[Blarg]

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X-Com has still never been topped at what it does in all these years, not even close.

And I mean that 100% literally. Not even close.

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Agreed. It's unbelievable how a turn based strategy game that's inherently slow paced can have you so much on edge while playing it. There's no feeling like taking on a terror mission at night, stepping out of your craft, and having an alien fire at you from some unknown location.

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Yup. This is one of the extremely few games that actually has made me jump when something happened, given me a feeling of authentic fright.

The aliens were vicious and when that zombie making alien suddenly revealed himself by turning a corner it was stark terror because you knew something almost unstoppably horrible and powerful was going to come.

Creeping through those nighttime missions in a darkened store or lonesome field was intensely scary and full of suspense. You always dreaded nighttime missions, but if you put them off, you could lose a city or lose points with the populace or funding or all of it. You couldn't escape the terror!

And I loved that the map generator was random and that you could even play the same savegame of a battle from its beginning and have it turn out much differently. I played a bunch of my favorite battles over again, not because of winning or losing, but because they were so fun.

There was nothing like trying to make it up the stairs without getting your head blown off. The tactical challenges were fantastic, and the lightning fast realtime exchanges in a slow turn-based game were shocking and fun.

And time was handled better than in any game I've ever seen. Auto-fire enabling multiple troops to open up on a guy was great, and misusing it was always a danger. Loved those auto-fire rockets swooping in to annihilate a sector, but maybe blow you up to or knock out the stairs you needed, or engulf you in smoke you couldn't escape in time. So usually rockets weren't good for autofire ... but then you lose initiative. What a friggin great system. Moves and feels like realtime at all the right times, and lets you use so much strategy and tactics at the others. Awesome blend.

The sense of panic that you might go broke, not get your research done in time, that buying too many scientists or soldiers might have been a big mistake, that you might be caught short, that a weak base might be invaded, that an inexperienced crew might cause you to lose a battle or base station or might even get mind-controlled and waste your powerful veterans ...

(sigh) They don't make games like that anymore. They've never made one since.