Oct

11

Games I want to play: Destroy X-Com

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The game opens with a cutscene explaining the Alien Alliance’s reasons for invading Earth. It may be a resource-rich planet but the Alliance aren’t invading the planet for its resources. It’s invading to save Earth from those vicious murderous cancerous organisms, those so-called Humans.

A montage showing these Humans’ various transgressions is shown. Quick cut from a scene showing caged chickens to the shocked countenances of the Alliance representatives from Avian.

This isn’t Invasion: Earth.

This is Rescue: Earth.

That this alienitarian rescue mission, if successful, will see the Alien Alliance gain control of a resource-rich planet just begging to be exploited is completely irrelevant.

Ahem.
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Sep

6

Steam’d

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Good news, bad news time.

The good — no, scratch that — the great news is the X-Com games are available on Steam.

The bad — no, scratch that — the horrible news is the X-Com games aren’t available to Steam users worldwide. This is what I see when I attempt to buy the games:
Steam: X-Com: not available in your region
It’s been years since the games were first released. Why aren’t they made available to every single Steam user? I could, I suppose, pay someone to gift the games to me but I shouldn’t need to resort to that.

Valve is fond of touting the number of Steam accounts worldwide — 15 million right now — but clearly some Steam users are more privileged than others.

Good Old Games can’t launch fast enough for me.

Aug

31

Jagged Alliance 2: business as usual

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I’m delighted to report the Steam version of Jagged Alliance 2 has been updated to version 1.12 and it’s now largely free of the problems that plagued the previous Steam version. You can actually save when playing the Unfinished Business expansion now and the bug in the original campaign which made money irrelevant has been fixed.
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Aug

23

Final Fantasy X: the endless spiral

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Final Fantasy X: Auron
(Original image source: SCEA.)

Final Fantasy X complete!

Final savegame before the showdown(s) with the Ultimate Bad Guy(s): 44 hours 58 minutes.

As with the other Final Fantasy games I’ve played over the past few months, there’s a lot to like about the game. The presentation is top-notch and there’s certainly plenty to ooh and aah over in the complex world Square created.

But there’s also a lot about the game that’s unappealing. Comically overblown and overlong (and unskippable!) cinematics seemingly directed by a 12-year-old, a hero with daddy issues, a crackpot villain with mommy issues, secretive characters with secrets they’ll only reveal 12 hours after the player has guessed them, jejune commentary on the hypocrisy of religion, another new set of hoops to jump through to get the same set of spells that are utterly useless against bosses who just won’t stay dead …
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Aug

17

Final Fantasy X: the ninja businessdingo

Filed Under Games, PS2 | 2 Comments

Having played and completed Final Fantasy XII and Persona 3 FES, I’ve begun my third Playstation 2 Japanese RPG on the trot, Final Fantasy X.

Final Fantasy X was released in 2001 but it looks older than that and occasionally plays like a really old game. Playing it makes a gamer better appreciate the improvements Final Fantasy XII brought to JRPGs, console gaming and RPGs as a whole.

The random encounter feature in FFX is the biggest gameplay annoyance by far. You’re jogging at a sedate pace on what appears to be a quiet country road when the screen suddenly shatters without warning and foes appear out of the ether.

Final Fantasy X: the ninja mobs
(Original image source: SCEA.)
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