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I found this in a review of UFO:Unknown Terror. I've never heard of any of the games called that before so I took a peek. Turns out it was a UFO/TFTD compilation with the original manuals and two walkthroughs by Dave Ellis (Which was a suprise to me at least!)

 

This picture confused me as I've never seen anything like it before and I've completed tftd over and over again... Maybe it IS just the normal explosion, made to look strange by taking a still image. It certainly looks strange to me though. :)

 

https://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/dec96/xcom53.gif

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It is the explosion image as a still. It's normal. I once took a screenshot of the UFO Defense explosions, because I thought they looked like skulls. Turns out they were little like, mushroom cloud thingies. I left the screenie on my old comp, but even if I did have it I wouldn't be able to post it, I don't know how to do websites. :)
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Or, perhaps the skull is there, but only parts of it are in each explosion frame. So when the animation is running, our brain registers each part of the skull and this leaves us thinking that we saw a skull.

 

- NKF

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XCOM: Unknown Terror - Review

 

It looks like XCOM: Unknown Terror (notice the lack of dash in X-COM... hmm) was a two-pack with UFO and TFTD. Sort of like a precursor to the CE.

 

The review is pretty cool, and if you look at our infamous screenshot posted by Vet, you can see the caption:

 

Scuba-diving, XCOM2-style. Beware the HE autofire ...

 

So after some closer analysis, you can see the bubble trail near the lower left corner of the picture, looks like it came from a hydro-jet cannon. I think gas cannons produce a larger explosion and bubble trail.

 

Edit: Umm, I guess you can see the hydro-jet cannon in the picture... I just umm, didn't notice that.

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  • 1 month later...
I don't remember about land missions, but underwater explosions were big bubble thingies like in vet's picture. And they aren't skulls at all, they are like mushroom clouds. They just kind of look like skulls when you see them going fast.
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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
I've no idea what the underwater explosions look like at all as I run it on an XP computer :) No sooner do you fire a weapon than a nice charred patch appears obn screen. It's so unbelievably fast I can sometimes tell a man to move, wonder where he is and find him dead about three screens away!
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If you set the movement speed really high... https://www.angelfire.com/games3/jeffy90/images/smilies/sarcastic.gif

 

Or better. You don't have to wait for units to move if they aren't on the screen. So, when you want troops to move fast, you trail the view around so that the whole route, with the exception of about the last step, is off the screen.

 

Handy, but it can be a bit reckless at times (cause you'd only really use it for long trips, and you shouldn't really order those anyway).

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  • 3 weeks later...

As for the explosions. Yes, they look like skulls, but in Enemy Unknown (or UFO Defense).

Amasingly, I haven't noticed that until I saw a following screenshot on the Byron's XCommand site

 

https://dynamic.gamespy.com/~xcom/images/x1x5x59.jpg

 

Don't sure, whether every type of HE ammunition causes such explosions or only Blaster Launcher (as you can see on the shot) cause game runs pretty fast on my machine (and it is not being XP) even with Moslo.

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Nah. In UFO, at least, all the explosions look like skulls. There's a screenshot from the 1994 coverdisk demo that came with PC Gamer which shows an explosion very much like that one. But the only explosives in the demo were grenades and HC-HE rounds.

 

If I can get to my back issues of PCG, I'll scan it. If I can't, you'll just have to take my word for it :)

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Nah.  In UFO, at least, all the explosions look like skulls. 

Well, then I guess they do. Frankly speaking, I think the artists wasn't going to draw an additional set of explosition pictures without the apparent reason.

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