🚀 go-pugleaf

Interceptor is set before X-Com Apocalypse, hence no mention of the
game in Interceptor's manual.

Although it does suck, I think Microprose does deserve some credit...
at least they're trying to give us something new.

On Thu, 27 Aug 1998 12:08:35 -0500, no...@abma.com (Niscal) wrote:

>I got Interceptor just a couple days ago, thinking this must be the latest
>and greatest in the series, but have been pretty unimpressed. Does anybody
>know the story behind this thing? It almost looks like a sub-group at
>Microprose threw this thing together in their spare time, and decided to
>release it as some sort of alternate third-game-in-the-trilogy. The
>documentation talks about X-Com 1 and 2, but doesn't mention Apocalypse at
>all. I should've remembered Microprose's fondness for "hack-job" games.
>
>For those of you who haven't played it, it's a first-person spacecraft
>shoot-em-up, mainly. It does have some of the X-Com "strategy" elements of
>base-building, technology-researching, radar-watching, etc., but just feels
>slapped together. Used to be, when I was running an old turn-based X-Com
>mission, I felt like I had lots of options. Capture the aliens? Save the
>people? Destroy the houses? Bullets (single, burst, auto), gas, flame,
>rockets! With these first-person shoot-em-up missions in Interceptor, I
>feel like I basically have to blast everything in sight before they can
>blast me, and that's about it.
>
>Mainly what's lacking, I suppose, is the feeling of exploration that really
>"makes" an X-Com game. As bad as TFTD was, it was spine-tingling to decend
>into the lower levels of a mother ship. Likewise for the alien buildings in
>Apocalypse. In Interceptor, there's no exploration -- you can discover
>alien space bases, but when you go to destroy them, it's all done in
>spaceship dogfight mode -- and one dogfight looks pretty much like any
>other. It gets monotonous really fast. Even beefing up your spaceship with
>new weapons, etc. doesn't really help or change the appearance of the
>fights that much.
>
>I sure hope that the next X-Com game, whatever it is, isn't first person
>the way Interceptor is first person. It kills 90% of what made up a good
>X-Com game.