Just a quickie to mention this latest offer over on Steam: All of the Steam X-Com catalogue for $4.99 in the US, and £2.99 in the UK. It’s reportedly only on sale for this weekend, although that’s not made clear on the Steam site, and I suspect that’s a pack that we might see cheap again in the future. That’s some classic gaming for very little and hey, at that price you don’t have to feel guilty about not bothering to play Enforcer. Hooray!
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Sold!
New Pynchon later this year, in fact. A-and only 2 years after his last novel!
Real men complete UFO:AU in Iron Man style, no saving/reloading. Although its really tempting when your elite squad you have been building for months all get taken out and you lose the ship as well ;_;
Enforcer is pretty fun, as long as you turn off ya brain and forgot its related to x-com in any way (its not). Some of the weapons are REALLY over the top and its a fun fast paced shooter.
pkt-zer0:
Would love to, but too busy learning Dwarf Fortress the Captain_duck way. I’m going to get sodding addicted to this fucker.
Exiting the transport is a very dangerous time, especially in Terror Site missions. I usually chuck a smoke grenade or two on the first turn for cover. Early on you will lose men. Even with some basic armour (an early research priority) you can still get killed in a single hit.
As a game it’s unforgiving, but fair in its own way, and utterly absorbing once you get into it.
@Heliocentric
You’re misunderstanding me. I’m not asking for everything to be a bargain, but for the games to be priced fairly across all of Europe.
I refuse to buy anything from Steam until they fix the European pricing. I’ll use other digital download sites (GOG, Impulse, etc), online shops (absoluttspill.no, play.com) or a direct purchase from the developer’s website, like I did with World of Goo.
If there is still any question, yes, this is for this weekend only. The site specifically states that it is a “weekend sale.” Steam has a sale every weekend, so…
“It’s reportedly only on sale for this weekend, although that’s not made clear on the Steam site”
top right of the steam homepage, just like every other weekend deal.
Oh HELL yes! Thank you for highlighting this!
@Panther (If you’re still reading this, and anyone else curious): From my experience you don’t actually need to be running Steam at all to play UFO defence and TFTD (only two I’ve tried though). Once they’re installed you can just play them straight from the DOSBox shortcut in the Steam apps folder.
Is there a more recent X-Com-clone that is worth playing?
@CryingTheAnnualKingo:
UFO: Extraterrestrials is good, and is about as close to the original games as it gets.
Also, an indie project, UFO: Alien Invasion has been in development for years. I played an old version, and it was great! And it’s getting better all the time.
@Alctel:
Nice to see someone else who appreciates Enforcer! I’m a huge fan of the original games, but I can appreciate Enforcer for what it is: A super-dumb, yet super-enjoyable blastfest with only the most tenuous of links to X-COM.
UFO: Extraterrestrials tried hard, but they made too many inexplicable changes to things that X-Com did right to make it a worthy contender. The first X-Com is still the best of its kind, and the only other games that capture at least some of it were the Jagged Alliance games and also Silent Storm.
With X-Com you have to accept that losses early in the game are a normal part of the game. You don’t need perfect survival on each mission, and getting your veterans through is part of the fun. Once you research some better weapons and armour things get a little easier… until the psi-influence sectoids appear!
STOP DISSING ENFORCE, KIDS. It cost me 50p from Gamestation and I enjoyed it a lot more than many other games I’ve payed £40 quid for. MANY GAMES.
Sure, you run around and just shoot stuff….but it’s fun, init?
I never played it, but IIRC apparently fan-made patches have made UFO: ETs into more or less the game it wanted to be.
I bought the first one for the same price earlier this weak, so yes, I am not amused.
I thought about buying the pack and then gifting UFO Defense away until I saw giants+sacrifice on gog.
Videogames, yay!
You can’t gift away your Steam games, unfortunately. That was a one-time deal with the Orange Box as far as I know.
I liked enforcer, i think i got it with Mech warrior 3 and the pirate moon expansion pack for 10$.
I tried Enforcer. I didn’t really know what to expect so I was absolutely bewildered to find soemthing like a sub-par arena-shooter with a few X-com trappings. It feels more like an Unreal Tournament mod than a real game.
I don’t understand why you’d want to play an inferior clone when the orginal is literally made of awesomeness and superlatives. Unless you want better graphics and worse gameplay I suppose.
A few more points:
* Oops – I should’ve mentioned: You have to play UFO: Extraterrestrials with BMan’s mod. It adds in lots of features that make the game more X-COM-like. For instance, now your soldiers can actually die!
* Enforcer starts off pretty lacklustre, but it gets better and more varied after the first bunch of levels.
* I think the only way to play the X-COM games is to force yourself to accept deaths. Okay, I would reload a mission if my entire squad died (i.e. mission failed) but I wouldn’t reload for anything else. You’ll feel genuine pain and fear as your favourite soldiers get injured, get killed or miraculously survive with 1 hit-point and become even more heroic.
That link doesn’t seem to be working for me. :( Searching X-COM on the steam site yields nothing as well.
Well, I have to confess to being a total XCOM virgin and normally none to entertained by turn-based games (I am assuming they are?) but hell, 5 games are worth 3 of my pounds any day.
Heard many great things about these over the years and haven’t played an old school actual “game” (as opposed to the now more common “interactive experience”) in some time so have given this a whirl.
Now… to read many manuals as I have no clue at all what is going on! =)
LOL @ people complaining about the difficulty of intercept missions – wait for the first terrorists to strike, while you only have solid projectile guns and no clue what to do. Wait for them to break your soldier’s minds from the shadows of the jungle. Then flee to your bases where you think yourself safe from harm. Loving this game is because of Stockholm Syndrome, and it is still true love.
It helps to think of the X-COM games as survival horror, just on a really grand scale.
And without the ’survival’ bit. Natch.
cant even see it here in brazil =(
Bought them myself, but a “X-COM for Dummies” guide would be a great idea. Even the beginner’s guide on the UFOpaedia site was not dummy enough for me.
P.
ok something is broken i will try a new post
Paul: you can get the manual of the individual game’s store page (clicky here), it includes a tutorial for getting started, it is quite helpful. Go windowed mode by Alt+Entering and work through it.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned how ridiculously difficult TFTD(the second XCom) is! As a sixteen year old, I plain just gave up and moved on.
The best way to preserve your sanity is to avoid playing that installment until the very end. Any game that comes with a game killing research bug as standard practice is SCARY
“I’m surprised that no one has mentioned how ridiculously difficult TFTD(the second XCom) is!”
I did!
It was the firt game I played in the series too, when it was released and I was 13, loved it to bits. I didn’t play UFO till about 5 years later and finished it on my first go, having never completed TFTD (but gotten pretty far). I much prefer the setting of TFTD though.
Ooh, UFO for the first time is a tricky one.
If you know too much about UFO then it can spoil a lot of (nasty, fun) surprises. The best bet is to just learn the controls (how to move, shoot, crouch, research and opportunity fire) and leave it at that.
DON’T look up the opposition AT ALL – They’re supposed to be alien and mysterious.
Oh, to be able to play this again for the first time…
TFTD is still my favourite of the lot, despite the many, varied and entertaining logical inconsistencies.
Want to throw a grenade 50 metres while underwater? No problem! How about swimming about in the sea? No way!
It’s a tough challenge, but it’s atmospheric, the music’s spooky and the graphics are clearer than UFO.
The enemies are also way better.. boo to greys and yay to aquatoids!
Meh, whether you steal from UFO loons or from H. P. Lovecraft really doesn’t make a big difference.
X-COM: UFO Unknown is one of my all-time favorite video games. It is one of the most difficult games I have ever played. It played it, in total, for at least 100 hours. I had the Playstation version, which had an insanely terrifying soundtrack that perfectly extended the spooky atmosphere. If your playing X-COM: UFO for the first time, you MUST download the soundtrack and play it with the game.
The best advice I can give is for newbies for the early game:
- Your squad will drop like flies unarmored. You will not have any armor in the beginning, so always save enough time points for a snapshot during the Alien’s turn. Also, your weapons suck, so grenades are your friend.
- Do not install a large radar detector until you are ready. Once you do, there will be about 5x the amount of UFOs you have to deal with.
- During night terror missions, go slow. A civilian is worth less than a marine; worry about your marine’s safety first.
I may add:
- The black market is your friend. Really, what do a coulpe thousand laser rifles in the hands of potentially untrustworthy people mean when the alien menace is averted? So if you need money – and you need money – just hire a couple of engineers and find out what the most profitable and easiest to reproduce future tech is, then sell it big time.
You will probably want to set up a base just for that later. I kid you not.
“Meh, whether you steal from UFO loons or from H. P. Lovecraft really doesn’t make a big difference.”
Yeah it does, HP Lovecraft is much more entertaining.