I will gladly “contribute” what I can to help out, but you folks have already done an amazingly great job! I have told a few folks about the game, and they too have downloaded it. But, they never played X-Com and are having a difficult time figuring out the gameplay. The X-Com story I guess you would say is what they are missing.
The one thing the devs could have done with X-Com was to offer some tutorials, which was in my opinion, something that would have helped a lot of people step into the game a little easier. Age Of Empires offered these tutorials, and thus helped an unknown amount of people learn the game quickly. In X-Com, you hit the floor running, so to speak, which forced a lot of trial and error guessing and a lot of restarts of the game due to failed bases because of the lack of understanding of the game. I now wonder how many would have kept playing if there were good tutorials for X-Com?
I have tried to explain the story and the gameplay to them and bring them up to speed as to the reasons and rhymes of the game, but I have found it easier to teach my dogs how to play Chess. “I personally think most folks have gotten far to use to the point and click for instant satisfaction!” Please don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the Quake explosions of the late 90’s like millions of others did, but there are more to games than flying by the seat of your pants graphics in FPS’s. The Need For Speed series also offered tons of wonderful eye candy for the graphics junkies who loved the car world. But the story to those were simple and quick to understand.
Quake 2 was released late November 1997. I bought the game, and finished it within a week. Very disappointing. Quake 1 took much longer, and had 4 separate sections to finish separately, not to mention the story to Quake 1 had a much better plot!
The Need For Speed games, well, they would require you to upgrade your OS just to play the newest release, and not warn you that the previous version of NFS would not work on the newer Microsoft OS! This happened with win95/98se to Win ME, and Win 2000, and XP, and Vista, and I am sure they will do it again with Win7.
Now, the folks at Westwood Studios, before they were bought out, did good things for the command and conquer series, red alert, red alert 2, and so on. They also had rather good tutorials.
But, when you want a game that has a wonderful story line, a solid plot, and grit, X-Com was very difficult to compete with, in my opinioin. And now, with the purity of UFO:AI and your remarkable ability to capture lightning in a bottle for a second time, is just something you don’t see these days and is so very refreshing, especially for us scifi junkies.
I will be around for a long time now, you have me hooked! I have a lot of reading to do with your forums and see if I might be able to contribute to something, but in all honesty, you folks have done amazing things with UFO:AI, you really have! The quality, atmosphere, and grit of the game has blown me away!
Again, thank you all for all your wonderful work on an old friend like this. It’s been a long, long time since I have seen a game, no, a piece of masterful work that really grabbed at a persons imagination, made them think, immersed them into the game and forced the passage of time to the curb until the sun started to rise.
I guess you can tell, you have made an old gamer very, very happy! So ask what you want of me, either in PM or email, I will do what I can to help preserve such a wonderful game and to help the people involved in it. I don’t think I have a lot to offer, but what I do have I offer freely. I have used level editors in the past, mostly for Q1 and Q2, and even made a few maps for some old Command and Conquer series games. I've been a software/hardware tester then a test lead for IBM in the past, "which I already know devs don't really like testers, hehe."
I've used visual basic eons ago, and I have dabbled a very little in c, c++. I am still figuring Linux out, but I am getting more fluent with it. "One tends to remember better when one learns first hand and on their own. I might pull my hair out a little faster, heh, but I do learn."
Thank you all again. Now, I have aliens to deal with.......
