Though we preferred TIE Fighter when it came to listing the best Star Wars games on PC, we did rate X-Wing quite highly on one important metric: it lets you fly a bloody X-Wing. The fantasy of flying to the rescue when a guy with a codename like Red Two shouts “I can’t shake him!” is a highly specific one, but if you watched Star Wars at the right age you absolutely have that fantasy. X-Wing lets you fulfil it.
Unfortunately, it has some problems on modern PCs. The Special Edition won’t even launch if you don’t have a joystick plugged in, and while the Classic version and the Collector’s CD-ROM version will let you play with mouse and keyboard, they run like butt. It’s a 32-year-old game, but even on a high-end PC the framerate’s inconsistent. And of course the spaceship models do look quite flat and blocky in the way you’d expect from 1993 graphics.
Which is why X-Wing Virtual Machine (XWVM) is such a glorious mod. At the base level it’s a wrapper that lets you play X-Wing in Unity, meaning that it runs smoothly and at modern resolutions with adjustable settings—and it doesn’t ask you to plug in a joystick even once. But add the HD asset pack on top, and you get new 3D models for not just the spaceships, but also the cockpits, and even the previously 2D planets that were there as backdrops. Oh yeah, and there’s a full 3D model of the Death Star too.
Bonus features include VR support, a remastered digital version of the dynamic “iMuse” soundtrack, and improved in-flight mouse control. There’s more to come, including support for TIE Fighter, but this first release is enough to get you playing. Note that if you don’t install the HD asset pack you’ll have menus replacing the 2D concourse and a virtual cockpit a la X-Wing Alliance, as apparently those were a struggle to get working at variable resolutions. So yeah, I highly recommend downloading the 2.5GB HD asset pack.
You’ll need to own a copy of X-Wing, which you can find at Steam and GOG today, and then download the core mod for either Windows or Linux, and your optional extras (as well as HD assets there’s a mod that adds additional in-flight mission dialogue). Unzip and run the downloaded exe to install XWVM, unpack the HD assets to the xwvm_Data directory, and finally run xwvm.exe. It should find your X-Wing install directory automatically, and then you’ll be ready to enjoy X-Wing in glorious high-res 3D. At least, if you remember all the keyboard controls. Was it Alt-E to eject?
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