XCOM

[Zpock]

This is why Alien vs Predator is one of the greatest and scariest games of all time- fuck them for caving in and giving a save patch.

I could play this game for about an hour before I simply couldn't take it anymore hehe. The nosaving, extremely unsettling lighting, and worst of all, the respawning aliens coming at you from all directions, including above. I would wander around looking for some button or door that I couldn't find to advance, with aliens keep respawning on me so there's no safe areas that you cleared, ammo and health slowly running out..

[Argh]

I loved X-COM. Played it on the Playstation. Which, surprisingly enough, worked quite well, imo. None of the would-be sequels have managed the horror factor correctly, imo, and have had other serious game-design flaws.

X-COM had a lot of issues, mistakes and goofy design decisions as well, imo, which I won't bore everybody by listing, but is still my favorite TBS of all time, simply because of the horror factor.

[[Krogoth86]]

@Saktoth:
The problem about the rookie tactic is that it at some point gets near impossible later in the game (at least with the higher difficulties). That's mostly because of high alien sight range and your rookies sucking at PSI defense making them convert to the enemy and causing havoc in your own lines...

Trying to keep your guys alive also is an advantage in terms of accuracy, stamina and health. Imo that load/save tactic also only is really important in the beginning of the game where you have no armor. Later on with energy and flying suits (plus your experienced soldiers) this gets way more relaxed and I then also only rarely reload...

Concerning your shooter behaviours well I don't know when I did some intensive reloading in any shooter at all. The exception may be Max Payne where when I can't solve certain situations for multiple times I tend to do the save/load maneuver until I get to that point...

Aliens vs Predator also is one of my favorite titles (I especially like part 2)...

[Zpock]

Why play on a higher difficulty if you have to resort to load/save cheesing the game? To get into the lategame without hassle?

[momfreeek]

Superhuman with no saving/reloading whatsoever can be pretty epic. The absolute best times are when you would already have reloaded normally.. but you force yourself to play on and through luck and bravery you somehow manage to pull through (I have fond memories of that one lone hero wandering the backstreets at night looking for the crysalids that used to be the rest of his squad.. walk slow keeping that heavy plasma ready to fire.. throw a high explosive round every corner..)

Terror f t Deep was cool till you couldn't complete the (huuuuuge) mission cause of one alien hiding in a closet somewhere. The whole game was way too big anyway. A friend played it for over a year and still wasn't 25% through.

[Pxtl]

Yeah - actually, the save/reload thing is a big complaint I have about a lot of games. I really like games that actually give you checkpoints AND manual save, so that you know what the designer has in mind for save frequency. Lots of FPS games make you start at the beginning of the level if you die, which is sucky and dumb if it has long levels, so obviuosly you want ot use a save... but it becomes a question of how often do you save before it becomes cheesing?

Serious Sam would've been an all-time-fave if it weren't for that. Crack-dot-com's "Abuse", on the other hand, is awesome. So's the Halo series for the same reason.

[Erom]

Yeah, I think the Halo series is a great example of load-save done right, it gives you enough saves that you don't ever have to think about it without compromising the gameplay by letting you save in the middle of a given challenge. Bioshock _almost_ got it right - if the vita-chambers had been save-retry points instead of respawn points the game would have felt a lot more challenging.

Now that I think of it, Marathon had that exact system - cloning stations that acted as save points. No wonder Bungy got it right in Halo, they'd been doing it right for years.

[Pxtl]

Yeah - other FPS devs could learn a lot from Halo. I remember playing co-op Doom, and doing horrible things like losing my teammates, backtracking for health, and constantly begging for ammo, and spending way too damned long catching up after I died.

Meanwhile, Halo respawns teammates at the last respawn point, ammo is both plentiful and easily maxed out so there's no need to be miserly about your guns, and shields jump back when you take a minute to recover instead of backtracking for healthboxes.

And yet for the longest time, every FPS game just cloned Doom's stupid mistakes.

[rattle]

I loved X-COM. Played it on the Playstation.

... and guess what, there's a PSX GUI patch for the fan patched windows version of UFO EU and TFTD

[SwiftSpear]

Yeah - other FPS devs could learn a lot from Halo. I remember playing co-op Doom, and doing horrible things like losing my teammates, backtracking for health, and constantly begging for ammo, and spending way too damned long catching up after I died.

Meanwhile, Halo respawns teammates at the last respawn point, ammo is both plentiful and easily maxed out so there's no need to be miserly about your guns, and shields jump back when you take a minute to recover instead of backtracking for healthboxes.

And yet for the longest time, every FPS game just cloned Doom's stupid mistakes.

FFS... You're comparing one of the genre pioneers to a current day superseries. Doom couldn't have learned anything from halo because doom was released 10 years before halo. Ya, halo does those things right, but it does alot of things worse than alot of other current day FPS games as well. I'm looking fowards to Left 4 Dead (dispite the retarded title) as a true step forward in coop gaming.

[Teutooni]

X-Com: Ufo Defense, hell yeah! I played Extraterrestrials too, but didn't like it much. It was missing all the cool toys - ability to mind control (the aliens do still, though), flying powersuits, guided missiles, melee etc. It's limited to gradually more effective pewpew weapons (which is redundant, since the aliens become gradually thougher) and a few grenades, boring shit. And nearing the end, the battles became insanely difficult. I did kinda like Saktoth with the save thing, reloaded only if mission was a total failure (the loss of only transport ship is truly fatal), and ended up trying the same alien base mission a million times with no luck. The alien sight distance was ridiculous, they could spot me over like twice my sight radius, and shoot all kinds of nasty shit at me with deadly accuracy, not to mention mind control. Even with the best armor, which only a few strongest soldiers can ever even hope to wear, and they need to be super elite to do so anyway, a single critical shot from the later alien weapons could kill him.

Jagged Alliance, anyone? Much better than any x-com clone.

[momfreeek]

ooh ja2 yeah. thats moved on as well. They released the source code and its being patched into an all-round improved mod platform as we speak (ja2 1.13).

[Saktoth]

@Saktoth:
The problem about the rookie tactic is that it at some point gets near impossible later in the game (at least with the higher difficulties). hat's mostly because of high alien sight range

Use cover and the surprise rule, dont just walk out in the open.

and your rookies sucking at PSI defense making them convert to the enemy and causing havoc in your own lines... x

If he gets PSI before you, drop out the 'rookie spotters' and switch to tanks instead, with your troops being the fire squad. Naturally tanks are immune to PSI, move far and have a lot of HP- but not much firepower. Ideal spotters, though they're expensive (which doesnt matter in later game). The enemy can only mind control a unit he has seen- and once he has seen it once, he can mind control it even if it goes out of his line of sight. So keep your fire squad WELL back.

If one of your troops starts to drop in morale or get PSI attacked, get him to throw down his weapons ASAP. They almost always attack the troop with the lowest morale. You can zap him with a stun rod too if you like. You can in fact 'farm' PSI attacks in this way- have a couple of low morale troops with no weapons who do nothing but sit in a corner facing the wall and gibbering, they will be the target of all PSI attacks.

Of course, the best way to beat PSI is to get it before him. I got straight for a Sectoid Commander ASAP, then rush 2 psi labs, then put all my veterans and a bunch of troops in dedicated PSI training, and take a new rookie force out on missions (with an avenger, this can mean 50+ troops in your base). Do NOT take troops who are in PSI training into the field unless you have to- they'll die and waste a PSI slot. After the first month of PSI training, its game over. Walk your low-PSI spotters outside, spot the first alien, mind control him, use him to spot the next alien, mind control him, use him to spot the next alien, etc etc. Make sure to panic the aliens (using your worse PSI troops who have no hope of doing a mind control) before mind control, as aliens with low morale are easy to mind control and will just panic if you ever lose your hold on them. You can seriously do this with Ethereals, commanding a horde of them, then once they are all under your control, line them up against a wall execution style and shoot them in the back of the head for XP. Ya, the game gets dumb by this point.

Now, time for a great little story. First time i ever won the game, i didnt have PSI. I got past Cydonia onto the alien command, and got pretty badly owned. I was down to a couple of troops, and they had mind controlled some of my best veterans. One such veteran, with a heavy plasma, was under constant mind control attack, being mind controlled every turn and moved about by the aliens. He finally managed to go a turn without being mind controlled- and where is he? Inside the alien command centre facing the giant brain. They'd mind controlled him to walk straight to it. I used my last blaster bomb launcher to fire from almost the other side of the map, up the teleporter, and straight into the brain.

[[Krogoth86]]

Well I don't know what version you played but with later missions with lots of Aliens (especially terror missions) they even could PSI attack your soldiers which are standing at the very end of your dropship right from the start...

I tried using tanks but didn't find them really worthy. They just die too fast vs. the better aliens with heavy plasmas and their sight range also isn't that great. Together with taking four units in my dropship and their costs they imo only make a good support in the beginning...

My tactic of choice vs. crashed UFOs still are those motion sensor bombs. Place them in front of the UFOs door and - well it shouldn't take too long until an alien comes out...

[Zpock]

It's not hard to get armour either...

alien alloys-personal armor and that just needs the 1st little ufo...

and advanced armor isn't hard to get either

then if your worried about mindcontrol you can have shitty weapons that don't penetrate armour on most guys. I found it fun to just use the standard purchables and that it works pretty well, most aliens just have a lot of hitpoints and not armor so they all go down even cyberdisks to rifles...

[[Krogoth86]]

Chryssalids + shitty weapons = your doom...

And well that first armor really sucked in UFO Defense imo. You still die after one hit way too often...

[El Idiot]

Chryssalids

I HATE Chryssalids. Possibly the most annoying enemy besides the guys with mind control.
Epic note, early in the game on veteran: 13 civilians zombified + 8 of my 14 soldiers zombified + the 4-5 original Chryssalids and ~5 snake men. At night. Retreated back into the ship after laying proximity mines all about the only corridor to the ship to light up the place. Used incendiary weapons all the way back to the ship. Gunned down the hoard with autocannons and more incendiary rockets as they tried to run through the minefield. Epic, but the proximity grenades are rather cheap to use.
Thank god the aliens didn't use any proximity weapons.

Why was there no night vision or thermal?

[yuritch]

Well, that't the strong points of Apocalypse - Aliens do use proximity weapons there (boomeroids), but they are stupid enough to throw those just like regular grenades, ie right at your soldiers. Which still works, but proximity properties are kind of lost.
The thing that replaces Chryssalids is also quite interesting in Apocalypse - it's a gun that fires pods which hatch small fast creatures (brainsuckers) at the end of turn (they hatch even if you simply kill an alien carrying the weapon, so you sometimes have to check suspicious corpses for those). While unable to fly, they can jump to attack a flying soldier. If those attack your soldier and succeed (there is a chance the soldier will resist the attack), that soldiers turns to the alien side. Not a melee-only zombie, but the whole soldier with all the weapons and armor he had, which can be quite tough to kill, and old trick with a primed grenade in the backpack doesn't work.

[Zpock]

There's no nightvision, but there's the motoin sensor thing (alien movie feel, except no beeps ), and light grenades... More interesting then a nightvision that just makes night->day I think...

What about training your soldiers health up by shooting all the rookies with pistols a few times or throwing a grenade in the ship (everyone in armour)? Yeah that might weed out the weak as well hehe

[[Krogoth86]]

Yeah - Apocalypse is a bit different in the beginning. There those brainsucker pod launchers pretty much are the only weapon the aliens use (at that phase you'll meet mostly simple beings spitting acid & stuff anyway). They imo are nowhere as bad as a Chryssalid which has excellent armor is fast like hell, insta-kills and spawns zombies which when killed spawn another Chryssalid...

Those Brainsuckers are very easy to avoid and kill. You can try to run away or take cover in any way possible to let them miss you but even if he hits it isn't over yet. It takes a while until they take over your soldier so if one of your soldier has one of this things on his head just shoot it with one of your other soldiers. As you have good armor in Apocalypse you pretty much always can do so without hurting your soldier (unless you use like that auto-gun with HE-ammo or heavy stuff like that)...