Firaxis have announced that they are working on a new X-Com game! It isn't an FPS! They've been working on it since 2007 so it gets released this year! This looks like it could finally be a worthy successor to the oldest game that I still play. The image to the right shows a very different looking game to the original that the fans are used to; the alien shown is the all-new "Man in Black", an almost human looking alien.Firaxis say that, like before, there will be fully destructible environments and the premise seems very similar thus far: Send your team out in a Skyranger to fight aliens, recovering artefacts that can be researched or sold (or researched and then sold). So far, I like the look of most of the changes, particularly the level of soldier customisation that the game seems to allow. In the first game, all you could do was rename your troopers, but even that was enough for me. Giving soldiers a unique name created a sense of attachment, and giving them unique appearance is sure to make it that little bit more heartbreaking when Sergeant Garry Shultz finally gets it in the neck from a plasma blast on his eleventh mission after 15 confirmed alien kills. Another interesting addition is that of an actual cover system. I say actual because the original X-Com sort of had one in that you crouched your bloke behind a wall and hoped that the inevitable alien shooting phase would melt the brickwork and not his face. The new level up system is something I'm waiting to play with before I criticise. I liked the old way of how stat gains worked. Most stats would increase naturally as a character performed tasks. For example, marksmanship would improve through hitting an enemy target, bravery would improve through not panicking when the situation arose and reflexes would improve whenever a reaction shot (shooting during the enemy turn when a target comes into line of sight) was successfully made.
The only change that I don't like is that Firaxis have planned to allow only 4 soldiers per mission (later upgradable to 6). I would always roll with 9, 2 squads of 4 to sweep the map more quickly and 1 person looking after the transport and maybe using a mind probe to identify targets to capture for interrogation. I'm hoping that the game is mod friendly and that someone releases a mod to increase this limit to at least 8, while simultaneously increasing the proportion of aliens in the mission to account for this.
Reading some of the comments on sites such as "Kotaku" (Where the screenshot is from, by the way, though it also features elsewhere on the web and in magazines), some of the comments look fairly vitriolic and presumptuous about the game. Based on Firaxis' last strategy game released on consoles, some of this bile is fair enough, but what is important to remember is that Firaxis is the closest thing to the original developer that the X-Com franchise (as abused as it's name has been - look at 2K's X-Com! How the hell is that X-com?) is going to get. I for one, cannot wait!
In other news, I took a pre-constructed Deck to a small-scale sanctioned Magic: The Gathering tournament held at my local gaming haunt (http://www.darksphere.co.uk/). I did quite well. Despite getting an automatic loss for turning up late, I went on to win two out of the four rounds I played in, but then dropped despite having a chance to reach the top 8 due to time constraints (I wasn't expecting to do well at all!).
My decklist, without sideboard, is here: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/cry-some-more/
