HN Reader

X-Com was amazing, and Xcom2 also pretty good. I just checked, and there is an amazing mod and very active community around LwotC (Long war of the Chosen), with tons of fixed bugs and improvements, a decade or so after the game was released. [0]

I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge.

I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc).

[0]: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen

I recently played through 'Aliens: Dark Descent' which manages to feel like a X-COM game, but real time. It felt like the natural next step for tactic strategy games and was instantly hoked -- I can't imagine returning to the turn-based roll-of-a-dice luck systems after that.

"random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.

I've never played the original X-COM, though I played the two Firaxis games to death. I have 132.2 hours on X-COM: Enemy Unkown (the Firaxis game) and 327.5 hours on XCOM2, both of which seem like an undercount (especially the first one).

I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account.

The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't.

There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.

As an old Spectrum head I was obsessed with JG’s output back in the day. Chaos may have looked awful but it was so much fun. I still have core memories from that, Rebelstar Raiders and Laser Squad. (Beating people online is one thing, beating your friends when you’re hot-seating in the same house is something else.) Ironically never played XCom, but I have a lot of hours on Magic and Mayhem (which had the executable… Chaos.exe)

Enjoy their quote midway through about how pointlessly miserly the Spectrum Holobyte people were about development. Made me bleak laugh a little.

  > suddenly we really had to finish it by end of March, and they required us to work in-house in Chipping Sodbury seven days a week, 10 hours a day for several months. They didn’t give us any extra resources. In fact, we had to beg them to give us a more powerful computer to use, because my brother’s computer couldn’t handle it! My computer was having serious overheating problems. I had to remove the case and it crashed occasionally. They begrudged us one new computer for Nick and they stuck us in this tiny little room.

The Magic and Mayhem quote's pretty funny too about game dev, still seems to be the same.

  > They said RPGs don’t sell, which was, of course, complete rubbish. They wanted to make it much more RTS-focused, partly because of Command & Conquer, which was very popular at the time.  (...) We started to make it before Diablo came out, and it was also before Baldur’s Gate, which was the real milestone in RPGs.

And naturally the demise of Nintendo

  > my boss was opposed to doing a sequel. He said the 3DS was dead and that we had to go with the PS Vita

3DS sells 76 million, PS Vita ... 10. Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars even sold "acceptably". 340,000 according to the data available.[1] Not exactly Mario Kart 7 or Pokemon, still acceptable for a third party.

[1] https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-...

It was an enjoyable read at least. Lots of standard horrible practices in the game development community, and some actually surprising ones. Such as, "they didn't even hire the X-COM people to work on any of the X-COM sequels?"

Wow, I didn’t know Laser Squad was done by the same guy (and his brother, full indie-style, it turns out) — I remember playing that game on Spectrum in 1992 or so, and it was absolutely next level, no other game came close at that time.

I maintain that his best game was absolutely Chaos: The Battle of Wizards.

Although later creations were more popular it's that first one that really stands in my memory 40+ years later.

I guess it might be time to fire up an emulator and play again, as I do every couple of years:

https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos

I was a big fan of the predecessors like Raiders and Laser Squad.

The first X-COM felt like those, afterwards not so much.

Rebelstar player here, was a great little game.

Original XCOM and XCOM2 was ok, PP was rubbish.

I hope the future direction of this game goes back to its roots. The X-COM2 DLC which introduces alien combatants to your team as players always seemed deeply misguided to me. To me the point of XCOM is about humanity confronting those aspects it finds unacceptable to its condition, I’ve never taken it literally about aliens vs. humans, so the othering of a race of aliens is not a concern for me. What I care about are non-fictional people, their nations and their cultures. So the DLC where aliens were part of your team seemed like such a misguided venture to me. It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. But what does that even mean in this case? So, yeah I hope XCOM reexamines it point, or someone else should create a better IP.