X-com Enemy Unknown; some thoughts.

As some of you may or may not know I’m a huge X-Com: UFO Defense fan. It is the game that I most credit for me making the transition to what I consider to be a gamer. This ancient (by technology standards) game is something that I still play to this day. There is nothing that compares to the intensity and nerve-wracking suspense of each and every turn. The terror that you feel when you see a Chryssalid wandering near your troops or when you hear that distinct shrill shriek as the psionics sound rip its way through your speakers and directly into your brain. The apprehension as that horrific window popped up with the dreaded words “Terror Site.”The amazing feeling you got when you passed that point in the game where most aliens no longer threatened you (except those damn Ethereals) and you were just wiping the floor with them.
It was a tough game. A game where you’re just thrown to the wolves under-equipped, under prepared, and under manned. Hell, your base is set up as a death trap if it’s ever invaded. Veterans of the game know you have to completely rebuild your first base because of this. The online community has also helped keep this game fresh by giving us mods to help it keep running even on today’s systems. It takes some tweaking and trial and error, but it’s worth it.

Sectoid then and now.

Anyways, my point is that I love the game and have been playing it pretty consistently for over 15 years. You can understand my elation when I heard that Firaxis was heading up a remake of this beloved game. People who were fans of the original game were working on a successor at the studio of one of the legends of game design. My money was spent already before I had even finished reading the headline.

I had been worried that I was never going to see a turn-based X-Com again, especially since that weird prequel FPS was in the works and the last few X-Com games we got were weird ones like Interceptor and Enforcer if you don’t include all of the titles that got lost along the way. But here it was, right there in front of me.

I was finally able to download it via Steam and have been playing it as often as I can ever since. The new game is a great spiritual successor to the original. It maintains the tension while streamlining the controls and troop advancement systems. The art style is wonderful. It captures the essence of the original game while giving the game its own modern twist. I will gladly and happily recommend this game to EVERYBODY EVER. It is wonderfully crafted and masterfully executed.

Old School

Many problems with the original games have been smoothed over and streamlined. The swapping of time units with the two actions is very nice. The creation of the 4 classes of soldiers is wonderful, and so is the fact that you can customize appearances. I’m always for customizing appearances. (Okay I DO have the Elite Soldier Pack DLC specifically so I can give people the original ULTIMATE FLAT-TOP. Yes it has to be in all caps, that’s how Guile trademarked it.). The upgrades to the Psionic abilities is a breath of fresh air. The distinct abilities and the great cover system make every mission enjoyable and far more tactical than they used to be. I could sing the praises of this game all day!

ULTIMATE FLAT-TOP

There are very few complaints I have about it, nothing that makes me even want to regret playing it. But since whining seems to be the theme of my blog, I’m going to go ahead and complain about these few problems I have with it now.

[Please note: Because of the small amount of free time I have available to me these days I usually don’t get to play very often. That means I haven’t been able to finish my first playthrough yet. I am to the point where I’ve just built the Hyperwave Decoder which says to me as a fanboy that I’m probably getting to at least the ¾ point in the game’s timeline. I’m saying this because I want you to understand that I haven’t seen everything the game has to offer yet and that there might be some things here I haven’t encountered yet that I’m complaining about so bear with me. (I refuse to look at walkthroughs, FAQs, etc. until I’ve completed at least one playthough on this one because you should have to be completely blind going into this game dammit!)]

My first complaint is one of my biggest. It has to do with the number of troops you have. In the original game you have 3 types of transports available to you. You have your basic Skyranger, the UFO-like Lightning, and the “ultimate transport craft” the Avenger. Each one had its own strengths or reasons for existing. The biggest thing though was the number of troops you could transport with you into battle and the amount of equipment available to you.

In the new game you are limited in your number of troops by a hard number that is based upon your researched tech and the ranks of your soldiers. That wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact that you are only going to have four to six soldiers in a mission. Period, end of story. That’s it.
I understand why they did it tech and gameplay wise. It makes sense, but it still irks me, not only from a classic X-Com point, but from a narrative/military stand point as well. When going to an encounter in this game you are going to lose people, especially early on. Each squad member is a specialist of some kind and brings something specific that you want or need into the fight. Losing just one of them when you have that low of a number of troops means you could be losing 25% of your fighting effectiveness from a single lucky shot on one guy.

I find that unnecessarily frustrating, especially in a game that is as brutal as this one gets. It’s more frustrating when you think about how the first Skyranger you have in the first game was equipped with about a dozen soldiers. I’d personally like to see larger engagements with more troops under my command. I need rookies to sacrifice as scouts!

Another thing that’s been missing, and I know this one is missing because of some reviews I’ve read, is the classic Base Defense mission. This was when the aliens discovered your base and made an attempt to invade it. It was a desperate and brutal fight every time, especially when it was your main base. Those aliens wrecked everything they freaking could. It was a nice change of pace from the other missions and was an especially important mission because it could destroy you and end your game.

If this entered your base and you didn't shit yourself...

I’m just a little sad I won’t be able to shoot up my base in this one. Oh well.

I’ve also noticed that this game seems to have a lot less alien encounters than previous editions. Normally at this point in the original you’ve encountered over 100 UFOs and at least fought in 2 alien bases, if not more. I’ve seen, what, one Base and maybe a handful of UFOs. The abduction sites and all that count as encounters and all, but you still aren’t sending your ships out to shoot down those fleets of ships every couple of days, which has led me to neglect upgrading all of my interceptors. Which of course leads to my weaksauce ones getting shot down repeatedly.

Sometimes it seems like the LOS for this game wasn’t checked out very well. Sometimes my troops can shoot through walls, while other times they can’t see something 30 feet in front of them. It’s just a little inconsistent and slightly annoying. This won’t prevent you from completing missions, but if I were playing Ironman mode (which means the game autosaves for you while beating you over the head with the highest difficulty level, basically creating what we vets were doing on the honor system in the original game to keep it challenging after so many playthroughs. We X-Com vets are a sick bunch.) I would be rather upset by this more often than not because it can lead to the loss of some of your troops through poor positioning. As mentioned earlier, the loss of one guy is devastating in these encounters.

Not every race, terror beast, or piece of tech that you might know and love from the original game are represented here. Items like the Stun Bomb or Aliens like the Snakemen don’t make an appearance and it makes me a little bit sad. I was looking forward to seeing modern interpretations of Reapers and Snakemen and they’ve obviously been passed up for Berserkers and Thin Men, which are great, but I want my damn Snakemen and easily burned bipeds! Maybe they’ll be in a DLC or something, I could get behind that.

This! Why couldn't we have this!?!

And my final complaint is really going to sound really picky, but it’s one that bothers me a lot. When you completed research in the original game, no matter how worthless or benign it was (Alien Entertainment I’m looking at you!) you got to read the description while you looked at some type of artwork that went along with it. Autopsies had each of the aliens cut open so you could see their organs and such while Interrogations showed you what they looked like while alive.

Hell, you can see some of those Interrogation pictures on the targets that this game’s scientists are testing their weapons on. Really this isn’t much, but it would be nice to be greeted by a completed research project with some type of artwork unlock or character model coming up so you can truly admire the work the team put into these things.

Ah, gotta love the homage.

If you’re on the fence about getting this game do not let these little complaints stop you from buying it. The game is wonderful. It is far more than I ever hoped to see from this franchise I thought was long dead. With 2K and Firaxis working together on this behind the scenes and it being available on consoles as well as the PC (which is really is the only platform you should be playing it on but if you don’t have the hardware, I guess you can play it on a console…) this game should be able to keep you entertained for far longer than you think.

It is by far a successful reimagining of the Franchise and I’m looking forward to more.

Welcome to the Collective

So I’ve long held the belief that the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek is actually run by a shadowy government that controls all major decisions behind closed doors. There’s plenty of evidence for it within the various media to support it, mostly having to do with the insane number of corrupt/crazy officials and organizations within the Federation. (Section 31 anyone?) Part of that Alex Jones style conspiracy theory leads to what the true origin of the Borg are, a failed Federation experiment that was luckily shot far away from the federation shortly after the dangers were discovered.

If you can see the underlying corruption of the federation and know its history with awful experimentation and those very experiments going awry rather spectacularly very often you can understand how it might be possible. Just think of any episode of TNG where they’re trying some type of new experimental tech and it almost destroys a world or starts poking holes in reality or causes everyone on the ship to begin to de-evolve. How about that holodeck? With the safety protocols disengaged it can cause a real warp core breach or allow an antique gun to be used to slaughter some Borg.

Now think about that while imagining this. (Spoilers of Voyager ahead) In Voyager the Borg started to get explained. Some of their origins, their tech, and all of that other stuff is brought into the light. One episode the crew finds a planet full of former Borg who were separated from the collective and had to fend for themselves. It was a pretty interesting episode. Basically what you should take out of it though is what the Neural Link of the Borg is capable of doing. It is able to share all the thoughts, memories and mental energies of those in the link with all the others. It creates a sense of bliss and the positive energy is capable of stimulating rapid healing of life-threatening energies.

Chakotay has his life saved by this energy from the link and is then used by one of the groups on the planet to reactivate their hive mind. Within seconds of activation the war the two sides we fighting stops without so much as an afterthought given to everyone one the planet's feelings on being reintroduced into a hive mind that crushes their individuality.

This is a majorly important thing to understand. The Borg are linked by their hive mind and share the same voice because of this one invention, the neural link. Everything else is just an expansion of this if you really think about it. The episode in question ends with the crew reactivating the neural link between all of these former Borg which ends their war immediately because they are all suddenly one again. It’s a weird thing to think about too long.

(I can only imagine what would happen if someone had a string enough will to overpower the others within the collective or was manipulative enough to convince the collective to follow their will, or hell, reprogram the link to make themselves have a higher priority within the thought protocols or whatever you want to call them.)

Everything else the Borg do, use, or create is an expansion of this Link. The link provides them with the ability to solve problems quickly and with one voice while keeping all who are in it healthier. This was a benevolent invention with good intentions until something or someone caused a catastrophic failure of the system. Like maybe a corrupt/crazy Starfleet Admiral or Federation official?

So the theory I’m getting to is that this was a major cybernetics project for the Federation. All sorts of ways to remove the need for food, breathing, etc while making each individual safer and allowing a ship to function better. This would likely be happening during a time of active warfare, so possibly during Kirk’s time. Instant communication and better combat capabilities are all things you desperately research. Each of the individuals who were in there getting implants were volunteers, each with differing specialties, most of them scientists though who then used this link to enhance their information sharing which helped accelerate this project.

The project must have been producing great results. They managed to create devices that replaced biological functions and some others that were useful for shipboard work, computer interfacing, and combat (like a reprogrammable personal shield generator). They even developed a way to recharge these devices with an exterior power source so they wouldn’t need to each be carrying miniature warp cores with them everywhere they went. They called these regeneration alcoves. Everything was going great until they added their final volunteer.

I’m going to guess that this volunteer was an attractive young woman who had a rough past. Possibly growing up on a war torn world and suffered varying abuses from her time there. Maybe she had lost multiple limbs throughout her life as well as some types of extensive and permanent organ damages as well. The researchers took pity on her and tried to help he out by giving her these implants. I’d imagine she took to the implants very quickly and was beyond happy to receive them. Maybe this awakened one of those deep seated addictions that can only appear in someone who has suffered a long train of abuse. This led to her need to fill her body with technology. She had to replace the weak flesh. When the researchers began to worry about her sanity and attempted to slow her down she took control of their collective by sheer force of will. It was then she started to call herself the Queen.

The one researcher who was left who was luckily able to break the link before she could take control of him. He tried to run as quickly as he could, but the others were too capable and almost succeeded in capturing him and forcing him back into the collective. He was saved at the last minute after an entity calling himself “Q” basically froze them in place. The researcher begged the entity to assist him, which he agreed to do on one condition, Humanity would need to be judged X number of years in the future to determine if they were worth continuing to exist after unleashing what this collective would become. Of course he agreed and Q sent the Queen and her collective to a random spot in the Delta Quadrant.

The Admiral/Official in charge of the project briefed his superiors and Section 31 about this incident after interrogating and imprisoning the lone researcher. The information was secreted away and hidden to preserve the peace of the Federation during the war so as to not give the Federation nor Star Fleet a bad rap.
Meanwhile in the Delta Quadrant the Collective took control of the world they were transported to and began to use their scientific knowledge to build themselves up and force more sentient beings into their collective. Eventually they were able to get their hands on a Nanotech scientist who was able to finalize their transformation into the Borg that we know now by creating the nanoprobes that became their most useful weapon in forcefully assimilating others. The nanoprobes took care of building the initial implants that make a Borg what it is, most importantly the Neural Link.

The Queen achieved technical immortality by being able to move “her” to whatever vessel that exists that can handle her individual consciousness.

Wow, that got off my original intent rather quickly…

The point is, this neural link uses positive feelings and instant communication to all those who are connected to allow a bunch of people to communicate their thoughts and ideas across the link. It’s a future Facebook.
Social networks are starting to show signs in studies as being as addicting as heroine. It produces a mini-high every time you click a “Like” button or when someone responds to any of your posts. It is a social link that connects you with other people nearly instantaneously and keeps you there with the positive feelings that you get from it.

Social networking is the start of the Neural Link!