I dunno. I wasn’t being particularly snarky, nor was the “for the fellow who…” bit even intended to address you. I’m just saying “We’ve replaced printed tutorials with ingame ones, what’s the big deal.” with a bit of “can we stop idolizing the days of manuals yet?”
Well, I’m glad you liked it. I started replaying it two months ago and put it down again about halfway through because, well, it’s not the best gaming experience I’ve had even -this- year. So different strokes and suchlike. I’m giving advice from my perspective. If I had never played the game, knowing what I know about my experiences from the past couple of months, I wouldn’t want someone to tell me it was super awesome and that I needed to go play it.
It’s a very important piece of gaming history, but as the team working on the new version has quite rightly stated, it’s in a genre that hasn’t really received (m)any new entries over the past decade and which as a result hasn’t received much in the way of polish and refinement. If the squad-based tactical strategy game had received as many entries as the FPS genre over the past umpteen years, I expect we’d be viewing UFO Defense in the same way people who like FPS games view Quake - something that was awesome and revolutionary at the time but has more or less been succeeded by more modern games, but is still enjoyed by a small ‘purist’ section of the market.
tldr; I feel a lot of the respect this game gets is a result of a lack of competition, rather than it’s actually being all it is made out to be, if only because if it WERE all its made out to be, it would be printed on solid gold.
The lmgtfy bit threw me. I’ve never seen it used without snark, and the strange thing (to me) was, I didn’t get the point of it. I wasn’t saying the XCOM manual was particularly hard to find or anything. Nor was I idolising manuals. Try re-reading my post. Like I said, either you were missing something in my post, or I was missing something in yours. It’s cool.
I was just pointing out how easy it was to get the manual, for the guy who hadn’t got the manual.
Similarly, you weren’t idolizing manuals, but someone else was, hence me addressing part of the post to “the fellow who’s bemoaning all the super long ingame tutorials you get these days” who was not you.
Basically, I put replies to too many different people in my post, and since I only quoted you, you thought I was talking just to you. Sorry about that.
Well, except for the two direct sequels. And the Jagged Alliance series. And Fallout Tactics. And Silent Storm. And Temple of Elemental Evil. And Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate and Rites of War. And Final Fantasy Tactics, and its sequels. And Valkyria Chronicles and its sequels. And UFO: Alien Invasion and its sequels. And the old Gold Box D&D games, of which there were about a billion.
And that’s ignoring turn-based tactical games that take place above the squad level, like Panzer General, Advance Squad, and so forth.
Which’d be me, and to be fair, I haven’t used a manual when playing a game in so long that I’d forgotten how necessary they used to be. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could use the manual.
I didn’t really realize the similarities with Valkyria Chronicles, actually, but I don’t think there’s much resemblance between Xcom and FFT at all. FFT owes far more to Shining Force, which is a distant cousin to this stuff at best.
The rest of those I haven’t even heard of, except Fallout Tactics. But frankly, less than a dozen games in 18 years is going a long way towards proving my point, rather than yours.
It’s a turn-based, squad level tactics game. It does have some limited real-time aspects, and the strategic game is pretty different, but I don’t see the basis for claiming it’s an entirely different game.
No snark intended, but that really says more about your knowledge of video gaming than it does about the state of the genre. It is, admittedly, a small genre, particularly compared to FPS or real-time strategy, but X-Com is very far from being alone in it.
Sorry, my bad. Advance Wars was the game I meant. Anyway, yes, a few of the games I mentioned are a bit obscure, but he’s never heard of Jagged Alliance? Or Final Fantasy Tactics? These are touchstones of the genre that are every bit as important and influential as X-Com. If you want to discuss the genre as a whole, and you’ve never even heard of those titles (much less played them), that’s de facto evidence that you don’t really have the grounding in the genre’s history to have a useful opinion.
Gah. That’s such a Comic Book Guy post I feel like I’m covered in Cheeto dust, and I haven’t touched a Cheeto in at least two years.
It’s not a dead genre, either: Frozen Synapse made a huge splash for an indie game, and another new entry just came out a month or two ago (though it didn’t look very good)
I’m still skeptical about this new X-Com though. I was a huge fan of the original, and even loved TFTD, but this new thing looks so watered down that I have a hard time seeing it have even remotely the same sort of depth. It sounds like they’ve barely added anything new, but the laundry list of things they’ve reduced or removed is significant. Not a healthy way to go for a remake.
Wasn’t frozen synapse a full simultaneous movement thing? I consider that more of a sort of digitial “Robo Rally” than an X-com derivative. I watched a few videos of that one, but frankly it didn’t grab me.
The thing is that I don’t really view “squad based tactics” as a genre that includes every game where you move a squad of units on a map.
What’s on this supposed “laundry list” of stuff that’s been removed other than base defense? I guess time units, but wow, I’m not going to miss that system.
It also sounds like you haven’t really been following the game if you think they’ve “barely added anything new” considering base configuration mattering (adjacent facility placement, etc), base facilities (many more than in the original), grappling hooks, suppressing fire (this is huge, IMHO), “hunker down”, and soldier skills are just the ones I can rattle off off the top of my head?
It’s kinda pointless to speculate at this point regardless. The game comes out in under a week. We’ll prove you wrong with real info soon enough.
I’m toying with picking up the old games on Steam. I played the shit out of the original back in the day. I may even still have the manuals kicking around somewhere.
£8.99 for the XCOM games pack pn Steam - I purchesed them the other day as my originals dont play well on my PC - everything runs too fast :rolleyes:. I had to install them on an old laptop (well UFO and TFTD anyway) been playing them all week. :eek:
Hahah. That video really was funny.
“You can play this game for 10 hours and still lose.”
“Actually it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun when it sounds like that”
Huh. Did you try running it on dosbox? You can adjust CPU cycles to make the game run slower.
