The History of XCOM - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxUVoWt2K78
X-COM
171–180 of 238 posts
Re: X-COM
#172I love the original X-com and take it for a spin every few years. By far the greatest thing original X-com had was the sense of mystery and dread of the unknown on your first playthrough. You didn't know what lies ahead, you didn't know what technologies to research, and how to do what. New aliens were catching you by surprise all the time, and Chrysalids, god, they were so so scary. When I got to flying armor my guy…
> Ironman adds a lot to the game, you can't savescum from a risky missed shot, and actually start to be really afraid for your guys.
I don't savescum... but I've had a couple of bugs or glitches with the reboots that I'm afraid to start an ironman game and not be able to go back to a previous turn.
Re: X-COM
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not play the original Master of Orion, but absolutely loved the second part. I started focussing on science (namely Psilons) and only later developed a taste for trying out other strategies/races. I often played multiplayer with friends too, and really liked the laid back atmosphere enabled by turn based strategy.
Please go ahead and play the first Master of Orion. It's by far my favourite of the pair. (Make sure you get the latest community patches.) The genius of the first MoO was that it really paired down the tedious busy work. And the tech system works a charm, it's cleverly randomised in a way that's not really possible with the more prevalent DAG based tech trees.
I had a soft spot for Master of Magic. I preferred it to MoM and MoM2.
Re: X-COM
#174I love the original X-com and take it for a spin every few years. By far the greatest thing original X-com had was the sense of mystery and dread of the unknown on your first playthrough. You didn't know what lies ahead, you didn't know what technologies to research, and how to do what. New aliens were catching you by surprise all the time, and Chrysalids, god, they were so so scary. When I got to flying armor my guy…
The sense of mystery and dread that you mentioned touches on the only part of the article I disagreed with - the critique of the "pointless" weapons, of the game giving you a sub-par base and sub-par craft to begin with, and basically no guidance is what made it such an adventure. X-Com (the organisation) truly feels like a hastily slapped together ragtag bunch in the beginning. Governments have thrown money at a pro…
Yes, this is it! The special sauce of the original is that there is so much mystery; "Enemy Unknown" is the whole idea. While I love the Firaxis reboot, and think it has better gameplay, I'm not sure it's strictly a better game. It all feels so clean and organized, and it's always clear what needs to be done. There's no sense of bureaucratic panic, wasted time on pointless tech-trees, or over-investment in a singular hail-mary plan that is completely foolhardy only in retrospect.
The discovery portion of XCOM matched with the dreadful mystery of XCOM, overlaid by unknown levels of complexity, is what makes the game feel real/alive. It makes the gamespace feel much more wide-open than it really is. When you first experience your own base under attack, the feeling is "holy shit I didn't even know this could happen and wow I did not plan appropriately for this eventuality!" In the reboot, it mostly just feels like another mission, where the layout is totally decoupled from the actual decisions you've made. And you're much more likely to have trained commandos at homebase rather than a ragtag bunch of rookies with "failed experiments" gear (eg laser tech and maybe some grenades lying around).
That's just one more example to illustrate how the original XCOM was as much about creating tension through the limitless possibilities of the unknown. Each and every decision was less like a chess game and more like a desperate gambit.
Re: X-COM
#175I love the original X-com and take it for a spin every few years. By far the greatest thing original X-com had was the sense of mystery and dread of the unknown on your first playthrough. You didn't know what lies ahead, you didn't know what technologies to research, and how to do what. New aliens were catching you by surprise all the time, and Chrysalids, god, they were so so scary. When I got to flying armor my guy…
Try "Xenonauts", a recent remake of X-com using the original mechanics. It isn't a direct port, they have added a couple mechanics in areas like air combat, but it is 95% x-com with better graphics.
My want: Xenonauts + TFTD. TFTD was the pinnacle of the x-com franchise imho. That opening sequence, and all the sound, was amazing. I still hear TFTD sounds being reused in modern scifi.
Re: X-COM
#176I loved, loved X-COM. It had an ability to capture imagination in a way that few turn based strategy games do. The randomly generated soldier names still loom large as heroes in my mind. I was affected when they were killed in action. "Bernard Dujardin", wherever you are, I salute you
It did get slightly comical when one of them died (or you started another game from the beginning) and you had the second or third guy with the exact same name down the road, though.
But it's true, you did grow attached.
Since in some sense the nature of the game is also that your soldiers will die -- and sometimes a lot of them -- because of a small mistake or just due bad luck, that creates a weird dichotomy where you're tempted to care on one hand and to see them as expendable and replaceable on the other hand at the same time.
Also, the atmosphere of night missions in particular where shots might come out of the dark at any point, and you might not really even see where they came from, made for a surprisingly engaging and even scary experience.
The weird, ominous music was probably a part of that.
I've heard others not find it that way, though, so maybe it's a matter of imagination and how prone to getting immersed you are.
Re: X-COM
#177Definitely one of my favourite games growing up (along with Colonization). I'm reminded of one of my best gaming facepalms which occurred playing X-COM. We'd been playing the game for ages and had found it very difficult to kill all the aliens during the ground missions. We'd go round the whole map attempting to find the last remaining aliens before having to give up. It was only when one of us accidentally clicked i…
I was recently noticing just how ahead of its time Colonization was, not just for its gameplay. I mean, it's a game where the music is period music, where each Native American nation actually feels like its own unique culture where both cooperating or looting them can have far-reaching consequences and be a viable strategy for the Euro settlers, where you can crash the Euro economy and even screw with the economy of your neighbor colony's supply chain, where Privateers have secret national alliances appearing as unaligned ruffians...and so, so much more. It's a really incredibly deep game, and as much as I loved it when I played it, I didn't realize just how special it was because I was at an age where I didn't have anything worse to compare it to.
Re: X-COM
#178I loved this series all the way back to Rebelstar Raiders. Must have spent endless hours playing all Laser Squad versions on the Speccy and it was only natural to jump into X-COM. Although the ones that moved away from the Rebelstar Raiders/Laser Squad initial concept are not worthy to me.
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Re: X-COM
#179I loved this series all the way back to Rebelstar Raiders. Must have spent endless hours playing all Laser Squad versions on the Speccy and it was only natural to jump into X-COM. Although the ones that moved away from the Rebelstar Raiders/Laser Squad initial concept are not worthy to me.
My takeaway from the article is I got to get these running on an emu...
FYI - may be useful - there is some contrast between the CPC releases of Rebelstar and Laser Squad and the Spectrum releases.
Re: X-COM
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Save-scumming", such an ugly name for speculative execution ...
I would actually welcome the following variant of save-scumming: You can plan all you like, ie save-scum. But you can't keep it. You can only make forward progress that counts, when you first disable your save-scum ability for a bit. Of course, that only works for questions of probability, like hitting shots or not. It doesn't address that save-scumming also reveals information you are not supposed to have. There's a…
I've played the first reboot in the ironman mode, and there's a point to avoiding save-scumming, but there's a point where I find it may actually make the game less enjoyable.
I found myself making every move so calculated (and seeing it as a massive mistake whenever I failed at that) that it actually took away some of the atmosphere of the game for me. I had too much of a motivation to make the game less exciting and to make it as little about chance as possible, and in a sense it began to feel like work rather than an atmospheric story.
It might be a bit different in the original since IMO it seems much more difficult to calculate your moves and their potential outcomes as accurately. But that also makes it even more brutal in the original. (Or maybe I'm just worse at playing it, but that's how it seems to me.)