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Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Rodo on January 22, 2009, 04:11:12 pm

Title: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 22, 2009, 04:11:12 pm
Yesterday I was going through a bunch of old cd's that I had stored around here searching for windows xp install cd (don't ask why) and I happened to stumble upon this great old game..

for the sake of replaying at least a couple of hours I tried to install it but sadly the cd is too old and it's already unreadable... quite a bump cause I was really looking forward to play through it over again.

Do any of you remember this one right?? I loved the fact that almost everything was under your control in game, that's something not all games can achieve.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: TrashMan on January 22, 2009, 05:46:22 pm
Is the CD scratched? There's one thing I tried once on a CD that was unreadable...adn it worked.

I took a piece of fabric (the one used to clean the monitor) and I polished the CD's underside..again and again and again and again...pressing down on it. After a while the scratches were visibly smaller and the CD worked again...for a while at least :P
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Adept on January 22, 2009, 06:10:40 pm
X-Com Apocalypse is a great game. I absolutely love it. I dusted mine off and replayed it some months back (I have an old 200 MHz Pentium for these things).

But guess what, it's awailable on Steam for a few bucks! It's bundled up in a already configured Dos Box, so it works right on a moden PC. If you are a steam client, get a working copy and enjoy a great game! Maybe like me you still have your manuals too?
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 22, 2009, 06:49:31 pm
manuals?? nop I dumped everything a couple of years ago and kept only the cd, I'm not that fan on buying on internet, I'm on Argentina and the shipping costs more than the game itself.

Is the CD scratched? There's one thing I tried once on a CD that was unreadable...and it worked.

I took a piece of fabric (the one used to clean the monitor) and I polished the CD's underside..again and again and again and again...pressing down on it. After a while the scratches were visibly smaller and the CD worked again...for a while at least :P

it is scratched but I doubt that's the problem, the inner part of the reflective disc (the metal part) is all corroded, I guess the moisture of this places has finally found a way into the cd and blasted it to hell, it's not even booting any more, a bump...on the other hand I'll google it to see if I can find a copy somewhere around here to buy it back.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rick James on January 22, 2009, 06:53:12 pm
Is the CD scratched? There's one thing I tried once on a CD that was unreadable...adn it worked.

I took a piece of fabric (the one used to clean the monitor) and I polished the CD's underside..again and again and again and again...pressing down on it. After a while the scratches were visibly smaller and the CD worked again...for a while at least :P

If possible, I would create a CD image (something akin to an .iso file) so that you can run the game straight from your hard drive with something like Daemon Tools and not have to worry about getting your CD damaged any further. My Earthsiege CD had a rather prominent scratch on it that caused the disk to eventually fragment while the drive was reading and mulch the internal components.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 22, 2009, 06:57:12 pm
no I'm definitely not runing the cd any more... I've tried to install the game several times already to no avail.

I'll get a working copy somewhere... I'm guessing I must have made a copy of this one If I really liked it.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Davros on January 23, 2009, 08:42:57 am
Then play UFO: Alien Invasion instead
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/?page=Home
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 23, 2009, 10:56:22 am
hell look at that!! I might even start playing this one instead of looking for X-COM itself... it free as far as I can see right?
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Gortef on January 23, 2009, 11:17:51 am
Sweet, X-Com Apocalypse was indeed (and still is) a great game. We had so much fun playing it with my friend back in the days.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 23, 2009, 11:21:52 am
Sweet, X-Com Apocalypse was indeed (and still is) a great game. We had so much fun playing it with my friend back in the days.

could you win on higher difficulties?? It was impossible for me! I stayed on the easy and medium at most and it was a pain in the ass after a couple of weeks the aliens already had battleships and crushed the entire city.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: TrashMan on January 23, 2009, 12:04:36 pm
Then play UFO: Alien Invasion instead
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/?page=Home

Some of my stuff is there... :D
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 23, 2009, 12:07:55 pm
I'm downloading it right now... still an hour and half till it's finished and I'll peek into that one.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Shade on January 24, 2009, 06:23:12 am
Definitely a great game. Now I need to install it and have a go again...

For higher difficulties, there are a few ways to exploit the way the game uses score to determine the difficulty of the next 'wave'. For example, raid the Cult of Sirius. Lots. Get loads of stuff to sell for cash and valuable experience for your troops. Unfortunately this also gets you tons of points and tells the game that the next week's aliens should be much tougher. However, once you feel you've raided them enough, instead take a few ships and start blowing up one of their temples from the air (take out the launch tubes first if you can, cuts down on the number of ships that can defend the place), and basically just keep gunning for that temple until your score is back down to a moderate level, as you lose points for causing city damage. An exploit, to be sure, and tantamount to cheating... but it does make the higher difficulties survivable :)
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Demitri on January 24, 2009, 03:31:48 pm
Ah, brings back so many memories :( It was the very first game i played on my first pc. A Pentium 166MHz. You couldn't run a toaster with that these days! Loved the whole x-com series from then on. Got to admit tho, i was absolutely useless at it. Was quite young and didn't really know what i was doing so kept running out of money all the time. To my great shame i never finished it. Might look into getting it off of steam. The whole package was going for something silly like £15 not too long ago. Will need to check if its still the same
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 24, 2009, 04:12:29 pm
well that's an interesting way of wining! I had no idea that the game sent the aliens conciderating what kind of sucess you had on the previous run, that might be the problem, I always kept my field missions 100% sucessfull, I never loose a single trooper, and If I did, I would replay it all over again.

I'm actually trying this new free version... it's like the same but with the hole world... which I don't like but well.. better that nothing.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: redsniper on January 24, 2009, 10:42:16 pm
it's like the same but with the hole world...
:lol:

Yeah, like the first X-COM. :p
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 25, 2009, 08:49:45 am
well I like the city version a hole lot more... this new one is really hard!! the terror missions are in shifts (on apocalypse you could choose between shifts or real time.. I'm so onto real time one and it's hard to get a hand on this mode), I can't get a knocked alien to research live specimen so far and I'm getting frustrated grgr.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rick James on January 25, 2009, 01:45:21 pm
well I like the city version a hole lot more... this new one is really hard!! the terror missions are in shifts (on apocalypse you could choose between shifts or real time.. I'm so onto real time one and it's hard to get a hand on this mode), I can't get a knocked alien to research live specimen so far and I'm getting frustrated grgr.

Bah. You're a pansy if you can't handle turn-based action...which actually makes the in-game missions quite fair.

I like Alien Invasion, but I miss my destructible environments. I miss the days where I could have a soldier lob a grenade at a wooden wall, step through the hole made by the blast, and murder everything that wasn't human on the other side.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Demitri on January 25, 2009, 04:47:14 pm
Just looked on Steam and the package of all 5 x-com games together is £8.99! That my friends is a result. Will be getting that at the end of the month when i finally get paid.  :nod:
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Shade on January 25, 2009, 05:09:15 pm
Quote
I like Alien Invasion, but I miss my destructible environments. I miss the days where I could have a soldier lob a grenade at a wooden wall, step through the hole made by the blast, and murder everything that wasn't human on the other side.
Amen. In fact, my main tactic for missions involving Chryssalids used to consist of two steps - 1) Bring rocket/blaster launchers and plenty grenades. 2) From a safe distance, demolish everything that could possibly hide an alien. Never enter a building - Level it. Never go around a hedge - Level it. With Chryssalids around, it was the only way to be sure...
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 25, 2009, 06:09:44 pm
your reputation with the companies must have benn awfull if you did that every single time..

which are the Chryssalids ?? I hated the brain-suckers and the ones that runned really fast and exploded near your soldiers... damn those where dreadfull on closed enviroments.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: redsniper on January 25, 2009, 09:08:14 pm
Chryssalids were really fast crab-looking guys that would run up to your guys and inject them with an egg, which would cause them to turn hostile until the egg hatched into another Chryssalid and so on. Horrible. Shade's response is completely appropriate.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 26, 2009, 07:09:54 am
Chryssalids were really fast crab-looking guys that would run up to your guys and inject them with an egg, which would cause them to turn hostile until the egg hatched into another Chryssalid and so on. Horrible. Shade's response is completely appropriate.

well on X-com 3 apoc, that role was replaced with the brain-suckers, it run to your soldiers, jumps on their head and delivers some kind of micro live.alien or something, and after a couple of seconds your soldier turns to the aliens with full knowledge and capabilities... and also suicidal sometimes
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Shade on January 26, 2009, 07:30:44 am
X-Com 3 brainsuckers were but a poor imitation of the true terror that were Chryssalids. Real-time combat didn't help them either of course, but even with that taken into account a Chryssalid was a far scarier foe.

They were, essentially, like adult Xenomorphs, only harder to kill and incorporating a turbocharged facehugger capability. These things would shrug off bullet and laser hits and even take plasma in the stride, with only explosives having any real degree of effectiveness against them. I've seen a single Chryssalid destroy a 12-man squad almost on its own during a night terror mission. And by the time it was done there were seven Chryssalids...
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Gortef on January 26, 2009, 12:20:37 pm
could you win on higher difficulties?? It was impossible for me! I stayed on the easy and medium at most and it was a pain in the ass after a couple of weeks the aliens already had battleships and crushed the entire city.

Actually I think we never really tried the higher difficulties.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: TrashMan on January 26, 2009, 03:30:33 pm
UFO:AI is really good.
It's not finished tough. There's a whole lot of content in there, especially if you download the dev version.

F'course, you might get dissapointed by the final story (I know how it goes, since I'm a contributor). I'm trying to get them to change the ending to something more sane.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: Rodo on January 26, 2009, 04:06:56 pm
I'm just starting with AI, so far so good, sure you can't destroy the environment but well... I read over there that it's gonna be fixed somehow in next versions.
Title: Re: X-COM 3 Apocalypse
Post by: redsniper on January 26, 2009, 06:23:59 pm
night terror mission
:shaking::shaking::shaking:

:(