🚀 go-pugleaf

Okay, I've just realised that a few messages I meant for the ng have
been sent to various people...so I've tried to rescue what I meant to
post.  Here's one:


     Subject: 
            Re: New X-COM Beta Test
       Date: 
            Tue, 29 Sep 1998 20:37:54 +0100
      From: 
            "Shaun Green (Greenish9)"
<gree...@greenshb.globalnet.co.uk>
        To: 
            Joe Schulte <ki...@earth.execpc.com>
 References: 
            1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6



Okay, here I go:

Tha valiant defender of Apocalypse once again gears up for battle!

Joe Schulte wrote:
> 
> Shaun Green (Greenish9) (gree...@greenshb.globalnet.co.uk) wrote:
> : I assume you all have previously read the message I am replying to.  I
> : just want to say: I agree with you completely, Jakob!  He says
> : Apocalypse was "terrible" (which it definitely WASN'T!), and then the
> : guy lists loads of stuff that he would like in a game - all of which was
> : in said "terrible" game!  Maybe he should think out his posts a little
> : more.
> 
> : Greenish_9
> 
> : PS. I don't intend any offence - just request that you (Joe) consider
> : exactly what you are saying.
> 
> Let's add more "great" things about Apocalypse.
> 
> 1. They totally fucked up the world. Megacorporations warring. In the
> middle of a city. Vehicles randomly getting shot down.

"Fucked up"?  Hardly.  They tried something new, and the general opinion
I have picked up is that it worked.  Would you rather have played a
third rehash of UFO, like TFTD?  TFTD was good,  but still essentially
UFO with more eye-candy.  Megacorporations warring is far from a bad
idea - the police fighting criminal syndicates etc. all added an extra
element to the game, which truly made you feel like you weren't the only
player in the game...there were other people out there as well!  And
vehicles weren't randomly shot down - police and other armed craft would
shoot down the vehicles of organisations hostile to them.
 
> 2. Aliens invading one big city. Why? Where's the rest of the planet? It's
> not like they have to invent one. They know what the Earth looks like. I'd
> bet most of the audience does, too.

As the manual states (quite understandably too) after two massive alien
wars, the rest of Earth is largely ruined, some parts even radioactive! 
Also, much of the population has left war-torn Earth for the more
prosperous colonies, so the newly united (THAT bit is unlikely! ;))
Earth government gathers together the survivors into several
mega-cities, the largest and most powerful of which was Mega-Primus. 
There were others, but they were too small and weak to have any bearing
on the game.
 
> 3. Neon everything. Thrilling.
> 
> 4. People dress well. Even in the slums. Neat.

City aesthetics laws, imposed by the senate after pressure from the
Extropian org.  Seems a bit silly, really, but at least it was an
original concept!  Hey, if Earth is ruined, you'd want to make your
homes look nice, wouldn't you?  Take your mind of the devestation...
 
> 5. Nothing spooky about it whatsoever.

Untrue.  Some of the tactical missions could really freak you out,
especially when cloaking shields came into play...a delicate, tense game
of cat-and-mouse through sewers and around the wreckage of a downed
battleship...great!  And hell, Megaspawn were scary, to say the
least...the fact that the aliens are this time so...ALIEN is spooky...a
totally organic technologically advanced society...weird, huh?
 
> The engine was fine, everything else was terrible.

The engine was excellent (although poor for turn-based play) but
everything else was NOT terrible!  Except snakemen, which were sooo easy
to kill!
 
> Now, what was being discussed? A grafting of the graphics from UFO to the
> Apocalypse engine, or an update of the original?

Hmm.  What is being planned?

Greenish_9