, you can pull them up on your targeting system and actively try to destroy them for absolutely no reason at all.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: What became of Uncle Antan after his failed attempt to betray you to the Empire prior to the Battle of Endor? Although it is clear he now has a price on his head, little to no mention is given on his final fate or how your surviving family intends to bring him to justice.

Xia XiaEveryone RatingX-Wing vs. TIE Fighter
X-Wing vs. TIE FighterCreator/Lucas ArtsDark Forces Saga
X-Wing vs. TIE FighterRecap/Star Wars Expanded UniverseEmpire at War
X-WingScience Fiction Video GamesX-Wing vs. TIE Fighter
X-Wing vs. TIE FighterSimulation GameColin McRae Rally
X-WingLicensed GameX-Wing vs. TIE Fighter

alternative title(s): X-Wing Alliance
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