In Com We Trust... 5/5

The 5 classes in X-com: Assault, Sniper, Support, Heavy and...um... silhouette?

IN COM, WE TRUST...

    So it would take some kind of super computer to work out the hours I spent as a child, working my way around suspiciously familiar farm-like environments, being slaughtered by shadowy figured Sectoids in the original UFO: Enemy Unknown...Double said machines power to calculate the times a Muscular Muton in a green one-sie destroyed squads, or how the terrible "Wibble" of a cyberdisc sounded very much like the bagpipes at soldiers funerals...

    Take that same super computer, increase it's capacity ten fold, give it glasses, a pipe and a residence at Cambridge and only then do you have a machine able to measure my love for this game, and (as the council will so often tell you when you smash the Alien Foe month after month) that not is something this council says lightly...

UF - OH, YEAH!

Someone finally found out what was inside the Cyberdisc...
...their funeral is on thursday.

    Okay...not my finest pun, but this is definately what I was thinking as i played this game through. I loved, and i mean truly loved, the original games this was based on (with the exception of TFTD perhaps...) and i just felt that the whole team behind X-Com had the same love - but the necessary skills to take that love and make it into a damn awesome game.

"...and i just felt that the whole team behind X-Com had the same love - but the necessary skills to take that love and make it into a damn awesome game..."

    Like a good house renovation, the developers behind this game looked in detail at what was missing from the originals, and what made them good - then smashed up the bad and tossed them into expensive skips.
    The Aliens have had a re-vamp (though I was sad to see no "Snake-Men" running amok in the cities) and child-like Sectoids now look like an army of Golems from Lord of the Rings...The Pyjama clad Mutons (beautifully refereneced in the weapon testing cut scenes) are now hulking great armored beasts of terror and the cyberdisc, a once highly annoying Frisbie, has been changed into the Matrix's answer to the Swiss Army knife...

If it bleeds we can kill i...oh God damn it isn't bleeding...

    Subsequently, every decision counts and Tactics have replaced throwing 12 rookies into a Skyranger to be turned into piles of goo by a relentless foe. Every move matters, and though saving the game and replaying a section so that it goes more your way could be a way round this, the Iron Man function removes this and makes you pay for each and every indecision, or revel in joy at that impossible shot that makes it...

"...you pay for each and every indecision, or revel in joy at that impossible shot that makes it..."

Any Last Words?

    If you've an ounce of nostalgia in your bones, then jump into the warm waters of this game and find yourself looking at exactly what a remake of a popular classic should be. Take the elements that were restricted by original design whether they be technical or creative, alter and amend them, make them better. Isolate and expand upon the things that made it wonderful, give those ideas wings and let them soar...

    I was lost in this game from the first instance and that tingly sensation that I was playing something incredibly good didn't leave, in fact on the final mission it was bolstered. The final mission really is a crescendo, a final twist that creatively ties up the mystery and the elements that were missing from original and left not only my mouth gaping, but my mind craving more.

If you're in Game Development and someone says to you "You're at a dinner party, and anyone from history can join you...who would you invite" then here's my suggestion...
...Push Jesus and Lazarus back into that cave...
...kick Wilde in the shins and toss him threepence for some Gin...
...sit Einstein in front of a computer and show him that his greatest legacy to the modern world was a poster of him with his tongue out for students and leave him to weep...

Then compile a list of the Firaxis team who put together X-Com: Enemy unknown...and ask them how they did it.

The modernisation of "West Side Story" was met with mixed reviews...and plasma fire...