Snakeman

It is kind of amusing ain't it? Sad, but also amusing. Developers and companies need to wrap their heads around the notion that you can't just market a game, you have to design the damn thing, and accept the criticizing that comes with it.

Yeesh, 70mb on a 56k. I'll let you know what I think next week Is this the same thing that's been out there on the web? (I'm referring to the online adventures thing, they're at episode 2 or 3 by now). Or is this for an honest to goodness standalone game? edit: I'm getting a download error: Problem encountered with internet connection (ARM1056, 12002) Have no clue what that means.

Like pretty much every fan of Trek, I was looking forward to this game. I was hoping that it would be a worthy successor to Armada II (which isn't so bad in its self in terms of mod support extending gameplay decently enough), but I don't think mods (presuming its even mod friendly to begin with) will save this title. I don't know why they went so wrong here. I can't imagine that something like contracts for voice talent for example, is an excuse for poor game production (I doubt this could sap your production money this badly). I still think its probably more to do with deadlines and pressures to meet them where franchises are concerned - because it doesn't appear to be because of lack of talent. I mean, if gameplay is so horrible, was there even a notion of a beta for this title to work out any kinks in the first place? As far as I know this game never had one. At least not a public one. Same was true of quite a few of the Star Wars titles. Too many game producers seem to rely on fixing their games after the fact with patches (but hey, a deadline was met on time so its all good?). What bothers me even more than that some games need patching after the fact, is not enough support after they release 'em before moving on to another product. ex. Empire at War and its expansion Forces of Corruption. Not bad gameplay with these so much as balancing issues however. About the only good points these two games have is that they are very moddable if your into the extra work that entails. If you just game, its frustrating however. Because now its not about anticipating the release of the game, but also about waiting for the communities to step up to the plate and make it more interesting.

Its that creepy accompanying synthesizer music, gets me every time.

I honestly don't know enough about some of these newer games to know one way or the other which is closer to the intent of the first UFO. The only reason I haven't tried them has mainly to do with money and computer specs at the moment.

Yeah but when it came to the Apoc timeline, it wasn't just environmental reasons people left, E-155 changed the way they looked at propulsion and that started colonization efforts - and I don't believe that it caused enviromental problems (but I could be wrong). To my understanding, the using up of most of the elerium between the 1st and 2nd wars kicked this off. They first found more eleirum in the Mars base, and that led them to the frontier in the other games that came out where apparently they did find ways to mine it and replenish what they needed from the frontier and shipping it back. As for the city represented in Apoc, I think Mega Primus or whatever it was called was the only mega city with plans for more if this experiment had worked. Your absolutely right though that the funding levels were skewed too low for what they were about and what their mission was in the original game's time frame. I imagined their funding level to be not too far off from say, what NASA gets - and that's already a fairly underfunded enterprise by most other program standards in use. Realistically they'd probably get a little more because it was internationally funded, not a U.S. led operation.

Well my conscious is clear on the two X-COM titles I did buy at any rate, pts1 and 3

How does profit work for the publisher by buying a copy from e-bay? If the point is to support the people who made it I mean. They only benefit by the guy or gal who first bought it. I'd guess that to do that, you'd have to hope the publisher still has it in their catalog to order direct as the most proper alternative. Personally, I really wish they would. I think all games companies and license holders for older games should have a game nostalgia website ordering system in place just in principle.

You raise a good point Slaughter that indies will want some kind of support for the business end of things. Perhaps one thing that might help them along could be a combination of other independents who know a little more, use webhosting and networking services to make it easier to form contacts, provide links to good resources and advertising tips, possible distribution channels etc. I suppose what I'm describing here is basically a consulting and support service of some kind for this particular group of developers. Anything that takes many of the business pressures away so they can focus on their work is probably key here.

I presume they did this not just to define what a planet is, but to even do so in the first place, they must have had to agree on a diameter of a body to fit the definition. I brought up the word planetoid because I'd heard it before (so it has to be a word right?!? ) so I figured that had to be one competing element to defining a planet besides orbital circumstances.

I personally think that one of the best ways for independent game developers to succeed apart from advertising in the right places, is hosting their own game for download (some have options where you can download it but also get it in CD form later for those of us who like hard copies of games). If any innovation is going to occur though, in terms of high quality games, it'll come from independents. These guys aren't in it for the big bucks most of the time (though they do need to eat like any of us), they actually retain their love of games through all these business shananigans taking place. For any of it to succeed for independents though, much of the innovations will probably have to stem from advertising and distribution capabilities mainly.

If Pluto is not a planet, then that makes it a planetoid right? Does that make its moons planetoidlets then?

I think your right, it makes it harder to stand on some moral high ground in justifying a war when a previous conflict saw our indirect particpation cause more problems. More Cold War fallout bites us in the ass. We help guys like bin Laden during the Russian war with Afganistan - it bites us in the ass later. Russia helps the Vietnamese, it turned out relatively well for them. China helps the North Koreans, ended in a stalemate that's lasted 50 years. We help Iraq fight Iran, it bites us in the ass again. Seems to me remote control wars work less often than not. Mopping up our problems isn't so easy is it.

I've always thought it was a blunder for the administration to use possible chemical weapons posession as an excuse for the war. Or they shouldn't have worded it that way (or the press shoudn't have focused so much on it either way). Considering too that the UN has no real muscle other than sanctions to enforce its directives, I personally think they ought to have hyped this angle. Sanctions didn't work so well or as well as they'd hoped as a deterant. Neither did diplomacy for that matter - didn't they boot out weapons inspectors on more than one occasion? I think the bottom line here is that, the enforcement of UN resolutions. If they've been broken, there's only so much you can do. I also think this event probably has set a new prescedent in terms of trying to figure out what the UN's purpose should be in this kind of thing. There's also another issue, and that's countries who may be up to no good who aren't members or bound by their decisions. What do you do? Default to some kind of moral high ground and take necessary action anyway? And who leads the charge?

Sorry about that, after the forum rearrangements over there, I had a harder time digging it up but its under the Laboratories subforum - X-Lab: Alien goals/motives, Storyline http://www.xcomufo.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4041 A lot of the material here are either ideas for Xeno's backstory, after version 1, or just things people would want further elaboration to where the originals are concerned.