81–90 of 238 posts
Even greater than UFO Defense, in my opinion, was its expansion - Terror From the Deep . It truly taught me that our oceans are so close, yet much farther than outer space can ever be. Looking at that lone blue globe in space always makes me feel so insignificant, so meaningless. Space is vast, but empty, and sterile. Down the abyss, not even light can shine to bless and purify. The greatest contributor to that is ce…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the fatal flaws that made the reboot X-COM worse than the original was the inability to control the environment. Shots could no longer be aimed at scenery, and stray shots that hit the walls anyway proved that said walls were made out of cardboard. Even a pistol round could break an undamaged wall! This made hiding behind corners much less useful: if you're suddenly flanked, you have a great risk of losing you…
You can still catch enemies unaware. In fact, enemies in the reboots only become aware of you when you are within visible range of their pod (ie group). The pod system is at the heart of the reboots. High level play involves exploiting it to the hilt.
I would say the more direct successor to the original X-Com is the excellent Silent Storm game (with Sentinels add-on).
With the exception of the lateest one, I've loved all the x-com games dearly. So many hours spent recruiting newbies, training them up, building equipment, researching tech then hunting down and killing alien scum!
Do you mean Xcom2 or Chimera Squad?
Haven't yet acknowledged Chimera Squad existance yet :-P
Even greater than UFO Defense, in my opinion, was its expansion - Terror From the Deep . It truly taught me that our oceans are so close, yet much farther than outer space can ever be. Looking at that lone blue globe in space always makes me feel so insignificant, so meaningless. Space is vast, but empty, and sterile. Down the abyss, not even light can shine to bless and purify. The greatest contributor to that is ce…
> The greatest contributor to that feeling is certainly the music. If you are ever startled by a mobile phone nearby ringing with the menacing gmbigmar.mid buildup, please say hello, it's probably mine. I found TFTD a bit too much work-like in some missions (finding that last panicked Gray on a freighter...), but they sure earned an entire spot in gaming history only for their audio.
My favorite game of all time is another one in the turn based tactical genre, Jagged Alliance 2. A game still under active fan development some 20+ years later with the excellent 1.13 mod.
I might have to break that one out again.. you say is has a big community dev going?
I don't know if the author reads HN comments, but the story I heard about "Terror from the Deep" being so hard was because people were complaining that X-Com was too easy, due to an unfixed bug: Any time you loaded a save, the game reset to the easiest difficulty level. Not only would people often not play in one sitting, but many strategy gamers aren't above save-scumming either. Result, a large fraction of game hou…
"Save-scumming", such an ugly name for speculative execution ...
A solid article. I'd disagree with the "single play through" and "pointless starting weapons" comments though. For me it was multiple play throughs learning about what worked and what didn't. This for me was actually a thing that kept me coming back. Trying out new tactics, base locations and equipment to see what worked. All the while trying to balance the budget and keep the squad alive long enough to level up. A t…
I think he's slightly guilty of simply listing his own preference there, rather than reporting reality.
To be honest, I can't even remember why the aliens invaded. I can remember the research progression, and the excitement of starting the game from scratch again and going up against the aliens with automatic weapons instead of late game plasma blasters.
So the author and I had very different experiences.
Even greater than UFO Defense, in my opinion, was its expansion - Terror From the Deep . It truly taught me that our oceans are so close, yet much farther than outer space can ever be. Looking at that lone blue globe in space always makes me feel so insignificant, so meaningless. Space is vast, but empty, and sterile. Down the abyss, not even light can shine to bless and purify. The greatest contributor to that is ce…
A solid article. I'd disagree with the "single play through" and "pointless starting weapons" comments though. For me it was multiple play throughs learning about what worked and what didn't. This for me was actually a thing that kept me coming back. Trying out new tactics, base locations and equipment to see what worked. All the while trying to balance the budget and keep the squad alive long enough to level up. A t…