Sweet!  I've been around since the original X-Wing, and I'm glad to see the advances!  Remember the original floppy-disk X-Wing for MS-DOS?  The ships were nothing more than  a few single-colored polygons, and the HUD  only showed a picture of the ship, not the actual moving ship.  Plus, you  had 3 ships, well, okay, 4 ships (after the B-wing expansion pack) to pick  from.  The dumb racing track took over ten minutes to go through one lap,  and the missions were close to impossible!  But we didn't mind because that  was the best a computer could offer back then.  Well, not we've got  extremely detailed ships (with moving gun turrents...wow! :) ) with 3D  accelerated graphics, over 15 ships (you use about 8 of them in the real  game, many more in multiplayer) you can fly, and new-fangled light sources!  Plus, you go into the Death Star on this one!  It isn't like that  two-colored gray surface from X-Wing!  Now it's got 16 million colors!  Unfortunately, some of the difficulty from X-Wing moved over to X-Wing  Alliance.  It's just a WEE bit hard.  Some missions will have you laughing  at the enemy, while others will make you slam your computer desk.  Fortunately, you can put it on easy mode (can't do that in X-Wing!).  Plus,  some of the mission objects may seem a bit too much to handle.  But I think  this is only a minor problem.  A few missions stand out...like one where  you jump out of hyperspace directly in front of a Super Star Destroyer!  (for the uninformed, a SSD is a BIG mutha ship that you shouldn't go  NEAR...heck, it's so bad that you'll only see one in the whole game!)  Overall, you'll find a great space combat game in this package.  Go  on...buy it!