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[Mothra]

Well dang, Steam's having a X-Com sale where you can get every X-Com title there is for 2 bucks!

Having picked it up earlier today, I'm thinking it might be time to finally take another crack at Terror from the Deep, that cold, heartless, joyless demonchild of the 90's. In preparation, I started slogging through mods and gameplay tweaks to see if anyone had actually found a way to make this title fun in the million years since its release. I came across some pretty badass music remixes for UFO (Moody as the dickens. The battle theme, in particular, is The Shit), and apparently XComUtil is the end-all best X-Com mod around.

Anyone know anything else worth checking out? I'd consider some new tilesets if they didn't fuck up the enemy AI so much. I'd also love if somebody made new graphics for Apocolypse, but I'm almost certain that games' been long abandoned.

I also just discovered Niklas Jansson and his whole slew of sweet-ass concept work for the Rebelstar/X-Com series and a jillion other games. Really good stuff, conceptually, but I get the feeling he's never once actually finished a project beyond the planning phase.

His new Master of Orion races are worth checking out. His X-Com art rules as well - I remember Geo having these as an avatar a while back... I'd always assumed them the work of some Anonymous on Pivix.

[Miss Cat Ears]

How embarrassing.

[James Edward Smith]

Yeah I had them on rotation for a while before just going with the one Crysallid all the time. I really like how he draws the Crysallids, plus, you know, they are the most badassed alien race by leaps and bounds.

[Smiler]

The worst thing about TftD: Bugs and monster closets. Okay, I lost most of my people opening up 1x1 rooms with lobstermen in them, now it's time for part two of the mis- WAIT WHERE ARE MY WEAPONS?

[Mothra]

Well, supposedly X-ComUtil fixes that, but this isn't going to make those three-part tanker motherfuckers any less of a slog.

Probably going to use Statstrings to drop my guys' chances of getting mindraped down to 20%. I realize it's kinda cheating, but getting mind controlled or panicked every turn is the opposite of fun. I'd like to keep it as some reletively rare event that goes down when we're going up against a high-level psi enemy. Like those horrifying giant pulsating floating brains.

[JDigital]

The first X-Com is maybe one of my top games ever. Could use a graphical update and some interface tweaks, but the gameplay is solid.

A few weeks after the terror attack on Mumbai, I was playing UFO and the aliens managed to land a terror attack. In Mumbai.

[Mongrel]

The first X-Com is maybe one of my top games ever. Could use a graphical update and some interface tweaks, but the gameplay is solid.

Also, I am totally unashamed to say that I save-cheated like a motherfucker on that game.

I love it, but not enough to play it for two months straight trying to build a qualified team.

[Smiler]

The point of X-Com is to send little computer people to die. Eventually you will have your ultimate team standing in the middle of all of those other corpses that weren't good enough to be on your team.

[Classic]

I feel like I should give playing X-com with its game awesome-ering mods another go. I got lazy after just installing X-Com and had fun with that until I had to slog through four or five alien bases in eurasia and took an indefinite break.

[Smiler]

If you were good enough you wouldn't need to care about alien bases. As long as your approval rating stays positive and you aren't in the red you can have every country but Russia cut funding and still go on your alien fighting crusade.

[Classic]

Sometimes you just pick a bad start zone.
US airspace was clear for about 6 months before I remembered that I really needed a monitoring base in europe and africa.

[Dooly]

Were those nations still funding you by that time?

[Mothra]

Godddd this TFTD endgame sucks a stone cold west Texan shlong



THERE'S NOTHING HERE

I WANTED WHITE-KNUCKLE TACTICAL ACTION AND YOU GIVE ME THIS

[Mothra]

THIS ONE'S FOR DIGGER YOU SCUM-SUCKING INVERTEBRATE



MURDER WAS THE CHARGE THAT THEY GAAAUVE ME

P-P-P-P  E  A  C  E

http://www.youtube.com/v/Ukkkv2PF-IU&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b

[Mothra]

I love how perfect my sig goes with this

[JDigital]

The point of X-Com is to send little computer people to die. Eventually you will have your ultimate team standing in the middle of all of those other corpses that weren't good enough to be on your team.

Your high-ranking guys are still vulnerable to stray shots from enemies you can't see. That adds some real tension and rewards tactical play, but it's still annoying to lose your squad leader to stray fire. Even with armour your guys can get wounded and need to spend weeks in hospital while his skills atrophy.

[James Edward Smith]

I dunno, that's war, son.

I mean, if you are actually careful, and treat missions like the life or death struggles that they are, the chances of a high ranking guy getting killed outside of you just being completely out classed (Facing Etherials when your psi-skills suck) is pretty low. Take your time, don't leave a vector unwatched or a leave a guy out in the open, watch those corners.

But I mean, sometimes when you aren't careful or even when you are, something shitty happens. It's just how it is. I actually really like Dwarf Fortress for this. Dwarf Mace Lords are pretty badass and can mow through waves of guys with no injuries in the right situations, but the same guy can get his neck broken in a sparring session in the barracks. Also, if he's in battle and a Frost Wyrm eats his leg, that's it, he's a cripple now for the rest of his life and unfit for combat. The realistic finality of certain potentially non-leathal wounds in Dwarf Fortress is something I really respect about the game.

[Mongrel]

Actually, it was the constantly getting outclassed by Ethereals that always had me savecheating sooner or later. If it was just cannonfire, grenades and things that cause explosions in the shape of a cluster of little skulls, I probably would have played the missions "fairly".

Maybe I shouldn't have renamed all my soldiers once I discovered you could.. makes you a little too attached to the wee bastards. >___>

[Mothra]

Save-cheating's something I eventually grew out of in more realistic games when it became clear that having some semblance of lasting consequence enhanced the dread and tension and added mythos to the mission. Anyone who does something special gets a name, and when he inevitably shot up, that just makes me all the more careful in those kinds of situations with the next Rook that climbs that mountain of corpses.

If I'm actually worried about losing my main guy on a nighttime terror mission, I'm gonna stick to the walls and take it a lot slower, which is how one would go about a mysterious bug hunt in real life. If he gets taken out, that's a teammate's sworn vow of revenge right there, but what's done is done and there's nothing you can do to undo his stupid mistake or terrible luck.

The thing about gaming in general is that it tries to be completely fair to the player, and that's obviously not how the real world works. When I can rewind time and undo my mistakes, it means I can do anything without having to think about making mistakes. That translates to me finding the easiest way to break the game in order to win, which is really not why I play X-Com anymore. I've already beaten this damn game like twenty-five times, I don't care about winning any more; what's stuck with me are these tense moments and little fabricated character dramas where I actually have to launch a rescue to get the lone survivor of a Chryssalid attack out of the damn warehouse before my snipers can get into position and my rocket guy finds an open window. That guy's getting a name. Let's see how far he makes it before he's a CO.

Anyways I'm doing an all human tech superhuman run on UFO with some slight mods to bring assault rifles and pistols up to laser rifle damage. I'm also sticking in a mod that beefs up the tank's HP to take three or so heavy plasma hits. Going to be relying a lot of incindiary rounds this time around, something that've become obsolete too quickly in the past for me to ever really give them a go.

[Mongrel]

I think that my problem with that is that if I want to see unfair, random experiences all I have to do is wake up in the morning and pay attention. Those have more resonance than anything I can get out of a video game.

But glib comments aside, I get the point and I have played games like that myself. Other than a single very quick play-through for nostalgia's sake about two or three years ago, I last played X-Com well over a decade ago, in my mid teens.

One thing I'll say is that playing "for reals" gets a lot better when you "screen" your guys before sending them on missions. See, in my mind why would the planet's most elite special forces team accept any retard shipped to them? You buy a bunch of guys and pick the ones with the best stats to start with, then fire the rest. It costs time and money, but then so would any real intensive review process. And you're not modding the game or screwing with stats, you're just firing all the idiots with the mental defenses of a cane toad.