/vr/ - Retro Games

>>1435186
Buying? None of them. The money goes to people unrelated to the original games. Paying for them is absolutely pointless.

Playing, though, - that's a different matter. Play the first one, it's still the best, and it's tremendous fun when you get a hang of it. Really, it's a unique game and it truly is engrossing. The second is a sort of an expansion, and the third is a very different take on the formula. The first is the best, but 2 and 3 are quite good, too.

Spinoffs are silly.

The new game is a bit too streamlined for it's own good, but it's a very, very good game regardless. If you want to throw money at something, throw it at Firaxis.

I love X-com....and then tried the other ones but felt they were worse than the original.

like in the sequel...terror from the deep...they rehashed the same game, made it look uglier, and then made all the maps unerwater maps instead of like towns and forests.

terror from the deep sucks.

Terror From the Deep is basically a ROMhack of the first one. You see, there was a bug in the first one which silently reset your difficulty to "Beginner" every time you loaded the game, so people who thought they were playing on Superhuman found the game way too easy. Thus TFTD was made brutally, brutally hard to compensate. Watch GuavaMoment's game against a Lobsterman Cruise Ship if you don't believe me.

>>1435304

fans made Terror from the Deep or the actual company?

well..never mind i guess i can just google it.

In the original X-Com you'd start a game on Superhuman difficulty for a challenge, but when you save the game and start it up again later the game starts running on the easiest difficulty level instead.

As a result players thought "Superhuman" difficulty was too easy and complained about it to the developer.

In response, the developers made the sequel, TFTD, sadistically hard.

The difficulty reset bug in the original X-Com is fixed in the gold edition, so it's possible to play it on Superhuman properly without hacks that way.

The new X-Com game is alright and is good enough in its own right to warrant a playthrough, but its mechanics lack any of the depth from the original.

The original had actual firing trajectories and voxel-based collision detection. I was disappointed to see that the modern reboot completely ignores all of this and just plays out canned animations based on the result of the dice.

>>1435304

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WziO005uM3g

>>1436093

look you either hit the thing or you don't....the new one has accuracy % like an RPG and you can up your % with scopes and better guns.

i usually prefer Assault guys/ladies though because they can Run and Gun up to aliens and blow their heads off with Dobule Beat Runes.

I remember beating TFTD without too much difficulty, but I remember finding alien bases genuinely frightening a difficult, since the floating brains could instantly kill you and had massive move range.

Plus there were tons of places to hide and the complication of free vertical movement.

But hard? Not really. I guess if you like something a lot you play it until you beat it.

The only thing that was truly unfair and stupid about TFTD was terror missions, searching every inch of a luxury liner could take an hour if you weren't save scumming.

Original is awesome. Play with openxcom (google it) - fixes many bugs (like difficulty reset), adds in some UI functionality.
TFTD is more of the same, basically original reskinned. You can watch a LP, but basically, if you played the original, you've seen TFTD as well.
Apocalypse is a different beast. Complex and ambitious, but falls short here and there; an enjoyable game but too different to compare it with the original. At least give it a try. I think the team behind original UFO:EU worked on this while some other team was busy with TFTD.

In other words, get original+openxcom and have fun. Oh, and read the manual (or faq\guide, whichever you prefer).

I have this site in my bookmarks still:

http://www.xcomufo.com/codes.html

It's all the codes from the manual...remember DOS games where the anit-pirate tactics were to put secret codes spread throughout the manual?

im sure the bug fixed game being linked to in this thread deals with that problem of actually starting up the game but if it doesn't that page will come in handy for X-Com original.

>>1438795

Oh, and speaking of Apocalypse, remember saturation fire is a legitimate strategy. Pic related.

>>1439128
>It's all the codes from the manual...remember DOS games where the anit-pirate tactics were to put secret codes spread throughout the manual?
I have no idea what you're talking about.

How bad should I feel for savescumming in these games?

>>1437345
>look you either hit the thing or you don't....the new one has accuracy %

So does the original, only the mechanics are not so simplified. Your hit% in that game indicates the chance that your shot be on course for center of mass once fired. Once the shot leaves the barrel of your weapon, it's a live projectile that will interact with the voxel hit maps of objects on the map. It flies until it hits something or goes off the map.

Your shot may miss the target by a hair and then hit something behind him, or it could by flying dead center only to hit a lamp post the alien is standing behind. Cover is actually functional in the original games and not just a small bonus to the dice.

With a strong enough weapon you can also intentionally fire at terrain to take it out and open paths or deny cover. It doesn't even have to be an explosive; a laser rifle can take out plaster and brick walls.

>>1437345
>>1440568

The old games are more like RPGs than the new one. Each of your soldiers has individual stats you can build up rather than static perks. It's a hell of a lot more flexible about inventory and equipment, too. Don't want to walk into a building and get shot in the face by an unseen alien? Got some high explosives and a soldier with a good throwing arm? Pic related.

>>1440341

You're bad and you should feel bad.

>>1436093

I disagree with your interpretation. In game, it makes more sense to me that a sniper is capable of taking out a target in cover, and if they miss, they still end up destroying scenery.

>>1440573

The one thing I couldn't stand were the medium scouts.


One big room, you open the door, BAM, 5 aliens shoot your guy into a fine raspberry jam. And there's nothing you have early game that can even scratch the paint of the outside, so you're either sending in a kamikaze rookie, or taking advantage of that dumb bug/ai quirk/whatever that they all come wandering out at round 40

>>1441558
>it makes more sense to me that a sniper is capable of taking out a target in cover,

Soldiers with high enough firing accuracy have no problem hitting a target behind partial cover, and partial cover in the original game does not mean a 10% bonus for hiding behind a shrub. It means the target is actually partially obscured by objects or terrain, and how much depends on what the cover is, how big the target is and how it's standing.

If the target is completely behind cover then you don't even have line of sight.

But you can hit them anyway if you know where they are. If your soldier is fast enough they can blow away the cover and then shoot the target, or have a clumsier squadmate tear up the cover with a spray of automatic fire (and possibly hit the target in the process).

>they still end up destroying scenery.

Yes, "scenery" is about all cover amounts to in the reboot.

>>1440568

yes, you're right. that's true. but cover is actually better in the new one. in the old one i'd do like 3 snap shots and take the cover out and kill the thing. cover was like a one-shot thing to take out,

>>1441568
>BAM, 5 aliens shoot your guy into a fine raspberry jam.

Then don't walk in unprepared.

Smoke the entrance to make yourself harder to shoot.
Use a motion scanner to track where the aliens are inside and determine if they're used a lot of their TUs.
If you've got someone with decent reactions and TUs (doesn't have to be amazing) standing in front of the door and the aliens have used up some TUs, you can open the door in relative safety.

Also a soldier with 60+ health will survive a fair bit of conventional grenade damage. Sectoids however will not, and the ship's engine is durable enough to withstand some antipersonnel grenades.
Have the healthy soldier start their turn right at the door with full TUs and a primed grenade, take one step in and drop it.
Have somebody else throw a primed grenade further into the craft at any other sectoids inside (preferably not too close to the solider that just walked in).
End turn, both grenades go off and kill all the sectoids inside.

>>1442663
>cover was like a one-shot thing to take out,

Not really. Whether or not cover gets taken out depends on what it is and how much damage your shot does to it.

Laser rifle vs stone is certainly not a sure thing.

If you have heavy plasma and somebody is hiding behind a sheetrock wall then it sure as hell should be easy to cut them down right through it.

It's better that the type of cover matters and that it's important to not give away your position even if you have cover.

The new ones didn't mesh with me. Didn't have that feeling of the original where you would load up fourteen rookies and coming back with half that.

The feeling of splitting your team into three groups and slowly clearing buildings, knowing that someone would take a plasma bolt to the face... That and the music, hearing footsteps and doors opening. And chryssalids. Oh god the chryssalids.

>>1441568
>One big room, you open the door, BAM, 5 aliens shoot your guy into a fine raspberry jam.

Silly anon.

If you aren't reaching victory by standing atop a mountain of rookie corpses, then you aren't playing X-COM properly.

Why does this game penalize you retardedly during deployment?

>can't choose where you're landing in the field
>can't choose the line-up order of your soldiers
>can't detect enemies standing in the open before landing
>the moment you land you might be looking at nothing or you might have a hundred hover tanks and aliens aiming at you, it depends on luck
>even if there's a difference in elevation your guys can still be shot, but you can't necessarily shoot aliens that are on the ground
>you can't throw a grenade from the lander into a lower elevation
>if you don't see shit from the ramp it might mean that there are a dozen aliens that are aiming at you

The fact that you can't manually operate doors and instead have to walk inside the room only to walk in the middle of half a dozen aliens is also brilliant. Who came up with this shit?

Don't get me wrong I like the game but compared to something like Jagged Alliance 2 the combat is bullshit.

>>1443341
Well this might not be all that comforting, but at least in Terror From the Deep, >The fact that you can't manually operate doors and instead have to walk inside the room only to walk in the middle of half a dozen aliens is also brilliant. Who came up with this shit?
was solved. You can just stand in front of a door, right-click on the other side, and it will open without going through it.

>>1443341
Doesn't Open Xcom fix most of these issues?

>>1442808

This, so much.
There's something magical about the bigger urban maps where the entire map gets shot to hell, one unit gets wiped out, one is pinned and the third is running out of ammo.

>>1439621

An actual memory from the best X-Com game imho:

>have a shotgun breacher for door busting and dynamic entries
>have a veteran sniper covering from a higher ground
>breacher approaches glass door of an expensive corporate building
>suddenly door opens and a worm-like facehugger makes a giant leap for breacher's mug
>sniper is on an aggressive "shoot-on-sight" stance.
>takes a shot as I hammer my space button to make the breacher go prone
>shot zooms above pointman's head in the middle of his crouching animation (friendly fire was a real issue in xcom: a)
>facehugger turns into pink mist while in midair
>I take a breather and check if I shat myself
>four seconds later - 3 more facehuggers slither through the door.

All this in real time. Loved this game to death. Too bad Mythos Games went bankrupt and never made another proper sequel.

>>1442726

Actually, what I wound up doing a lot of the time was.

>Get rookie
>Prime grenade
>Have like 3-4 other guys hanging out by the door.
>Rookie enters room
>Gets shot to ribbons
>Grenade falls.
>Kills sectoids.

Or, colloquially: Prime grenade, throw rookie.

I just didn't like how pretty much no matter what I did, I was guaranteed losing a guy. I mean, you take losses, it's part of the game, but the sheer certainty of that first guy's death got to me.


And I fail to see how the smoke grenade thing helps. Unless one of the later games changed it, you could only open a door without stepping through when TFTD came out. It was walking through into the froot step of the med scout that was suicide. You can't smoke it up without opening the door, although I suppose the motion scanners could have helped, if I thought of it.

>>1436093
I don´t understand. What´s the problem here?

>>1435186
Play the Fireaxis reboot first. Its a simpler but if you haven't played the rest you won't miss the depth and playing them the other way round would spoil your enjoyment of the new game.

If you don't like it then fair enough. If you do like it (and why wouldn't you?) and have developed a taste for the game, go and download the original, then TFTD . You'll be rewarded with all the extra depth challenge and it will feel like a natural progression of the mechanics and skills.

>>1444263
>motion scanner

Fucking loved that thing when I used it.

Felt like I was playing Aliens.

>>1444297
>advocating non /vr/ shit first

Back to /v/ with you.

>>1445889