Best Amazon Prime Day Laptop Deals

The Best Amazon Prime Day Deals

Right now, if you're going to spend $40 on Amazon, you can save some cash and send yourself a $40 gift card and Amazon will send you $10 in Amazon credit within 24-48 hours.

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Also, it's important to note that you'll need to have an active Amazon Prime account to score the steepest of discounts. You can sign up for Amazon Prime right here. Moreover, if you've never taken advantage of the free trial for Prime, pick up the 30-day trial right now and save money even without a subscription. You can even cancel your subscription before the first bill shows up, if you want to roll that way. If you've already used the free trial, you can subscribe for $12.99 a month, or $119 for a full year.

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— PlayStation (@PlayStation) October 12, 2020

For all the ups and downs I've had with various Star Wars media products over the past few decades, the formative space combat simulations of X-Wing and TIE Fighter on MS-DOS (or at least, my memory of them) have always been a fixed highlight. It's hard to go astray when you're focused on the minutiae of inherently cool sci-fi fantasy planes, as opposed to whatever's going on with Jedi lineages or space politics now.

There have been a few arcade-style Star Wars space combat games that filled the 20-year period since the last flight simulator, and some of them were even good. But Star Wars: Squadrons is now making a welcome return to some of the simulator intricacies, while still retaining a large degree of the approachable spectacle of the arcade-style flight games. And the balance Squadrons has settled on works very well in creating an experience that makes you feel as if you're really an active participant in a Star War.

The basic mechanics will be familiar if you've ever played any kind of flight game. You pitch your fighter up and down, you bank it left and right. You fly forward, not backward, and you can twirl until you feel sick. You maneuver your crosshairs onto an enemy and then fire lasers or missiles at them. You're locked to a first-person cockpit view of the action, but all of Squadron's missions are in space, which means maintaining altitude isn't something you have to worry about, and instead, you get the wonderful freedom of being able to fly along any axis--rolling your ship and flying upside down is a hoot. It feels like you could feasibly finish the Squadrons campaign relying mostly on those principles if you wanted to, especially on lower difficulty levels, and that's great. But Squadrons digs a little deeper with the ability to reroute power on your ship, a system that brings a nice layer of complexity in the advantages that it can open up for you and the considerations that come with that.

For all the ups and downs I've had with various Star Wars media products over the past few decades, the formative space combat simulations of X-Wing and TIE Fighter on MS-DOS (or at least, my memory of them) have always been a fixed highlight. It's hard to go astray when you're focused on the minutiae of inherently cool sci-fi fantasy planes, as opposed to whatever's going on with Jedi lineages or space politics now.

There have been a few arcade-style Star Wars space combat games that filled the 20-year period since the last flight simulator, and some of them were even good. But Star Wars: Squadrons is now making a welcome return to some of the simulator intricacies, while still retaining a large degree of the approachable spectacle of the arcade-style flight games. And the balance Squadrons has settled on works very well in creating an experience that makes you feel as if you're really an active participant in a Star War.

The basic mechanics will be familiar if you've ever played any kind of flight game. You pitch your fighter up and down, you bank it left and right. You fly forward, not backward, and you can twirl until you feel sick. You maneuver your crosshairs onto an enemy and then fire lasers or missiles at them. You're locked to a first-person cockpit view of the action, but all of Squadron's missions are in space, which means maintaining altitude isn't something you have to worry about, and instead, you get the wonderful freedom of being able to fly along any axis--rolling your ship and flying upside down is a hoot. It feels like you could feasibly finish the Squadrons campaign relying mostly on those principles if you wanted to, especially on lower difficulty levels, and that's great. But Squadrons digs a little deeper with the ability to reroute power on your ship, a system that brings a nice layer of complexity in the advantages that it can open up for you and the considerations that come with that.