i feel like mind control and panic were still threats in the original game but they were overall less punitive to your whole campaign than they are in new xcom, like if Pvt. Asshole Fuckhead got MCed while lugging around a fucking blaster launcher there goes your whole squad, but in og xcom i felt like i was allowed to lose battles but not the war. ive had missions in terror from the deep open up with a fucking lobsterman firing a fucking torpedo up the ramp of the skyranger on turn 1 and killing my entire squad and it was like, well, fuck this, but OK, but if something like that happened in new xcom i would have to savescum no matter what because you have such limited squad sizes and XP is so valuable that it feels like i can never lose any fights
i also hate how much firaxis likes putting dumb timer lose conditions in these games because of the one time when i was 13 where i had to finish a UFO defense playthrough as a rogue organization selling alien corpses and fucking plasma rifles to god knows who on the black market to maintain funding after the council pulled out - the only real ways to lose in UFO defense are to get completely annihilated two months in a row or get super deep into debt or lose the last mission
Not sure if it was deliberately a correction, but the first minor DLC for XCom EU added a questline that rewarded you with 3 powerful psychic soldiers in the midgame, so you could turn the tables on mindcontrol even without active investment in the psychic tech. Part of the problem with the original XCom: EU is that it allowed fully physical, low-Will-stat squads to work just fine until they suddenly didn’t.
i never really thought psionics were that useful…theres no problem blaster bombs cant solve, baby
Well they aren’t, offensively, but just the inherent resist on mental ailments and the skill to heal ailments of others can be worth it on their own
Anyway, I should try Invisible Inc again. It didn’t grab me when I tried it a few years back but maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for tactics around then.
the psionics in XCom 2 can basically learn lightning stab and holy explosion lol
I got a kick out of it because there aren’t that many big teams out there who are so clearly enamoured of FFT and aren’t just making anime stuff I won’t touch but at no point after that could they pretend they were making a good UFO defense successor (though honestly, combining Japanese and western games in such a heavy handed way because you’re drawing on such a broad vocabulary that you can’t help yourself is still endearing to me)
speaking of which Julian Gollop’s game is out soon and appears to put a lot of focus on free aiming and terrain destruction
yeah for sure wrt enemy unknown. as i mentioned earlier one of the advantages of ufo defense is that it actually gave you the room to weed out the psychically fragile recruits and train whoever was left into responding to a sectoids weak ass attempt to mind control them by guiding a blaster bomb up their ass
im glad julian gollop is making games again
Mario Rabbid Battle Kingdom is the game I am playing now and I like it a lot having never played XCOM.
I tried 2 games from Xbox Game Pass:
I played some of Smoke and Sacrifice
It has really great graphics. Not the same style, but Kind of like if Odin Sphere were Isometric. High quality visuals.
Gameplay would be fine—except the survival aspects are dialed way up and it feels like you’re constantly doing chores. For every step forward, you have to step sideways, so to speak. All. The. Time. Its rare that you can just go play for a stretch. Constant fiddling with menus and inventory. I’m not going to finish this.
I also played Ruiner. Has really cool visuals and aesthetic. Its like MGS/Running Man/Killer 7 mashed together or something. But-----it has tank conrols, making attacking never really feel direct and crunchy. Also not going to finish this.
Check out Beagle’s Operator modset that he’s sort of tinkering with while playing through a War of the Chosen campaign, its whole intent that you can lose soldiers and missions and keep powering through (I think he’s up to like 3 or 4 squad wipes on this campaign at this point)
I mean check this shit out it’s amazing
OPERATORS VS ALIENS
Hell Yeah
My time with Stephen’s Sausage Roll has taken a rough turn as the third island feels like a bit of a mess. In English Country Tune there was a big drop-off when gravity/the third dimension was introduced as the player basically had to grind their way through those puzzles until they eventually figured out how they functioned after about a full section just of them, and once that internalization was accomplished and other mechanics were introduced the game bounced back and was fairly strong afterwards.
Something similar is happening in SSR now and I think it is possible that Increpare’s ability to come up with neat mechanical twists outstrips his ability to effectively teach all of them. Island three so far has basically been a game of “guess the technique you were never taught” and I’m hoping it returns to a game of “using what you know in different ways in different situations” soon as that one was a lot better.
Decided to pop in an old demo disc (Square’s Preview 3 for the PlayStation) which had an Ehrgeiz demo on it. Upon beating it, a movie plays letting you know that the demo actually has two other modes you can try by holding L1 or R1 when pressing the start button on the demo’s title screen. Not only is it rare for demos to have a reward besides beating the demo itself, but having it hidden in plain sight like that with a key combination is extra neat.
Invisible Inc didn’t grab me the first time I played it either. Play more Invisible Inc! (I think the tutorial isn’t great, but I don’t remember the specifics of what I dislike about it).
One thing I’ll never forgive nu-XCom is that you’re not actually rotating the earth and everything is taking place on real-earth but you’re rotating a hologram of earth. That encapsulates all the differences between original and reboot for me. (I’ve said this before but I’ll talk about this forever.)
The original is forever untouchable, I think.
I followed Phoenix Point all along the way and it’s coming along nicely. I think it will rule
nah I hate Nintendo and I always wait as long as possible before I have to buy their new thing, I’m just in the tank for Nvidia
you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to them
I might’ve felt differently about SSR if he hadn’t made English country tune just a few years prior, but that had already seemed like the result of years of work brought to bear on a commercial title and whatever SSR was it was a lot less accessible. people tried hard to work up enthusiasm for it but I never really bought in.
the Gears 5 versus tech test beta demo thing: they need to rename the two playlists from “Arcade” and “Ranked” to “Cover Shooter” and “Final Destination, Gnashers Only”