ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 180: xcom)

[Revier]

Well I was unaware this place had an effortpost on FFTA. I would like a link to it.

[Integrity]

parr can dig it up or not but i'm pretty sure he did a lp that didn't quite complete

[Parrhesia]

I won't dig it up but I did also 100% FFTA1 several years back - this is substantially less legwork than 100%ing FFTA2 because the vast majority are dispatches. My takeaway is basically that it doesn't hold up nearly as well, there's just a lot more pain-in-the-ass stuff (it even has its own needlessly hard-to-beat lategame dispatch!), the Law system and low accuracy and high time-to-kill and taking Ages just to play makes the core gameplay experience kind of a chore.

It's pretty and it's charming, and I prefer it a lot to TO: Knights of Lodis which always felt bizarrely soulless to me. I'm still really fond of it and it'll always have a place close to my heart. It was a Forever Game that could actually keep my attention when I was a hyperactive kid, before epilepsy medication made me permanently mellow out. But I couldn't recommend it.

Though I guess having 100%ed both FFTAs and completed FFT and Fell Seal, and got like to the 3/4 mark of both Tactics Ogres... do I need to go back and clear those, now? Reborn fixed most of the issues with TO Original at least, it seems. Sure as hell won't be 100%ing them, though. Reborn seems to have serious Forever Game aspirations.

[Revier]

TO Reborn is...weird. It makes many improvements over the PSP version. But, at the same time, it still keeps a lot of its mechanical bloat, and also overcorrects in some particularly cruddy ways. I would say it's a good SRPG that was almost great, and the fact that it sabotages itself out of greatness frustrates me plenty.

At least we can mod a decent portion of it now, which means it could, theoretically, achieve greatness someday. When that will happen, though, is anyone's guess.

...I am hoping they will do a better job with the FFT remake, though I understand that there are certain core aspects of it that don't hold up today, and that, being a popular game, it's likely going to come under fire if it attempts any drastic changes. Square Enix could very well surprise us, however. We will see.

Edited September 4 by Revier

[Dayni]

Didn't know DOOM had official releases this recently. Not much to say beyond that as someone who's Doomless.

If I were to take part in checking an old favourite, I'd probably be picking something on PS2 and that's a little limited at the minute. Maybe NFS:U as a pretty straightforward title in terms of length and structure, first thing that came to mind.

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

The Bazaar

Reading this, I'm kinda relieved I didn't get into this beforehand.

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

your sad-clown Wandering Anime Jew

Why do I feel like I need to tug my collar awkwardly reading this?

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

FFTA1 is a subversive masterpiece if you are 15 and have just discovered TVTropes and have made this everyone's problem.

Guilty as charged /s

 

[Integrity]

AGE OF WONDERS III (TRIUMPH, 2014)

Finished: 6/9/24 (heh). Playtime: 220.5 hours.

This one has been in the works for a long, long time. I was trying, on-and-off, to 100% Age of Wonders 3 back in 2016, long before the bug truly bit me. We'll get to why, but this is a case of it actually taking me ten years to polish something up, not just a game from 2014 I picked back up for some reason.

Age of Wonders is an interesting little franchise. I've found that the 4X / grand strategy space is generally separable by how much goes into their battle systems, and the strategic gameplay is often the inverse of that. At one extreme, you've got games like Europa Universalis, where combat is completely abstracted and influenced only by your behind-the-scenes numbers and maybe some very light army building. On the other extreme, there's Total War, with a nominal strategic game wrapper to give context to the in-depth real-time batttles. There's steps along this chain, of course, like modern Civilization being a step more tactical in combat than a Paradox game and being a bit lighter on the strategy, and opposite that's where Age of Wonders slots in. The step more strategic from Total War is games that have a bit more empire building to do, a bit less conquest to do, and zoom in for turn-based tactical battles. Heroes of Might and Magic almost typifies this, but plays more like a weird RPG in practice and belongs more with Total War; the proper exemplary forms in my opinion are Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, and Endless Legend. This tends to be my favorite gender of 4X overall, fun fact, so it's nice to finally get a representative on the shelf.

The strategic gameplay of Age of Wonders 3 can be described, without being too uncharitable, as Civilization lite in a fantasy world. You've got a set of races you can be, neutral races you can conquer or befriend, and a bevy of summoning and enchanting spells to augment your cities and armies. City growth is straightforward and based chiefly on in-city and capturable on-map structures rather than having access to rivers or anything like that, and empire growth is largely confined to building cities and connecting them with roads. Exploration involves fighting lots of neutral monsters, including raiding tombs for hard fights and hefty rewards, very much in the vein of 1994's Master of Magic, and those tombs become high-value things to settle cities around. It's a little deeper than Total War, but certainly not the game for you if you preferred Civilization 2 or 4 over 5 or 6.

The tactical combat of Age of Wonders 3 is where the meat of the game lies. Units can be grouped into stacks of up to 6 in the strategic map, and every combat outside of tomb raiding involves the attacker, the defender, and all stacks adjacent to the defender. Quantity can be a substitute for quality, but the game is eternally lurching towards an inevitable endgame of spamming the top tier units into big stacks. It's, regrettably, a game that's often over before it's done, but the midgame is very enjoyable to compensate. I won't get too into the various mechanics of the combat itself, but it's a very satisfying turn-based (player/enemy phase, not per-unit) affair that has a lot of beef to it and deeply rewards mastery. All units can level up very significantly to gain new abilities, higher stats, and sometimes even promote into stronger variants; on top of that, your heroes all have bespoke gear and skill point systems to build up as they level. It's very fair to say that the battles of Age of Wonders 3 feed into each other significantly, but in a way that's usually appropriately satisfying and rarely unfair. Some combinations of factors can get degenerate, but that's a bit part and parcel for this kind of game.

Getting into game modes and getting into achievements go hand in hand here, so we're going to interweave them a bit. Age of Wonders 3 is not a fun game to 100%, but is a very fun game to, say, like 94%. The lion's share of the game's 74 achievements (I'm talking, like, 60 of them) are just stuff you will naturally accumulate by playing literally any mode. There's six classes (Dreadnought, Rogue, Theocrat, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlord) that your leader can be, with a seventh (Necromancer) via DLC, and there's an achievement for winning a full game with each. Over the course of those seven games, there's dozens that will just show up as long as you're exploring the gamespace. Winning a game as each alignment (good, evil, neutral) and summoning the final monster of each type, creating a custom leader in the surprisingly-robust character creator, having an Elite unit, fully equipping a hero, researching everything, making the AI surrender, so on and so on. There's probably 40 achievements like this that you'll hardly have to think about doing. There's a few you'll have to go very slightly out of your way for, like to use Invoke Death (low% chance to kill a unit instantly) to kill an enemy leader or to win a Unifier Victory (basically the game's culture victory, in a game about conquest), but nothing that will take any particular effort if targeted and all fit inside those seven required maps. There's a single secret achievement called Mine Crafted to recruit the random hero Per Notchson, because now-known fascist Notch was a huge financial backer of Age of Wonders 3. That's aged pretty badly, but this was 2014.

Online games are where the fun of Age of Wonders 3 is, and by that I mean co-op compstomps with your buddies and not actual competitive play. I've put a hundred hours or more into this game just playing it with good buddies Jim and Parrhesia, not thinking about any kind of achievements. Before Total Warhammer 3, I'd say the Age of Wonders games were the ultimate hang-with-buddies strategic compstomp games. The title's gone, now, but it's still a respectable second. The achievements do come up here; everything earnable in that first paragraph can come from a multiplayer game just fine, and a total of about five more achievements come from the process of winning 30 online games and 1 play by e-mail game. That hundred hours above only actually constituted ten victorious games, so this is one to get a buddy and pad if you're actually gunning for it. Thanks, as ever, to Parrhesia for this one. I wonder how much of his life he's spent doing banal shit to finish games off for me.

The reason Age of Wonders 3 has taken so long is those last eight achievements. Age of Wonders 3's campaigns take their cues from good old Heroes of Might and Magic, in that they are absolutely oppressive fast-expansion tempo-fests where losing a battle or falling a bit behind can turn the game into an instant and horrible slog. They're exhausting to play, they're not very good, and to top it off beating them isn't enough. The base game shipped with two campaigns, the Elven Court and the Commonwealth, and each of them comes with a binary decision to betray your chosen faction and play an alternative final map. Each path has an achievement, for four across two campaigns. These campaigns are pretty easy, if dull, but that's the baseline going forward.

There's two more campaigns in the two DLCs. The Halfling campaign is the first "for experts" campaign, and I think it's the most reasonable of the four, not least of which because it just requires a single run through. It skews a bit brutal at times, but I nearly enjoyed it overall. Its big problem is that Halflings are the biggest, bullshittest, stupidest fucking race ever added to a strategy game. See, the deal with Age of Wonders is that your roster is determined by a combination of your race and leader class. Every race has the same loose loadout of units - irregular, swordsman, archer, pikeman, support, cavalry, elite - and these can vary hugely. The elves have a traditional archer who attacks three times at long range for heavy damage, while the humans have a lower-powered archer who's wearing actual armor, and the dwarves have a heavy crossbow unit who can only shoot one time but for heavy damage. Your class units vary wildly from class to class and do not map onto each other one bit. Some classes are heavier on the summons, while the Warlord has exclusively mortal units built from cities, for instance. For each of these, a certain racial adjustment is performed. With Human Crusaders as a baseline, Elven Crusaders might have lower health, higher damage, higher resistance, and a weakness to Shock damage; while Goblin Crusaders might have lower health, lower defense, but +1 Blight damage on melee and a resistance to Blight damage. It does create interesting decisions between races and there are absolutely clear winners and losers depending on the combination you're using (Goblin Monster Hunters what's up!) but overall I like it a lot.

Halflings are the wrench in this entire thing. The major Halfling racial adjustment is to take a 20% weakness to Physical damage, which is utterly crippling, and in exchange they get Lucky. Lucky is simple: it's a 10% chance to ignore any attack. The mathematically astute among you may note that this is a simple loss, considering how much damage is physical. The mathematically shrewd among you may be inclined to ask about hits-to-kill thresholds; to the unit with 20 hit points, being hit for 10 and 12 damage is often exactly the same thing, after all, so this could actually be a strict upgrade. Neither is quite right: it's a problem of variance. Given that the campaigns are a hellish tempo war where the AI is always bringing in more money than you possibly could, you cannot afford to play around Lucky at all. This goes back to my big old wall about Fell Seal's accuracy ratings: the chance to "miss" is so low, the pace of combat is so fast, the unit counts are insufficient to have contingency plans, so a lucky set of "misses" from an enemy is usually not something that you can maneuver to exploit, and an unlucky set of "misses" from you is something that can just ruin a fight instantly. Having two lucky procs in a row is only a 1% chance, but given the hundreds and hundreds of attacks you're throwing out in a campaign, you're inevitably going to run into that situation and have blown a third of your army's action economy on a sure kill and gotten nothing from it, and that's a situation that's really hard to recover from. You can't rely on it, and you can't budget around the enemy having it. It just fucks you both ways. Anyway, back to the Halfling campaign: I got through the harder maps by just replacing my Halfling cities with forced Goblin resettlement.

The final DLC, and final campaign, is the Necromancer campaign. This campaign is completely in the tradition of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It is an absolute and total ballbuster. The maps are enormous. You're always either given undead units that require necromancer support or heroes to heal at all and then only given one necromancer hero, or you're given a majority of living units for your living heroes but you still have the necromancer kicking on as your strongest hero and none of his shit works unless you get him some undead units. It never works. It's always hellish multi-front warfare. Worst of all, the early turns of the (even bigger than the last ones) final map presents you two binary choices: ally with the Big Neutrality to destroy the other necromancers, ally with the other necromancers and rule together, or tell both to fuck themselves and go to war with everyone on your own behalf. All three of these forks have their own achievements, and the choice is in the first ten turns of what will turn out to be 100+. It's grueling. The campaigns in general are the reason that this took so long, but this campaign in specific has been the only thing left to do for achievements in this game since May.

A big part of this, to follow up on the Halfling thing, is how Necromancy plays in the game's ecosystem. Necromancers as a class are unique: while they have their own set of class units like all six others, they also modify their base race completely. Every race can be Ghouled (Ghoul Humans, Ghoul Frostlings, Ghoul Halflings, etc.) to turn a city undead. Undead cities are unique in that they don't grow passively at all unless specific buildings are made to make that happen, and they only grow via conquest - a portion of all living units killed gets sent back to the nearest undead city as new citizenry. Undead cities, themselves, produce the same vast variety of racial units as living ones, but Ghouled. Ghouled units take on all the quirks of their living counterparts, but carry precisely the traits you'd think the undead would: immunity to morale and mental effects, a weakness to fire and light damage, a resistance to blight and cold damage, and they don't regenerate at all in the overworld unless there's a necromancer or necromantic support unit attached to the stack. They're fiddlier than the living, but can snowball really horribly, and honestly so far so good.

Bret Devereaux wrote in a blogpost about Game of Thrones' armor that, loosely paraphrased, the next weapon any culture is going to invent is always the weapon that lets them defeat their own armor. This summarizes, with incredible brevity, the problem with Necromancer mirror matches in Age of Wonders 3. Necromancers focus on doing a lot of blight and cold damage, a lot of plagues and diseases to debilitate and destroy the living, and a lot of fear and panic abilities. All of that is resisted or no-sold completely by any Ghouled unit, and all Necromancer units are Ghouled. There are mid-level Necromancer hero abilities to mind control enemy undead, but then there are high-level Necromancer hero abilities to make your undead immune to enemy Necromancer mind control. A top-end Necromancer vs. Necromancer duel is a duel entirely of passive buffs that gets settled by the ordinary numbers of their units. Ghoul Draconians are great at this because they're Ghouled units who contribute a good amount of fire damage to basically everything they do! Ghouled Frostlings are horrible because they get extra cold damage and a bonus to their already-good cold resistance.

Your Necromancer is a Frostling, there is no Draconian faction in most (any?) of the maps, and, to tie it back, all three forks of the final map will throw you into at least one mid-lategame showdown as a Frostling Necromancer against a Halfling Necromancer.

Still, perseverance wins the day! This won't be the last time you see Age of Wonders in this thread, or even the other two pillars of the subgenre I listed earlier. Master of Magic's surprise 2022 reboot was weirdly fantastic, Endless Legend is a long-term stretch goal, and there's two more games after Age of Wonders 3 that are all Steamworksed up. There's a straightforward sequel in 4, which is an updated version of the same concept they've been doing since 1999's Age of Wonders, and there's the franchise's own Alpha Centauri in Planetfall. That's a hell of a lot better than Beyond Earth was, though, thank God.

[lenticular]

  

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

Age of Wonders is an interesting little franchise. I've found that the 4X / grand strategy space is generally separable by how much goes into their battle systems, and the strategic gameplay is often the inverse of that. At one extreme, you've got games like Europa Universalis, where combat is completely abstracted and influenced only by your behind-the-scenes numbers and maybe some very light army building. On the other extreme, there's Total War, with a nominal strategic game wrapper to give context to the in-depth real-time batttles. There's steps along this chain, of course, like modern Civilization being a step more tactical in combat than a Paradox game and being a bit lighter on the strategy, and opposite that's where Age of Wonders slots in. The step more strategic from Total War is games that have a bit more empire building to do, a bit less conquest to do, and zoom in for turn-based tactical battles. Heroes of Might and Magic almost typifies this, but plays more like a weird RPG in practice and belongs more with Total War; the proper exemplary forms in my opinion are Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, and Endless Legend. This tends to be my favorite gender of 4X overall, fun fact, so it's nice to finally get a representative on the shelf.

The strategic gameplay of Age of Wonders 3 can be described, without being too uncharitable, as Civilization lite in a fantasy world. You've got a set of races you can be, neutral races you can conquer or befriend, and a bevy of summoning and enchanting spells to augment your cities and armies. City growth is straightforward and based chiefly on in-city and capturable on-map structures rather than having access to rivers or anything like that, and empire growth is largely confined to building cities and connecting them with roads. Exploration involves fighting lots of neutral monsters, including raiding tombs for hard fights and hefty rewards, very much in the vein of 1994's Master of Magic, and those tombs become high-value things to settle cities around. It's a little deeper than Total War, but certainly not the game for you if you preferred Civilization 2 or 4 over 5 or 6.

Yeah, I find all this stuff fascinating. Especially seeing how different approaches will resonate differently for different people. I definitely tend more towards the abstracted combat end of things, personally. I've been playing a bunch of Victoria 3 recently, which is even further towards that end of the scale than Europa Universalis, and I've been really digging it. EU4, incidentally, can actually have some highly tactical combat if you're willing to slow the pace of the game down to a crawl and pause every day to issue new orders. It's completely unrealistic, degenerate, gamey nonsense, but it is there.

Civ combat is weird and doesn't actually make any sense when you think about it for more than about half a second. Basically because it's operating on multiple different scales at once. We're supposed to see each hex as being hundreds of miles on the map, but also a typical medieval archer can happily shoot their bow two hexes away. It works fine from a pure game mechanics perspective, but is garbage when it comes to flavour and immersion and all that stuff.

The Age of Wonders/Total War way of doing things where you switch down to a smaller scale to resolve the actual combats makes so much more sense, but it generally doesn't work for me for gameplay reasons. Part of it, I think, is just that the constant switching back and forth tends to break up flow, but I think it's also a balance thing. If I do well on the strategic layer then that means that I have an advantage on the tactical layer, which then means that it's... kinda boring? Who wants to play a game where the odds are constantly stacked in your favour? But if you just auto-resolve the combat, it will always do worse than it should. I'm sure it's an absolute blast when the two different game modes feel in sync with each other, but it's never worked for me.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

There's a single secret achievement called Mine Crafted to recruit the random hero Per Notchson, because now-known fascist Notch was a huge financial backer of Age of Wonders 3. That's aged pretty badly, but this was 2014.

Oof. Yeah. That has aged poorly. I both love and hate that this is the second time in a matter of weeks that "Notch is a fascist tool" has naturally come up as part of this thread.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

Bret Devereaux wrote in a blogpost about Game of Thrones' armor that, loosely paraphrased, the next weapon any culture is going to invent is always the weapon that lets them defeat their own armor. This summarizes, with incredible brevity, the problem with Necromancer mirror matches in Age of Wonders 3.

So many games seem to fall into this trap. And yeah, it makes sense that a fire elemental would both deal and resist fire damage, but it makes less sense when it comes to wizards inventing magic spells that would do the same. If I'm a wizard and I'm trying to create a spell that will make me resistant to fire, I'm also going to make it so I can do water damage or cold damage or whatever else fire creatures are weak to in that world.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

There's a straightforward sequel in 4, which is an updated version of the same concept they've been doing since 1999's Age of Wonders, and there's the franchise's own Alpha Centauri in Planetfall. That's a hell of a lot better than Beyond Earth was, though, thank God.

Incidentally, have you seen that actual Alpha Centauri has made it onto Steam now? Sadly, no achievements, or Id' totally take it up for "100% an old favourite and see if it holds up".

On 8/30/2024 at 3:09 AM, Integrity said:

Sometimes a game is so huge that you just, like, what the fuck do you say about Doom? This is a high that players and designers alike have been chasing for over thirty years. Hell, some of the guys who made Doom haven't really moved on from Doom. It's difficult to conceive of a game this influential even with all the evidence staring you right in the face. It's insane.

Yeah, it's got to be right up there in terms of most influential games ever. Possibly behind the original Super Mario Bros? Or some of the real foundational games like Pong or Space Invaders? But even as a non-FPS-enjoyer, it's hard to deny just how much Doom has shaped video games. I am tempted to start a separate thread just about this.

[Integrity]

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

But if you just auto-resolve the combat, it will always do worse than it should.

i do agree with a lot of what you said about the balance often not quite working on aggregate, but it's worth pointing out for this that more recent games of this type have done a few neat things to make "just autoresolve the boring ones" a lot more palatable. total warhammer 3 gives you a preview of if you'll lose any unit cards from autoresolve, and as i recall age of wonders planetfall (and 4, i think) actually let you seamlessly rewind and manually play out the battle if you're unhappy with how autoresolve turned out. it's not a perfect solution, mind, but i do think it does a lot towards focusing your attention on The Big, Meaningful Fights that the subgenre is nominally built for

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Incidentally, have you seen that actual Alpha Centauri has made it onto Steam now? Sadly, no achievements, or Id' totally take it up for "100% an old favourite and see if it holds up".

i haven't! a lot of that old microprose fare is there, so i'm not too surprised. it's real interesting to see the ways in which master of orion 2 is still kind of untouched in the genre

[Revier]

I've not played the Age of Wonders, but I have played their great great grandfather, Master of Magic. I greatly enjoy it, and still play it from time to time, but it's definitely not a well calibrated game, lol. Would be interesting to see how they expanded on and mutated the formula into its own thing.

Edited September 10 by Revier

[Integrity]

aow3 is (imo) the single closest game in overall vibe to master of magic (1994, the best game ever) that's ever been made. i don't know what it lands that fallen enchantress, the other age of wonders games, etc. don't, but something is there.

[lenticular]

On 9/8/2024 at 3:10 PM, Integrity said:

i do agree with a lot of what you said about the balance often not quite working on aggregate, but it's worth pointing out for this that more recent games of this type have done a few neat things to make "just autoresolve the boring ones" a lot more palatable. total warhammer 3 gives you a preview of if you'll lose any unit cards from autoresolve, and as i recall age of wonders planetfall (and 4, i think) actually let you seamlessly rewind and manually play out the battle if you're unhappy with how autoresolve turned out. it's not a perfect solution, mind, but i do think it does a lot towards focusing your attention on The Big, Meaningful Fights that the subgenre is nominally built for

Oh, that is good to know! I might have to give the subgenre another look at some point to see if it agrees with me more now than last time I played it. Maybe I'll pick up Planetfall next time it goes on sale or something.

[Integrity]

MECH ARMADA (LIONCODE, 2022)

Finished: 22/9/24. Playtime: 17.9 hours.

Two of my most beloved things are tactics games and mechs. Not just any tactics games and any mechs, mind, I have preferences and standards on both sides of the aisle, but in general these are the two flavors of games I tend to be kindest to even when I'm being critical of them (hello, Aegis Descent). Mech Armada is a cute little mech-based tactics roguelite that isn't super deep, but offers plenty of enjoyment for the fiver you can get it for during sale seasons. The premise is plenty simple: you build little mechs in your little mechlab and then go through a roguelite branched map to get more parts to build your mechs out of and more money with which to maintain a bigger squad. Variety is maintained not only in better parts costing more money but also in that you can only field a limited number of any given part at a time, meaning you do end up having a pretty wide variety of gameplans from run to run, especially when each mech is fielding multiple weapons against those limits. It's a little ugly but it's, in a word, pleasant.

One really neat thing the game does that I think needs to be poached by every other tactics game (including Fire Emblem) immediately is how it handles the enemy phase. Battles are pretty low scale; movement tends to be in the 1-2 square range and firing in the 1-3 range, and you can only field up to 6 bots on a field that's typically somewhere around 8x10. Enemy attacks are telegraphed live in response to your actions a la Into the Breach, but that's not the neat thing, which is the way the game resolves enemy animations. After you hit End Turn, enemy attacks on you are animated and resolved one by one exactly as any one of you would expect. After all enemies who can attack have taken their turns, every single enemy who is just repositioning repositions all at the same time. Put with an example, if you're up against 8 enemies and end turn, you'd watch Enemy A move and resolve its attack, then watch Enemy B move and resolve its attack, and then watch all of Enemies C through H all move around the field simultaneously rather than taking turns. It's such an astonishingly elegant way to save an insane amount of time while still having the player watch all the action that I'm shocked I haven't seen it in anything else before.

The achievements for the game are wearing the skin of a much harder roguelite, but I found them to be pretty breezy to get through. They fall into three categories: exploit a certain interaction of parts and enemies, do a challenge completion, and shit you'll get by accident along the way. The former are pretty straightforward and essentially just boil down to having the right parts to do something silly, like shooting an enemy from 8 squares away requiring a mech built from a [Roller, Ranger, Sniper] with two support mechs with Eagle Eye chassis in support, or having a Mine Launcher-equipped mech fire a mine and then having a Teleporter-locomotion mech swap positions with it. Mech Armada lets you customize what handful of parts you start with and blacklist others from spawning in a run, so these are all pretty trivial to get once you decide to do it.

Challenge runs are where the game gets interesting. There's a meta-currency that you can allocate freely to run upgrades and an achievement for deallocating all of your upgrades and winning a run vanilla. I got this one on my very first run before I had spent any in the first place, go me. There's another to beat a run using only the tutorial parts (weak legs, weak tracks, basic chassis, machine gun, and twin-linked machine gun) that lends towards you spamming out cheap guys instead of making big ones. There's another that asks you to win a run without spending money on new part development, but I'm pretty sure getting that one is automatic when getting the previous. There's two really fun opposite ones: win a run without ever fielding more than a single mech, and win a run while fielding 6 mechs with zero duplicate parts used. I found all of these to spark enjoyable changes to how I interacted with the game and liked doing them all. In addition to those is an Ascension mechanic that starts completely unlocked, no need to beat difficulties one by one to unlock the next tier. There's an achievement for maxing that slider out and winning the resulting run, which basically just asks you to find something degenerate that you enjoy and to spam it.

The game's very light plot contributes the next few. When you beat the game, your scientist figures out the next step towards actually beating the invasion, and the option to deploy him alongside your mechs gets added. Deploying him adds a little one health dude (who is comedically tiny) that you have to shepherd through a harder alternative route to get a Thing, then he departs and you have to walk back to the start through a series of really, really long battles. This is an enormous pain in the ass and, unlike the actual challenge runs, was not fun at all. Your reward for this is a new weapon that does nothing to trash enemies but kills the effectively-invincible Fog that can eat your mechs, enabling you to advance to phase 2 of the final boss fight and get the true ending, such as it is. The second phase of the final boss is also enormously tedious to work through, so these were absolutely the worst set of clears I did.

Last up to wrap up the game are two gently pain-in-the-ass achievements. After each boss fight you can select an augment that works passively for the rest of the run, things like giving all your mechs +1 damage or letting walker-type locomotion move on diagonals; one achievement asks you to have picked every one of these at some point in some run. The final achievement asks you to have spawned every single part at least one time, which can easily be accomplished by selecting any parts you've never used to be in your starting lineup and spawning a mech holding them on Turn 1 and then forfeiting the run - note if you follow me on this that starting with a mech doesn't count those parts, you want to start with the cheapest mech possible and then spawn a mech with the parts you want immediately. The thing that makes these two achievements gentle pains in the ass is that the game does not track what parts or augments you have used, so if you don't pick them up through organic play you'll have to make a spreadsheet of what you've spawned or picked to grab them all. I managed to get all of the augments organically, but needed to deploy a handful of weapons to mop everything up.

So ends a nice little package. Like I said, it's a fiver during sale season and there's even a demo so you can try before you buy. If Battletech Lite sounds up your alley and you're not looking for a forever game, I can't recommend Mech Armada more highly at that price point. Go check it out.

[Integrity]

CELESTE (MADDY MAKES GAMES, 2018)

Finished: 26/9/24. Playtime: 38.4 hours.

A funny thing that I've never really talked about on account of all the fucking Sonics is that I do like 2D platformers a fair bit, conceptually. I like a simple mastery loop and practicing precise inputs to surmount an obstacle, but I fall into a weird middle ground. I like to be challenged by my platformers, which has generally categorically ruled Mario out (the last Mario I played was actually Super Mario World), but I don't like the high-end kaizo nonsense like I Wanna Be The Guy. There's a sweet spot of platformers where things are difficult but not absurd that should be filled by Sonic, but I haven't actually enjoyed any 2D Sonic very much. This means that this void, for me, has really only been filled by Super Meat Boy. This is annoying, because I've had to spend 10+ years holding the dual opinions that Super Meat Boy is the best platformer in the world and also that Ed McMillen is kind of a fuckhead who I have a blood feud with for making a whole generation of gamers associate my name with a literal piss baby.

Awesome news, then: I think Celeste is even better than Super Meat Boy.

There's a billion words about the game written by a hundred thousand people who know the genre far better than I do and, frankly, there's very little need to add my voice to the chorus. Celeste is a fantastic game in every element, from the absolute core of how Madeline controls to the level design to the story to the sound design. It's not a perfect game - any time you have to use golden feathers to fly can get the hell out of my house - but any criticisms I have are ultimately very minor in the scheme of things. Celeste has been hailed as a modern masterpiece by a lot of people, and this time I absolutely agree with the consensus.

Platinum Celeste is the mountain that it really ought to be, and contains the majority of my praise for the game's design. There is a constant nearly-linear treadmill of difficulty that always feeds back into itself and always challenges you to be a little bit better. The high-flying wire stunts you need to do by the end of the optional content are completely incomprehensible to the guy you were in the first few worlds and they're hard as hell to do, but Celeste has held your hand every step of the way and encouraged you to do the next harder thing. It's a sublime structure that culminates in some of the hardest shit I have pulled off in a game and I am damn proud of myself for doing it. I think that means I understood Celeste, fundamentally.

What this all entails is actually surprisingly simple and, again, the game constantly leads you by the hand through the next hardest thing. The game's main story is seven levels long and fairly gentle, all told. Each of these levels has a bevy of strawberries to collect and a single crystal heart. The puzzles involved in getting to the crystal hearts are a bit esoteric for my tastes and, cards on the table, I looked up solutions for pretty much all of them. I think this is the one kink in Celeste's structure, since the hearts are required to move on through the final two levels. Each level also has a cassette which unlocks that world's B-side, a remixed and significantly harder version of the stage which gives another heart on completion. With hearts in hand, World 8 opens up. World 8 is a little step back in difficulty from World 7, the original conclusion, but introduces new mechanics for you to get your head around. It also has strawberries, a heart, and a cassette to unlock a B-side. Getting all of these things is required for achievements, naturally.

Once you've finished all 16 hearts from the A- and B-sides of all eight other worlds, the final set of challenges opens up. First for me was World 9. World 9 is a complete bastard, end-to-end, and demands a significant amount of improvement from you to gut through it. It took me about as long to get through World 9 alone as the sum total of the A-sides of the rest of the game. It's a long, long level that ends in a single mammoth screen that lasts several minutes with no checkpoints. Keep that in mind for a minute, by the way. The one grace of World 9 is that it has no collectibles along the main route; it's just a simple and direct platforming and light puzzle solving challenge. Do it.

The other thing that unlocks here is the C-sides for all eight of the initial worlds. While the B-sides are the world's design remixed to be significantly harder, the C-sides are the world's design pushed to the limit. Each C-side is typically two short screens reminding you of that world's features and sometimes showing you how to use them in an unexpected way and then a final screen which is long as hell and relatively brutal for the stage's placement. Even with all my skills at the end of the game, each of these C-sides bled a clean hundred deaths out of me except for one. Befitting its place as the original conclusion to the game, 7-C is a consummate motherfucker, a single long screen which took me multiple days and nearly four hundred deaths to finish on its own. 8-C is, like in the A-sides, a comparative step down, and was actually the final thing that I did in the game so that my last achievement would be called "Thanks For Playing". It felt right.

Celeste's ultimate challenge comes in that final screen of World 9. At the very end of it, you break a box to disable the lightning fields that you've been carefully navigating and then hop off to the game's conclusion. If you break the box and immediately go left, you can platform back through the remnants of this bastard screen - with no checkpoint, mind - and climb up to a whole new part of the stage. Once you're up there and have received a blessed checkpoint after probably 5 minutes since your previous one, you get a new set of brutal platforming challenges as you ascend to the final secret strawberry on the moon and seal the deal except for a cleanup achievement. 1-Up requires you to hold six strawberries at once without redeeming them, which happens automatically when they get close to you on solid ground. This took about half an hour to get on 1-A but was not bad at all. Sayonara, Celeste, and well done cracking into my very top echelon of games.

[Dayni]

Well that's slightly ominous (the difficulty), it's in my library.

On 9/26/2024 at 5:26 PM, Integrity said:

also that Ed McMillen is kind of a fuckhead who I have a blood feud with for making a whole generation of gamers associate my name with a literal piss baby.

!?

[Integrity]

On 9/27/2024 at 2:13 PM, Dayni said:

!?

isaac, of the binding of isaac fame

 

(i did not leave you hanging for several days to make a point helene knocked me completely off the grid)

[Integrity]

XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN (FIRAXIS, 2012)

Finished: 2/10/24. Playtime: 158.7 hours.

As of this writing, I'm still without internet thanks to Hurricane Helene. I've had to make do with whatever offline stuff I had installed before the apocalypse while I try to conserve phone data and thank my past self for buying a USB wi-fi dongle for some reason. So, you know, let's talk about XCOM at a bit more length and with a slightly cooler head than I did in the Chimera Squad post.

I've played every game in this franchise (okay, Legends aside) to some degree and feel fairly particular about them all. I played the original way back in the day and never quite jived with it. I was still a child, after all, and there were just a few too many moving parts for my tiny brain to wrap itself around compared to simpler, shittier games like the later Fallout Tactics. My XCOM story really begins in earnest in around 2009, in the same run of looking for new tactics games to sate the urge that would lead me to buy Fire Emblem in a Gamestop on Wright-Patterson. I'd finally, eighteen-ish years old, gotten old enough to get my head around X-COM: UFO Defense, and I found it to be a fantastic (if dated) time. These days, you can get it for a song and OpenXCOM does a hell of a lot of the lifting to get the game more palatable, so take this as a recommendation.

My first attempt at the series as a whole would come as a part of these here forums. If you dig very hard, you can find some very, very old Let's Plays of the original and of Terror from the Deep that I ran around here something like thirteen years ago, including some embarrassingly unedited videos. That was my first experience with Terror from the Deep, and I loved it. Something about shifting the game to the ocean, the starkly weirder enemies, the atmosphere inasmuch as a tactical game from 1995 can evoke atmosphere, it all worked perfectly for me. My biggest regret about the entire XCOM ecosystem is that all the spiritual sequels and successors go full into emulating the first, and absolutely nobody has taken a crack at being Terror from the Deep 2.

The rest of the classic pentych is pretty uninteresting. I have literally nothing to say about Interceptor, though I've nominally played it. Enforcer is an impressively dogshit game, as bad as the reputation implies. Topically, I've actually been spending offline hours playing Command and Conquer: Renegade, which is also pretty bad but plays like what Enforcer would have played like if it didn't suck completely. Apocalypse is the one interesting one, as it shifts focus from the planet to a single megacity, where you have to rent (or seize) properties and play nice with the local corporations and politics and control collateral damage while fighting aliens in the streets and all this shit. It's an extraordinarily ambitious game, and it's easily one of the games I most strongly wish I understood any bit of.

XCOM would famously take a long hiatus after the twin bombs of Interceptor and Enforcer, and then would famously be reannounced to the world as a third-person cover shooter to raucous disapproval. That game would still eventually come out as XCOM: The Bureau, an exceptionally 6/10 game that I've beaten for some reason and occasionally get the bug to 100% just to say I'm the guy who 100%ed XCOM: The Bureau. I have issues. Anyway, after 2K reeled from the blowback to The Bureau, they scrambled Firaxis together to make a "more X-COM-ey" game: XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown understands what made X-COM what it was and chooses to chart its own parallel course. The simulation of coordinating the defense of the Earth with your legions of faceless marines is replaced with a more recognizable structure of global events and a much smaller scale of guys one interview famously referred to as "your little action figures", which I think is a simply perfect description of Enemy Unknown's entire philosophy. There's certainly reasons to prefer the original over it, and I wish a game that wasn't the completely vapid and soulless Xenonauts would try it, but I like XCOM's smaller scale, flashier plays and progression, and all that. I like it just as much as the original, or maybe a very little bit more, but not as much as either its or the original's sequels. It's still a solid as hell game, though.

The achievements of Enemy Unknown are pretty wrapped up in things I want to say about the expansion, so let's go through them. A large chunk of the achievements are things that are basically (or completely) inevitable to get across the course of one or two campaigns. Plot beats, trivial "interact with this system" type ones, slightly longer "kill X aliens" or "shoot down X UFOs" type ones, etc. There's a few completionist-type ones, for shooting down all types of UFO in a single playthrough and for completing all autopsies/research projects/engineering projects in a single playthrough. There's a few challenge-type ones, like beating a mission with all female soldiers (titled Flight of the Valkyries, for a sensible chuckle), clearing a downed UFO with a single soldier on one of the top difficulties, or clearing an endgame abduction mission very quickly. There's also one for stacking your psionic multipliers as high as they can possibly go in order to mind control one of the enemy psionic leaders, the Ethereals, on a low% chance even taking it as far as you can go.

Then there's the completion achievements, and this is where the bulk of Enemy Unknown is tied up. Beat the game, beat the game on Classic (third from four), and beat the game on Impossible (fourth from four). Another asks you to beat the game on Classic or Impossible (Classic, let's be real) with Ironman enabled. A third asks you to beat the game on Classic or Impossible without ever buying a squad size upgrade: 4 soldiers per mission all game long. This one's a real doozy, doubly so because I did it on the Impossible run like a chump. Another hard/annoying as hell one, but one without any difficulty requirements, is to deploy a single soldier to every single mission all game long. You have very little wiggle room for mission windows, so you either have to savescum liberally to get one soldier almost never hurt or you have to take massive strategic penalties for passing on missions because your chosen guy is in the hospital. This one's annoying to get even on Easy, do not try it on a harder mode. The final one of these is A Continental Fellow. When you start the game, you get to choose to headquarter XCOM in any of the five continents, which correspond to FIFA's non-Oceania constituent federations. Each comes with a unique bonus, and there are distinct haves and have-nots here, but A Continental Fellow requires you to register a full campaign victory from each starting position. It also does not track which ones you've won from, though there is a mod to check that. Keep this achievement in mind for a bit, though.

Enemy Unknown would be followed up a year later with its expansion pack, XCOM: Enemy Within. If there was one complaint to have about Enemy Unknown, it's that progression was just a bit fixed and linear with very little room to deviate from the ballistics -> lasers -> plasma track except for when you decided to slot armor upgrades in. There wasn't even very much to do in terms of building on your little tank buddy (lovingly, the Super Heavy Infantry Vehicle, or SHIV) or in utility items to give your guys. Enemy Within was constructed from the ground up to address this lack of variety and mostly succeeds. I would say, overall, that Enemy Within is the definitive way to play the game, but it does commit a colossal misstep that sincerely tanks the lategame. We'll get to that. Every new thing Enemy Within added corresponds to an achievement set, which is why I started talking achievements earlier.

Meld is the primary addition to the game's ecosystem. Meld is seeded into most missions as two canisters that are randomly seeded on the map and decay after a certain number of turns unless you manually secure them with a soldier or beat the mission before the timer. The idea here was to get players to break out of a very slow creeping meta way to play the game which was both unassailable by the aliens and boring as hell to do, and it mostly works. Meld is carted home and used in two new buildings, the Genetics Lab and the Cybernetics Lab, to give you an alternative advancement track for your guys besides just "get to plasma faster".

Gene mods are the lesser of the two systems, unfortunately. Most aliens will give access to one of the game's ten gene mods when autopsied, split into pairs for five categories in total. Any soldier sent into the gene pools can be given any combination of one from each pair at a cost of money, Meld, and a processing time. The concept behind them is strong, letting you invest a limited resource into making your guys better at what they're already doing, but the implementation is significantly let down by about 7/10 of the gene mods being deeply underwhelming and the remaining 3/10 being absolutely completely busted. Your two options for skin mods, a microcosm of the whole system, are "the soldier cannot be grabbed by the Stalker, who appears in pairs maybe every second or third mission and is not a significant threat" versus "the soldier is invisible and untargetable when in heavy cover". A leg mod allows the soldier to jump infinitely high, which would be incredible in XCOM 2, but is let down by half or more of XCOM's missions not having significant height to interact with and the second armor you invent being very good and having a grappling hook; the alternative lets the soldier regenerate health up to their unarmored max, which on higher difficulties is "if you're not killed, regenerate up to where you will still be killed by the next shot". Neither is particularly tasty, so why not just save Meld for another instance of Mimetic Skin for literal invisibility? The gene mod-related achievements are pretty lean, fortunately: beat a mission with all soldiers having two or more mods and a handful for using specific ones, like using the psionic feedback brain mod to kill an alien or using the shitty skin mod to reveal and kill a Stalker.

Cybernetics are where the game got the hugest overhaul. In addition to a massive expansion to engineering projects to get new capabilities, utility items, and upgrades for the darling SHIV, you can spend Meld to send a soldier in to the lab to become a torso and head. Doing this lets you spend meld to make a MEC suit, equippable by any torso boy, that turns a soldier into a big old mechanized infantry - think the mech suits in the Matrix sequels. MECs are rad as hell but very expensive to maintain in all facets: you need a lot of money, a lot of Meld, and you need to sacrifice a soldier to the machine gods. However, they do the one thing gene mods failed to do: they give you an alternative place to dump resources that significantly increases the variety in how you can approach squad building, since MECs are powerful but need to be manually upgraded with more money and more Meld to unlock more features. The achievements for cybernetics mirror the gene mod ones: beat a mission with all MECs (at least one from each of the four different base classes) and a variety for using specific features, like blowing up a car with a MEC or punching a Berzerker to death.

Your third and least impactful new system is Medals. Medals are earned when XCOM accomplishes certain things, like stopping a terror mission, and can be given minor bonuses and awarded to any soldier. These are, unfortunately, a complete nothing burger, and the small cutscene you have to sit through every time you award one for what amounts to a trivial gain relegates them to a footnote except for an associated achievement. Your final mission starts when a single psionic soldier Volunteers to lead the assault on the alien mothership, and you have to make sure this guy has all five possible medals. That's it. This involves holding onto a copy of each until you find out who is and isn't psionic, and is only "difficult" in that there is a maximum number of each type of medal you can earn per-campaign which, in one instance, is One.

Besides new progression, Enemy Within implements a bevy of new content in the form of short, lightly-plotted mission sequences. For the Battletech-pilled in the thread, think a rough version of Flashpoints. Operation Slingshot is technically Enemy Unknown DLC, but I'm including it here, and it's a very good three-mission sequence set in Hong Kong that rewards you a unique recruit. It carries the bonus achievement of having to take Mr. Zhang to the final mission, but that's not too bad. Note that in Enemy Unknown it's only required that you start the final mission with him in the squad, while in Enemy Within you have to finish the final mission with him deployed and still living. Operation Progeny is the Enemy Within equivalent, and it's just not that good overall. It rewards you with its own unique recruit, but she's nowhere near as memorable as Zhang and the missions are nowhere near as good. The Newfoundland mission whose name escapes me has you discover a whale carcass that's being used as a nest by the horrifying Alien-inspired Chryssalids, and it's a unique mission where you probe slowly through a fishing town and then plant an airstrike beacon and get the hell out of Dodge as fast as you can. It's probably my single favorite mission in this version of XCOM. Finally, the base defense mission was added to the late-midgame of every campaign. It's a do-or-die assault where your guys are bolstered by the ballcap-wearing XCOM Base Security guys and the aliens are assaulting you from all sides. It's a fantastic idea that oversteps its own abilities and just kind of ends up being a samey slog on replays, though it absolutely does have the magic on the first run.

Enemy Within's new major enemy within humanity is EXALT, a Nod-esque faction devoted to bringing the aliens to Earth and sabotaging XCOM's efforts around the globe. This is, I think, the thing that Enemy Within gets the most right. EXALT fight very differently to the aliens, breathing a lot of life into the midgame, and they're a genuine pain in the ass that you want to root out on the strategic map. You root them out by getting tips on EXALT cells, sending a single guy to infiltrate, and then getting a mission to go extract that guy with a full squad and fight EXALT. Each cell you destroy gives you a single Carmen Sandiego-esque clue ("the headquarters is not in Asia") and, once you have enough evidence, you can accuse a single nation seeded at the beginning of the game of being the secret EXALT-harboring nation. Accuse the wrong nation and they pull out of XCOM; accuse the right nation and you can mount a raid on EXALT headquarters, which turns them off for the rest of the game. It's a fantastic way to add a little more oomph to the midgame without inflating the lategame at all and the EXALT raids are genuinely pretty fun to do. The one downside is that you get EXALT's weapons added to your inventory as a cosmetic equivalent to XCOM ballistics/later lasers, and while they do look nice, they take up a bunch of real estate in the market screen and only sell for like a dollar apiece because you amass so many. This would have been better as an infinite-equippable skin, rather than discrete instances. Anyhow, the achievements related to EXALT basically boil down to taking them down and a few lighter ones, like sniping an EXALT Elite Sniper or trying to mind control a member of EXALT, causing him to commit suicide instead of bow to XCOM. Funny, though: there's an achievement for gathering enough intel to be positive of where EXALT's headquarters is and another for actually assaulting the headquarters and destroying it; the latter is significantly more common than the former. Go off, gunslingers.

The last bit to talk about is the bit changed the least by Enemy Within: the alien force composition. The expansion only adds two units to the aliens and modifies one, but it manages to do so in ways that completely fumble the ball. Stalkers, as mentioned briefly earlier, are the only new enemy before the late midgame. They show up in pairs and immediately go invisible and follow your group, and they'll attack one by one on subsequent turns. The problem with them is that the only way for them to be dangerous is if you ignore them and plow into another group of enemies while they're unaccounted for, which means that the best thing to do is just stop in your tracks and put everyone on Overwatch for two turns to kill them or just fire a rocket at where they went invisible. They're deeply forgettable, existing only to slow you down minorly, and they're the best of the set. Mechtoids (a genuinely pretty funny pun off the basic enemy, Sectoids) are the other addition, showing up in the late midgame to provide a miniboss-type boost to the aliens. These guys can shoot twice from neutral with exceptional accuracy and high damage, have altogether too much health, and can be given a shield by nearby Sectoids. Aside from the fact that they're just overtuned, my major problem with these guys is that they're just a stronger Cyberdisc that shows up exactly when the Cyberdisc is starting to show up as well. They don't really add even as much variety as Stalkers do. They're just a stronger mechanized unit showing up just before you're equipped to deal with them, with no real counters besides "levy your entire firebase at it and hope that's enough". If it isn't, especially on higher difficulties, anticipate a death. They're deeply annoying to deal with, and they're not Enemy Within's primary flop.

Cyberdiscs and Mechtoids, together, represent the lategame enemy mechanical force. You have the weaker Cyberdisc and the stronger Mechtoid. It's straightforward. The problem is that this paradigm already existed in Enemy Unknown. Cyberdiscs showed up in the late midgame and Sectopods showed up in the lategame as the aliens' final unit. Sectopods have a shitload of health, fire twice from neutral, and exist to be an "oh shit I need to send all my bullets this way" enemy whenever they show up - exactly like the Mechtoid. The Mechtoid does everything the Sectopod does from a unit composition standpoint except it shows up earlier and I swear it has higher accuracy, though I haven't checked the numbers. So, then, what do they do with the Sectopod? The answer, unfortunately, is that they halve all incoming damage to the Sectopod, permanently. This makes the Sectopod an absolutely unreasonable brick of health, requiring an effective 60 damage to take care of a single one while being immune to critical hits, having significant evasion of its own, and having a passive form of Overwatch where it will shoot a weaker gun at the first XCOM soldier that moves even if it didn't enter Overwatch on its turn. For reference on that 60 figure: with plasma you're looking at 10-12 damage per shot. You need top end bullshit to deal with these guys, be it upgraded MECs or some form of cheese, and they're just not any fun to deal with. The addition of Mechtoids and the knock-on effects it had end up making the lategame of Enemy Within significantly more of a slog than the lategame of Enemy Unknown, which is such a shame because it improves so much about the midgame. It's worth noting that the final mission has a fixed pair of Sectopods that you have to fight together, and I'm genuinely not sure what the developer-intended solution to tackling them is.

Now, here at the end, is one final major complaint that probably won't apply to you if you're following me up. Remember A Continental Fellow? Progress is tracked separately for Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within. It's all one achievement, but it requires either 5/5 location victories on Unknown or 5/5 location victories on Within, no crossover at all. I've beaten this game at least eight out of the five required times. For anyone coming in later, they're probably going to play exclusively Within and this won't be an issue, but dammit if I didn't want to at least grumble about it here. Speaking of grumbling, I didn't even mention that there's multiplayer. It's rudimentary and really only included because it was 2012, and the achievement set is "to win one match". Oh, yeah, also, it was 2012, there's a God damn viral achievement. I have it now, so if any of you decide to follow my footsteps, absolutely feel free to ask me to send it your way because getting someone to agree to go back to XCOM and give it to you is a fucking nightmare.

Sour ending note aside, neo-XCOM was still a complete paradigm shift in the genre and it's still absolutely worth playing in either its Enemy Unknown or Enemy Within forms. I think it's the least of the new trilogy, but in a way that's very much the worst of these three delicious $80 gins you've given me. I still love it, and it's still an easy recommendation. It's actually three dollars right now and for the next week, as are 2 and Chimera Squad, so hey. Splash in, try them out if you haven't. They're all good.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

Funny, though: there's an achievement for gathering enough intel to be positive of where EXALT's headquarters is and another for actually assaulting the headquarters and destroying it; the latter is significantly more common than the former. Go off, gunslingers.

Ha. I'm guessing you can just plant a save at base and go down the list accusing everyone. Considering the answer is seeded when you start the game.

[lenticular]

3 hours ago, Integrity said:

My biggest regret about the entire XCOM ecosystem is that all the spiritual sequels and successors go full into emulating the first, and absolutely nobody has taken a crack at being Terror from the Deep 2.

After the ending of XCOM 2, I thought for sure that XCOM 3 was going to be a Terror from the Deep remake. Except it's been over 8 years now, and it's becoming increasingly less and less likely that we'll actually get another new XCOM game any time soon. Sigh. I want to play XCOM now.

[Integrity]

4 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Ha. I'm guessing you can just plant a save at base and go down the list accusing everyone. Considering the answer is seeded when you start the game.

you do need "some amount" of intel (2-3 raids) before you can J'Accuse! just anyone but yeah, you absolutely do not need to narrow it all the way down before throwing out accusations and reloading if you were wrong

 

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

After the ending of XCOM 2, I thought for sure that XCOM 3 was going to be a Terror from the Deep remake. Except it's been over 8 years now, and it's becoming increasingly less and less likely that we'll actually get another new XCOM game any time soon.

keep the faith. I Want To Believe. honestly, though, firaxis has never been huge so i think it's still fine to anticipate it in the middle future given as they made chimera squad four years ago and obviously dedicated a ton of internal resources to midnight suns + have civ 7 on the horizon

e: 'it' being a new xcom game, that is, not necessarily TftD 2. we can but dream.

Edited 24 minutes ago by Integrity