Quake3World

Firaxis (creators of the Civilization series) are working on a reimagining of X-COM: Enemy Unknown. This was the original X-COM game released in 1994 and now they're working on a new and improved version of that game. Here's the debut trailer, which shows some in-game footage but mostly the developers talking about it:
http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/firaxis ... wn-trailer

I absolutely loved the X-COM games so I hope this will live up to my expectations. If they stick close to what X-COM was, then they almost can't fail. Yes, I'm excited.

Oh this is not that first person shooter X-Com game.

It's looking pretty good: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/pax-e ... emy/729330

I loved the original.

Memphis wrote:Then you remember Fireaxis made Civ 5, calm down, make some toast. New and improved

and also the other civs, all of which were awesome.

Awesome as Civ may be, there are always certain areas where Firaxis inexplicably dropped the ball. For instance the completely idiotic diplomacy in the civ series that hasn't improved at all since Civ 1.

I'm thinking they can pull this remake off though Time will tell.

Just pre-ordered this. It looks quite promising and very much like an updated X-Com Alien Defense.

Aye, been following the rather extensive RPS coverage on this. It does indeed look good... think i'll be snatching this up when it's out.

Memphis wrote:

HM-PuFFNSTuFF wrote: X-Com Alien Defense.

X-Com: UFO Defense

or UFO: Enemy Unknown for euro and playstation peoples

d'oh. Yes.

Demo is go!

http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/200510/

you running xp too? xp isn't supported

Ohh has it? Excellent

Thought some of you might be interested: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/x ... -your-way/

Nice. Promising review. So is this one:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09 ... with-xcom/
Apparently it's really good. Cant wait

Enjoyed the demo myself, did anyone else play it? Thoughts?

I'll definitely pick this up once it's out. Preferably a bit after it's out in a sale of some sort, since it's a bit expensive at full price

heh, here's a video of Jake Solomon, lead designer on this X-COM game and he's trying to sell his game to game shopping audience. It doesn't exactly work out well though.

kudos for posting it online regardless.

Video games

Ryoki wrote:Enjoyed the demo myself, did anyone else play it? Thoughts?

Played the demo on XBox yesterday, while the demo was downloading off of Steam as well.
It's a shame the demo is so short, but it shows the combat mechanics relatively well. That seems in order. It doesn't feel dumbed down as some people feared, it's just streamlined a lot. The pace is much higher than in the original XCom. I am saddened that the missions included (although I didn't play the China one yet) are so incredibly linear. I hope (but expect) that the full game will include open maps, where you have to explore an open ended area, not knowing where the aliens are. Controls on XBox were good enough, although I would prefer to control it with a mouse. I think that'll give a much more direct feeling for what you're doing.

That's why I'm going to play the demo on my laptop tonight or tomorrow as well (then choose the China mission), just to see how it runs. If it runs well enough (and I expect it will, it's a turn-based game so high FPS isn't that important) I'm going to get it for PC. Otherwise I'll get the XBox version.

Aye. The demo convinced me it's a game i'll likely enjoy, just didn't seem awesome enough to warrent a prepurchase or a purchase at full price. Patiently awaiting the sale...

On a sidenote memph, i been playing darksiders a bit and it's not bad - except for the fact that it's worst console port i've ever played. It's just shocking, how did you cope?? I've played maybe two hours in burts of 30 minutes, everytime i'm forced to enter a menu there's a good chance i'll ragequit. What the fuck were they thinking...

Memphis wrote:I passed on buying pre-release, but too miffed to buy now and not get the squad customisation (wtf). So meh, roll on the x-mas sale, or a goatee edition.
The demo didn't exactly blow my socks off - or feel much like X-Com.

Aren't those just additional customization options you get as pre-order bonus?
And to be honest, the demo was too short for me to really judge if it felt like XCom or not. A lot of the elements from the original seem to be in place but haven't opened up in the demo. Stuff like research, manufacturing things, developing your base, politics and the open combat area design I mentioned before are all sort of missing from the demo, yet they played a huge part in the original.

The only thing that saddens me is that aliens can no longer try to invade your base. It absolutely sucked when that happened, but it was pretty cool that it could happen.

So I ended up buying this for XBox 360 (it runs terrible on my laptop, which is surprising considering how well Guild Wars 2 ran).

Anyway, I'm a few hours into it and so far I find it an enjoyable experience. I can't say I'm emotionally invested into my soldiers yet and I'm starting to think this might be a bit overrated as well. They rank up at quite a pace and all they get in return is a few added abilities (like throwing smoke grenades, using a single medkit multiple times or some suppressing fire ability). Must say I haven't customized my soldiers at all because I haven't come up with a good naming scheme yet

The battlescape combat is interesting. I've had a few situations that really required some tactical thinking. It's not quite the same as the original XCom. It's much higher paced and admittedly less scary than the original, but that's a side effect of this game not being as brutally unfair as the original. I'm a bit miffed that the maps aren't nearly as big as in the original games, and the direction in which you should explore is usually kind of obvious, but maybe the scope will increase as I get further into the game.

My main gripe with the game so far is in the geoscape/base gameplay. It feels incredibly scripted and it feels like the game is trying to push you into a single direction. Maybe it's because I'm still relatively early in the game, so I still have good hope that this'll become less apparent, but from the start of the game it goes like "we should take a live alien but we need alien containment for that". Then you build alien containment, and you're basically tasked with researching weapon tech to take a live alien. Then they tell you to actually take a live alien. When you do that, they interrogate it and tell you that you should take another live alien of a different species. When you do that they extract the location of an alien base from the alien and tell you that you should attack it.

Now you don't have to do these things right away, but they're listed as objectives. If you're a good minion and you do these tasks, you basically perform the wishes of the game rather than what you feel is the best course of action. I really hope the game stops doing this soon because this sort of hand-holding actually feels rather insulting after having experienced the "keep kicking the player while he's down" mentality the original games had.

Finally, in the original games, the clock kept ticking. Sure, you could slow it down to 5 second ticks (and perhaps it even fully halted while you were viewing a base, I can't exactly remember), but the clock forced the game onward. In this new game, you choose when the clock starts running by hitting a "scan for activity" button. The net effect of this may be the same as the original game, but for some reason, now it feels like alien sightings are the result of one of your actions.

So to wrap up, it appears Memphis and Ryoki are right. Don't get me wrong, the game is a lot of fun to play, and the mechanics as they are work well, but the feeling of dread and wonder whenever you encounter something you haven't seen before that the original games offered just isn't there anymore. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that everything you see and encounter is immediately commented on by one of the scientists or the commander. So rather than forming your own thoughts and opinions, you're offered the opinion of the game which kind of halts your own train of thought. Yeah I guess that's another problem, the game tries to explain too much, especially about the aliens themselves.

I'm not forming any definitive opinions on the game yet, as I'm not sure if things open up a little more when I get further into it, but so far it doesn't feel like the same XCom as we know and love. Still, it's a good game that's worth giving a shot.

So i caved and bought it anyway, couldn't help myself.

I'm enjoying it too, though i agree with Eraser's points - it's simply good, not great. Certainly not the original made shiny, but it's still a solid game on it's own. Think i'm a bit further than you Eraser, the pushing into a direction stops after you do the base invasion, it's basically a tutorial that goes on for a bit. By the way, that first base invasion is an absolute bastard of a mission that cost me 4 brave soldiers out of 5 after i got ambushed by three asshole bug-aliens at the very end. Ouch.

I've made my troops an elite team of American politicians and get a good giggle out of the nicknames the game gives them. Mitt "Bonus" Romney is my main assault dude, Sarah "Frosty" Palin my shotgun specialist, etc. The emotional investment works for me, cought myself saying things like "Go on then Mittens!" and "Sarah you fucking bitch, how could you miss that shot!" at the screen few times. I've also detected a bias in the game, Republican named soldiers have a much greater chance of staying alive than their Democratic counterparts

Yeah them republicans know how to handle their guns ey?
I've decided to name my soldiers as well, although I'm not sticking to a single theme. I just check their nationality and then come up with a name. It can prove tricky with countries like Argentina, South Africa and China though. So my squad now consists of Diego "Odin" Maradona, Shigeru "Hazard" Miyamoto, Nelson Mandela, Mao Zedong, Desmond Tutu, Hillary Clinton and last but not least, Sean Connery.

My Hillary Clinton got torn to pieces and zombified, had to put her down

I just lost most of my men near a downed UFO. Did kill all of them alien bastards but I lost Hillary as well and she was an awesome sniper Nelson Mandela and Sean Connery are in a better place as well. The rest of the squad barely survived and are in the infirmary for at least two weeks.

So some new recruits were hired. And goddamn is it hard to come up with suitable names for people from Saudi Arabia, Brazil or Egypt. So my new men are "Moham Med", "Jorge Zorreguieta", "Ronaldinho Whatshisname", "Lance Armstrong" and "Cleopatra Philopator" (yes, that's Cleopatra VII's real last name. Had to Google it). Problem I have with Brazilians is that most either don't have real surnames or have twenty million of them.

Must say, once you've named your soldiers yourself, it's easier to keep them apart and identify them. I was gutted when Hillary Clinton got shot down. And it was an unnecessary death too

Have you discovered how to switch soldiers for a mission? Is that even possible? I developed an expensive robot on wheels with a gun, but i'll be damned if i know how to add him to my squad.