A million times yes. I spent hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of hours of my teens and some time in college playing X-Wing (and X-Wing v. TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance) that I probably should have spent outside playing with friends or attending classes.
It was such an amazing game. I begged my parents to buy me a joystick so I could play it properly, after breaking a mouse attempting to play it that way (frantically sliding the mouse and lifting it and dropping it down to slide it again took its toll after a while). I keep meaning to pick up a new joystick so I can play it again properly. You can technically use a gamepad, but there are so many functions on the keyboard, too many to map to gamepad buttons, and gamepads usually require two hands. Using a touchpad sounds painful.
I was even part of the modding community; I remember writing (with the collaboration of someone else I met online) a program in Visual Basic(!) that could binary-edit the X-Wing Alliance .exe so you could do... gosh, things I don't even remember. I think we called it XWAExeEd or something like that. This was in the very early days of Google, and I'm not even sure how we hosted or distributed it at the time; I can't find any references to it on the web, at least. I have a ton of old backups from very old computers from that era, need to sift through those sometime.
Huh, weird. I just launched XW, XvT, and XWA via Steam and you're right; they all bailed out immediately saying a joystick was required. So I'm definitely misremembering something. I do recall breaking a mouse on a game where a joystick was recommended, but it must have been something older.
Or back then I'd found some sort of hack/mod that allowed you to play via mouse; not sure if that's plausible, though.
I found a random Steam forum post where someone claims they played the original XvT without a joystick, not sure if that's a reliable anecdote, though.
I remember playing with the keyboard. My memory might be playing tricks with me, but at that time joystick were certainly not a standard feature of pcs.
Edit2: there are two versions : the original 1993 version I played (dos based, doesn’t require a joystick) and a remake I didn’t know existed (1998, windows based ) which does require a joystick
I don't think that's true. I am almost certain the DOS version requires a joystick. And it has a huge keyboard binding list of all sorts of essential things you had to do.
It absolutely was pretty unusual to require a joystick. I had to beg my parents to help pay some of the cost & I think they helped me get a classic Sidewinder 3D (Pro?). I don't even know if we had a sound card that it could plug into or if I ended up getting a sound are too for it? Plus the cost of the game... It was incredibly expensive & difficult for me to get X-Wing.
But it was, like, my mission to make it happen, & eventually I did. Tie Fighter came out not long after I finally got X-Wing going & after another year or two I did manage to buy that game too!
It was such an amazing game. I begged my parents to buy me a joystick so I could play it properly, after breaking a mouse attempting to play it that way (frantically sliding the mouse and lifting it and dropping it down to slide it again took its toll after a while). I keep meaning to pick up a new joystick so I can play it again properly. You can technically use a gamepad, but there are so many functions on the keyboard, too many to map to gamepad buttons, and gamepads usually require two hands. Using a touchpad sounds painful.
I was even part of the modding community; I remember writing (with the collaboration of someone else I met online) a program in Visual Basic(!) that could binary-edit the X-Wing Alliance .exe so you could do... gosh, things I don't even remember. I think we called it XWAExeEd or something like that. This was in the very early days of Google, and I'm not even sure how we hosted or distributed it at the time; I can't find any references to it on the web, at least. I have a ton of old backups from very old computers from that era, need to sift through those sometime.