Posts Tagged ‘X-COM: Terror From The Deep’

X-Com spiritual successor Phoenix Point is doing $100k per month in pre-orders

phoenix_point_6

Snapshot Games, lead by David Kaye and X-Com creator Julian Gollop, is a runaway success. Or at least I would think $100k a month in pledges would give a game studio some breathing room. But Snapshot isn’t sleeping at night. The prevalence of cheap games and promotional bundles has the studio spooked because, while this is a time of incredibly bounties for consumers, not every game can have the financial safety net of, say, Sea of Thieves. This makes creating a game of the scale of Phoenix Point exceptionally perilous.

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GOG’s 2K sale features old school X-Com among others

terror from the deep

Over at GOG, the reduced-price trips down memory lane continue, only this week there’s a whole lot more X-Com. Specifically, this week’s GOG sale range focuses on a lot of 2K’s older franchises, particularly from the strategy genre. The entire original run of X-Com games can be found here for less than £2 / $2 each, which is nigh-impossible to not recommend. Then there is the 2004 version of Sid Meier’s Pirates, a game I’ve poured more hours into than I really want to think about, and much more.

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RPS Feature X-COM Meets The Mist

Phoenix Point: Every Detail Of The X-COM Creator’s Return To The Genre

One of the most exciting games in Los Angeles this week won’t be featured at press conferences or on the showfloor. Phoenix Point [official site] is the new tactical-strategy hybrid from Julian Gollop, the creator of the original X-COM, and we met yesterday to discuss its procedurally generated alien threats, simulated human factions and much more. Here’s the world’s first in-depth look at the game.

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RPS Feature The greatest total conversion ever made

You Wouldn’t Steal A Skyranger: X-Piratez Is An Outstanding Total Conversion Of UFO/X-COM

In my intro to Silent Storm, I mentioned both modding scenes and UFO (used to distinguish the 1994 original X-COM from the 2012 Firaxis one, and not only out of increasingly sad Eurocentric obstinance) without tying the two together. That, it turns out, was stupid, because X-Piratez, a UFO mod in active development by Dioxine, is the best total conversion for any game I’ve ever played.

Based on OpenXcom Extended, a long-running open source clone of UFO, it takes the story and gameplay structure of the original, and a huge stock of resourcefulness, and turns them into something that’s simultaneously very similar and completely new. The result is a dangerously addictive compound of comfortable old UFO with constant surprise, discovery, and content.

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RPS Feature neXtCOM

What Should XCOM 2’s First Expansion Be?

I visited Firaxis in 2014 to see Civilization: Beyond Earth and it was impossible not to wonder which closed doors were hiding the XCOM 2 [official site] team. The game hadn’t been announced but surely somebody was working on a sequel. Would it follow the path of the original games and take to the Lovecraftian depths? Would it reach toward the stars and a battle on various alien homeworlds? Would it take risks or rest comfortably on well-earned laurels?

The answer, as we now know, didn’t quite fit any of the above. These are happy times for the XCOM devotee but I’m hoping for an apocalyptic future. Here are a few ideas and hopes for what the game’s first expansion might be.

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RPS Feature

Have You Played… X-COM: Terror From The Deep?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

It’s not quite the forgotten child of the X-COM series – that title probably belongs to the ambitious but confused Apocalypse – but Terror From The Deep certainly gets a slightly raw deal. To a great extent, it deserves it – it’s primarily a quickly-made reskin with the difficulty cranked up. And yet my fondness for it is almost greater than my fondness for the first, admittedly superior game.
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