I'm not talking about the 2K FPS version, called XCOM. I'm talking about Firaxis's version. The one that looks like the real deal.

I just went "EEEEEEEEEE" way too much.

SQUEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!! I loved the original and am glad they are going back to the orginal concept and not an RTS for the tactical map.

"Squeeee!" thirded.

SHINY!

Oh, hell yeah!

This news exciting me in my pants. Check out the interview they have with some of the team members, talking about making people who are on the team who hadn't played the original, play it. Sounds like they have their head and heart in the right place.

"YOU WILL STAY IN THAT CHAIR UNTIL YOU HAVE FOUND OUT WHERE THE ALIENS ARE COMING FROM!" "But I have to go to the bathroom!" "SUFFER FOR YOUR ART!!!"

"Oh, you think you're a bad ass? Go, play Terror from the Deep on Supergenius. You will not be paid until you beat it."

Gods how I loved and hated TFTD. My favorite trick was to run a cannon fodder recruit into formations of lobster men with a backpack full of sonic grenades and 1 primed in his hand. The biggest BS was the floating brains. What? You made Chrysalids that can FLY? FUCK YOU, MICROPROSE!

That said, I've played and beated Apoc on supergenius. It was quite fun.

This is an amazing example of lateral thinking. I am embarassed I didn't ever try this. I just loaded everyone with a heavy thermic lance and waded in for some hand to hand.

There were parts of TFTD that just scream poorly coded to me. Troopers with a high accuracy stat were actually screwed with the heavy sonic cannon, because an aimed shot would take more TUs than they could hold. I enjoyed how they tried to make you rely on the new hand to hand weapons (especially on lobster men) and grenades because FAR more useful than they ever were in X-COM. Not having auto shot on the sonic weapons really hurt, the sonic rifles were more useful than the heavy sonic/sonic cannon. Some of the early weapons being unusable during land/base missions was particularly infuriating. Also, you couldn't fly in land missions... but the brains could still do it and zombie your whole team in a hurry.

In the final stages, I loved doing a mind control chain to see the whole board and then sending a couple of cruise missles right into the spot where 8 of the alien commanders on a battleship congregated.

TFTD was also fun, but sometimes when fighting on cruise ships finding that last hiddin alien was a real pain. Also the cruise torpedo didn't work on land.

My biggest difficulty or barrier to getting into the original x com was how without a manual I had no idea what I was attempting to manage. The icons were not clear to me. Also the alien turns would go on fast forward, almost too fast to see, and then I wasn't sure what all the tactical icons meant.

So if someone remakes the game in such a format that I can actually understand what I'm doing, I'd be curious to try the game again.

Blaster Bombs - more fun than a barrel of monkeys - until they send one right up the tailpipe of your Skyranger.

WR - You might try the Steam version, it's been DOSBoxed and runs at a more reasonable speed, instead of super fast forward.

Apoc was a hoot because you could have flying armor and heavy artillery within the first week, and all it costs is some bribes to shut MarSec up after you raided their facilities.

You mean I wasn't the only one who did that? Don't forget dropping stun grenades at your feet to avoid taking a death, especially to poppers and brain suckers. I did like the MarSec armor, mostly because it was lighter than the Megapol stuff, but it also had less protection as well.

Don't forget raiding the cult of sirius early on for combat experience and potentially good money selling off weapons you snag and any Psiclones that might be there. Those sold for a couple thousand a piece I think.

Yeah---first priority in any X-com mission, get off the damn transport!

Oh yeah. The Cult made my folks marksmen, and MarSec let me fly.

*Bang* "CO's dead, what do you do?" "Uh-Uh-Uh." *Bang* "He's dead, what do you do?" "GET OFF THE TRANSPORT!"

For some reason, I feel this appropriate to the topic at hand: http://lparchive.org/X-COM-UFO-Defense/Upd...34-xcom237a.gif

Ah, the good ol' days...

I remember the start of one game, when my computer was running everything at supersonic speed, when I accidentally hit the "Next Turn" button... A Sectoid appeared with a Plasma Pistol and fired off two bursts.

All six shots went BETWEEN THE HEADS of everyone in the transport!!! Drop the first two to kneeling, four assault rifles to full auto, baby!

I've got mixed feelings about this. Because of the strategy part, the tactical part quickly got uninteresting (you either have the right gear/troops to face your enemies and it's a walk in the park or you don't and you're screwed) and the strategy part felt like trial and error more than strategy to me.

Read my sig DGIF: Drones go in first!

Yeah, the early part of the game was the tactically challenging part-later in the game it became one of those I win cause your armor, weapons and troops rocked. Where as the stragery part of the game became more important later in the game (Research priorities, base placement and design). I recall having two to three major bases where I could launch troops from, and the rest beeing listing posts/interceptor bases. Sometimes they would attack the interceptor base and that would be fun. I put my worst troops on guard duty. Loved the motion sensor grenades!!

I'm still tremendously frustrated that my game corrupted in the penultimate mission (there's a game bug that if you go into combat while also following another ship, the game fails when you leave combat). And I was bad about my saves, so nothing to fallback on. Sooner or later I'm going to just hack the saved game to catch up.

Apoc fixed a lot of that problem. Combat remains fairly challenging throughout the game and the air combat portions can be particularly maddening for a while. I did miss having a tank to send into combat in front of my troops, however.

I always like the first one best. The second one was good but the part where irritated me. I never really gave apocalypse a fair shake. I should probably go back and really give it a chance. I couldn't get the hang of the flight sim parts of interceptor at all. I never played enforcer, I was afraid to after I read a few reviews of it.

When I play apocalypse, should I use real-time or turn-based tactical combat?

It looks hopeful but there is this from the Game Informer article that sets off a red flag for me:



Those turns of phrase "streamlining" and "uninteresting mechanics" sends shivers down my spine (exaggerating for effect). Sure, there is a amazing amount of things that could be improved upon, but less game mechanics? If anything from the first game I wanted more, not less to mess around with - it was things like the UI that definitely needs improvement and what could be hurt by updating the art assets, especially if it got more cartoony? And some of the latest screen shots do appear to be in that direction and its a welcome one.

I am holding on to the vain hope that was just the humble opinion of the writer of that article at GI rather than Firaxis developers.

Never got APOC to work on my PC--bad disk or something--and returned the game. Never got it again.

Crash - Try them both out. They both have their merits and are interesting, truth be told. I like to think of realtime mode as being more "popper proof" since all your guys will reaction shoot at them.

Warlord - You ought to give it a shot. It's cheap enough on steam. When I first played it, I decried it for being too different from X-COM and TFTD. I played it again a couple years back and really enjoyed it quite a bit. More than TFTD, I'd even say.

No X-Com thread anywhere is complete without the story of Patrick Stewart, so here it is:

http://xcomtales.atspace.com/PatrickStewart/PSindex.htm

Love that - brings back LOTS of memories...

AJC

The best stories are those that write themselves in these kinds of games.

Looked at the game again on the Steam Store, considering trying it after all these years. But it's still selling for thirty bucks? I guess I'll wait some more years for the price to go down.

Oh, and in hindsight, did it turn out to be any good?

It's excellent. At $30, it's a steal.