The year is 1999. The "Hip cats" in Europe were "Boogieing Down" with the "Euro".
The "kids" were committing "cyber-crime" on their "Napsters" as Y2K loomed.
The Star Wars prequels debuted, crushing the dreams of millions.
Oh, and aliens invaded to hideously slaughter humanity, turning their victims into undead hosts of their hideous spawn. It was, all in all, something of a bad year.
Our only hope was X-Com, a multinational task force given a shoestring budget and cutting edge technology to destroy the invaders by any means necessary.
It seldom went well. However, in the end, humanity triumphed, kicking the aliens back to Mars and exterminating them.
And then the aliens kept attacking every forty years or so.
Or other aliens did it.
And now it turns out some other aliens attacked in the sixties.
Remember, humanity is a tiny, insignificant species, an island in the midst of a cruel and, from our prospective, evil universe that is full of creatures bent wholly on our destruction or subjugation.
Our only hope is X-Com. Remind your local government of that next time they're discussing funding cuts.
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One day.
I believe there's an old dilapidated X-Com thread, maybe change OP to XCOM and add some screenshots/videos and spoiler the X-Com stuff so people know XCOM is >TRYING< to pay homage to X-Com?
Hope that wasn't too confusing... :P
Just like how XCOM is all caps with no hyphen and X-Com is hyphenated with X & C capitalized!
Everyone get back in the Skyranger.
Brazil can fend for itself.
I don't have a ton of love for the old games since they are hard to play and hate me but I'm glad they exist
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Tactical Error #2: Didn't send the tank down the ramp first
Tactical Error #3: Holy Crap !
Of course they hate you.
The only logical action is to hate them right back. High explosives are good.
It's of the era where you had to read the manual, but if you get past the initial hurdles, UFO defense and Apocalypse do things no other game does.
Why I fear the ocean.
On topic:
It's a bitch and a half to get steam X-com running at the speed I want it to. Every time I install X-com its either too slow or too fast. As in plasma bolts passing over the head of my captain in .3 seconds fast. Or killing a rookie in exactly one second.
I don't even... what the... did they let Chrysalids wreck civilians for 10 turns prior to that??
"Dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
A curious battle. The only winning move is not to play.
EDIT: Playing UFO Defense right this second.
Severe tactical error #1: Deploying the Skyranger without making sure it has its complement of Redshirts.
Severe tactical error #2: sending in the autocannon guy to clear the landed UFO using HE ammo. That last alien didn't even know what hit him, but neither did autocannon guy. I'd say he will be missed, but I can't remember his name.
It's the one behind you that does you in.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
It'd be worth it.
By the time of detonation, there'd already be thousands of the damned things.
Player laughs at "retaliation", wishes Brazil well with their new xenomorph overlords.
Totally unnecessary. Just limit the emulated CPU cycles in the DOSbox config file or hit ctrl+F11 to do it while in game. ctrl+F12 will boost the emulated CPU cycles in case you get it too slow.
I wonder if some industrious modders will be able to isolate those elements and make an actual X-com game.
Have you pre-ordered it? I want to hear some thoughts on it before I do.
: macg1991
Check out the Penny Arcade World of Tanks thread to join us in some fun times.
@screenshot: HOLY FUCKING
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I remember them being clunky but okay.
However the camera was fucking terrible and drove me into fits of rage on several occasions at it's lack of flexibility.
Edit: What would be even more terrifying is that if you lifted out of that Chrysallid mission and they kept multiplying until one end of that continent the other is jam packed with them from one end to the other.
Kinda like zombies except instead of the biting you get the bite and then have the pleasure of your skin splitting open as your hosting duties come to an end.
The UFO Extraterrestrials Gold on Steam is pretty good. It was terrible at launch but the gold version includes a lot of fixes (Mostly from a modder who worked to make it more faithful to the original X-Com).
There's also the UFO Trilogy series with Aftershock, Aftermath, and Afterlight. Afterlight is the newest one but has many questionable design decisions. It's enjoyable but gets very repetitive and tedious since you only have one base. I've not played the other two but I hear that the second game (Aftermath?) is the best one.
And then there's my favorite clone, which I feel is the best and most sincere. UFO: Alien Invasion. It doesn't really have much in the way of explaining how to play, but when you figure it out it is glorious. It's open-source freeware available on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu (Also Android too now). It's incredibly fun and the people who work on it do it for free and their love of X-Com.
: macg1991
Check out the Penny Arcade World of Tanks thread to join us in some fun times.
See, things like that are why X-Com can buy nukes easier than most people can get parking permits.
Why I fear the ocean.
I had debated reinstalling. now i'll just cower under my desk, thx.
Edit: Or just a new tactical turn based game?
http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net/
Rarely updated any more, but its multiplayer xcom, and its works fairly well.
http://ufotts.ninex.info/
Getting close to a 1.00 release. Whats that, you wanted a 2 player version of Xcom where one person is the aliens and the other is the humans, and base building and research matters? Okay, I guess you can has.
If you are talking about the combat being like the original Ghost Recon, I'd be all over that (if I could get friends to drop in and play as the deployed squad, even better).
Yeah, the originals.
Really, can AI be called an X-Com alike when you can't blow every single building between you and the aliens to hell?
I posit it cannot.
Why I fear the ocean.
Yes, this is the most faithful X-COM remake I've found, except for that one fatal flaw. The engine they chose for the game doesn't allow for terrain/building destruction. I don't follow its development that closely anymore, but I remember there being talk of a new engine, but I don't know the status on that. It always sounded a bit pie in the sky to me, they would basically be starting over. It took them how many years to get the current game?
I'm putting my hopes on that new game... crap I forgot the name.
Edit: I see Gene already linked it, Xenonauts
Looks pretty rad. I like that they are going with a cold war setting rather than near future.
Yeah. It's interesting, in a way. The original X-Com had a kind of odd grit to it that definitely felt cold war Eastern Europe, even if it was a happy accident.
Of course, that tends to make you miss the more impressive stuff from their tech. I mean, we all joke about how X-Com is scraping the bottom of the barrel at game start, but if you look what they've got?
X-Com starts the game with stuff most modern governments would kill for.
The piddly cannon for your interceptor? Punches through ten inches of steel. The planes are built like tanks. Avalanches are nuclear missiles. The rocket launchers reduce the front walls of warehouses to rubble. Man portable miniguns with high explosive shells.
The science teams can go from first principles to field ready models inside a month. The engineers can build spacecraft from earth-native raw materials.
Really, the field agents are the only weak link. Crazy team killing russian bastards. Lucky if one in ten is good. Upside is, even the cowards are brave to the point of psychosis.
Why I fear the ocean.
Now, I've never played an X-COM game (not a huge strategy buff), but seeing the trailer for the new. . . "thing" and then seeing some LPs of the original games makes me wonder why, if 2K wanted to spice up the series with a little more action, they didn't follow the lead of games like Valkyria Chronicles and make the new one turn based with direct control of each unit when selected. Makes sense in theory, rather than "yet another FPS trying to cash in on a popular IP".
Okay, now how much did Call of Duty?
Alright, maybe that's a little unfair. Substitute in Bioshock 1 or 2.
Point is, you're assuming that there was some sort of artistic vision involved when the parent 2K company told its Marin studio that their project was now going to use the X-Com license, when it was always all about the Benjamins, baby.
In all fairness, at least they shucked their initial "Bioshock in the 50s" concept and are apparently crafting something more befitting the franchise, something less about pulling the trigger at everything and more cerebral, which I absolutely cannot fault them for. It's quite commendable. I'm looking forward to what they will show in the future.
Now? Now they have the whip crack of corporate response to fan uprising to motivate them.