I always hear about how absolutely amazing Secret of Mana is. Got the ROM, ready to pull an all-nighter.
Pretty sweet, That second to last shot where the bullet hits something else first and starts to tumble gave me goosebumps.Had fun on that Russian server after you guys went for teams. Played 2 or 3 games with the guy who didn't go. Figured I would lose with 175 ping but I won em all Hit a ton of rails even.How did you and king make out? That one guy was pretty good. Hope to get on tonight.
sniper elite is not built to be a ww2 shooter, its a sniping game the engine puts the processing power elsewhere... it has bullet velocity, drop, heart rate, breating, wind... all sorts of complex things built just for the sniping aspect it is pretty cool, lots of absolutely ridiculous shots up on youtube from the first and second games
^ I've put more hours into that on SNES than any other game
in b4 tldr.I picked up the XCOM reboot from Firaxis over the weekend: Xcom - Enemy Unknown.I was expecting the worst considering the history of the franchise and how pretty much every game except for the first (and arguably the second) were screwed up due to various forms of poor management. I was delighted to be wrong in this case. I put about 20 hours into it since last friday, and it's addictive and challenging and it brings back quite a lot of what I loved about the original while seemingly cutting very little that was important and bringing beautiful modern looking graphics to the franchise.Of the things I noticed to be missing that were in the original, none of them are dealbreakers for me, and in a lot of cases they were little fiddly management steps that in some cases added depth and choice but didn't affect core gameplay much.As it's a multifaceted game I will break these in two groups.Combat Differences:1: Squad size in the new game is nerfed down to a maximum of 6 players who carry _only_ the equipment that they were personally equipped with, and they immediately disembark next to the craft upon the start of a mission. In the originals squad size on a mission was decided by transport ship size and available troops and you could change the loadout dramatically for different missions. The largest of the ships in the original Xcom could hold approx 24 soldiers or a mix of up to 4 tanks and the rest of the slots taken by men.Items taken on the mission for use by the soldiers were stored in the ship (limitted to 80 total), and you could screw up by bringing the wrong guns or not enough ammo or in some cases too much of something (and wasting space better used for another piece of gear). If you actually brought all 20+ men, those 80 items get spread VERY thin and you'd be picking up extra ammo from the dead aliens to make it through missions. When you landed, you'd equip your soldiers from the ship inventory and un-used items would be on the ground in the ship in case you needed them later. A great amount of depth and a feeling of greater scale are lost in this translation, but the mechanics of the gameplay IN combat only suffer slightly from this as certain techniques are no longer applicable: Retreating into your ship for cover or to dust off in case you were getting your ass handed to you are both lost. On difficult missions I would leave a man IN the ship just so I wouldnt lose the ship by having all of my men die. If I needed gear on the battlefield, this man would begin the chain of getting gear to the right guy, by taking the ammo and throwing it to the next closest man, who would then throw it to the next creating a supply chain. This kind of metagaming technique is not an option in the new Xcom because it's just not needed.Resupply is no longer an option, as you dont actually control the disembarking of your troops from inside the craft and the craft is not part of the map.This disembarking stage in the original xcom was arguably one of the most tense parts of any battle as you were opening the doors of the craft blindly and marching out into the unknown on every mission. Very often, the first 5-6 turns were entirely spent on emptying men out of the craft and into cover/overwatch positions before you began the meat of the combat missions (search and destroy takes up the bulk but this first bit set the stage for every success if done right) About one in 5 missions, you'd have at least one soldier get horribly killed stepping out the door.Overloading the ship with ammo for key weapons is lost too, but this is covered in #2. For the heavy explosive weapons, I'd stash 3 extra shots in the ship because a player inventory didn't hold more than 3 rockets and 1 in the gun. Those extra couple shots went a long way clearing out aliens in cover.2: Ammo management (and manufacturing) is GONE. You will never have to build a magazine for a weapon in the new Xcom, and your characters reload their guns by magic (although there are penalties in the form of it taking a whole turn and not totally filling the gun entirely)They don't seem to run out.Rocket launchers get at max 2 shots, and this is determined by a perk on the character themself and not by what ammo you bought or brought.Your engineers back at base do make the weapons, but never a magazine. In the original you had to build EVERYTHING and sometimes it was tedious and occasionally, if you didn't make ammo for the right guns before a mission left the hangar, disastrous.To me this is not a major loss, although it ties in with something that I think is a significant loss from the original to the new game.3: The scale and sandboxishness and control of the battlefields seem to be quite a bit more limitted in the new xcom.In the first games, some aliens patrolled the battlefield, some gaurded the ship in advantageous positions and others hunkered down to wait for you. Every randomly generated map was square like a chess board and usually only so many squares on a side, but they really gave a feeling of being pretty massive. You were able to control the board, much like chess, by positioning your squad intelligently and locking areas down.In this one, aliens seem to have random spawn areas on every map hidden by the fog of war until you get there, and then when you spot when they get a turn to take cover and not be taken unaware. The maps for specific mission types seem fairly predetermined although your landing placement will change, and only the enemy positions and not the terrain are random. Occasionally enemies will spawn back into areas you had previously cleared out (mission specific tho)There are a couple results from this in the new Xcom that are either good or bad depending on your preference.a: if you're following the course that the map kind of pushes you into, you never go more than a couple turns while moving around without finding some enemies to kill. the original could be very tedious when it came to finding that last hiding alien, as they would get in cover and camp or sometimes they'd go hide out in an area you thought you had cleared.b: you NEVER get the advantage of a full surprise attack on the enemies in the new game. They always get a turn to take cover before you launch an attack on them. This is my ONLY major complaint with the new game. In a strategy combat game, surprise attacks are the reward for using superior strategy in moving your pawns. You flank them and take them unaware/unprepared and you can completely wipe them out without much risk. In this, flanking is relegated to just giving you a better chance to hit percent based on the interesting and cool cover system, but you never really get a shot on an unsuspecting enemy where you have full control of the situation or you've caught them with their pants down. In Xcom Enemy Unknown, the aliens always have their pants fully on and they get an extra turn to make sure of it, every time you spot a new battle group. Geoscape/Base/World Control Differences 1: A lot of choice is gone and I miss it.Much like the original, you have detection facilities to find UFOs, manufacturing and barracks facilities for soldiers and equipment and labs for doing sciency stuff. The structure is different in a couple ways though and in most cases these ways tend towards simplification that takes away a lot of the management aspect of the gameplay. In the new game, you get 1 multipurpose base, you launch satellites over specific regions to detect UFOs, and your interceptor craft are located at convenient hangars spread around the world by geographical region (chosen for you by the game and the same every time)In the original, you had UP TO 8 bases with varying purposes, and your detection capabilities were entirely determined by your base facilities and location. If you wanted to detect UFOs over north america, you needed a base in north america with capable radar systems installed. The number of bases added to your monthly costs by each facility, soldier, scientist and engineer, along with leases for the aircraft you used in the early game and you only started with one, and had to build the rest slowly and painfully from scratch while trying to come up with the extra money to do so. These costs required a variety of strategies to manage, which gave rise to a variety of metagame techniques that I think added replayability and style to the game.2: Location location location.In addition to the costs of the facilities and the methods for managing them, base LOCATION and purpose were key factors in the original. Now you have one, with many purposes and the only location benefit seems to be a passive perk depending on continent.Every interceptor craft needed a hangar to live in near the UFOs you were planning to shoot down. Every transport was limitted in travel time by how close to a mission site your base was located. This led to sometimes being unable to field a team for an important mission and the various consequences of this failure due to monetary constraints or poor location choice. It also led to specific ingenious strategies for income and coverage of the world with the services Xcom provided.Some bases were built as purely listening and intercept outposts giving you more coverage of the globe on the cheap. Other bases at key places became large expensive fully functional bases with labs and workshops and soldiers in attendance to be deployed on missions to specific large geographical regions. One base's radar might cover a continent, but one base could provide troops over all of europe and africa with ease. Some bases, I built as nothing more than dry dock or manufacturing facilities with a radar on them and workshops for building advanced craft and weapons and transfering them to the large bases. This saved me valuable base space for other things at the larger bases and in a couple playthroughs became a major revenue path which totally changed the finance end of the game. One strategy to stay funded was to build a base specifically for building large amounts of laser pistols and selling them monthly on the open market for the best profit margin one could get from an item sale, and doing so on a huge scale to fund xcom almost entirely on manufacturing.One of my favorite strategies consisted of pirating the aliens to finance my bases when the governments of the world were not paying enough to upkeep Xcom. I'd make a barebones listening/intercept base right next to an alien base to catch their cargo craft as they landed with almost 100% results, shoot them down and go scrape up the very profitable goodies with a special squad geared just for this.Almost all of this is gone in the new game. The need to develop these strategies is just not there, and so far I haven't seen too much difficulty in staying funded or making ends meet with the single base I am allowed. I find myself missing the vast amounts of micromanagement but for some players these were major turnoffs in the original games, and I can see how they just are not necessary gameplay aspects and that they might unduly limit the market of the game.Because these management bits are removed, and due to the greater the availability of traditional funding/support at the world level, this game feels more like command and conquer than a simworld game with various levels of economic considerations to be taken into account.3: Alien abduction missions make you choose the lesser of evils, but somehow don't feel like choice. In the new game, no matter how many soldiers and craft you have, you seem to only have one transport craft and this makes it so that you can only perform one mission at any time. Every so often there are special mission types called alien abductions where you will have to choose from 3 simulaneous activity sites in different areas of the globe, only one of which you can deal with and all of which offer different benefits.The downside, is that 2 of these regions of the globe will now have a greater level of panic than before even if you whip some alien ass on the mission. You may rock the aliens in Australia, but in the UK and the USA the sites you ignored to go do this will cause panic to spread in their areas and in some cases cause you to lose the support of entire funding nations. In the old games, you were only limitted in your ability to combat the aliens advances and keep the nations of the world happy by your capabilities and forethought. You had as many transport craft as you had leased/built and that you could support with gear and troops and finances.If there were two simultaneous alien landing or terror sites, you could dispatch two transports to go mop them up and deal with them as the ships arrived on site.With a capable Xcom force under my control, there were games were I kept every single nation happy almost the entire game by crushing every alien advance as they occurred and not missing a beat.I like and despise this change at the same time. Due to what I would call the ease of the new game, the feeling that you are always one step behind the aliens would be hard to recreate without this mechanic and it is there in the new xcom without a doubt. The game FEELS hard and you feel like you are scrambling to stay on top of the threats although I would not say it's anywhere near as difficult as the original. No matter how good you do in the new xcom, those pesky aliens always be terrorizing the world somewhere and you can't always be there to stop them, where in the original management and location factors and the intense difficulty of combat vs aliens that had you overmatched in terms of tech level and numbers and individual unit durability all combined to give a similar feeling of dread even if you were doing a great job.I dislike that a specific choice was removed and a silly mechanic was used as the means to this end, but I like that they considered this feeling essential to an Xcom game and I am willing the get past it because it shows a deep understanding of what made Xcom one of the best computer games of all time.I'll chime in more when I've beat it.Congrats if you read all that. Have an e-cookie.
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May 09, 2024, 11:59:01 PM