Be Excellent To Each Other

I don;t want to spend £70+ on games this month....

Also which copy to buy 360 or PC.. mmm I think it'll work best on PC and I'll likely will never have to buy it again if it is that good... or until they remake it.

Assuming you mean "can't", yeah I agree - but apparently it does! No idea why.

They're all in on it!

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/37 ... eamed-of/#

Console version is no poor cousin, says Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevange ... r-console/

AE in 3.. 2... 1...

Sorry I'm a bit late. My PC wankometer isn't running as efficiently as usual. It's probably built by fucking Citroen too.

POTY!

On-train Lulz

Also, I really rather fancy this game. For some reason I never properly 'did' the UFO games, but by christ I spent some time playing stuff like Laser Squad back in the day, and more recently of course, Naked War, which remains one of THE MOST MAGNIFICENT GAMES IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD TO FAIL COMMERCIALLY BECAUSE TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE FUCKING STUPID.

I love turn-based games, I don't know why they're considered so unfashionable these days.

I may have to pre-order UFO Defence on Steam, it looks pretty nifty and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive.

The VPN worked, I've now unlocked the game 3 days early! Woo. Will start that off downloading at lunchtime, methinks!

AARGH! WHAT IS THE POINT OF PREORDERING DIGITAL CONTENT! IT ISN'T GOING TO RUN OUT NOW IS IT????!!!!!!

Well, bandwidth is finite, so you're better off downloading it early.

Did you have to pay for this? Or is there some free VPN shenanigans I can use? (I already have it 'pre-loaded')


ps: let me know if your account is suddenly banned.

You can normally get a free trial for 30 days regarding VPN thing. Just need to change your DNS settings or follow the sites info. If your computer breaks after 30 days it might be the trial has ended and your not allowed to use that DNS.... worth keeping in mind.

I use http://www.spotflux.com, which is a program you download that seems to work well.

Also has x.com at the end of the URL, which is strangely apt.

If they had a lot of money they could perhaps buy http://x.com from eBay.

I don't know how they ended up with that domain.

Why not?

Getting it pre-loaded is a nice little perk - (with games routinely weighing in at 10GB or more these days, even on a decent ADSL connection that can still be a reasonably lengthy download, especially if wife/daughter are hammering the internet at the same time) - and I also think it's a nice little 'statement of intent' if you will, as a digital pre-order is a way of saying 'ZOMG I WANT THIS', which hopefully, I dunno, cheers the guys up who write the games a bit if they get 100,000 people pre-ordering one of their games.

IT'S READY TO PLAY!

For me, anyway. Just typical that I have to go eat dinner now, and then go shooting. No XCOM for me until later tonight.

Boo hiss.

No internet yet in the new flat. I can see myself dragging the PC round to the parent's house this weekend to download this. I still regularly play the original UFO: Enemy Unknown.

Well, apart from a game-breaking bug that literally meant I couldn't click anything on the geoscape (and have thus lost my entire campaign progress so far, because auto-save is disabled by default and I had to kill the game task without saving) this is awesome.

One of my soldiers spotted an alien, had a 92% chance to hit and still missed, then got shot by an alien from further across the map and killed. The alien that my guy missed then took a potshot at another of my men but hit the car he was using for cover instead.

Then, stupidly, I didn't realise that the car was on fire and it blew up - and as I hadn't moved my guy that turn, he got killed in the explosion.

Bliss!

ZOMG NO THE GAME IS DUMBED DOWN FOR A MODERN AUDIENCE TOO EASY

I might have to buy this. If it will run on my works laptop

Hurrah this worked. I managed to play for a few hours yesterday. Once the game had 'activated' I put steam into offline mode.

Let's hope we don't get banhammered for doing this, as my steam account has tonnes of games on it.

It is, almost certainly, breaking Steam's ToS.

From what people tell me, no-one has ever been banned from Steam for using a VPN to unlock games early, only when they use the VPN to buy a game at a discounted rate that's only available in certain territories.

So hopefully, we should be fine.

Been thinking about my brief play yesterday, and I realised that every time an alien took a shot at one of my guys, my heart skipped a beat. That's the sort of tension that I used to feel when playing the original game, but haven't for a while because I know it inside out. But this? This is all new, so it's tense again. It's great.

I'm tempted by this. I never really got into it first time around, but I think I would now.

I'd like it on the 3DS though.. the touch screen would be nice.

As that's functionally equivalent to "I flew to the US on business, booted my laptop, and my game unlocked" I think it's unlikely to result in any problems. I'm really very surprised it works though.

I'm reminded of a very old Panel 4 piece by He-who-shall-not-be-named-lest-you-pay-2-of-your-British-pounds where he remarked that region locking was similar in a 'how dare you want to play our games?' way; going to great lengths to import stuff.

I might enjoy this but I couldn't get past the tedium of the tutorial.

I just wanted to Rebelstar around it around the place blasting shit but it just wanted to talk to me. Slowly. With as many generic futuristic clichéd soldiers as it could throw at me. Which turned out to be a fair few.

Bored. Deleted. Shot itself in the foot there as it might have been good fun if it was a bit more welcoming.

So... uh... turn off the tutorial?

I didn't even realise this was coming out on consoles too. Think I'll pick this up on pay day. I fancy a bit of sofa XCOM. Still waiting for Xenounauts, like, but this'll do for now!

Five stars from noted video game website, The Guardian.

I don't think you can on the 360 demo. Lord knows I was hammering all the buttons an' all.

The demo is just one big tutorial, even the 'free play' bit at the end is too small to give you any real options, also the difficulty is far to low. Still want the game though....roll on tomorrow

Ah, no. Yeah, the demo *is* the tutorial (albeit slightly different to the full game's tutorial.)

It really is a terrible demo, you can't judge the game on it. The demo is designed more for those who are completely new to turn-based games and X-COM in particular. For those who are familiar with the old game it's an infuriating combination of hand-holding and just not very interesting.

Well I have indeed caved in on this, it's reviewed so well and I do so like turn based strategy games.

Pre-ordered so it's downloading now, unlocks at midnight but I ain't gonna stay up on a school night to play (lest I still be up at 3am or suchlike), will tuck into it tomorrow evening.

Downloaded both the PC and 360 demos, really impressed with it. Yes there is a lot of hand holding but remember this is one of the first TBS games on the Xbox (at least I can't think of many) and new peeps will need a lot of help. Might have to pick this up for the PC.

I've been watching some gameplay vids and it seems pretty XCOMish to me. Tutorials be damned, the meat of the game seems... Meaty.

But is that meat, gamey?

Moderately entertaining 'Diary of a Wimpy Squad' from RPS here.

Amusingly, LewieP is a 'Rookie' in it. Dressed in fetching pink like the sexy African lady he is. How will he fare?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10 ... ore-127479

The important thing is: Gillen's dead.

Hmm, I now want this quite badly. Lack of cash means it'll have to be on my Christmas list, though.

Oooohhhhhh yes, I'm liking this very much.

Only a couple of hours in, but it's certainly got its hooks into me nice and early on.

Not really encountered anything that I'd call difficult yet, but I've already had a proper wince moment when I lost a squaddie (my first promoted solider) to a bit of a stupid dick move on my part.

I think I'm going to give all my soldiers real names.

I might get this on Monday, then.

Well I got my ass kicked pretty badly on a couple of levels last night.

On one occasion it ended up as me literally doing a desperate run back to the evac zone with a promoted soldier who I really didn't want to lose (he made it but was mortally wounded with a long recovery ahead of him, everyone else got killed), and on the next one I just got properly fucking slaughtered, total wipe out. I lost everyone.

I think I have too much of an 'FPS mentality' about me, even though I know I'm playing a turn based strategy game, I still just want to run in and kill everything.

Loving it, it's refreshing to find a game in this day and age that completely hands your arse to you on a plate without a second thought if you do it wrong.

This is an absolute mother fucking triumph.

I concur.

Who'd have thunk it, a turn based strategy game released in 2012 for mainstream games consoles and the PC?

I might have to start the campaign again, for two main reasons.

1) I'll be less confused when I start out and make better choices about what stuff I want to research and suchlike. (I've realised for example, that I definitely wanted the medkit first, which kind of leads onto reason 2.)

2) I get very upset when a soldier dies, I think that naming all my soldiers and trying to play through the game without anyone dying should be my goal.

But yes, I'm loving the game to pieces, the tension of needing a slightly dodgy shot to hit its target is quite something.