Pike wrote extensive about XCOM: Enemy Unknown yesterday and I’m going to follow up on her post now that I’ve had the chance to spend a few hours with it. Through methods. As you can infer from the title, I’m a big fan. I’m a HUGE fan.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with classic PC games will probably be aware of X-Com even if they’ve never played it; it’s regularly highlighted as one of the best games ever made and this is not a reputation attained without sound reasons. It is an absolutely masterful blend of strategic and tactical thinking, it crafts an atmosphere of extraordinary tension, and it somehow manages to combine a very strong attachment to your troops with a massive rate of attrition among them. It also featured the torture of watching your brilliant tactical maneuvers getting completely undone and everything going to hell.
This game masterfully recaptures that. The mechanics are different in a lot of ways, such as the removal of Time Units (Something that caused a sudden intake of breath among X-Com vets when it was revealed) and the smaller squad sizes. But it’s an isometric tactical game with a strategic layer on top, and it’s all about tension and everything going downhill and your desperate efforts to pull it off despite all your best laid plans going the way of George and Lennie’s.
Moreno, Okamoto, and Mack were good soldiers, and good people. Their sacrifice won’t be forgotten. Also despite this loss the mission had a good outcome, because Classic Ironman is hardcore and this is XCOM.
Indeed, most of the changes are very sensible and nice ones and it’s patently clear that the team at Firaxis put a huge amount of work into figuring out what worked and what didn’t and then polished the thing nicely. Which isn’t to say it’s not buggy as heck, because many reports suggest it is, but the underlying design decisions and mechanics all seem to be very, very solid. One nice touch I’d especially like to point out is the addition of three characters in your base, your chief scientist, engineer, and your right-hand man. It adds a lot to hear their commentary on various matters, but their suggestions are never more than that. They’re a wonderful little addition that add a lot to playing.
What this game does though is it takes me back. Like an old war vet, playing this game reminds me of the original, and it pulls me back to when I was a kid playing that game all summer long, getting destroyed by Cyberdiscs and Mutons (Not to mention Tentaculats and Lobstermen oh god), and this just feels like a game from a bygone era, when they were unforgiving bastards that made you incredibly angry but were far, far too damn good and addictive to actually put down for more than five minutes.
If you were worried about this not being true to the original, you can rest assured that all the changes I’ve seen so far have allayed that fear completely. The mechanics and look may have changed but the spirit absolutely has not.
(It should be noted that Pike and I are both playing the PC version of the game, and indeed one of the few genuine criticisms I have is that the UI is clearly intended to allow consoles to play the thing. I’m all for a game this relentlessly ballcrushing on a console but I hope Firaxis patch in a few tweaks for the PC side of things.)
I was originally going to wait until I’d clocked more hours in this than just the tutorial, but honestly I feel that said tutorial has got me confident enough to make a valid assessment, so here we go:
This is the strategy/tactics game of the year.
The short version is that they took the original X-Com: UFO Defense, beefed up the graphics and redid the UI, tweaked a very small handful of features, packaged it up and are selling it right now.
Sold yet? No?
Here’s the long version, then: all of my fears about the game have been thoroughly laid to rest. This isn’t an easy, casualized version of the game (unless you specifically put it on the easy difficulty.) This isn’t Babby’s First Turn-Based Tactics. This is X-Com.
In fact, that last sentence was something I just kept hearing in my head over and over as I played. This is X-Com. This is what it’s supposed to be.
Everything is there. The rookies from every country in the world with the appropriate name. The Skyranger. The Interceptors shooting down UFOs. The research. The construction. The money management. The geoscape.
“Hidden Movement” is there; it’s called something different but it’s there and just as terrifying.
The music is there. They redid the mission music from the original and added it as a track in the game and when I heard it I felt my heart jump into my throat.
Which leads me to my next and perhaps most important point; the sense of sheer white-knuckle thrill is there.
Let’s talk about Firaxis’s most controversial choice, which is the removal of time units and the replacement of them with a fixed set of moves. They pulled this off really, really well. There is still a sense that you can move a certain number of steps if you also want to shoot something, and thanks to a very clear UI you know exactly when you’re going to overstep that boundary. It doesn’t change the core mechanic, it just makes it easier to “read”.
They have also added a “talent tree”, so to speak, to your soldiers. Different soldiers come with a different specialty– or “spec” if you will– and as they improve you can pick up talents for them. Some of the talents are a real difficult choice because they could all be useful in different situations. This also ups the stakes, considerably, because it makes it all the more acute when one of your really spec’d out guys dies. (And he will.)
The other thing they added that I was originally iffy on– occasional cuts to a third person view of your soldier as he shoots or moves– was pulled off superbly and does nothing but heighten the tension.
I don’t have much else to say here that isn’t a fangirly mess of random letters and numbers and exclamation points. All I know is that the guys at Firaxis have outdone themselves with this one and pulled off something which I didn’t know could be pulled off. Absolutely worth every cent of the full price.
It’s that time of year, when the dearth of summertime videogames leaves us behind and we begin to be swamped by an increasingly heavy deluge of videogame releases over the months running up to Christmas. Mists of Pandaria, TL2, and Resi 6 just came out, soon arriving is XCOM, then there’s AssCreed III, Dishonored, Farming Simulator 2013, Halo 4, Hitman: Absolution, ZombiU, Company of Heroes 2, and a bunch of other games besides on the way. In short, it’s a busy time for folks like us – please tell us in the comments what you’re looking forward to in the coming weeks and months, and any cunning plans you have to avoid other obligations in favor of the important things, i.e. playing videogames!
But despite this deluge of delectable distractions I’m not altogether happy. No sir. Let’s take one of the games in the above list, XCOM. Now obviously anyone will be well aware that Pike and myself are tremendous fans of the series, and from what we’ve seen the new tactical game actually has a chance of being a true successor of that series, especially with things like the difficulty modifiers for NG+ runs (In fact a couple of those, such as depleting Elerium stocks, are even more hardcore than the original!) So hooray, I can’t wait until Friday so I can play!
Please mister can I have some videogames please?
Wait, Friday? Well yes, because as you may recall I live not in the glorious United Syndicates of America but in the Union of Britain. And whilst Americans typically see things released on a Tuesday, Brits instead have Fridays. This makes some sense of course; you can grab your new videogame and run home to spend all weekend playing it. In times past it was of little consequence, but the ever-increasing ubiquity of the Internet means that this sort of thing is utterly ridiculous in this day and age.
X-COM is a digitally distributed game. I’m sure there are physical copies, but who buys those for PC games anymore? No, we’ll mostly be getting the Steam version, no doubt – and yet Steam will distribute this game to people in the UK days after those in North America. If you folks can begin to see sense in that, I’d love to hear it, because I sure as hell can’t. The really weird thing is that many companies are learning you can’t get away with that anymore, because the same distribution channels opened to them by the Internet open less savory methods up as well. I want to play X-COM, I really really do, so why am I being made to wait an arbitrary few extra days? Because it seems to me that I’ll be able to get it elsewhere without needing to wait for no reason. I hadn’t intended on turning this into a treatise on piracy, but one of the lessons learned over the years is that perhaps the single biggest thing you can do to prevent piracy is to make your product as absolutely convenient as possible for people to get. The lack of paying money is only one appeal of piracy – getting what you want how and when you want it is also a huge incentive.
So, because of the no reason whatever, British fans of X-COM (A British series, I’d point out) have to wait longer to play it. If all this seems like I’m getting mad about videogames, well – I am!
Firaxis – that of Civilization fame – has just announced that they are remaking X-Com and that it’s going to be a turn-based strategy, like the original. Excuse me while I post my face:
And now, Mister Adequate and myself shall post our thoughts on this:
Pike’s Thoughts:
There’s a lot that could go wrong here but there’s also a lot that could go right. The easy way out would be to say to just make X-Com but give it a graphical and UI facelift, but we could even improve upon that. RPS discusses this at length in this article. Mostly what I think is vital to me is that they don’t lose any of that feeling of being terrified between turns as you hear noises and “hidden movement.” Like old Hitchcock movies, X-Com largely works not because what it shows you, but because of what it doesn’t show you. I hope that, in the whirlwind of fancy graphics and whatnot, Firaxis doesn’t lose sight of this.
This is definitely going to be an interesting one to watch– since we don’t have any major details yet, it’s definitely too early to say whether or not this is all going to work, but as it stands now I’m rather cautiously optimistic. Firaxis isn’t perfect by any means, but if we’re going to put X-Com in the hands of a major studio I’m glad they’re the ones getting it.
Mister Adequate’s Thoughts:
Given that we know very little about the thing at this point, Pike has already covered most of the major points that could be made right now, and I echo everything she said. What I will add is that I am also cautiously optimistic if for no other reason than the fact that XCOM – the shooter that is – is already on the way. There’s nothing to be gained by trying to capitalize on the action market, 2K would be competing against themselves, and a studio like Firaxis is never going to have an easy time going up against 2K Marin in the shooter domain, but the strategy side of things is, Xenonauts aside, wide open.
There is an enormous wealth of ideas about what a new XCOM ought to be floating around out there, and I hope Firaxis have been carefully and continue to carefully read and think about them, and take them on board where it seems appropriate. We’re a rabidly obsessed, hard to please fanbase, but give us what we want and we will reward you with kingly sums.
Another, and absolutely vital, aspect here is modding capability. People have done some impressive things with the original X-Com despite the thing not being remotely modder-friendly, but look at the mod scene for Civ IV and imagine that transposed into XCOM.
For a long, long, long, long, long time we have lamented the absence of X-Com. There have been various attempts at creating spiritual successors to it, most notably the UFO series by ALTAR, and these weren’t terrible games; but nobody has ever really captured the feeling of X-Com, nobody has ever come close in fact.
No ponies today. Only nightmares.
Now someone has. Spurred by the positive impressions of the fine gentlemen at RPS I picked up the preorder (Which unlocks beta access) a couple of days ago and, after spending a little time with the beta build, I can pretty safely say that Mr. Meer’s writeup is spot on. Let me lift a quote wholesale from what he writes;
A playable build of Xenonauts was on show in the RPS-sponsored Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer expo last week, and pretty much everyone I spoke to about it said the same thing: “well, it’s X-COM,” they offered with a wide grin. They didn’t say what worked or what didn’t or what they’d change or anything like that – they just said “it’s like X-COM.”
Xenonauts, ladies and gentlemen, is like X-Com. It’s hard to define what exactly X-Com is, but the end result is very clearly present here. You care about your soldiers even though you know they’re going to die very quickly. You find yourself cursing because in your eagerness to look around the next corner you didn’t spare enough time units for reaction fire. You feel the greatest tension when you take a long-range shot with a rookie. You need it to hit, it HAS to hit, or some other guy right next to the alien with no TUs is going to die next turn. And yes, you’re terrified of Hidden Movement.
It just adds up. Finally, after nearly 20 years, we’re getting a true and proper successor to one of the great, all-time classics of videogaming. I urge everyone to check out the Xenonauts page, take a look around, and to rejoice – for our prayers are being answered.
No, I really did. A couple of nights ago, I had a dream wherein I played a remake of X-Com. Let me tell you about it.
This was my reaction when I woke up.
It was in glorious 3-D, still intended to be played as an isometric game, but you could move the camera around freely and stuff, and when you took a shot it would sometimes go into an over-the-shoulder camera or something (Think Fallout’s VATS camera, used fairly sparingly). It was turn-based, but because the characters had little animations and stuff based on what was going on it felt extremely active and fast-moving (e.g. ducking at the sound of gunfire, kneeling behind nearby cover, etc. – kind of how Company of Heroes does things). Also, though the basic calculations seemed to remain very similar to the original, your guy and an alien would look like they were having a firefight, and others on the field would give supporting fire which I don’t think actually hit anyone, but which could give some bonuses and stuff? Also it seemed like you almost always had reaction fire when fired upon, and your chance of success in that was determined by your remaining TUs. A character with 0 would just spray’n’pray and have maybe a 1% chance of hitting, but the added effects of it all really contributed to a sense of combat.
I only dreamed one mission, in which I had downed an enemy UFO and was doing the usual cleanup. As it turned out it was on the edge of a medium-sized town; the UFO was crashed in the forest and we had to fight through that, but several aliens had retreated into the town itself and were holed up there, meaning I had to chase them into it. The map was huge, but you could get around by commandeering vehicles and stuff; one of my guys rode into combat on a freaking motorcycle which promptly got blown right up by an alien grenade or something.
I was only fighting Sectoids, but they were really really vicious and tough to kill. It was a gloriously difficult fight and one which resulted in my guys getting slaughtered horribly. We finally made it through to the city streets; the civilians were inside, but a few bodies suggested they and the aliens had had a fight (At least one alien was dead in the city when I arrived, far from the crashed ship.) These last couple were really hellish to fight though, they just kept blowing my guys to hell no matter what I tried, it was obscene. Then they ran out of grenades or whatever and I won. Then I woke up, and I thought “Wow I can’t wait for this to come out!” and looked like Rarity, then I realized the horrible truth. And cried.
On the one hand, I would LOVE to see an update of, say, SMAC, with an engine and graphics akin to Civ IV with all the stuff that made the original game great kept intact.
On the other hand, when we get a new X-Com that is more like Mass Effect with the X-Com name pasted on it, I’m not sure what to think. Sure, the game looks interesting and might even be pretty good, but I have a difficult time believing it’s really X-Com without all the turn-based-tactics-want-to-smash-your-head-into-the-wall-it’s-so-hard action.
"Hidden Movement" is arguably the most terrifying phrase in video gaming.
But then I wonder if I’m just either being a crotchety old gamer telling the kids about how games were HARD back in my day, or simply refusing to take off the nostalgia goggles. Or both. Can it be that my knee-jerk “do not want” reactions aren’t justified, and are purely emotional?
Well, sure. But as a wise individual in a classic film once said, “Whoever said the human race was logical?” We are emotional creatures who get emotionally attached to things we care about– and if you’re like me, you care about your games. We care about our memories of them, and we want others’ first experiences with our favorite games to be like our own.
So yeah, I want an X-Com reboot to be just as maddeningly difficult and involve just as much tactics as the first. I want everyone who hasn’t played the game to experience it like this. I want to see the keys flying off of your keyboard when you smash your face into it in frustration. I want you to lean forward when the “HIDDEN MOVEMENT” screen comes up because you actually have to listen to the game sounds as a part of the experience and I want you to jump in your chair when you do hear something. I want you to see how terribly genius this game was and why it managed to enthrall me some fifteen years after it was first released. That’s what I want from an X-Com reboot. That’s why I’m not so sure about this new one.
…oh, and yes, I am a crotchety old gamer wearing nostalgia goggles. I have no shame.
Following on from Pike’s post I shall also provide some musings on the games I consider to be the very best. But unlike her, I shall actually deliver a list of five games! Just to briefly note that I’m not trying to say this is a definitive list of “best games ever” or something; just give that I’m most fond of and have a lot of personal regard for.
5) Final Fantasy X
Well, it’s always a toss-up between this and VII, but every time I play through FFX I find something else to love about it. This is, for my money, the best game Squaresoft/Square-Enix have ever put out. It is massive, richly detailed, I love all the characters in their own way (I didn’t used to like Yuna at all, but I’ve totally come to love and respect her as I really thought about her life and how she deals with everything), the battle system is immensely fun, and it’s got the best bonus content of any FF except, perhaps, XII, but then I don’t like XII so I’ve not seen much of that!
Also, blitzball is the best minigame ever.
I think most of all I love it because it’s so beautiful. Not in the purest sense of eye-melting graphics, but in the aesthetic sense. Not too many games have a South-east Asian style setting anyway, but FFX feels so hot and tropical, is so colorful, so thoroughly alive in every scene, that I can’t help but get completely sucked in. And this is not mentioning the soundtrack; I listen to this and I am transported to Spira, feeling the heat and the water, it’s so wonderful.
X-2 is great as well, I don’t care what anyone says.
4) X-Com
Ah, X-Com. You’ve heard Pike talk about this lately, and just think about what that means for a moment. A game that’s nearing 20 is more compelling to a new player than almost anything contemporary. Just so! X-Com is vast, ridiculous in scope, encompassing a global geostrategic component, base building, research, economic management, manufacturing, and of course the insanely deep, detailed, addictive tactical combat against the alien menace. Why so good? Like any classic, because it’s immersive. It sucks you in. You are the Commander, you have to simultaneously care about your troops and deal with it when they die in droves. You have to juggle a number of competing concerns, and the aliens will usually throw a wrench into your plans. It might be an isometric pixelfest today, but it’s still more engrossing, and often more terrifying, than anything that has come since.
Pictured: An actual nightmare. Not pictured: You, never sleeping comfortably again.
X-Com came out in 1994 and the game has probably never been improved upon. I own four separate copies (Along with two copies of TFTD and a copy of Apocalypse). I really can’t recommend it strongly enough to anyone who hasn’t played it. This is why we got into gaming: Experiences like this are what it’s all about.
3) Deus Ex
Games like to talk about having multiple and diverse solutions. They rarely do – This one does, and oh man does it ever show how short the rest of the industry falls in that regard. You can be Snake, you can be Dook, you can be a l33t haXX0r and turn the enemy’s guns and robots against them, all kinds of stuff. And all backed up by two separate, synergistic methods of advancement, namely experience points on one hand and nano-augmentation on the other. All wrapped up in the most delightful dystopia I’ve had the pleasure of setting foot in, reveling in every conspiracy theory you can imagine (Except birthers, because that didn’t exist in 1999, obviously).
If you think this is an exaggeration, you'd be wrong.
Yes, the graphics have aged badly and yes, the gunplay is a bit clunky, and yes, it has voice acting that can veer right into the comical. Not a single one of those things matter, because this game is how you make games, and the few flaws it has are completely overshadowed by the vastness of scale and ambition contained here.
2) Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
There’s no shortage of 4x games around, but if you’re listing the best, you’re probably going to talk about either Civilization or SMAC. There is a reason for this. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is the 4X game par excellence, the apex of the genre, not matched before or since. What makes it so great, I hear you ask? Where to begin. Name an aspect of videogames and SMAC does it brilliantly or better. The implementation of the gameplay, the mechanics, all of that stuff, is essentially unimpeachable. There is little realistic way to say it could be better except, perhaps, to say there could be more of it. What elevates SMAC from merely a brilliant game to an all-time classic and a brilliant experience is the atmosphere.
This game has quotes from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, all kinds of stuff. And these quotes are usually the less impressive ones. The really impressive quotes are the ones written for the game’s various faction leaders. Every time you research a tech you get a quote from someone, every time you build a wonder, and the first time you build any given building. The end result? A 4x game with stronger, more detailed characters, who undergo more evolution, than the best RPG. As things progress their opinions change; compare these two quotes from Sister Miriam Godwinson, leader of the Lord’s Believers faction.
“The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.”
“And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?”
Also there are cyborgs, which is extremely hot
The final enjoyable factor is that the game goes for the ‘high balance’ route. All factions can achieve a position of particular strength, often wildly divergent from each other, but they can all become immensely powerful. When you can wipe out continents you really feel like you’re in charge of a future society, not to mention gives a palpable sense of reward for building up your empire. It was an excellent design decision which goes somewhat unnoticed, but contributes a lot to the game.
1) Suikoden II
So there’s some predictable classics on this list. Nobody is surprised to see X-Com or SMAC on a “Top games list”. But what’s this? Soo-wee-ko-den? What’s that? It’s a Playstation JRPG. It’s the best game I’ve ever played.
Suikoden, now up to entry V (All are exceptional except for IV), is a game where you lead an army. You generally start out on the side of an empire, and the corruption of it is soon revealed. Willingly or not you are caught up in a revolution or war to oppose it, and end up being the leader of the army. Yes, as a JRPG it means teenagers end up leading tens of thousands of troops. Yes, it has essentially silent protagonists, which is usually an immense pet peeve of mine. No, there is essentially no way to diverge from the prescribed plot (Though there are more chances to do so in SII than in any other JRPG I can call to mind). And yet here it is, number one on my list, a game I replayed around Christmas and loved as much as ever.
It’s a little hard to really explain what I love about this game, but that’s sort of the point of this post, so I’ll do my best. It has charm. It has grandeur, but it keeps things believable. You’re not saving the world from an ancient evil that has recently awoken, you’re fighting for your country, usually by fighting on the side of your country’s historic enemies. And you fight people on the other side who believe in their country, or believe they have a duty to serve it at any rate, who are for the most part thoroughly human. Except Luca Blight, who is the only ‘Murderous lunatic’ villain I have ever seen who makes me feel anything other than derision.
Viktor and Flik - most severe badasses to ever kick ass.
There are 108 characters to recruit in each Suikoden, sometimes recurring from other games in the series. They all form part of an overarching story of the Suikoden world, a plot not yet all revealed, but one which is engrossing in the extreme. Every game has fascinating characters and locations, gorgeous visuals, and absolutely stunning music. Forget Nobuo Uematsu, forget Yasunori Mitsuda, Miki Higashino is an unsung genius. I don’t think anyone has ever made better videogame musicthan she has.
Before I launch into this post, let’s define “ragequit”. How about: quitting something in the heat of the moment, without putting much thought into it, because you are thoroughly and completely frustrated. Does that work?
Your anger fuels Pinkie Pie's giggles.
I don’t ragequit games very often. I mean, I quit mid-game a lot, sure. I’ll quit because I’ve been playing for a while and my mind is wandering; and sometimes I’ll quit because the game isn’t going my way and I can’t be bothered to spend a bunch of time changing it so it IS going my way– especially if I know I’m already proven and capable of doing this.
Quitting out of rage, though, is not a typical aspect of my gaming modus operandi.
…until recently.
X-Com. This game is hard. There is no mercy. There is no handholding. There is just your troops being shot in the head by an unseen alien the second they exit their ship.
I ragequit this game pretty much every time I play it. Then I go play something easier for a while. Like, you know, Hearts of Iron II.
You know your game is hard when a World War II era grand strategy game made by Paradox is easier.
…but then I go back and play X-Com again, because there’s something deliciously addictive about it and I just can’t help but wonder if maybe this time I’ll figure it out. I mean, if I keep trying, then eventually I might live for more than five minutes. Right?
Mister Adequate and I lean toward having a pretty similar taste in games. Oh sure, we have our differences– I grew up a Nintendo kid and he a Sega kid, for example– but by and large, we like a lot of the same stuff. Strategy games, for example. Oh, do we love our strategy games. He’s played a lot more of them than I have, though, so he’s usually the one giving me recommendations. Which I have learned to take seriously. Here’s what’s happened the last few times he’s recommended a game to me:
Civilization IV: “A;GLKHSLKDJF BEST GAME EVER OMG. WHY DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS EARLIER.” 225 Hours played within two months. Several more hours of sleep lost.
Hearts of Iron II/Darkest Hour: “Hmm, shall I troll Poland today, or randomly turn Montana into a huge industrial powerhouse?” Either way, expect lots of Pike hurling insults at the AI, getting excited over tech trees, and ranting about the map.
Europa Universalis 3: “OH MAN IT’S LIKE SOMEBODY ROLLED CIV, AGE OF EMPIRES, AND HEARTS OF IRON ALL UP INTO ONE DELECTABLE BALL OF AWESOME.” Hours of playing as Britain and rolling over other navies with my own.
Anyways, the point is that Mister Adequate recommends me some top notch games. So now at his recommendation I’m going back– waaaay back– in time and playing X-Com: UFO Defense for the first time.
Guys. Guys. Guys.
It’s like… an RTS. And a tactical strategy game. And it’s amazing. AND I CAN ALREADY TELL THAT I AM GOING TO PLAYING THIS AND NOTHING BUT THIS FOR THE NEXT MONTH.
