LAST EDITED ON Feb-22-16 AT 05:53 PM (EST)
 
So just for laughs, I bought the original X-COM: UFO Defense (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) on Steam, then downloaded OpenXcom and gave it a try.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I played the crap out of the original UFO back in the day. And I do mean the original UFO, even though I live in the part of the world where it was released as X-COM. When I worked at Leading Edge Products in 1994, another member of the hardware support team had gotten his hands on a bootleg of the UK version of the game somewhere, months before the US version came out. (It might even have been a UK prerelease copy.) This was before the Web was really a thing for people outside of CERN, so I have no idea where he got it. Gopher, probably. Or someone in England mailed him diskettes.

Either way, and despite the fact that we had no documentation for its, let's face it, insanely complicated gameplay, UFO became the game of choice for whiling away the downtime at Leading Edge. Particularly among those of us who were lucky enough to be assigned to the dealer support line (as dealers called for support much less often than end users, and when they did call it was usually just because they needed a part number lookup). Because it was turn-based, it could be left sitting idle for the duration of a support call without ruining the game, unlike real-time games. There was a group of us who got quite good at it.

So, because I can't play either of the modern XCOM games on my aging laptop, I figured I'd give OpenXcom a shot, since it allows things like the use of modern display aspect ratios, windowed mode, and so on. I was anxious to see whether the various modifications and gameplay tweaks touted by the program's creators would affect that classic UFO experience.

Within about a half-hour, I had gotten my whole squad killed on the first UFO crash site mission, on the easiest difficulty setting, after which the game crashed to desktop.

So yeah! It's the authentic UFO experience, all right. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That's tempting me to do the same. I was always pants at the Xcom games, but they were lovely.

I had forgotten that in the original game, the Skyranger doesn't actually have a pilot. If your whole squad gets killed on an outing, you lose the aircraft too, because there's no one to fly it back to base. And I guess no one can go and find it in whatever field it got left in? Or downtown Cape Town? I got nothin'.

(OK, so supposedly the sites of failed terror missions get nuked to contain the invasion. Fair enough, you won't get the Skyranger back after that. But when it gets abandoned in a field in Iowa? Really?)

I had also forgotten how your soldiers look like Guile joined the Ghostbusters.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>(OK, so supposedly the sites of failed terror missions get nuked to
>contain the invasion. Fair enough, you won't get the Skyranger back
>after that. But when it gets abandoned in a field in Iowa? Really?)

"They dropped the ramp, and three blaster bombs flew inside. Let's just admit that one's in no shape to fly home."

>I had also forgotten how your soldiers look like Guile joined the
>Ghostbusters.

Hell, I'd watch it.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Ah, the number of times this almost literally happened to me... Especially about the time the Snakemen start showing up.

I will admit to one bit of... gamebreaking, shall we say? I usually modded the laser weaponry (especially pistols) to be much more accurate. I mean, c'mon - they're lasers, light travels in a (more or less) straight line.

Once we started getting alien grenades and blaster bombs, my group of friends and I started realizing that the most tactically sound battlefield was one that was blasted flat. They weren't so much weapons of war as landscaping tools. The lasers and plasma guns took care of any E.T.s that weren't removed from the equation by the carpet bombing.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

>
>I will admit to one bit of... gamebreaking, shall we say? I usually
>modded the laser weaponry (especially pistols) to be much more
>accurate. I mean, c'mon - they're lasers, light travels in a
>(more or less) straight line.
>

I had a few good games where I just sent in teams with laser pistols, ganged up on the first thing I found, and took its weapon. Repeat as necessary, with each soldier acquiring better weaponry.

I never could figure out how to find the alien bases, even after getting a few tips from better players. I'm not sure if that's the result of downloading from Abandonia, or if I just was that bad at that part of the game. (I'm pretty sure the part where it eventually started crashing to desktop on start was the result of downloading.)

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Might be Abandonia, might be that the game is just not well-suited for modern processors. Even DOSBox has it's limits :D

(Though I shouldn't be one to talk, I've got a working copy of Windows 3.11 running in a DOSBox on my modern PC, just so I can play Simtower again.)

I still remember firing up Wing Commander on a modern computer back in... hm... 2001-ish? Somewhere in that range. Windows 98 SE, either the Pentium 4 or one of the first Celerons, I can't remember, a whopping TWO GIGS of RAM, whoo!

Apparently Wing Commander relies heavily on the PCs internal clock for timing and doesn't lock to a specific rate -- it'll happily go as fast as the PC can run it. Which of course means that the music was a short chirrup of sound and the graphics flashed by so fast that the only thing I could make out were the still shots. I did manage to somehow get it into fighter sim practice. Explosions are pretty at 500 FPS!

But it didn't crash, for which I am duly impressed.

--sofaspud
--

>Apparently Wing Commander relies heavily on the PCs internal clock for
>timing and doesn't lock to a specific rate -- it'll happily go as fast
>as the PC can run it.

Yup! Used to be a fairly common thing—that's why 286s and 386es had a Turbo button—but Wing Commander was particularly infamous for it because of Origin's habit of requiring the latest hardware. A computer that would run Wing Commander II decently would make Wing Commander pretty much unplayable (but hilarious).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

My favorite little "old game tied to computer speed" story was when I was trying to get an installer to work for... hrm. I don't remember which game now.

What I do remember, is that apparently the installer did a little loop with a counter to try to figure out how fast your computer was. The idea being that, if your computer got through, say 10000 loops, it would be a 386. (Numbers pulled out of my hind quarters and are to be used for illustration only)

On my modern PC of the time, it promptly crashed as it overflowed the counter and got horribly confused.