dancer

How I did it: 7 snipers. at mission start select each squaddie and give them a destination, in an arc. One end of the arc is at the road. One end is at the wall, left of the gate. Squaddies are positioned about the radius of a missile explosion apart. No crouching - you can't evade a missile fast enough if you have to get to your feet first. Try not to put anyone in a low place, or in direct line of sight of the yard beyond the gate. Rude strangers show up during deployment. Expect that. Concentrate fire on one at a time. 7 snipers will take down an armoured reticulan before anyone needs to fire a second shot (usually). Loud rifle noises bring the little fellows out, through the gate in ones and twos. Not much of a threat after you're deployed. When you think you've got them all, set the clock running and grab coffee. Another one or two might show. Then, redeploy on the road in three teams. Three snipers on the road. Two on each side, flanking. Move each team forward a few steps (run, don't walk - the noise attracts the bad guys, and you want that). If you get about halfway to the gate with no more aliens, send your fastest squaddie to the gate. If they see an alien, run away, out of sight. Use the runner to draw the enemy into your sniper ambush. Shouldn't be a big problem getting to the base entrance now. Inside the base: Everyone stays put. Creep your fastest/stealthiest character to the objective, grab it and sneak back. There are some patrols but they are minor. A character with heroic speed can carry the briefcase and move faster than an alien (reticulans don't seem to be able to run. Speed is something that you have and they don't, and it doesn't take long to lose one in the corridors - though at the risk of attracting others). I certainly managed to sneak in and back out without actually ever seeing more than one alien, and he was looking the other way.

Finding good voice actors is pretty hard. Out of the various professional voice-actors out there, there's a few only a good ones (which is why you hear them all the time: Chuck Adler, Hillary Haag, Spike Spencer, David Warner, Melissa Disney to name a handful). There's probably not more than about 40 good voice-actors in the continental US, and they don't come cheap. A lot of folks think you can stand someone in front of a microphone, have them repeat their lines a few hundred times, pick the best and have done, but most people come out sounding very stilted. Sometimes they get better. Remember JA2, with Ira's voice actress? She comes over horribly wooden in the early lines, but manages to eventually improve a lot by the end of the script from practice. (A pity they didn't have her go back and redo the early lines again) Most voice 'talent' (and I use the term advisedly) just doesn't get that sort of chance to get into it, and I feel that game development budgets are generally based around the notion that almost anyone can stand at the microphone and sound okay, so why spend the big bucks on the big names?

UFO: Aftermath shipped to the Australian east coast yesterday (my mail order supplier in Sydney shipped it out to me same day - It should be waiting for me when I get home from the office). For the chain stores (EB, and the like) it should be hitting the shelves on Friday or Saturday, if they haven't yet put it out. EDIT: The slated release date was 30 Oct, so it's 8 days early.