Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m about to conduct another interview with Firaxis on the subject of their upcoming X-COM remake, and fortunately I go in armed with the knowledge lent me by watching around an hour of live-streamed footage. You can watch it too, because you are dear to me. It includes two missions of the game (one of which is a Terror Mission) and a wander around the base, narrated enthusiastically by three Firaxicons, and it’s meant that all the various elements I’ve heard about the game, both changed and reverential, finally fell into place. I understand, now, how this thing works. And I think it looks really rather fine – whether or it not it’s entirely X-COMmy, it is definitely a game I want inhabiting my hard drive. Here, take a look for yourself.
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I’m about to say something pretty profound here, so let me clear my vocal passages of any and all disgusting bilious substances that might’ve congealed while I was allowing them to hibernate for occasions like these. Ahem. OK then, here goes: War is kind of not great. Some cultures even go so far as to consider it “a bit of a shame, sometimes.” And from the sound of things, XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s going to be one of those wars. Millions of people will come away feeling slightly unwell, and some might even have to miss work the next day. It’s going to be gruesome, folks. See the unbridled carnage in a new trailer after the break.

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Alec can’t post these XCOM: Enemy Unknown screenshots. We’ve had to ration him to only thinking about the game in safely designated times, to stop him from exploding with excitement. For safety reasons, I’m bringing you the seven latest images of Firaxis’ take on the classic game. You may stare at them and probably worry that they’re doing it all wrong below.

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A small gray alien finds itself alone in the smoking remains of a forested battlefield. Everyone else – friend and foe alike – has fallen, yet it still stands victorious, a conquerer of worlds. And then, the unthinkable happens: SNAP. A beartrap closes around its exposed footflesh. It yelps in pain, which draws the attention of one remaining human survivor. The two immediately lock eyes, but this is no staring contest. It’s a staring war. But then, the solider lowers his gun and pulls apart the beartrap’s blood-caked jaws. He proceeds to help his one-time enemy up, at which point we cut immediately to a montage of the two skipping merrily through sunflower fields, pushing each other on a swing set, and making silly faces in a photo booth. “Wow,” declares the president one minute and 47 seconds later, after the montage has ushered in an era of peace. “If we’d just gotten to know our enemy, everything would’ve been so much easier.”

I will imagine this sequence every time humans and aliens team up in XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s multiplayer. Every single time.

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How often do you find yourself looking at Civilization V and thinking, ‘all this science and culture is fine, but there simply aren’t enough deities knocking about the place’. If the answer is ‘very often’ you might already have bought the Gods and Kings expansion. If not you could read my thoughts on what it does for the game or you could even try it for yourself. There’s a demo on Steam and, brilliantly, it’s standalone; you won’t need the base game to try it. Handy that, for those who held off buying in the hope that an expansion might make the whole thing more appealing. Embarrassingly, I’m not actually sure how much the demo contains but I’d bet fifty pence that it sets a limit on how many turns you can play for.

Civ V is integrating with Steam Workshop with the intent of making the use of mods much more user friendly. Create mod collections, browse what’s available through Steam and then fall to your knees in anguish because Fall From Heaven is nowhere to be seen in this version of the game and never will be. I haven’t explored the modding scene for this one a great deal, although now is the time for revisitations with the Gods and Kings expansion pack due on June 19. I’ll be telling you wot I think about that in due course and might be tempted to dip into modland as well.

The news lookouts from BluesNews lit a beacon signalling that the Civ 5 expansion pack, Gods & Kings, isn’t far away now, with a release date of a startlingly nearby June 19th. Firaxis have sat down to make their developer men talk a bit about what’s going on with the new races in a developer diary, which you can see below. The nine new factions come along with reworked diplomacy mechanics that will now encompass a fresh take on religion and espionage. There are a bunch of faction-specific abilities detailed in there, too, such as Carthage’s Alp-surmounting mountain leaping. Good work, Barca boys.
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I’m only just curling myself out of the tiny ball of rage I’d become due to missing out on getting to play Firaxis’ X-COM reboot the other week. Instead, we sent Adam. Adam! He’s famous for saying stuff like “aliens are for losers” and “turn-based combat is a dusty relic of a bygone age” and “I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Skyranger”, then he starts body-popping and singing Flo Rida songs.

I take some small measure of comfort from the following end of the world-themed and rather splendid E3 trailer for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which you may yourself watch below. It’s impressively dramatic and explosive, in a way that I can only presume will be somewhat at odds with the slower-paced, turn-based combat of the real thing, but more excitingly it shows a Cyberdisc transforming, some sort of new alien that might be made of crystallised light, a Chrysalid in action, hints at some sort of psychic powers for soldiers and a glimpse of a very pissed-off Muton trapped in an alien containment tank. I likey.
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Perhaps you would be mildly interested in seeing the handsome men of Rock, Paper, Shotgun strolling by the sea in Brighton, or perhaps you are more interested in being among the first in the UK to play Borderlands 2? You could also see XCOM: Enemy Unknown in action, with a 15-minute demo being presented by one of the brains behind the game. But where and when do such wonders occur, I hear you ask. The clue’s in the header image. Rezzed, the two-day PC-only show arranged by Eurogamer with assistance from these parts, offers this and much more. It takes place on July 6th and 7th at the Brighton Centre, and tickets are available now.

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