HereticSoul/Naux, Mid 30's leftist-something, currently in Ohio. Talk to my face about tabletop games and giant robots, and tell me about your fursona.

18+ over at https://cohost.org/Nauxxx


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

xenonauts 2 tries to present itself as a serious milsim take on xcom with everyone being Real Military Bros but then you tell someone to throw a grenade around a corner at a 75% chance and they instead throw it at the wall right in their face and knock themselves out and you understand that the fundamental clown shoes nature of og xcom will forever compromise the devs' aesthetic vision, for the better


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

thesis: all xcom games inherently contain the symptoms of a tabletop game where the DM doesn't know how to excuse an unlikely failure and just makes the PCs look wildly incompetent whenever a roll goes badly

this lends xcom the tone of a particularly disastrous ttrpg at all times


Arcalane
@Arcalane

You know, given how comically wild and bad XCOM2's misses can be, that kinda tracks.

At least in the original DOS-era title, you could have shots pretty narrowly miss and well, shit happens. But in 2? No, it's always "your soldier abruptly jerks their aim off-target right before firing", which looked more and more ridiculous the closer you were to the target.


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

ever since x hyphen com (Ufo Defense) it's always so funny how it presents itself as comic book hero bravery against the threat of unimaginable alien terror and your first mission guaranteed is 14 people packed into a clown car of a plane where one steps off the ramp and gets melted by a genuine glip glorp weedy armed huge head gray alien with a space grenade.

I have fond memories of the time I realized, in Xenonauts 1, that the knockout gas also worked your own units, so you could protectively knock out rookies who destroyed their own cover while trying to hit an alien 10 tiles downrange. Also flashbangs can force them to hunker even if out of TUs.

This is even true for the slickest rendition of X-COM, which is Firaxis' Enemy Unknown. It was slightly rarer to see than the sheer slapstick of Xenonauts, granted, but car explosions, wonky grenade physics, and occasionally wiping the floor out from under your allies with a bad rocket helped ground the game in that energy

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