New Homeworld?

What was the story in UFO Defense? And how was Terror From the Deep different?

I understand why they simplified so much; the game runs a lot cleaner and friendlier this way. But yeah, I miss the complexity of the older titles.

That was one of my favorite ways of flushing out aliens into my choke point.

I doubt this would ever happen, but one thing I'd really like to see with the X-COM franchise are more varied mission types. I always figured that X-COM represented a small tactical force and wasn't there to wage a war so much as to be the first respondents to a new alien incursion and do high-precision missions.…

Well. . . no one if forcing you to buy it.

Also with environments. I'd love it if you could see the difference, for example, between a European metropolis and a Latin American mountain village.

I think one of the places that Firaxis dropped the ball was eliminating the differences between the three weapon types. For example, in older iterations laser weapons were more accurate, did less damage, and never ran out of ammo. This meant that it wasn't, as you put it, a linear progression from your starting…

That's been part of the game since the 1st installment, and I'd be sad to see that element of chance go. X-COM is one of the few franchises where I feel cheated if I can win more than about 1/3rd of the time.

That sounds awful. What was the rationale behind that legislation?

Oh boy. Here it comes.

I cannot say how much I agree with this.

Everything comes with a tradeoff. Some professions, such as mine, aren't particularly lucrative; I'll never live wealthy with my job, but the satisfaction I garner from it is more important to me than my income. To someone else, however, money might be big enough of an issue that it's worth taking a less-ideal job…

I'm actually looking at publishing a piece I wrote about why the media's reaction to violent games is dishonest and disproportionate. The most scholarly work on the effects of violent video games has been done by Bushman and Anderson (both together and individually), using the psychological framework of the General…

Well, assuming that each side is an independent little screen, just code it with a rand function and change the parameters. It could be done through the tablet (okay, now I need to roll a d73). Heck, if this die was coded into a tablet game, the whole thing could be done automatically—the game tells you to roll three…

Though you could program it to simulate any one of those, or a theoretical die with any number of sides, for that matter.

To be fair: each iteration was better from a technical and gameplay standpoint. For that reason, I think it's perfectly fair to like them. But I felt that the things I actually liked most about the ME1—actual RPG elements, innovative story, the implication of wide consequences to your actions, open-world exploration,…

I kind of understand the Ash/Kaiden zero-character-development. They played interchangeable roles, as to save on dev time and money. I mean, they *could* have had the survivor's reaction change depending on who died in ME1, which would result in two slightly different stories based on the personality and motives they…

Well, they do bundle up there.