New X-COM game on the horizon...

[Sarmatian]

Will I be laughed at if I admit that I never managed to win in XCOM game until Apocalypse?

[easytarget]

Certainly not by me, it was a rather difficult game. Easy for a number of things to go horribly wrong, or even be ruined by something as mundane as going bankrupt. And it wasn't like the game walked you into your command, it was handed to you as if you knew everything about everything. Got to say, that was part of the charm though, sharing tips and tricks on forums dedicated to discussing strategies.

Nothing ever prepared you for one of your beloved soldiers turning a corner with no turn points left and staring into the eyes of what you just knew was certain death. Turn based gaming at it's best, I've only seen one other comparable turn based game series, Combat Mission, make what I consider a slight improvement with their WEGO system.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing these new iterations.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Gravedig, here's an hour and 10 minutes or so of live-streamed XCOM gameplay.

http://www.twitch.tv/2k/b/330155062

Looks preeeety good.

[easytarget]

I'm going to have a hard time resisting this game.

[Monk]

An RPS writer recounts his time with a week's worth of play in the upcoming Firaxis remake

These are the types of articles that keep me coming back to RPS. Between this, the huge two hour stream of the game and the RPS' many, MANY Q&A's with the devs that effectively allowed you to chart the game's development, it's been hard to contain my hype for XCOM. October needs to hurry up and get here.

[Major Robert Dump]

People complained that the first XCOM was too easy. So, the seond XCOMs easiest setting was as hard as the firsts superhuman setting. This explains why I never beat the 2nd, because I always went for anything but easy.

Got a wild hair to try XCOM Terror one more time, as it stands as one of the few video games I have never beat. In fact, it was my first PC Game ever on my first PC ever. Maybe it is some sublimanal, unconscoious sense of not having closure.....

So I played it, on easy, and its still to GD hard. The ship maps are insanely large, with that one guy hiding in the corner of a room, just waiting to blast your men one at a time as you run in to get him. Also, the research directly affects the aliens, so the quicker you go for uber weapons, the quicker you see lobstermen, which is a total game fudge for you. The game is sssssoooooo hard. I gave up again, no closure....

I loved apocoplyse. I would like to play that again but I cannot get it to render properly on my card, and the interface is so outdated it is painful to play.

[frogbeastegg]

This one is going to be day 1 for me. I've been cautiously hopeful for a while. Recent coverage has tipped me over the edge. I am considering booking a day off work so I can get a quality 3 day weekend with it. I haven't done that in ... 2 years?

Back in ye day the only XCOM game I played was Interceptor. I loved it to bits, played it repeatedly, and was shocked when, many years later, I learned it was viewed as a poor game by many series fans. I couldn't get UFO, Terror or Apocalypse when they were current as PC game shopping was very limited back then - I don't think I saw a single copy of any of them until they released the budget bundle pack years later! By that point the games had a reputation for not working properly on 'modern' machines like a Pentium 1 so I had to pass them over. I was talked into playing XCOM 1 this year, all DOSBoxed and fixed up courtesy of gamersgate and the UFOExtender mod. The game holds up fantastically. I'm quite fond of Terror too, love the unusual setting. Not played Apocalypse yet. Somehow the setting makes it less interesting.

XCOM ranks alongside Crusader Kings II as one of my favourite "Well, that all went horribly wrong - what fun!" games. Not many games manage to make disasters enjoyable for the player.

People complained that the first XCOM was too easy. So, the seond XCOMs easiest setting was as hard as the firsts superhuman setting. This explains why I never beat the 2nd, because I always went for anything but easy.

The detail which makes this hilarious is that the first XCOM had a bug which reset game difficulty to the easiest level when you reloaded a game. You need to hexedit one of the game's files in order to fix it. AFAIK it's still be present in the versions available on steam and gamersgate. You have to mod the game to fix it.

[Fragony]

It's fun when you can actually lose the main game, that has been a while.

[easytarget]

Well, I was right, couldn't resist, especially after the RPS coverage, I'm per-ordered and not very patiently waiting at this point.

[LeftEyeNine]

Post-release posts have been moved into a new thread for the clarity of the topic in discussion.