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The X-COM series of games totally passed me by when they were first released, but I have always been tempted to give them a go. As they are all on sale on Gamersgate this week I may well pick them up, but first I would like to ask those who have played them a couple of questions.

Firstly, which ones are any good? There appears to be five different ones, but I have heard certain ones are pretty rubbish and probably worth avoiding.

Secondly, how have they aged? I don't care if the graphics are primitive (I am playing through Star Control II at the moment, they don't bother me there) but what about the interface? Older games, particular tactical types games, tended to have pretty bad UIs.

Anything else I should know before I start playing? Essential tweaks or mods to use to get the best out of them?

I'll try and give you an honest answer before the rose-tinted brigade shows up.

They've aged extremely badly tactically, but pretty well strategically. The Geoscape is ambitious even now and works pretty well; late-game the economy falls to bits and you're swimming in money but particularly on harder difficulties it's challenging, interesting, rewarding and interactive; you can choose to chase guys over the ocean if you can't be fucked going tactical, you can wait for daylight, etc.

Tactically it basically sucks shit. Jagged Alliance 2 is both far more attractive and more sophisticated, and the tactical balance (for weapons and enemies) and the AI is basically non-existent. The UI is a huge cluttered and redundant mess of unnecessary buttons (amusingly, so are the UIs of XCOM clones). It's playable, but it's very much a precursor to tactical games that worked (like JA2).

I feel the tactical play is better in Terror, if only because the AI is better and the enemies more interesting. 'Interesting' includes the game-destroying tenticulat, so ... it's a mixed bag.

It's worth noting that without a fanmade patch XCOM is broken and will reset the difficulty to easy after the first battle. Oops. What's QA?

The have aged pretty poorly. Though, I never played JA2. (It might have been in a Strategy Collection I had years ago, but it might have been the first one instead... Can't say I liked it.)

The difficulty reversion bug is, from what I've heard, in the base game. UFOD reverting to Easy, TFTD reverting to Superhuman... Appearently accounting for a great deal of TFTD being so much harder.

It's pretty easy to abuse the hell out of the game. Especially if you abuse the mid-mission saves... And know what to build so your workshops turn a profit.

There're a few research peculiarities, that got worse as the series went on. (Apoc can become unwinnable if you fail to recover a specific type of UFO.)

There's also that notorious "Where in the fuck is the last Sectoid?" ending to more than a few missions. Which isn't helped by your soldiers' tiny sight ranges.

Personally, I liked Apoc best... but that's probably because I can't be assed to do anything but raid the Cult all day and night... (Or raid the police to get more stungrapples...) And the fact that it has a terrible endgame and rather poor aliens to fight anyway.

TFTD is the better of the original duo. Interceptor and Enforcer are pretty much the series skeletons in the closet. UFOD is high on the nostalgia goggles factor. (Although, at least Chrysallids don't FLY. Fucking tenticulats... And no lobster men... And Laser is a huge upgrade while Gauss is almost a waste of time...)

JA2 kinda looks like Fallout graphics-wise (isometric art) whereas JA1 was a far more primitive top-down thing. They're not the garish neon-flowers style of XCOM.

I have to agree with Stark: I found most of the tactical missions a pain and often was more interested in geoscape events.

For me, Apocalypse was a more interesting game, just because of the active combat, giving you a feel of the tense searching and the rush of actually finding an enemy in real-time. Rather than watch my men get raped because I couldn't see beyond as I lacked the time units.

Each game had good ideas and faults of various degrees. I say this as someone who has played the X-COM games relatively recently.

Stark wrote:JA2 kinda looks like Fallout graphics-wise (isometric art) whereas JA1 was a far more primitive top-down thing. They're not the garish neon-flowers style of XCOM.

Yeah, then it was definitely JA1.

About the only game I remember playing much of on that collection was M.A.X. Loved it's almost broken upgrading. (It's also part of the reason I own 3 or 4 copies of UFOD...)

JA2 looks like this



Poor old UFO looks like this



Oh dear.

It's kinda a shame JA2 1.13 is a pain to set up, it's a lot of fun.

They're still fun for me, but it's pure nostalgia that keeps it that way.

Give 'em a go, because really it's worth the price of admission nowadays just to see some really interesting and ambitious game design.

JA 1.13 blows X-COM (and vanilla ) out of the water, especially with its actually innovative inventory system (You mean soldiers have a limited amount of pockets? Digging through the backpack takes time? You can carry different amounts of magazines (rather than rounds of ammo) in different tactical vests? No reloading magazines in combat?) and about a gazillion other improvements (Oh hey enemy soldiers will actually try to flank you now!)

P.S.

Also, JA2 actually has night vision equipment which a super secret ultraelite organization dealing with an existential threat to Earth does not

To be fair to it, the inventory system was one thing X-Com didn't do badly. Soldiers did have limited numbers of pockets, it was magazine based, and it did take different amounts of time to access things from different places, and more time to stow an item than to retrieve it.

Vendetta wrote:To be fair to it, the inventory system was one thing X-Com didn't do badly. Soldiers did have limited numbers of pockets, it was magazine based, and it did take different amounts of time to access things from different places, and more time to stow an item than to retrieve it.

Yeah, thinking about it, it was pretty well implemented for its time. JA 1.13 takes it a step further, though: upgrading the kit of your soldiers includes things like tactical vests, backpacks, holsters, bags etc: they overdo it a little with the variety, but at least you get a sensible and logical inventory system (large backpack = no climbing buildings, medic vest = more pockets for stuff medics use, want to lug a desert eagle around? need to buy a large holster)

X-COM guys all had the same inventory slots, and of course it didn't save loadouts between tactical missions, so you had to manually drag every magazine to its proper place every time, which was massive a pain.

PeZook wrote: X-COM guys all had the same inventory slots, and of course it didn't save loadouts between tactical missions, so you had to manually drag every magazine to its proper place every time, which was massive a pain.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I consider UFO to be unplayable without XComUtil, which can save squad loadouts.

Vendetta wrote: Yeah, that's one of the reasons I consider UFO to be unplayable without XComUtil, which can save squad loadouts.

Oh? That sounds like a nifty utility.

Thinking some about how X-COM aged, it had fully destructive environments, and implemented the effects of smoke and fire - something we wouldn't see again until Silent Storm for some reason. Of course, a hilariously broken scoring system meant that instead of giving you another tactical option, blowing up everything in sight became the best tactic ever

XComUtil is quite fun, it can tweak all sorts of things, like making heavy lasers actually not shit, allowing high explosive packs to penetrate UFO walls so you can breach in rather than just relying on the door, making laser cannons unprofitable to manufacture, all the way up to turning off psionics completely (which I always do because they break the game too much, since the AI doesn't need line of sight to the target to use them and you can use them to win matches without leaving the skyranger)

PeZook wrote:JA 1.13 blows X-COM (and vanilla ) out of the water, especially with its actually innovative inventory system (You mean soldiers have a limited amount of pockets? Digging through the backpack takes time?

It's too bad the first few missions are murderingly hard; and that the entire game just does not work well on the large scale map. With XCOM, it's pretty obvious from alien interrogations etc that Cydonia is the way to go; while with JA2......not very much so. Fuck, I had to go look up online via googling how to beat JA2 -- you have to find some super secret hidden tunnel in the Mansion. Otherwise, the game never ends.

Laughing Mechanicus wrote:The X-COM series of games totally passed me by when they were first released, but I have always been tempted to give them a go. As they are all on sale on Gamersgate this week I may well pick them up, but first I would like to ask those who have played them a couple of questions.

Firstly, which ones are any good? There appears to be five different ones, but I have heard certain ones are pretty rubbish and probably worth avoiding.

XCOM/UFO is the best.

XCOM 2/TFD is basically a reskin of the first game by Microprose's internal studio, with the difficulty turned up to 11; and when I say reskin, I do mean it. Like it follows the tech tree of the first one 95% with a few exceptions. It's annoying after playing the first one and asking "hey, you know those plasma guns and laser guns I researched 40 years ago in Alien War I? Why the fuck don't I got them now?"

XCOM 3 is by the guys who did 1. It's now set in a city. There's a LP of it going on now in G*C somewhere. Now has a real time option. Decent little game.

The remainder? Not worth the electrons basically.

Secondly, how have they aged? I don't care if the graphics are primitive (I am playing through Star Control II at the moment, they don't bother me there)

The graphics have aged decently well, they were released in 1994; and they still look pretty good today. Oh sure, they're blocky due to the whole VGA = 320x200~ thing.

but what about the interface? Older games, particular tactical types games, tended to have pretty bad UIs.

The interface works pretty good and is pretty intuitive. The only real flaw is that it has pretty large buttons, when they could have reduced the button size on the bottom to show more of the tactical scape.

MKSheppard wrote: It's too bad the first few missions are murderingly hard; and that the entire game just does not work well on the large scale map. With XCOM, it's pretty obvious from alien interrogations etc that Cydonia is the way to go; while with JA2......not very much so. Fuck, I had to go look up online via googling how to beat JA2 -- you have to find some super secret hidden tunnel in the Mansion. Otherwise, the game never ends.

The first few missions are hard? Huh? You mean the ones where enemies are dumb, have low HP, no body armor and are only armed with pistols? The ones I beat with the custom mercenary working all by himself?

And yeah, storming the palace is the weakest part of the game, I agree, but overall, it's a vast improvement on X-COM.

PeZook wrote:The first few missions are hard? Huh? You mean the ones where enemies are dumb, have low HP, no body armor and are only armed with pistols? The ones I beat with the custom mercenary working all by himself?

Keep in mind I never played vanilla JA2; but v1.13; since I found one of my brothers old discs, loaded it on, put v1.13 on; and those guys while adding a hell of a lot of useful things; turned the difficulty up to 20.

What about UFO:AI? It's a fan-made successor using a 3D engine.

I've played a few rounds with it, and I found it reasonably enjoyable, but I hate managing inventory for everyone.

MKSheppard wrote: Keep in mind I never played vanilla JA2; but v1.13; since I found one of my brothers old discs, loaded it on, put v1.13 on; and those guys while adding a hell of a lot of useful things; turned the difficulty up to 20.

No they didn't, unless you deliberately chose the highest superduperultramegahardcore setting. Expert in JA2 V.1.13 plays much like expert in vanilla, except in 1.13 you can't realistically expect the enemy to charge your firing line and get slaughtered.

EDIT: Oh, there's also the thing where Drassen gets an immediate and extremely strong counterattack levied against it. Yeah, this can get pretty hairy, but you can turn it off with one config switch. This is what I like about 1.13's developers: they're not idiot fanboys set on their own vision of how the game should play, you can pretty much customize all aspects.

UFO:AI, on the other hand, has gems like "No saving during missions! You SHOULD be afraid!"

And a jobless, lonely nerd, too, apparrently

Stark wrote:tactical balance (for weapons and enemies) and the AI is basically non-existent.

You mean like how there is only the heavy plasma, praise be upon cthulthi, for everything?

It really does end weapons progression and balance by ensuing 1-2 shot kills for every alien in the game, with the exception of perhaps a few specialist units like the Chryssalid, which is I believe a bit more resistant to plasma than most, and because Chrysallid zombies become chryssalids, meaning you got to kill them twice.

The AI was decent for the time, and while it wasn't advanced enough to flank you, it had a memory of sorts, so they could duck in and out of UFOs or buildings to snipe at your guys.

Two of my most memorable XCOM missions were:

1.) When I went on my first terror mission and saw Cyberdisks. Damn those things are tough. Okay, killed the fuck.........*BOOM*

2.) Mutons. Do I need to say more. I hit one of those purple guys with a rocket launcher directly, and......he didn't die.

PeZook wrote:EDIT: Oh, there's also the thing where Drassen gets an immediate and extremely strong counterattack levied against it. Yeah, this can get pretty hairy, but you can turn it off with one config switch. This is what I like about 1.13's developers: they're not idiot fanboys set on their own vision of how the game should play, you can pretty much customize all aspects.

Clearing Drassen out initially is still pretty hard -- because your initial merc picks are pretty weak -- for a very big international merc agency; AIM apparently has pretty low standards; and you're going up against a decently large number of bad guys. The only real way to do it is to wait until night, and then go in with the early "nighttime" stealth people to snipe from the darkness to clear Drassen.

Just set your guys up in the bar and keep skipping until a badguy walks in the door. Only one door + no windows = you'll always win. The immediate Drassen counterattack is a great source of money.

Stark wrote:Just set your guys up in the bar and keep skipping until a badguy walks in the door. Only one door + no windows = you'll always win. The immediate Drassen counterattack is a great source of money.

Last time I tried that, they blew up the fucking bar. I had more luck setting up on the roof of the central building, and blasting them as they approached and crawled up. It also had the added bonus of being hectic and tense and really a lot of fun.

I'd say they've aged very well overall, but they were never tactically complex to begin with. The enemy you're facing isn't one with an awful lot of military capability, they're just moronic terrorists running around raping cattle and burning down resort villas. It's more like playing Squad Based Portal, with the badguys as turrets. Your goal is to locate, outflank, and eliminate these little turret critters with as little fuss as possible, because more advanced versions start popping up real fast. The danger comes from the fact that you're walking into an environment full of places for one of these space rednecks to hide in, and you only need to miss one for things to go south badly.

It's for this reason I actually prefer Terror From the Deep, X-Com's sequel, because it's harder and the environments are more interesting and colorful. You also get some really cool enemies like the Lobstermen. I did a LP of TFTD Ironman on Superhuman back before the Penny Arcade forums were wiped, long before I joined here, but it's a great game. You'll want to run XCOMUTIL with that too because you can start with a better arranged starting base (just a time saver), save squad loadouts, and it corrects a few game-breaking research bugs. And don't worry too much about Tentaclauts, they're really not that bad. Crysalids are infinitely worse because they'll infect 30 civilians before you even find them. 'Clauts are just nasty because they hide them in little alcoves and niches. Once you know what to look for you can nearly always spot them ahead of time.

If you want actual squad-based tactical gaming there's a ton else to play, but X-Com's big feature was the multitude of things to do--strategic control, base-building, radar nets, enemy bases, the funding metagame, and the tactical missions that lead directly to the research game. It had all that and still a fun (if not very bright) tactical game. UFO: Afterlight is the best modern alien-stomping tactical game in my opinion, but I have never played the Jagged Alliance series so I won't pretend I know what the best tactical game is. If I wanted to play a JA game, which would I play? I don't want to play any game that halfway through makes me use Nazi Power Armor and Lasers.