Wave if you love X-com!

What are your guy's fondest memories of playing the Xcom games way back when? And which one of the trio do you consider your favorite?

Personally I liked Apocalypse the most. Once you go realtime you never go back, not to mention that some of the maps were just so damn big that turn based turned into a chore. Whats with the realtime hate? Not traditional enough for the dinosaur in you? I have many fond memories of pwning 10 consecutive brainsuckers with the plasma sword. Also, the destructible terrain was loads of fun when it went badly. I kept being a dumbass and didn't leave the missile launchers at home whenever I was cleaning out the food farms or weapon factories.

One particular time I responded to a call with a three man team. One with a rocket launcher and another two with mini rocket launchers and carrying as many rockets as they could. I had a jolly old time blasting those aliens to smithereens one by one. Whenever the guy with the big launcher was busy, the mini launchers would step in. Long story short is the guy with the launcher missed or the guidance missed, whatever. Something went KABOOM and destroyed a critical structural support or two. Suddenly the ENTIRE ceiling started to fall. The aliens at the far end of the building were being crushed one by one by falling debris.

As it happened I looked around and there was zero cover I could shelter my guys in. There USED to be some but hey, rocket launcher! (plus at this point about 4-5 popper attacks) At first I tried to get them to run away, and after a bit of reloading saves I figured out that there was no way of saving my guys. They were all wounded at this point and the ceiling would crush em no matter where they ran to. Now the guy with the launcher happened to be one of my generals and quite skilled so I didn't want to lose him. The other guys were complete noobs whom I had renamed "junior redshirt 1 and 2". I needed to find some way of keeping my general alive but I couldn't think of anything. But I figured I might as well keep trying.

On my last replay something funny happened. A brainsucker managed to sneak up on my guys and latched on to redshirt 2. (as you can probably imagine, there were a LOT of smoke clouds around at this point) Since the only weapons I brought with me were high explosive (and the rockets loaded at the time were incendiary), I couldn't do anything about it. All of my guys had jetpacks so I got the general and redshirt one to fly up towards the ceiling (which at this point was still falling and getting really close to them). Not surprisingly the first act of the brainsucked traitor was to turn and fire on my guys. Redshirt one happened to be missing most of his armour and was heavily wounded at this point thanks to being shot by an entrophy launcher. He was also higher up because the general was busy firing his rocket launcher when I gave the order for those two to take flight.

So the mini rocket launcher fires, the rocket streaks up and hits redshirt one. With PERFECT timing he died and the 6 rockets in his backpack exploded, blasting a tiny gap in the falling ceiling. My general came to a stop aligned with the hole and the wave of falling debrit fell past him and flattened redshirt 2. Good times.

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Also I got a question for anyone who purchased the xcom pack on steam. What video resolutions do the games support? My monitor has a native resolution of 1600x1200 and it is total crap at stretching things to fit the screen. If they would run in a window that would be just fine.

First the Steam question: I believe they run under DOSBox, which you can switch to window (the old Alt+Enter shortcut). I believe they do not support other resolutions than 320x200 (UFO Defense, TFTD) or 640x480 (Apocalypse). Sorry. I still use my CRT monitor, so the stretching works OK for me.

My favorite story with UFO was told here at least once, but here goes: When I got UFO Defense (UFO: Enemy Unknown in our countries), I was playing it for several days almost non-stop. I got huge cramp in my shoulder muscle from holding a mouse, I couldn't even move my hand. Doctor prescribed me muscle relaxants to ease the cramp and the pain, so I popped a pill - and instead of resting went playing. I got three days off school and they were filled with alien shootings to the brim.

My favorite parts were possibly those involving Psi-Amps. I just loved hypnotizing aliens and making them shoot each other and destroy their ships. Then I just threw away their weapons and let my guys shoot them down.

Sadly, I have no X-Com stories, but I played the hell out of the original with my 3.5" floppy disks on my Pentium 75 MHz with 8 MB of RAM back in the day!

I grabbed it a few weeks ago on Steam and have been playing it on-and-off since then, trying to re-learn the game. Since playing X-Com years ago, I've played mostly RTS games since then, so it's difficult for me to go back to a turn-based game. Still, the base management and tactics in the game still hold up after all these years and I'd love to see some sort of re-make done in the vein of Bionic Commando Rearmed (e.g. keep the gameplay and mechanics identical, but dress it up for widescreen and higher resolutions).

Personally, I think the game has definitely stood the test of time and takes as much of my PC gaming time as C&C3 and TF2... Pretty good for a game that's 15 years old!

First X:Com was the best in the series.

And yes, the dinosaur in me still hates the realtimes version.

best story: Not much happened, but the first time the UFO's attacked one of MY bases I freaked. So much I woke my brother up. We played well into 3.00am after that.

I guess my favorite part of the game is when your soldiers begin get excel: accuracy, time units, etc. You can snipe across the entire map, zoom past a civilian, between your jet's landing gear, through three windows,,and kill a brain sucker with one shot.

IMAGE(http://bp2.blogger.com/_WUAYewVdb80/R_Hmwh4N_iI/AAAAAAAAAAs/tTow5US20-8/s320/xcom_ufo_02.jpg)
Boom.

Only ever played the first one... thinking now of buying it off Steam. Just a bit scared that it won't work properly, and if it does that I might be disappointed by it...

One of the episodes I remember most clearly is the first time I saw one of those small flying saucer/tank things. I was saving a city (well, trying to) and that terrifying thing came around the corner. WHAT THE HELL?! And as I tried to shoot it down with my puny guns one of those flying aliens arrived, possessed one of my soldiers and used him to blow up half of the building where he was standing, killing a couple of my team members.
Oh, so the tank wasn't enough!
The great thing is, I managed to win the map with one surviving soldier in the end.

Such a wonderful game.

All games work, with a few well-documented issues.

- Interceptor is still v1.2 and suffers from the probe/pirate mission bugs on Vista/XP (you have to use cheat code to destroy your objectives), and crashes infrequently.
- Terror From the Deep is the hasbro version, patched for windows. It crashes infrequently, and also DPL torpedoes (Underwater blaster bombs) don't work properly when trying to ascend or descend. They tend to zip off at a slight tangent instead of going straight up or down.
- UFO and Apocalypse both use DosBox. They run fine, but you'll need to fiddle with the settings a bit. For Apocalypse, you also need to disable fullscreen if you are using a widescreen monitor.

DosBox games can be made to run in windowed mode; change fullscreen=false in steamapps/common/[game]/dosbox.conf. This may be tiny for you, so change scaler=[advinterp/normal]3x to make it a bit larger, although that doesn't seem to affect Apocalypse. As for TFTD and Interceptor, I was going to try Linux/Wine to fix the incompatibility anyway.

My favorite by far is Apocalypse. A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but anti-alien biological weaponry is a guy's best friend.

The first is definitely the best. Terror had maps that were way to big to stay fun when you were looking for that last guy on the ship over five decks in some friggen bathroom or closet, then when you open the door her kills three of your guys. Apocalypse is my second favorite for at least getting close to the first and having some cool innovation thrown in. Though I have to say it may have one of the worst endings in game history.

Huge, massive X-com fan here. To the point that, a few years ago, I put together an archive of X-Com 1 and 2 with dosbox and an installer.

In fact, I actually updated the whole thing for a friend a few weeks ago, so it should be working properly.

Let me look around here...

Here you go, X-Com 1 and 2. Be sure to read the install instructions as it tells you how to go into fullscreen and whatnot.

General_J wrote:

Stuff

If that archive includes the games, you don't want to link it here ... especially given the Steam availability of the series.

The first one was the best, though I was never sure whether the fact that the ending was absurdly easy made it more or less fun. But who could resist the chance to drop with a ship literally full of waypoint missiles and launchers? That is near the top of my "best weapon in a game" list of all time. I played Terror From the Deep as well, but the multi-level encounters just dragged on while the nautical setting somehow lost the oldschool creepiness that "aliens in the farmhouse" had. The later versions were even worse, in my opinion, partially because I loathe RTS games. And also because that same creepiness was not present.

I've seriously considered purchasing the first X-Com on Steam, but after having won it multiple times I'm not sure I'll play it for more than the occasional bit of nostalgia.

Jagged Alliance all the way !

*boos at X-Com*

Vote Jagged Alliance!

heheh

I ended up having to hack my save game a bit when I played. There was an alien ship headed towards one of my bases and that base did not have a sufficient turret defense to destroy the saucer in mid-air. The problem was that when the aliens landed and started blowing sh*t up, the game crashed every single time. And the only recent save game I had was that one with the ship about to land. I had to beef up the automatic defenses to stop the ship from being able to land.

Yeah, the original is the best. I can't remember if I nearly gave up on the series or thought it was the best thing ever when I heard Apocalypse was going to have real-time, but I held both opinions at various points before it's launch. Now, real time is the only way to play Apocalypse and I love it that way. It's just not the same as the original.

I played the original almost 8 hours a day for most of the final quarter of my Freshman yr of high school and b/c of it, I managed to shirk enough responsibility to get my one and only D ever on a report card, in English of all subjects...

I did use turned based every now and then. Mostly for missions with the smaller UFOS and the early game when there are no poppers.

I'm gonna have to say I *loved* XCom, because I don't think I would enjoy it now.

Best moment: finally killing all the aliens in Cydonia! TAKE THAT!