Recent content by Smart Alec

Awesome to relive these adventures. Great fun then, and great fun now. :cool:

We never did find out what happened to Vala Night. Shame, alas, but you gotta stick with the mission, we didn't have a way to get back (there were tanks outside the mansion!) and she wasn't really part of X-Com. Bros before hos.

Just an observation I want to share before this part of the mission goes on any further: Vasily was very much inspired by a viewing of Rocky IV. But it's funny to reflect that here he really comes off as more like Rocky than Ivan Drago - taking the blocking-punches-with-his-face strategy and...

The woman from the Federal Bureau of Irritation strikes again. If you go back over the story, you'll likely note that there's a fair bit of Drake/Kasprjak snark - it's usually overshadowed by Drake/de Farrago bitchiness, though. As to why? Well, Rik's theory's as good as any. If you think...

Or, was there an Ethereal but it escaped? It is a mystery.

This does sort-of reflect how tough things could be in X-Com. The damage system in the old game was strange; you shot at something, and if you hit, the target could suffer from between 0% to 200% of the weapon's damage, randomised. Then, damage resistance would come into play This is why...

If I remember right, Alyssa was very much crushed by Beta Team's violent end, coming so soon after the Aliens' giant battleship attack. Unlike Alpha Team, Beta were a lot more friendly and at ease with each other (tension between Alyssa and Perez notwithstanding), possibly because they were more...

Neverwinter Nights's limitations meant there was no flying armour to be had here. We're going to a dark place now.

Ah, yeah, Mutons. Yikes. Without giving away too much, the appearance of Mutons in the campaign was really the point when we realised our de-emphasis on weapons development in favour of other avenues had to stop.

The beginning of the dark times, this.

The funny thing about reading this is grasping just how much punishment the team, and Vasily in particular, recieved in the course of a mission - and seeing how the narrative justifies their survival. Vasily was a high-level Tough/Dareevil/Soldier by this point, and reguarly endured superhuman...

Strange to tell, France does indeed have nuclear weapons and submarines. The aliens pick their allies with care.

Oddly enough, the vampires WERE servants of Orcus, as it turned out. Anyhow! The 'Aliens' post. I think by this point I'd settled into Vasily's role as something dangerously close to an action movie hero parody, complete with Schwartzenegger dialogue, Bond one-liners, etc. I think the Aliens...

That's more or less right. He was the most physically imposing member of Alpha Team, but he was dwarfed by - for example - Sveinn of Beta, who was very much a Big Guy.

The NWN engine allowed us to use a D&Desque philosophy of group tactics - tank, healer, damage-dealing snipers etc - that would have been very difficult to co-ordinate in the original X-Com. When it worked, it worked very well. Speaking for my own guy, for example, Vasily was very much a tank...