Ethereals...

[Bomb Bloke]

Check out this page for a list of PlayStation tools. XAEX looks the most promising, even if it does seem to be DOS based.

[Zombie]

Funny you should mention that page, I visited there a few days back as I wanted to listen to the organ music from one of my PSX hockey games. I tried the xaex program but it didn't work then and it doesn't work now. The readme file is in Japanese so that doesn't help either. My command line looks like this:

 

C:\~xaex01>xaex D:\flic.dat C:\flic

 

And when I run it, it simply complains "Media not insert". Well, of course it is inserted! Jeez, it's in the drive and properly seated, what more do you want? I tried copying the dat files to my HD and extracting from there, but the program wants the sound file to come from the D: drive. Lovely program indeed. I'll try running it through DosBox to see if that has any effect.

 

Edit: Ah ha! DosBox says that MSCDEX is not installed. That's the problem. I found a site here which talks about it. I'll probably need to download that, but I really hate when I have to mess with my autoexec.bat or config.sys files.

 

Edit again: my config.sys and autoexec.bat files are empty. I'm not computer saavy enough to rebuild them from scratch and can't find my CD-ROM device driver location name so getting this to work is basically a dead-end. I'll have to leave grabbing these sounds to someone else with more experience. Sorry.

 

- Zombie

[Bomb Bloke]

Attached is a file that should be of some use. Extract it, load up DosBox, and run the batch file. No need to deal with autoexec.bat/config.sys this way.

 

I don't think that it'll work with DosBox, though. You're better off trying it through VMWare or something, because DosBox simply mounts drives and lets the host operating system deal with the driver side of things. But hey, ya never know.

MSCDEX.zip

[Stygian]

Dropped in on an Ethereal Terror Site the other day with my non-psi team and had more trouble with the Sectopods than the Ethereals by far. My Laser-Rifle equipped squad--over the course of four rounds--hit one Sectopod with -- I'm not making this up -- 16 to 18 laser blasts before it finally went down. The random number generator must have been rolling some low damage for my units. I'm starting to be a big believer in the Blaster Bomb approach to Terror Sites--(my BB troup was continously panic/mind control attacked and would not get off of Blaster Launcher and pile of BBs, so I could not get an unaffected unit to grab the Launcher and go to town...) Oh well.

[Zombie]

Sectopods are tough creatures to kill even with the Laser Rifle. On Experienced-Superhuman 81% of shots taken against a Sectopods front armor will not do anything. To put this another way, 1 out of every 5 shots will do damage. Out of 18 total, 3 should have connected and penetrated armor. Of those shots which do connect, each can do anywhere from 1 to 35 points of damage and the average would be around 18. A Sectopod has 96 for health so dividing by 18 we have an average of 5. So you actually did really good with 18 shots taken.

 

As for the Blaster Bomb approach at Terror Sites, I agree - but only to a point. You are pretty safe in nuking the outside to smithereens in the first couple rounds without killing too many civilians. But if you wait too long this advantage evaporates as the civilians start to come out of the buildings to "investigate". It also works well on aliens with Psi powers as you might be able to reduce morale enough to cause widespread panic with a couple well-placed shots. Just make sure your guy handling the Blaster Launcher has some decent Psi skills and a higher-than-average bravery rating. This should make it somewhat difficult for the aliens to be successful in a panic/mind control attack.

 

- Zombie

[NickAragua]

As for the Blaster Bomb approach at Terror Sites, I agree - but only to a point. You are pretty safe in nuking the outside to smithereens in the first couple rounds without killing too many civilians. But if you wait too long this advantage evaporates as the civilians start to come out of the buildings to "investigate".

 

Of course, I don't think I've ever let the presence of a civilian or twenty near a sectopod stop me from nuking it anyway - yeah, I take a hit of 50 or 100 points per civilian, but unless I'm trying to play some sort of "save civilians" challenge, I could care less. On the harder difficulty levels, there are enough UFO recoveries/etc to compensate for the loss of a few hundred points of civilians...