Heh, that reminds me—when I first got the original XCOM (without a hyphen), I once wasted a very frustrating 10 or 15 minutes trying to save scum the last move of a battle, before eventually giving up because the outcome never changed. It was only later on (I think as part of the Enemy Within expansion) that they added an explicit "Save Scum" option, thereby revealing that by default, the RNG seed doesn't change on a reload and so nothing is ever going to be different assuming you make the same moves. IIRC, this was not documented in the initial release.

I'm not terribly fond of the phrase itself, because it has that usual whiff of "only hardcore elite gamers deserve to play games" snobbery about it that is one of the baneful parts of gaming culture.* There is a lot of that in Firaxis games generally, and the XCOM series in particular, and as an agèd scrublord who doesn't feel a need to apologize to adolescents, I'm annoyed by it. Still, at least they offer the possibility at all.

>They're challenging but didn't feel unfair to
>me--each has a couple -strong- weaknesses that make dealing with them
>entertaining rather than frustrating.

They start off on a bad foot with me by immediately engaging in Cutscene Winning when the first one appears, which is never going to get me into a video game villain's fan club. That, and a lot of their powers seem really cheaty from a spectator's point of view.

Their storyline is also more than a bit goofy. I love that first cutscene they're all in, where the Ethereals demonstrate their extreme talent for personnel management by taking their three most powerful operatives and explicitly pitting them against each other. No wonder they've had such trouble overlording the Earth. How the hell did they win the war in the first place? Oh, right, in a cutscene. Well, that circle closed itself. :)

Also, the two male ones—they're Starscream and Megatron, right? I'm not just imagining that.

>Mind you, there is one critical
>fact about them that they don't say in the manual that makes
>everything doable--they DO NOT HEAL between missions. You damage one
>and they will carry that wound until they eventually die.

... What? How do you even beat them the first time, then? Do they eventually just get bored godmoding your squad and fuck off?

>Almost as moronic as the armor you can make from
>their skins--GOD those things look stupid, even if they're powerful.

...

What the fuck, Firaxis.

--G.
* although not the most baneful part; that would be how many of them are evidently Nazis IRL.
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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
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