How well have X-COM games aged?

[PeZook]

Jagged Alliance 2 v. 1.13 is a good place to start. JA1 is not really worth the time.

[Mr. Tickle]

I started with TFTD but tried UFO later, personally I found the graphics to be improved, I think it has a bit more of a cartoonish edge to the look which benefits it.

A bug bear are the shipping lane attacks, not only do you have to clear the top deck and hundreds of rooms, you have to then deal below decks with more rooms and multiple levels. Unless you take a very slow approach checking each room and corridor, you end up with hide and sneek. The up side is that you do have to take a bit more of tactical plan, spliting up your team and spreading out throughout the ship, covering long corridors and such like.

Difficulty wise once you get the armour you are pretty much fine until psi attacks kick in, and then those are fine once you get the psi-lab up and running and have weeded out the recruits with rubbish stats. Which is shame as you could spend 6 months leveling some of them up for them to end up with rubbish scores in psi skills. But really once you get the ability to take control of the aliens it's all over for them, they make excellent spotters. For the last mission the aliens do 75% of the work for you.

But yea it has dated a bit but it's a solid game to run windowed for a time waster and I found it quite addictive, just 1 more month etc.

Oh and the research tree bug, I forgot about that. If you don't research certain things in the right order, you can't beat it. I think it's related to a live deep one terrorist, if you research that before or after something else you don't get the get next tech option which leads to a certain ship you need.

[Covenant]

Yeah, it's those stupid deep ones, and I think like a Lobsterman commander or navigator... there's some really finicky parts of the game.

When I play I usually split my teams into groups of 2-4 with a tank in front, and I use at least one if not 2 or 3 tanks per mission. They're expensive as hell to replace, but money is real easy to come buy, especially once you set up some factories to produce and sell equipment for funds. I would much rather lose a tank than 2 soldiers, even rookies, and Tanks are Psi-Immune as well as incredibly fast. They are shit for shooting with, but their 200 time units make them great at moving, pivoting in a circle, moving again... etc. I'd have my tank spot an alien and then have my 4 crouching Sonic Rifle snipers shoot 3 screens downrange at it.

This actually worked in my favor in the Superhuman Ironman game, even though I didn't know it at the time. If you spend enough time the aliens will come looking for you instead of waiting, making them MUCH easier to kill. By moving real slow, door to door, sweeping everything and breaching all the dangerous areas with massed sonic/gauss fire into the walls rather than actual doors, you actually encourage them to give up their advantageous positions.

Plus, the practice of cutting holes for tanks forces you as a player to take a more methodical, more well-planned approach. Sometimes cutting open some doors or throwing detpacks to open a wall will reveal aliens you didn't think were there, or draw reaction fire from someone you didn't see. I also used ridiculous amounts of flashlight grenades, proxy mines, and stun bomb launchers. Proxies are great as early warning systems. I'd usually have 2 per soldier and 2 flashlight mines per soldier as well.

It's not as much of an issue on the lower diffs, but that's why I say people should play on the harder ones. You may lose to massed battleship assaults (I have a savegame where my guys are being invaded every 6 seconds for a month, retaliation for a base op I had just run) but the day-to-day tac-game stuff is more fun that way. Honestly, the end-game is the most boring and tedious of the entire game anyway. The fun stuff is all those first 4 months.

[MKSheppard]

I really do wish that someone would do a game engine reimplementation of UFO and TFTD, similar to Open TTD; with modern resolutions (windowable) or 1920x1080 full screen, and open game files allowing easier modding.

Someone has already somewhat done this (UFO2000) but it's a multiplayer only reimplementation.

[Stark]

And it doesn't tackle anything important.

It's ridiculous to say that anyway; you know full well there are piles of attempts to remake UFO and they're always shit. They're either sidetracked in fanfiction, about accentuating whatever the team liked about the original, or get bogged down in shit feature reimplementation.

JA2 1.13 has the advantage that the base engine isn't so totally obsolete; they can hack in new resolutions and inventory systems and have a relatively modern game. UFO is fundamentally broken on several levels, so it's a far more ambitious concept.

[Covenant]

The worst thing most X-Com remakes do is rip out most of the strategic game functionality and just drag out the research tree and tactical gameplay, which were important but arguably the least important part of X-Com's actual success. Why did X-Com do well at the time, let alone even now? It's not nostalgia (since people can pick it up now and get thrilled by it), it's the breadth of gameplay. It gives you lots of different things to do all the time, with good high-and-low tension pacing moments, and the reason people complain about the "Go find that last sectoid" situation is because the tactical gameplay is really not all that fun on it's own. If it was standalone fun then you wouldn't really mind looking for that one last dude.

Narrowing X-Com's focus just to the tactical gameplay, and only improving that, is like making Masters of Orion IV and having the entire 4x aspect reduced to focus on the "deep mythos and exciting battles of Masters of Orion" or whatever bullshit boilerplate they'd put up. It'd be called "Orion" and be an RTS.

While it'd be fun to have an open toolkit to play with X-Com, it's not really anything of note. Redoing X-Com requires a non-trivial time investment, and making sure it doesn't come out fuckawful means people need to really sit down and look at the difference between it and other games of the type, and it sure ain't superior tactical gameplay.

[Stark]

Yeah, geoscape functionality is generally cut back, when it's the core of the game which provides the tactical gameplay with its actual value. Nobody said nerds were smart.

[Nephtys]

X-COM's infamous 80 item limit is my bane. Because of that and the inability to save gear loadouts per-soldier, it really makes me just give them all the same damn weapon, a grenade, a medkit and call it a day.

Anyway, nobody's ever made a *GOOD* spiritual sequel to X-COM. Something's always off. To be fair, neither has the actual X-COM series. Either the tactical battles don't feel right (accuracies, ranges, how fragile your guys are), or that the game has a much weaker strategic element. Or whatever. So while a game like say, Silent Storm may have an engine that feels awesomely X-COM, you suddenly facepalm at the horrible strategic mode, no research, and so-forth. Something is always missing. And that's the thing. If X-COM was lacking just one small part of what made it good, it would be pretty rubbish.

Yet, even now, some new people can play this aged game and still see why it was so great.

--

Other than X-COM, Jagged Alliance 2 is the very best game of the same genre. And arguably superior. It's certainly more sophisticated, and shares a rich strategic mode.

[PeZook]

Jagged Alliance has some real problems with presentiation, though. You don't really get any feedback when interacting with characters: does this guy need to be threatened, or asked nicely? If he doesn't fold, does it mean my guy has stats that are too low, or that he's just a random useless NPC?

It's a minor thing, but it means some things to do are made just incredibly obscure

Oh, and:

"Deidranna has Meduna fortified enough to stop an army! ANY army!"

A company of infantry, a dozen odd Pattons and a tiny force of Mig-21s. Yeah. I really expected something...more.

[Stark]

Man, I really wish Silent Storm would work under Win7. Scifi plot aside it's easily the best turn/tactical thing. If only every modern geoscape wasn't complete shit like all the UFO:Aftershit games.

[Nephtys]

Man, I really wish Silent Storm would work under Win7. Scifi plot aside it's easily the best turn/tactical thing. If only every modern geoscape wasn't complete shit like all the UFO:Aftershit games.

SS really had that wonderful combat model. I've never seen anything quite like it in a game since. I mean, we're not used to the idea of spraying down a shack you suspect a Nazi to be hiding in with lots of high-caliber fire, and watching the thing colapse with the bloody corpse of the enemy inside. Or to shoot the stairs out underneath a nazi from below.

If it became a straightforward Jagged Alliance WW2 clone where you decide when and where to attack, and how to manage resources.. that'd be amazing.

[PeZook]

They tried doing that with Sentinels, and then again with the godawful mod (Red Hammer?). Red Hammer at least had an interesting setting, but Sentinels was just...meh. Idiotic plot to boot.

I sometimes wonder if developers just don't think there's a market for such games?

[Stark]

S2's biggest problem was the horrible laundry-list of totally identical guns (and the related absurd commonality of historically-rare weapons). At least JA2 tried to give you a quick-draw reason to use pistols.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Thanks for the advice guys, I've picked up the collection with all the Xcom games (was only £4). This weekend I'm planning to cram XP onto my old 2GB eee netbook, that should give me a nice portable platform for Xcom/Star Control 2 or other older 2D stuff.

JA2 sounds cool and isn't a game I really knew anything about so thanks for mentioning it; it's a shame I didn't make this thread sooner as they had it for 50% off on GoG a couple of weeks back. I'll pick it up at some point - is this 1.13 patch some sort of community add-on?

I had totally forgotten about Silent Storm too. I played the demo of it when it first came out, but never got around to buying it; guess I won't get a chance to try it now if Win7 support is broken.

[PeZook]

1.13 is a community patch-slash-mod sort of thing which vastly improves the interface, AI and gameplay in general. It's not a different game with it, just what JA2 should've been from the beginning.

Amongst other things, you get modern resolutions, a very interesting and well-done inventory system, AI that's worth a damn, the ability to train militia which actually roams the strategic map and fights the military, a non-convoluted way of making your custom mercenary, more guns, etc.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I actually liked the tactical gameplay of the first X-Com. Sure, weapon balance was terrible, and having to assign loadouts every time by hand and memorize which soldier should get what by their name was atrocious even for '94, but the combatination of extreme mortality, destructible terrain, and very powerful area effect weapons made for a sublime combination of tense gameplay and sheer apocalpytic destruction that has never been remotely approached since in a tactical game. The graphics still stand up quite well, and the interface does its job.

JA2 is undoubtedly the best tactical squad-based shooter ever made. The graphics are simple enough not to have aged terribly, lethality is high, things like cover and terrain are hugely important, the interface is fairly clean and easy to use, and the strategic layer is engaging. The big-personality mercs are also a plus for the series.

Silent Storm had a fantastic engine (even if the gameplay felt a bit clunkier and more plodding than JA2's), but made a big mistake with a level system where you couldn't shoot across the street in the early game or throw a grenade past its lethal radius. Lethality was also too low, with unarmored people needing to be shot dozens of times to die in some cases. Then there was the whole sci-fi powered armor suddenly showing up halfway through an otherwise highly realistic and historical game. Something with design decisions close to X-Com or JA2 would have been fantastic in the SS engine, and there were mods to that effect in production, but I don't think they went anywhere, especially after people realized that the horrid leveling system was hardcoded.

Another tactical squad-based game that I feel is given short shrift is Fallout Tactics. It's not as good as JA2, but it's a solid tactical shooter with an innovative combination of turn based and real time that is only brought down somewhat by using a combat system designed originally for an RPG that is not terribly suited for a tactical game, and the fact that they tried to please everyone by allowing you to choose either regular turn based or quasi-real time. This is a mistake that X-Com: Apoc and Arcanum also made and in none of the cases did it turn out well. In all three cases, the real time mode was the way to play and the turn based mode was an unbalanced mess. Some of the weapons were also basically "I win" buttons, like the auto shotguns and the .50 cal machinegun, but then these weapons should be expected to eviscerate just about anyone so I don't know if that's a legitimate complaint about the game.

[Nephtys]

I actually greatly enjoyed fallout tactics.

It is however, not quite the same as the X-COM/JA games, because it's turn based mode was just impractical. It's problem was that each map was so big and beautiful, with many little nooks and crannies. But each turn, your troops could only walk about ten paces before waiting for the AI. You move in real time between combats if you please, but that lets the enemy get the jump on you, and you're almost always engaged with one or two enemies in some capacity.

So basically, the best way to play is to be basically doing a diablo game. select your gang of soldiers and rush them in, letting the 'auto-engage' function shoot the enemies.

[Edi]

The closest thing to an independent XCOM remake (in progress) can be found here. I understand they're sprucing up the graphics and doing all kinds of stuff and you get to play the alien side as well if you like, but it's still at the demo level.

UFO:AI is the best clone I've seen and I'm not even bothered by not being able to save during missions. It's improved considerably, especially in the last three or four months, though it does not have a proper ending yet, just an interim one that will ultimately be replaced.

The original games have aged pretty badly, but for me they still have nostalgia value. I liked the Apocalypse engine a lot, even though the city setting was less interesting than the original. I liked TFTD for its more varied options compared to the original, but it was less interesting conceptually.

[montypython]

I had read about a Cold War era remake of X-Com being developed from the Spacebattles forums, but don't recall the title though.

[montypython]

The title of the game is called Xenonauts and it has some interesting game play elements like full sized IFVs instead of HWPs, here is the link:

Xenonauts

[PeZook]

The title of the game is called Xenonauts and it has some interesting game play elements like full sized IFVs instead of HWPs, here is the link:

Xenonauts

It also has the silliest name of all XCOM clones, and of course it currently only exists as piles of (stupid) fluff, so it's kinda hard to say if any gameplay element is "interesting" or "broken".

I mean, the only screenshot on the site is of the geoscape, which is basically a map of Earth with some buttons.

[Stark]

Their desire to make interceptions more complex (ie, tactical battles) is pretty misguided.

[Covenant]

They were already about as tactical as you need. You had weapons of various ranges, engagement windows, and attack stances--as well as the ability to call in multiple interceptors to fight simultaneously. I know a lot of people who say they'd like to make them more complex, but I don't think they appreciate how complex they are already. They would probably start regretting their request after the new 'tactical' interceptions cause their planes to get shot out of the sky, wasting their time and making it more difficult to engage in the gameplay elements you actually want to do.

To justify the increased risk and annoyance of a 'tactical' interception you would want to make them rare. As it is, you already intercept more ships than you recover (at least I do, I knock everything down and rarely pick up the remains), imagine having to spend a few minutes in tactical combat each time you want to cockblock an alien horse-molestation mission? You'd quickly start asking for an 'automated' system or the ability to set up SAM batteries.

So while there's probably room for some tweaking, making the battles more 'tactical' just ends up with X-COM: Interceptor.

[Stark]

Yeah, their plan is apparently tactical dogfights with aspect angles and weapon ranges and stuff. I think the direct interceptions at high speed were more characterful.

[PeZook]

I liked them because in addition to everything else, they gave you a feeling of chasing down a UFO at Mach 20 over half of Asia, showing that the best of humanity's technology is just barely adequate. At those speeds, combat is simply not going to look anything like a dogfight. The pilots would be able to chose their weapon, the moment of firing and decide to either close or fall back. Just like X-COM's system