X-Com but lady mutant air pirates - It's X-Piratez!

Games
1

I’m really surprised that you guys haven’t made a topic for this already.

XPiratez is a total conversion mod for OpenXcom that places you in charge of a fugitive squad of badass lady mutants, in a far-flung future based on the original X-Com universe. And exploitation films. And B-movies in general.

But they’re air pirates! They booze, they raid, they rob, they take hostages, they indulge in uhhh… Forced labor practices (kinda like the videogame industry). They rescue their sisters, forge alliances and discover trade links, while making a wide array of enemies old and new.

Spoilers for factions and recruitment in the game

It’s got nazis, rat people, zombies, religious lunatics, the anthropomorphic cops from Duke Nukem, left-behind sectoids who have resorted to building mechs to compensate for their wimpy physique.

They can recruit from other factions and species, like poorly trained settlers or human/alien hybrids. They can also enslave their male captives and use them as slave-soldiers.

I would say it keeps all the flaws and hooks of the original X-Coms, along with a few new ones. It takes everything about those games and cranks it way past 11 to something like 71.

The most impressive thing is how it redefines the way you play. The gals being pirates, sword fights are now a thing, and profits are paramount, which means knocking people out with truncheons is usually preferable to shooting them in the face.

A chainsaw and a pistol is also a very viable loadout!

It’s got so much content that it’s extremely inscrutable at first. Nothing will make sense on the first playthrough, and there are a lot of new missions and balances to wrap your head around. Some of those new missions are TERRIBLE, others are AWESOME.

It’s that kind of mod. Like eating delicious spaghetti with a few stainless steel chips that you have to eat around.

It’s a crazy project that won’t appeal to purists, and isn’t suited for people who struggle with controversial themes.

Personally, I love it. It’s the best excuse I’ve ever had to revisit the original X-Com. Lady mutant air pirates!!!

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2

“BootyPedia”

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No thanks.

3

To be fair, half of that entendre is pirate-related.

But you have the right idea, the exploitation vibe is pretty strong throughout.

4

I tried it after a @John_Many_Jars recommendation but bounced off it. Probably more to do with the OG X-Com UI being so utterly awful than anything else. Manually re-equipping everyone at the start of each mission wasn’t too bad when there’s probably only 1 or 2 viable guns to bother with at any one time, but XPiratez has so much stuff it’s just felt like an overwhelming chore right off the bat.

Plus it’s got that whole softcore exploitation porn thing going on which, y’know, I’ve played Huniepop 2, so whatever, it’s fine, buuuut… Here it’s weird and cheap looking. Partially because of the 320x240 downscaling of everything, but also because most of it is just a shameless rip of (pirated!) art straight into the mod with no thought given to the overall aesthetic. Your girls are big-titted anime babes in the BootyPedia entries but in the gameplay screens are total she-hulks. Either would’ve been fine for me, but not both.

5

This was my first thought reading about it. There are just so many tactical combat games with decent interfaces, not to mention the tactical combat games with great interfaces. Going backwards, interface-wise, is soooo painful these days.

Mods are great at thinking of cool things to put in a game. But when it comes time to take out things for the sake of gameplay, I’ve never met a mod that couldn’t afford to cut one or twelve added features.

I mean, just because it’s exploitative doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take pride in your work, right? Say what you will about Hunipop, but that game was nothing if not consistent with its characterizations.

-Tom

6

@fox.ferro I’m with you on most of that. If you struggle with the original X-Com, then XPiratez won’t do anything to change your mind. For me, still playing the originals from time to time, and loving it, it was an awesome new experience.

Personally I don’t view the mutants as lessers though, quite the opposite. I think they’re fucking badass.

They are obviously amazon-stereotypes, and the whole game is a power fantasy featuring women who are purely perceived through the male gaze. They’re oversexed, hard drinking, but they’re also some of the most powerful creatures in the universe. They can take a .50 cal to the chest and keep fighting.

They also enslave men and use them as cannonfodder. Or casual entertainment.

You can gawk at them if you want, but if you fail to respect them, they will have your ass.

So I don’t agree that these women are just big-titted babes (every part of them is big, they’re mutants) although you’re also right about much of the art being pilfered and pervy.

I think the image shared by Nick is a magazine or comic book that you can read as part of your research, which will sometimes contain valuable things for your mutants to learn, but obviously any magazine in an exploitation universe is going to be horrible. Obviously.

Haha, with this one I think you could count to 500 easy. It’s a MESS.

My immediate feeling is that you’d probably hate it.

For example, many of the weapons really have no value to a player at all, I think they exist partly to thrill the guy who made it, and partly for immersion when used by the NPCs. They’re junk.

I really like my delicious spaghetti analogy. This is clearly the work of a madman, and it takes effort, but if you can stand to sort through it, there’s some good stuff there.

7

OpenXCom does do a pretty good job of smoothing out the worst of the UI. X-piratez is overall pretty interesting- it’s a neat change that you start with a group of absolute badasses looking to get into melee as opposed to a bunch of x-com dipshits getting wiped by plasma pistol-wielding sectoids. The progression of the game is somewhat randomized too, but to some, that can be quite tedious. The game doesn’t do a great job of telling you the significance of some of your decisions, either. The designer seems obsessed with not spoiling the player in a lot of ways if they don’t want to, but it doesn’t explain, for example, that there is a very specific set of requirements that you can hit to get a guaranteed 7-pack of max-stats male soldiers at the end of the first year.

The recent addition of the ninjas is not something i’ve cared for. I mean, ninjas were an enemy for one of the random mission types, but now they’re a bigger part of the game and fighting them doesn’t really feel empowering the way the rest of the game is.

There’s also some cool aspects- like tanks aren’t automated HWPs any more, they’re an armor one of your soldiers wears, and there’s some limitations on who can be in what. You’ll end up wanting to train gnomes and lokk’nars to fly your hovertanks later on, for example.

An example of cleaning out a “humanist” mansion.

8

OMG you pack of namby-pamby prissy little fairy Marys. Just as with the game of all games, Dwarf Fortress, it is YOU who are on trial, not X-Piratez.

You’re going to cry about an interface that you already know? What, does clicking the buttons strain your wank wrist?

You’re going to shed phat tears because the game makes you discover its secrets instead of spreadsheeting them for you up front? That is in fact the delight of the game, as it was the delight of the original – “Enemy Unknown” and always shifting while you desperately search for new tactics and weapons to stave them off.

But indeed X-COM always had more than its share of knock-kneed autofellators who downloaded the tech tree beforehand, plotted the fastest course through, and then said they’d found the game easy.

Those chesty irradiated Amazons are ten times the men you are. Now shut up. Thread closed!

By the way, we already had a thread.

9

Ooooooh okay, I see what happened. I didn’t do the dash. Doomed by the dash.

Where is it though? Searching for X-Piratez, I still don’t see it.

10

There’s nothing quite like being shamed by into partaking of a little softcore erotica in your mod scene. Yours was a noble effort, @MelesMeles, but sometimes it takes a John Many Jars.

-Tom

11

Yeah, I clearly haven’t been watching enough Clint Eastwood movies.

12

Clint Eastwood never played X-COM. As such, he is not a man but merely a whiskered thing.

13

Never played an XCom game (the beginning where you have to select a location on the globe then build your base always daunted me) but I kinda always wanted to, remembering how enjoyable some of those Gerry & Sylvia Anderson UFO episodes were as a teen. As for modders adding tons of additional content to an old game, perhaps I shouldn’t attempt that Fallout 1.5 + the others I was thinking about doing a play through with. I can barely handle those widescreen hacks that turn old 480p games into super hi-res ultra wide 4K aspect ratios where the characters in old isometric games now look like flies crawling across a discarded side of beef left on the side of a road.

14

It’s like, one click. Just click somewhere at random!

15

I love me some soft core, but this is a bridge too far.

Besides the modern XCOM has nude mods. That’ll do.

16

This is a great mod. Thanks for posting. I started playing a few months back. It’s immersive, tactical, tense. The art style is humorous, the writing and setting is bonkers (in a good way). Very much worth a look for any tactical gaming fans. I found it close to Rim World as a story generator - the longer fights, crazy scenarios and distinct characters made me really feel for my little electronic companions. But it’s X-Com, so don’t get too attached. :-)

17

But what if he does click the wrong thing!

(with clicking NA or Europe to cover their lands would be enough)

18

He could have ended up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and then his game is over before it even begins!

-Tom

19

Isn’t that just the start for a Terror From the Deep campaign?

20

Yeah, it’s not like there wasn’t an optimum area to click on, and you could actually select a place where it would pretty much be over before it started. It wasn’t just the location you needed to click, but also the button that apparently allowed you to build bases too; and not only that, but you must find the button that activates the UFO baddies a’comin, If you missed a button or forgot to click a button, it was like that old poor taste joke about the late Christa McAuliffe of the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy. Christa: “What’s this button do?” Game over, man. Buttons, buttons, who got the buttons? I never saw a game that needed so many buttons clicked to even start. No wonder I was paralyzed with indecisiveness.