sinister agent wrote:
Oh yeah, personal armour was crap. But power armour wasn't out of reach quiet early on (I'm pretty sure it could be researched before you had a reliable supply of plasma clips), and you also had to research ufo-related stuff to get it, which gave you a small headstart on the air war.
I contented myself with just following the bigger ones to ensure I could see where they landed, and then go capture them intact (more booty and the important high-ranking aliens didn't die in the crash) until later.
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TFTD was great in that it was immensely difficult and really quite atmospheric (and those lobster men remain among the most fearsome of villains in any game. Utterly unstoppable in the early game...
It's a pity that the game itself was so hopelessly bugged and rather fiddly, and while I enjoy a long game sometimes, you could literally be stuck trudging through 200 missions before having any chance of capturing the next vital tech you need to proceed.
Yup. The ridiculous difficulty (until you had at least the Sonic Blasta or better the Sonic Cannon, all but your heaviest weapons were pretty shitty) combined with the broken research tree (unfinishable game ahoy!) kinda ruined it for me. I did play it constantly for days and days after I got it, but then I hit the wall. The sheer number of missions I was having to deal with, but also the sheer length of each one and the difficulty of each one just took it out of me. In the end I did an experiment - I just ignored all the enemy subs, bases and terror attacks, and waited to see just how long it would take for my crucial research project to finish. Sometimes a month and a half, and that was with scores of scientists working on it. In that time, I saw so many subs land, two bases spring up and three terror missions. That, I reasoned, would take me the rest of the weekend... and I just couldn't be bothered any more.
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Apocalypse is brilliant, though. It's a very different game, so kind of comparing apples and oranges to ask which one's better. The motion sensor was ace in that though, aye. I particularly liked the way the walls would show up on it when the trooper carrying it was moving.
Apocalypse was marvellous. The issue of sprawling levels and lots of combat missions was largely negated by the real-time combat which meant you could just run at fast-forward speed and let your guys sweep the building, rather than walking them forward five paces each and then ending the turn and waiting etc etc etc.
Plus you could run! So someone who was hurt could run to safety. The number of critically injured soldiers I saved by just ordering them to run out of the building was ridiculous! There was also the cool factor of rooting the aliens out - an alien infiltration level meant I'd send a groundcar with four soldiers around to each of that organization's buildings to search for aliens (quite often I'd see them being beamed in by a UFO I couldn't shoot down in time) and quite often find only a few combat units (the rest were those egg or chrysalis forms) and in a few lucky cases nothing but eggs which meant the mission finished instantly with a success for me!
And that's before the cool factor of an entire building collapsing as a UFO blows it up...