Dear Sweet Reader,
As Day[9] would say: I love you. And when you're in love and things go poorly you know how to face up to and work through it.
And so I come to you with a sad, somewhat shameful truth: X-Com has gotten old.
I had to manually edit DosBox (the emulator steam uses to let you run x-com, an excellent tool for those older windows games) just to increase the speed and stability of my copy of X-Com to something playable. After that I was subjected to a motley of errors as well as the unflinchingly difficult mission which I had set for myself.
X-Com just wants to play you know, but it can be a temperamental playmate. Let me air out a couple grievances that me and X have had over the course of my all too short trip down memory lane:
No X, I Don't Want to. . .
. . . play "Where's the Floater". Again. Stop asking, that's disgusting.
. . . guess which rookie left an armed proximity grenade by the Skyranger ramp. It's not funny.
. . . call you on camping my Skyranger's ramp one more time. I'm not even going to get into the way you 'memorize' my soldier's location oh so conveniently. *cough* *jerk* *cough*
. . . listen to that noise you make when I'm shuffling equipment around the base, because you can't even manage the simplest tasks without me to beep things around for you. Geez, just. . . load the damn thing yourself.
. . . turn the difficulty down behind my back! I didn't ask for that! I didn't want that! I can take care of myself dammit! WHY CAN'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?
So here we are. . . I found myself muddling through the painful strategic layer and obtuse time unit/energy system of the tactical combat I found myself struggling to recapture that feeling of enormity that originally drew me into X-Com. So after one too many little "line-o'-sight" slips (if those really were accidents X) where I was shot descending the ramp of my Skyranger THROUGH THE RAMP I was feeling really down. I was even doing quite well in the game, it had simply become a chore to play.
That's when the aliens struck their most devastating blow: FTL (Faster-Than-Light). A game which, according to inside sources, quote: "Everyone and their Mom is playing." [By the way, if anyone's Mom is actually playing this please feel free to post and I'll name a character of after you in my coming X-Com: Enemy Unkown playthrough (2012)].
FTL drew me up off the poorly pixelated Earth and sent me hurtling at breakneck speeds to countless deaths among the stars. I felt alive again. I relished the challenge, I craved new ships and new encounters. I wondered at the subtle balances between the weapons and defenses, the agonizing decisions about when to upgrade and when to hoard resources. In effect the aliens had won. I gladly left the human race to the garish eggplant colored invaders and their mechanical velocicrocoraptors and was stolen by this beauty of a game.
I won't elaborate too much on the gameplay of FTL itself. Suffice it to say that it is superbly balanced and quite challenging. It claims to be a roguelike (a difficult and graphically sparse game of great complexity, named after the original game of its kind Rogue). It is.
I've spent hours and hours knee-deep in the dead with DoomRL (Doom: The Roguelike) and ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery), two excellent roguelikes, each punishing and complex, rewarding and cruel in turns. I can say for certain that in spirit, if not exactly mechanics (a real-time roguelike?) FTL is more than worthy of the genre.
The Confession: I've abandoned Earth. I've given up on my quest to purge 1999 of old-school aliens. It wasn't the difficulty of the game, it was the difficulty of the interface that brought weakness to my heart. Don't blame FTL for my weakness, it is a fine and worthy game, just a symptom of the problem, not the cause. I needed something less grating to hold me over until the shiny new X-Com hits Steam on October 9th and FTL slipped right through my orbital defenses and abducted all my free time.
I regret not following through on my mission dear readers, but there's a reason people are excited about Firaxis' X-Com remake.
X-Com needed a remake very badly.
That said you should also check out a game called Xenonauts. A much more true to the original remake which, as far as my limited alpha testing has revealed,will smooth over all of my complaints about the original while maintaining almost exactly the plethora of choices and options that made the original one of the best games of all time.
So let me leave you with this tantalizing foreshadowing: On October 9th I will be live-streaming my playthrough of Firaxis' X-Com: Enemy Unknown. Expect me to put all my gaming prowess and knowledge to the test against the merciless onslaught of the xeno hoards.
It will be Classic.
It WILL be Hardcore.
And I won't panic like a rookie when the Chrysallids come a calling. . . much.
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