Mini-Cyn, I didn’t play X-COM (or UFO: Enemy Unknown as it was known in Europe) until… about 2006-7, for the first time, and emulated on an Amiga no less. Even then, perhaps under the worst conditions possible because the Amiga version was pretty damn unresponsive and slow, I was compelled to get hold of the PC version which blew me away despite the quirky interface (which ultimately pushed me away in the end). The way the different layers and systems of the game are folded together and interact with each other are still tremendous even today. XCOM Enemy Unknown nailed the streamlining for the most part but in doing so made many things really abstract (the cover system, line of sight and to-hit percentages, lack of inventory and throwing stuff and picking it up, no free aim which impacted panic friendly-fire quite grotesquely). Open Xcom takes the original (and everything that made it a classic) and irons out 90% of the wrinkles. It’s the best possible way to play one of the greatest vidya games of all time. And the original that’s required to play it is dirt cheap.
Serious? How can you rage quit this game, death (multiple, terrible, frequent) is woven into it’s very fabric. Death is almost ‘winning’ in some respects; the aliens are a nasty brain sucking evil you have to beat! Get back to it and do your duty soldier! No retreat, No surrender. Just lots of death and money spending(building/recruiting/resupplying).
I’m in the middle of a terror-mission right now, at night (i couldn’t ‘wait until morning’, no time) and although no-one is dead yet my sergeant Emilia took a head shot on leaving the transport. I healed her, but in general i have a ‘bad feeling’ about this whole stinking mission. I hate terror-missions at night.
Alien grenade on the second turn killing everyone except the HWP at 2am in the morning on a Thursday. On reflection it was probably a good thing it happened when it did…
If I get a chance to play tonight I have a feeling that the game just spiked in interception difficulty, may need to swing research towards better ship weapons!
The main dev is very friendly and helpful if you experience any bugs or crashes. I love the ability to use the music files from the PS1 version, available through the forum. The game is difficult. On the second lowest difficulty, sometimes I have, on the second or third mission not been able to get any of my soldiers off the Sky ranger, because the aliens repeatedly snipe/ reaction fire into the door and kill all my soldiers straight away. Or you get base assaults during the first week. But I love the game.
Yes, you have to copy over the data directory or something like that. I personally have been too lazy to find my disks, but these screenshots seem to be a motivating force.
UPDATE: Ok i’ve had this happen also now. A ufo fled an air-to-air engagement and simply disappeared. So yeah a bug of some kind.
My night-time terror mission ended in all hands lost! So yeah, while not exactly a rage-quit, i decided to do something else and come back to it later. I’ll get the aliens later this evening.
That is good to know, as apart from the above mention of occasional vanishing ufo’s, and slightly temperamental screen scrolling in the battle-scape, i’ve also had one CTD (a grenade going off on end turn (during Aliens turn) was looping it’s sound file just before the CTD…i might have had a wounded soldier holding a live grenade, that died that turn and the grenade set to the new option of instant explosion went off?). I’ll go see if there is a forum for the project.
The official forum is also at openxcom.org.
The dev usually answers within the hour and is really easygoing .
I hope you monkeys are proud of yourselves. All this X-COM talk made me bite the bullet on Steam X-COM and openxcom. And I’m getting my ass handed to me time and again. On Beginner difficulty. This game is going to steal countless hours of my life, just as it did the first time around, all those years ago. I did wonder if it would hold up in the 21st Century. It does. The accolades showered upon this game over the years are all well deserved. It really is the best game I have ever played.
Btw, talking about Xcom and related… what about Xenonauts? I didn’t hear anything about their progress for half a year or so.
I recently finished my first playthrough of OpenXcom and I think the developer did a tremendous job. Even though AI etc. are completely new, for the most part the game plays and feels like the original X-Com - which is to say great.
The best thing as that the game is open source, because people can and will mess around with the source, kinda like they did with Civ4.
Literally everything is possible, from a simple tweak implementing a new piece of equipment to a total conversion.
The only bigger mod so far introduced Shotguns, added military and police fighting the aliens too, added new layouts for UFOs and new tiles for the maps … and many things more. The mod is unfortunately outdated currently, but that’s exactly the stuff I want to see. Changed tech trees alone would make replays infinitly more interesting. Really a great reproduction of a great classic.
rezaf
Completely agree. Still one of my top 5 games of all time, easily.
Ah…mods for it? Well i’ve not looked into things much, just been busy dying and having fun in my current game. I’ve restarted and took out the change to make grenades explode instantly due that possible CTD it can introduce. I’ve put the explosion damage to effect height as well as width option, and in general will play through a number of the new options to see how they work overall. I have selected for both harder AI searches for bases and sneaky AI in the battlescape and i have noticed the difference in the battlescape so far, they are much more sneaky!
If OpenXcom is modable, that is something i’ll definitely look into. That would be fantastic.
Ach, this is great. “Thanks,” Mr. Gordon, for making me lose yet more hours to this game.
I love the remake, but this is still the best.
Sorry? Still i can’t feel that bad for sharing the old X-com love, it is just one of those games that pretty much nails everything perfectly, a rare, rare gem of a game.
Once i’ve made it to the end, this will definitely get some mod-work on my end. For decades (i guess?) there have been a few issues on prices and effectiveness of items i’ve wanted to adjust, and i’m sure i can come up with content to make things more varied…i’ll have to get over to the forums and see what all this talk of modding is about that rezaf brought to our attention.
The remake (what a disappointment!) doesn’t come close to the brilliance of the original X-COM. Thanks for letting me know about this mod, as I will no doubt lose many more hours of my life.
Funny how now you all talking about X-Com, it’s now when I’m playing Xcom (the new one). When it was released, I played it around… 60%? of the campaign, then I parked it around, with the intention of coming back at my save in 2 weeks. Which were transformed in 2 months with all the new games released, then I had a big project at the job, and and 7 months later I finally reinstalled. I had the intention of continuing my game, I still had the save game, but I chose to start a new game because at this point I didn’t feel like my campaign, just because I had discontinued so much time ago. I’m doing it pretty fine in the tactical battles, but even then I just lost 3 countries in the startegic side. Eh :/
IMO, the biggest competition to Xenonauts is OpenXcom. Can somebody explain to me why I’d want to buy Xenonauts when a bug-free, modifiable, portable version of X-com is available?
New graphics and storyline, much higher resolution out of the gate … maybe some new features? OpenXcom might get all of that at some point, though.
At the very least, maybe it’s time for the Xenonauts guys to finish twiddling their thumbs. What SupSuper (the OpenXCom dev) pulled of is nothing short of spectacular, in my opinion.
rezaf
OpenXcom just looks to be xcom but easier to run. I’ve played xcom already. Xenonauts it something new.
I’m pretty sure i played the original xcom in XP without that much fiddling, so i’d guess that it works with some messing around in windows7/8.
To be honest, i don’t see the draw in OpenXcom for someone having already finished the original.
There’s some nifty new features already - for example, the game remembers your soldiers loadouts, there’s path highlighting, potential radar ranges are displayed when you place a new base, there’s an option for a more difficult AI … and a lot more.
Most new stuff is optional.
Then, the game aims to be very moddable, and quite a bit of that is possible even now. Want medikits available without research? Or the hovertanks only after you’ve dissected a cyberdisc? Or how about a stun ammonition for the minigun? Simple changes in the rulefile make this trivial.
Many much more fancy things (I mentioned some in an earlier post) are totally in the cards, but they require you to download the sourcecode and get going with it. It’s already happening, too.
Right now, unless you’d be willing to replay X-Com anyway and want some convenience features, yeah, not much to see. But soon enough, I’m betting there’ll be some pretty nifty mods.
rezaf