This is rather old news, but Bruno Marcos has written a couple of excellent space shooters using the Star Wars setting. Download them and try them out if you haven't seen them already.



These games are hard; I haven't finished either one. They are intense and addictive, though.

Bruno opted for an airplane-like control scheme. There is a global “up” vector and your X-Wing can't roll or pitch too far away from level with respect to it. This restriction keeps the player's frame of reference much simpler.

Your X-Wing has lasers, which can be configured to fire round-robin, in gangs of two, or all at once. You have a limited number of torpedoes, useful for taking out shield generators on the star destroyers. Your “lives” consist of a finite supply of X-Wings on board one of the battleships. Since you can't resupply once you've launched, sometimes you may want to sacrifice your current X-Wing in order to get a fresh batch of torpedoes. Friendly AI pilots also use the same pool of extra X-Wings, so you want to protect them whenever possible.

The star destroyers launch waves of literally hundreds of TIE fighters which fly in little clusters of four apiece, like in the movies. Once they reach your fleet they break up and circle around, taking shots at battleships and fighters alike. Since the number of defending fighters is so small you have to kill TIE fighters at a furious pace to keep them from destroying your battleships. A big part of the skill in playing the game is figuring out how to shoot them down as efficiently as possible.

The games give excellent feedback. You can get a health reading on any ship by aiming at it. This is useful for deciding which of your battleships need defending the most, or seeing how much more damage you need to do to take out a shield generator. Radio chatter is presented using printed text. There is a counter of how many fighters you've shot down, which serves as your score.

Later on in the Endor battle, the star destroyers move into combat range, and you can get to work taking them down. Star destroyers have multiple targets: the shielf generators, the gun batteries, and the ship itself, and you have to prioritize the targets based on their threat. I usually eliminate the gun batteries that are aimed toward my fleet, then concentrate on taking down the entire star destroyer as quickly as possible, since it continually launches fighter reinforcements.

Note: I haven't had any trouble, but a friend of mine had his machine lock up hard when he tried out these games, so be careful.