XCOM is elegant and simple except when it’s not. For instance, ever wonder why you are or aren’t flanking a particular alien? Like so many things in XCOM, it’s all about the cover. MarinusWA’s excellent diagrams of various tactical situations shed light on the inner workings of XCOM. Plus, I can’t get enough of those weird alien smiley faces and frowny faces. Check it out here.
Magnar is a slaver race. When they raze enemy cities or defeat human armies, they boost the population in their nearest city. The idea is that they take slaves. Furthermore, they can train slave armies who they don’t have to pay. The emperor Magnar (some relation) can basically eat these slaves for health. Or he can boost these slaves in battle with a spell called death lash. Because it’s a death lash, the slaves die after the battle. But who cares? They’re slaves.
In case you can’t tell, Magnar is bad guys.
After the jump, sometimes bad guys finish last Continue reading →
While recording an interview with an actual non-gaming broadcasting network about XCOM, the host introduced me as the guy who didn’t like Deus Ex. I confessed that was baggage I carry around, at which point he asked me how long it had been. I noted that was back in 2001 and then, while casting about for something to say — I thought we were going to talk about XCOM — I said something to the effect of, “well, a lot of bad stuff happened back in 2001”.
As the words were leaving my mouth, it was like that moment when you’re swinging the car door shut just as you realize the keys are still in the ignition. “A lot of bad stuff happened back in 2001”? What the…?
I later asked him to edit that out. In case he didn’t, I would like to preemptively apologize for being the sort of dillhole who compares a game he didn’t like to 9/11.
2K has announced the first DLC for XCOM.
In this new set of linked Council missions, gamers will meet an enigmatic Triad operative, divert an alien ship’s course, and do battle with the aliens in the skies over China. The Slingshot Content Pack includes three new maps tied to the Council missions, a new playable squad character with a unique story and voice and new character customization options. The release date and pricing of the Slingshot Content Pack will be announced soon.
Linked Council missions? Like a mini story arc on pre-set maps? Do you play it on its own, or does it just drop into your ongoing game? A new character for your squad? A character they’re making instead of me? It sounds to me like someone at 2K doesn’t get XCOM.
On a related note, you can now buy the option to customize your soldiers’ armor for $5. This was previously only available to folks who pre-ordered XCOM.
Overheard from a level 26 player in the multiplayer lobby of Forza Horizon, a game in which you spin a roulette wheel every time you level up, earning a random car or sum of money:
After level 25 it’s pointless to level up, other than to get free shit, because you don’t get an achievement for it.
I can’t really speak to that, as I haven’t even gotten the achievement for hitting level 10 yet. However, I’m shocked — shocked, I tell you! — that Forza Horizon won’t let me drive a Honda Fit or a Dodge Viper. I shall ragequit forthwith–
Wait, what’s this? A classic black and gold 1977 Trans Am Firebird, one of mankind’s greatest kitsch accomplishments? Forza Horizon may very well be the awesomest driving game ever conceived.
Most MMOs punish you when you stop playing, even if it’s inadvertently. Not so with Guild Wars 2, a rare MMO that doesn’t mind if you want to take some time off to see other games. Go ahead and take a break. Guild Wars is cool with that.
Read about guilt-free downtime in this week’s Guilded.
So I’m letting Steam do it’s thing (i.e. download updates) when I notice the little envelope icon is green. A message. It’s a friend request. It’s a name from Breaking Bad, with some sort of clan taggery around the name, and an accompanying Bryan Cranston icon. I have no idea who it is and we don’t have any friends in common. But I’m not picky. This isn’t Xbox Live, where no one could possibly have more than 100 friends. So I accept the friend request. At which point I almost immediately hear that little bloop of an incoming chat message from my new friend.
After the jump, hey mister, how much for the hat? Continue reading →
Cargo Commander is one of the worst titles to grace a great game since Renegade Ops. You wouldn’t know it by the title, but this wildly inventive, wildly enthusiastic, wildly randomized, and deeply deep space dungeon crawl belongs on your hard drive when it comes out in a few weeks. I’ll have more to say as the release date gets closer. But today, I want to warn you about the font.
After the jump, that’s no G Continue reading →
In his apology for bragging about how he fucked a 14-year-old, competitive Starcraft II player Ilyes Satouri says it was a private joke. Unlike the time he was arrested (pictured) for publicly vomiting all over a Swedish nightclub. Satouri’s private joke was broadcast when he sent it to someone who was participating in a live stream on TwitchTV.
The look on his chat partner’s face is priceless.
Satouri’s team suspended him for the rest of this month. This means he’ll be back on November 1st, at which point sponsors like Monster and Intel will implicitly condone e-athletes who brag about fucking minors.
It’s important that you can choose your characters’ names in a party-based RPG like XCOM. Mainly because it creates a greater sense of investment in the characters, and therefore the game, when you use can use the names Vazquez, Hicks, and Apone in yet another videogame. But also because sometimes the random name generator can be a real dick.
Retro City Rampage is what would happen if Rockstar had a sense of humor. And if it was the year 1988. Which it’s not, so bring a gamepad. I’m having a grand time tearing through the storyline and working my way up the leaderboard (currently #1690). So please don’t play this game much until I’ve made it into the top 1000 or so. If games that used to look like this were this good, my mind would have been blown.
Retro City itself is pretty small, but it sure is lively, especially when I’m wreaking havoc. I mostly do it for missions and points. Sometimes I do it for aesthetic reasons. In the above image, that’s me on the right. The guy on the left is wearing the same hat. How embarrassing. I had to beat him to death with a golf club.
It’s hard not to have Space Shuttle fever here in Los Angeles right now. The Endeavour will trundle through our streets tomorrow on the way to her final resting place at the California Science Center (suck it, Houston!). It’s a one-float parade, but with a single float so awesome that it doesn’t need the rest of the parade. I’ve never seen a Space Shuttle in person before, but I’ve seen various fighter planes, and specifically a B2 stealth bomber doing a flyover at an air show. Through my modern moviegoer eyes, it looked like a special effect. It was too cool to be possible. My brain told me it must have been CG. Shut up, brain. I expect an in-person Space Shuttle will look the same.
While checking out the best places to check out Endeavour in person, I came across this amazing hi-res interactive imagery of the Endeavour’s powered up cockpit, courtesy of some fancy online service called Gigapan. The imagery is amazing to me for a couple of reasons. I’m old enough to remember that when I was a kid and I flew on an airplane, the stewardess would ask if I wanted to see the cockpit. Of course I did! So she’d march me up the aisle through that little door and into a bewildering wonderland of dials, switches, and levers, all manned by fatherly pilots and copilots. I even got little plastic wings I could pin to the place on my chest where Cub Scout merit badges would go if I had ever earned them. I’m not sure when they stopped doing cockpit visits for other kids. Certainly after 9/11. But I never stopped wanting to go up there into the cockpit. Even today, I can’t help but lean into the aisle and peer up the length of the plane hoping they’ll leave the cockpit door open for a while. So it’s pretty amazing to virtually marvel at Endeavour’s wonderland of dials, switches, and levers.
It’s also amazing because it reminds me of what I used to love about complex flight simulators. Systems within systems within systems, all conspiring to blow up an enemy SAM, shoot down a Tu-16 that I’d never even see, or even just find the VOR to DFW for my ILS. It’s been a while, so I might be mangling some of those acronyms. I can’t flight sim hotdog like I used to. But I remember actually caring what any given toggle did. I look at that panel up there, and I want to look closer at the buttons, and I want to know what that button does.
Finally, it’s amazing because it’s an amalgam of avionics over the decades. In the 2000s, Endeavour was refitted with glass cockpit displays for many of her analog gauges. Basically, some of the dials, switches, and levers were either replaced or their functions were duplicated with iPads. The cool blue screens in that image co-exist with all the analog frippery of the 80s and 90s. And if you go to the GigaPan site, you can zoom in and read every label, admire every texture, and all but hear the decisive click of flipping the LOOP 2 BYPASS from MAN INCR to DECR or turning the S-BAND PM ANTENNA from UR FWD to UL AFT.
Guilded, my weekly Guild Wars columns, continue apace over at Gamespy! Check out last week’s entry on the joys of cooking, and this week’s entry on what’s so great about Guild Wars 2’s storyline. Yes, Guild Wars 2 has a great storyline. Several in fact, but not the way you might expect.
The hunter Gareth makes dolyak jerky, but he’s also a single father. His wife is away making her legacy. Gareth insists she’ll be home one day with scars, stories, and trophies. The implication is that something darker has happened and he isn’t ready to acknowledge it, but the point is that he’s got his hands full watching his three kids. The last stranger he enlisted to help lost his right foot. They found it on the roof a week later. Adventures in babysitting.
Guilded appears on Fridays at Gamespy.
If you bought Elemental or pre-ordered Fallen Enchantress, you’ve been able to play the beta of Stardock’s fantasy strategy game for some time now. It’s been exciting stuff, with inventive twists that make it far more than just a fantasy skinned Civ. But since it’s been a beta, it necessarily involved that constant nagging sensation of “wait, is this the way it’s supposed to work?” or “will they change that?” or “well, I’m sure this will be different in the final version…”. Now that Stardock has announced an Official Release Date, that all changes on October 23.
Furthermore, we’ll finally get a look at what Stardock has in mind for Fallen Enchantress’ story-driven campaign mode. The Galactic Civilizations games similarly tried to spin out stories over successive scenarios, which always seemed odd to me in a richly detailed 4X game that will tell its own story anyway.
I can maybe learn to live with the missing hyphen in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the latter day update of X-Com. Especially since developer Firaxis seems to have simultaneously nailed and updated what made X-Com great. I’ve also been playing a canny iPad clone of/homage to the original X-Com called Aliens vs Humans, which reminds me how slow and intentionally frustrating and meticulous and tense and even sadistically user-hostile X-Com was back in the day. Aliens vs Humans doesn’t shy away from any of this. But Firaxis clearly wants to present the X-Com fundamentals without alienating folks who weren’t dinking around with AUTOEXEC.BAT files and manuals and the punishing trial and error of choosing between progress and permadeath. The differences between X-Com and XCOM strike me as the difference between great movies in the 70s and great movies today. They did things back then that they just don’t do today. It’s the same with games, and that’s not a criticism so much as an observation.
But I do draw the line at the lack of a UFOpedia. What kind of X-Com merely has a “database”? “UFO Database”? Really, Firaxis? Fortunately, I’m playing on XCOM the PC, so surely a mod is on the way.
