The Gun Counter

If any of you guys remember the old X-Com games. This is supposed to be the modernised version.

If that is, "modernised" means that if you want a scope on the rifle, you can't have a medpack... or a grenade. Because aside from your weapon, you can only carry ONE THING. And you have no backpack at all. And fewer commands and options for a keyboard (PC) user than the console kids get.

In other words, they once again took a great name in PC gaming and slapped it onto a simplified (dumber) console port game with pretty graphics that hides the lesser substance and that places PC gamers dead last in their interest, which has become the industry standard.

Fortunately, a friend of mine downloaded the thing off of steam and warned me in time to get on Amazon and cancel my own order before it shipped. That 60 bucks that didn't go to waste.

Instead spent the past couple of afternoons playing X-Com Apocalypse, an antique, seriously out of date game where each of your troopers can carry a med pack, some assorted grenades, spare ammo, a stunner... and even pick stuff up off the ground if you want to.

And I'm watching an indy game that will be out soon, heavily based on the "good" X-COM. Have to give it a try when it's ready.

http://www.xenonauts.com/

I don't really care as long as the new one doesn't cheat the way the old one did.

"Trying to find that last little grey bastard? He is NOW PSYCHIC!"

"TEAM WIPED OUT. EVERYONE DEFUNDS YOU. WHY ARE YOU STILL PLAYING THIS?"

New one is a nice compromise. You can "hear" aliens moving around if you stand still. YES, it is simplified, arguably overly so, however most of the changes reduce the ass pain.

A bit shallower than Xcom, but still a VERY good game.

Did you honestly think that this would just be the old X-Com with new paint? The developers have been very clear from day one about what kind of game they were making. They even released a demo. I have not yet played it but the game is getting great reviews, not just from the big gaming sites but places like RPS as well. If you can get around the fact that its not going to be the old X-Com with a new engine you might enjoy it.

Now if you want to complain about the other new X-Com game that's stuck in development hell then go for it. Why they felt sticking the X-Com name on that turkey was a good idea I'll never know.

I still have "XCOM - Terror from the deep" loaded on my computer, and I STILL play it fairly regularly. I gotta say.... all the naysayers are remembering the older games do so with some rose colored glasses.

Caveat: Your tax dollars at work while I am deployed.

I still play the original adn TFTD, I love them both even when the TFTD research tree screws up to prevent you from being able to complete the game.
I finished Enemy Unknown on the Easy stteing the other day, I gotta say, I like it. I am presently in the process of seeing how long I can drag it out now.

I recall having one game of UFO Defense take about 10 years in gamebecause I refused to use anything but the conventional weapons you start with.

Watch out for the Chrysalids.

Get the STEAM version of X-COM, it fixes the tech tree.

I knew it would not be the same as the old classics. I knew they were going to do what they do to EVERY sequel to a great PC game these days and "simplify it", dumb it down at the very least, utterly pervert it at worst. But I did at least expect that the PC version would be as good, with as many options, as the console one and it isn't. If you bought it for a console, you have more command options in combat than you get in the PC version.

This was a PC game. And what PC gamers got was a very simplified console port. It's been a long time since X-COM came out, you have to play it with a DOS emulator. Back then, your troops had backpacks, and could carry spare ammo, 3-4 kinds of grenades, stunners, etc. This new one? You have 1 gun, and 1 other thing. That's IT. If you put a scope on a rifle, no grenade for you. That's grenade as in ONE ONLY.

Simplifying, dumbing down, this goes beyond that. With all the improvements in computing power and such, there is just no excuse for it. If the computer could handleeach of my troops having half a dozen grenades and a medkit THEN, it can sure as hell handle it now. Hell what it ought to have now is troopers packing 4 mags of normal ammo and couple of armor piercing with a nice screen showing you all the pockets and pouches to put stuff into. A PC could certainly handle that but this isn't a PC game, it is a console game only published for the PC as an afterthought.

I remember how long it took to get my X-com troopers up to decent shooting with the old classic. I spent a couple of hours on the headphones listening to my best friend in Texas cuss as he related how partial cover blocks his shots... but not theirs. And how he could regularly miss when the game was telling him he had a pretty good chance to hit. He lost one trooper by missing a 98% shot at point blank range and said it was hardly the first time in the 12 hours he sank into playing it. And in this new one, you get one squad. In the old one, you could respond with every unwounded trooper you had and search that building with 4-5 full squads of 6 each if you desired.

Pretty graphics are nice, I like pretty graphics. But the actual bones of the game have to up to snuff before I'll call it good. The old X-com and Jagged Alliance set the standard for this kind of game. And with all the improvements in tech, in AI, meeting that standard and bettering it should be easy. But what the PC game industry is offering us these days just doesn't measure up. I've played more games than I can recall, since I was a teenager. I had Pong, I had intellivision, C64, and all the generations of PC since then. These days, when I take a good look at a game that wears a classic name. It better be worthy. It better measure up to its predecessor or I'll decline to waste my limited gaming time on it.

Most big name games are being published by just three big companies, all of whom want that fast, easy dollar. Making something playable on a console is easy, simple, compared to making it work on a PC. Cut out all that complicated stuff out of the coding, spend less time and money that way. So now the PC, that made modern gaming the big business it now is, is being considered dead last when making a new game. The big developers have become like the big three TV networks. Your last choice when you want to spend your time on something good on a PC.

Diablo, Mass Effect, so many others. Look at the one that made the name, now look at the latest version. You paid more for less.

Fortunately, the people that actually made the now classic Diablo, who were all pink slipped and their nearly ready game deleted to make way for that milk your wallet crud they now call Diablo III, a game wrapped from the ground up around a revenue model intended to get all the cash out of you it could before you walked away, stayed together and made an Indy, real Diablo game called Torchlight and Torchlight II. Other PC programmers are likewise rebelling and going Indy to make what they want and we want. Just like Chris Roberts is now making the new space fighter game the big guys won't sell to us because the no keyboard consoles can't handle a game like that.

Before we start just so you know where I am coming from I'll give a brief rundown of what I thought about some recent sequels that are relevant here. I thought Dragon Age 2 was oversimplified both in mechanics and more importantly in plot and setting. Deus Ex 2 was blatantly dumbed down for the console. Deus Ex 3 is awesome (even if I never asked for it). Fallout 3 was good but I missed the western setting. I have not played New Vegas. Mass Effect 2 was good and I actually liked the combat streamlining. Mass Effect 3 is an vile affront to the Lord and Saint John Moses Browning and should be purged from the realm with holy fire (actually I haven't played it). I have not played Skyrim as I am sick of elves. The Witcher 2 is great despite the elves and so is the company that makes it. Max Payne 3 was actually allot of fun though I must admit that I am still not 100% onboard with the setting change. Lastly Deadspace two was likewise allot of fun.

You do have some good points, though I think there are two separate issues here. The first is crappy, or at least lackluster, sequels created obstinately by the same company that created the original game. Depending on how you define a poor sequel this includes games like Dragon Age 2, a goodly chunk of the Resident Evil series, Mass Effect 3, and my own personal nemesis Deus Ex 2. I fully understand being unhappy that these games, for whatever reason, did not live up to their previous incarnation. One would think that the company that made the original good game should be able to create a good sequel without cocking it up but this is obviously not always the case.

The second group did not exist before the 2008 success of Fallout 3. These are sequels based on largely dead properties that have little to no involvement from the series initial creator. This includes games like Deus Ex 3, Fallout 3, Max Payne 3, and the just released X-Com, and even though it's not out yet the X-Com FPS. Judging these games is difficult, as is making them. With a new IP you can pretty much do whatever you want. But with these kinds of sequels the question is how to make a game that is faithful to the original while still moving the series forward and attracting new players. The new X-Com is an excellent example of this dilemma. The developers have, in my opinion, made a great game that I intend to purchase once funds permit (ARs are expensive). So Firaxis has done a good job on the "new gamer" front. However due to the changed made to the game gamers like Johnnyreb are not interested. I honestly think that in this case the developers made the right choice and the result is a better game that will be played by more people, though I understand the opposing view.

I would like to end with this bit written my Tycho of Penny Arcade fame regarding some of the changes made to Fallout 3:

I simply believe that elements like Turn-Based and Isometric were artifacts of their time. There is nothing wrong with them mechanically, they do not want for elegance, and the genre is still going strong in Japanese titles that I play and enjoy. But I’m not going to create a religion out of it because tiled environments happened to be expedient a million fucking years ago. Fallout is not - for me - defined by its perspective. It’s defined by the unique setting, and the meaningful, satisfying choices I can make to affect that setting. I don’t care where the camera is. If those things are intact, they can put the camera in geosynchronous Goddamn orbit.