Thirty years ago on this day, "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" was released in theatres across America. To commemorate this landmark occasion, TwitchGuru presents Part 2 of our "Best of Star Wars Games" series (for more Star Wars Games, see Part 1 of our Star Wars games series). Here are eight more Star Wars games, ranging from the classic TIE Fighter to the epic Knights of the Old Republic.

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Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994, PC)

Travis: Everybody loves to be the bad guy. Whether it's the freedom of indulging your darkest impulses, or not worrying about the consequences of your actions, playing stories from the "evil" point of view is a favourite path for gamers. Star Wars: TIE Fighter didn't exactly play up the "evil villains" angle, but it did offer gamers the opportunity to see the Galactic Civil War from the side of a regular Imperial pilot. It was released the year after Star Wars: X-Wing, and took everything that made X-Wing excellent and improved upon it. TIE Fighter introduced some advances to the graphics engine, specifically Gouraud shading, which gave the flat, featureless textures of "X-Wing" a little more life. It also improved the heads-up display and mission briefings, allowing for more interaction.

Compared to the X-Wing, flying a TIE Fighter can be tricky. It has no shields to speak of and very little armament, but it makes up for these shortcomings with speed and agility. The Empire favoured attacking with a fighter ratio of 3 to 1, so the idea was to swarm enemies with many expendable fighters and overwhelm them with sheer numbers. These tactics are visible early in the game campaign, but once the player starts making a name for himself, the more powerful (and, thankfully, shielded) ship designs are made available, such as the TIE Advanced, TIE Defender, and the Assault and Missile Gunboats. The story itself deals with the Rebel Alliance to some extent, but there are also missions that involve policing sectors of space under Imperial control, hunting down pirates, and even a rogue Imperial Grand Admiral with a fleet of followers.

The cover art for Star Wars: TIE Fighter, the immortal space simulator.

TIE Fighter portrays the Empire as an intergalactic peace-keeping organization desiring nothing more than the happiness of all the systems under its protective wings. The mission briefings - especially the ones dealing with the Rebel Alliance - have that twist of nationalistic propaganda to them, making it all the more enjoyable since we know the whole story. The Alliance is treated almost as a terrorist cell disrupting and endangering the civility and well-being of the galaxy.

All of the missions are engaging and exciting, but I mostly enjoyed squaring off against the X-Wing squadrons and putting those goody-goody Rebels in their place. X-Wing started off the Star Wars space sim series excellently, but it was TIE Fighter that polished it to a legendary jewel.

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