OpenXcom 1.0 Released 50
It's a small class of video games that still draw interest or inspire an active community 20 years after their first release — even if we're now 40 years into the era of commercial video games. Games like Doom, the several iterations of Civilization, and the Mario Brothers franchise will probably be around and played in some form many decades hence. The X-COM family of games fits, too, having inspired various spiritual successors since its release in 1994. Now, an anonymous reader writes that the open source (GPL) " OpenXcom 1.0 is finally released, after 5224 commits, 1843 days, and 606 resolved issues since v0.9. 20 years of X-COM — XCOM oldschool lovers enjoy!"
Resolution (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not leave everything exactly as it is but up the resolution? Is it because it's hard to find people who would redraw the sprites?
Re:Or... (Score:5, Interesting)
.... you could just buy XCom.
You need a copy of the game to use this. This project is to resolve the difficulty running the original game on modern hardware, fix bugs in the original game, etc.
I've got several copies, the original, a CD re-release over 10 years ago that I could NEVER get to run properly due to speed issues, and it's outright incompatibility with using nvidia graphics cards; and I now own it on steam as well (but it came with Enemy Unknown and I haven't actually tried the steam one yet) -- I did get the re-release version working in DOSbox but it still had its issues etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the steam one has its flakiness as well... a proper modern remake is a good thing.
The new Firaxis title was surprisingly good.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Having said that, it still doesn't completely scratch that itch that only a game of nice, classic Xcom. Dosbox has always been an option of course, but Xcom has bugs, and while using "XcomUtil" (http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=XcomUtil) can fix many of these problems, the work of the OpenXCOM to give us such a wonderful, expandable, moddable version of such a giant of PC gaming is simply astounding. As I read over the documentation, I can't wait to give this a shot. Really want to thank these guys for such a wonderful job - my memories of the summer of 94 and this game are very fond indeed.
Xenonauts also released (Score:4, Interesting)
Another release is that of Xenonauts [xenonauts.com], to be finally released next week. I think it's a must-have for fans of the classic XCom. Xenonauts is a modernized remake, but it keeps the same fundamental game mechanics (unlike the Firaxis version). Time units, multiple bases, great freedom in soldier inventory and other things from the original, and there's a huge amount of balancing and subtle improvements. I have played several indie and small-studio successors, such as UFO: Aftermath, UFO: Extraterrestrials, and UFO: Alien Invasion, but none of those have, in my opinion, captured the original's feeling, while Xenonauts managed to.
Re:The new Firaxis title was surprisingly good.... (Score:0, Interesting)
You have to make some hard choices.
The difficulty of the choices doesn't make the game have more strategy or less. If you were told to flip a coin and figure out the result to win 1M dollars it would be a hard choice, but without strategy at all. In fact, that's what strategy is about: you predict all the possible outcomes and plan ahead for them, so if you get that soldier shot at a crucial moment, you have a backup plan. And suddenly losing a soldier is not a "hard choice" because you plan for that.
If a game restricts the inventory system, skill trees etc, I'd say it has less strategy options than the original, reducing it to merely coin tossing. Having to choose between two options instead of twenty really sucks as strategy goes. It did suck Doom 3 having a soldier not being able to use a weapon and a flashlight at the same time. It sucks having a soldier able to carry a rocket launcher plus main weapon and not more than a single grenade. In Doom 3 soldiers didn't know about duct tape, and in fireaxis Xcom soldiers don't know about belts. I wonder how they keep their pants up.
With regards to the mods I would like to play, but they won't come out on iOS/Android devices, and my desktop machines aren't capable of running the game.
Interesting! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nice to see that there's still people interested in the *original* XCOM games - and not the utter junk that's been released since TFTD.
Some 13 years ago (wow, time flies), I was delighted to see a Windows re-release of the XCOM games (the "Collectors Edition"), since the DOS version was indeed pretty troublesome to get running under Windows - this was before the luxury of DOSBox. However, the fine developers who did the port didn't know the difference between "pitch" and "width", and thus it was unplayable (on a wide range of graphics cards, apparently). I was put down by this, but my friend who was visiting that evening said "well, you usually fix... bugs... in programs, so can't you fix this?".
One frantic night of reverse engineering and beer-drinking and reminiscing about chryssalids and tentaculats laters, I had a bugfix loader running. XCOM once again! The CE port in general wasn't perfect, the XCOM1 intro only had MIDI music but not the muton screams and other sound effects, there were stall-for-a-second issues when changing soundtrack on many soundcards, et cetera.
When XCOM1+2 were re-released on STEAM, they initially used my bugfix loaders (I'm told they use DOSBox nowadays - that's a more authentic experience). Didn't even contact me about it. When I reached out to the people in charge (took a while, the rights to the brand had been shifted around quite a bit), I was told that the source code no longer existed - apparently, at the end of days, it had existed on a single laptop that had been stolen or destroyed or whatever.
So, with the above in mind, it's nice to see that people are trying to re-create the legacy of one of the best games I've ever spent countless hours with.