Debriefings

[EclipseDog]

Actually my guess is that it is a case of the programmers not thinking things out fully rather than it being a prog bug, the same as the other one where the moment any lil buggers stick a foot in your hanger it magically makes that base vanish from the map to them. Sadly programmers not thinking their programs out completely is the case in every game I've ever seen so it's nothing new to see.

 

Think of all the other things similarly not thought out and programmed in such as fall damage, the mind control on four square enemies only putting one of four squares under your control, the way blaster bombs can blow holes through enemy ships but not X-com ships, etc. I'm not even going to get into the stupidity of having the research at each individual base not being combined together or how exactly the aliens can wander around the battlefields outside of their ships without any special breathing equipment yet you need a special alien containment unit to house them.

[Bomb Bloke]

Load up a bunch of games from when this was written, and you'll stop complaining. The amount of detail programmed in here is huge.

 

The games good enough that it took us this many years to spot all the bugs. Who cares? https://www.angelfire.com/games3/jeffy90/images/smilies/power.gif

[M. Hoz]

MHoz - 40 heavy plasma - that hadn't been researched yet, I'm guessing, like one of my mistakes? "Hey, does anyone know where the ON switch is for these things? No? Anyone? Because someone's at the door..."

That's it. :mad: It's ~40 mind you,not 40.

I can't remember the exact number.

And as for the crashed UFOs disappearing: Maybe the surviving aliens call for help and strip the wreck for spare parts 

I know they do that in TFTD.

I saw it myself.

[EclipseDog]

@Bomb Bloke - I know this was created ages ago, and I am well aware that it was incredibly advanced for its time... why else would I still be playing a game from a decade ago in computing technology and frequenting a board devoted to it?

 

As for it taking many years to spot these bugs... err no. Most of the bugs get spotted by folks within a week or two of beating the game for the first time at the max level and then beginning to tinker around trying to get the full feel of the game. Most of the bugs I've caught I actually spotted in the first 24 hrs actually since I tend to get bored and play around trying to see the worst possible scenarios and best possible to try and gain a better feel for the gameplay of a game.

 

Your reply to this correction I figure will be along the lines of, "Then why are we only now hearing about this?" Actually most of these bug reports can be found elsewhere posted by others and I do believe I even spotted some of the same folks that frequent here getting into the action way back then. Myself, I was too busy actually playing this game and others like it to ever even check for internet communities devoted to it. In fact I only became aware of the existance of this forum site a few months back when I decided to run a search for a patch to get my old game working on my new WinXP.

 

BTW: That list of bugs which should have been easily fixed with a little bit of thought on the programmer's part is not related to age. Every game has that fault, including the newest stuff being released here in 2004. I wasn't complaining about X-COM being worst than any other but rather simply pointing out that there's like some unwritten rule that at least one incredibly dumb error needs to be left into all game programs just to make its' players wonder how the programmers could possibly make such a stupid mistake, and that a bunch of minor quirks should be left in just to give that feeling of an itch that won't go away and can't be scratched so it just torments you in an endless agony of methodical torture. I think there may just be something in the personality markup of the programmers that leaves them all as secret sadists. *shrugs*

 

As for your comment about loading up a bunch of games from back then and seeing exactly how little they had in comparison to this game... agreed with one exception. Now I'm going to have to go into a bit of detail in order to detail exactly how huge the game actually was, so I will apologize now prior to going into the non-XCOM game review.

 

Any of you ever play an age-old game by the name of 'Daggerfall'? It was a first-person shooter type game where you wandered around a huge map (I once actually tried to walk a character from one end of the month doing nothing else... gave up two months later... now that is big) and used swords, axes, knives, archerry, brawling, and magic to blow apart various things. That game boasted a do-it-yourself-spell-creator, hundreds of skills to gain experience in, tons of weapons each with different qualities depending upon the type of material used to create it, hundreds of enemy types, several different character races both for male and female avatars, a wardrobe of a thousand clothes since they created about 50 different types of clothing for each gender and about 10 different color codes and each type could load uniquely into each of the color versions, giving about 500 articles of clothing wearable for each gender.

 

But what truly made the game amazing was its freedom of chracter setup. You could choose your own primary skills, secondary skills, and alternate skills and thus determine the way your character would play instead of being stuck into a set sect, you also could add unique abilities and disabilities to make the character more fun or challenging or easy. This was everything from immunities to things or the opposite where a single exposure carried a danger of death with it, to the ability to instantly handle a weapon like a master after picking it up for the first time, to a blind panic where you act like a headless chicken anytime you encounterred a certain enemy type (such as beasts, undead, or whatever). It even allowed your character to be unable to enter holy areas or take damage from sunlight as well as other assorted interesting twists on the way you had to play. Wait there was one thing even better about the game... the game included races of werebeasts and vampires which would attack you. Each 'hit' would spawn a random hidden dice roll and if you were 'un'lucky enough to land just the 'right' roll you'd become a vamp or were yourself. This would change your character picture, your stats, advantages/disadvantages... and would open you up to being attacked by demon-hunters, but if this wasn't to your liking you could always begin a quest to rid you of the demonic taint. Speaking of quests there were thousands of them, some of which were even vital to the gameplay. The most realistic part of the game, however, was that the game map consisted of hundreds of provinces/nations instead of just a single place. Each of them had hundreds of cities and their own bank system, criminal justice system (yeah, there was one), and so forth. The game was so freaking big that even after over a decade worth of time playing the game (first on its original system and then later on the PC after a hack-over was done to make it PC-usable) that I still have yet to ever fully explore the entire game map.

 

So how did such a huge game get put together back in the times when there wasn't even such a thing as DOS or the huge memory chips/storage devices of today? Ugly 1-dimensional block graphics for the scenery and enemies/NPCs sadly enough. Then again it is a bit of a laugher to walk through the people/trees or to twist in place while standing in the object/being and see it on all sides of you as if it was standing next to you. ;p

 

Oh... and the ability to be in a dungeon and leap off a stairwell... only to pass through a wall/ceiling/floor and go falling for miles through endless nothingness then finally get to the bottom level of the map and be stuck there if you can't cast a floating or flying spell can be quite a shocker too. *eye roll* Oooh and I almost forgot about the weird bug where a person in the ocean could use the jump skill to 'jump' across the oceans/lakes/ponds/flooded tunnels instead of having to slowly swim or drown.

 

See? Even games that I'd rave about have those incredibly dumb errors to them. Actually the more things I complain about in a game the more of a compliment it is since games that I like I pick apart all of the ways they could be better whereas the bad games I don't even bother wasting time complaining about.

[NKF]

Yep. Despite the bugs, we still enjoy the game. And that's all there is to it.

 

I really just wish they were still working on the game. We'd have made killer bug hunters... (pun intended)

 

If only they'd release the source code! I'd love to sit down and refactor it on the weekends.

 

- NKF