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Gaming subthread.
I've recently found X-Com Files a so-called 'megamod' for OpenXcom - a fan re-implementation & polishing of one of the first squad based tactical turn based games ever. Ufo: Enemy Unknown, which came out in 1993, back when 1999 was still in the future and was re-made into a slick but profoundly soulless if somewhat competently made corporate product lately.
Better, I've found 'Brutal OpenXcom' which is a fork of OpenXcom with a completely re-written and pretty good AI that doesn't cheat (unlike original) and is massively challenging because it's basically fine and competent and can (if the mod makers were feeling nasty) use the same brutal tactics of lobbing satchel charges 15 m ahead where it suspects the enemy is. Luckily, it's not that common at the start that the enemy has large amounts of explosives on hand. O
Very comfy game. The setting is sort of like X-Files: all the major conspiracies are true. Name a major one , probably true in the setting. You have been appointed to investigate 'weird shit' on behalf of one of the more pro-social ones. Of course you don't know anything about that yet bc you're just some sort of capable security bureaucrat, and you have a shiny permit from UNSC to go around and black-bag people all around the world whenever sufficiently weird crap is happening. And boy, is there a lot of it!
Anyway the gaming loop of classic Xcom and also this is still the same: build base-> respond to weird shit -> black bag or kill said weird ..beings, loot the corpses->autopsy or interrogate -> find out more about said weird shit -> use this to improve your capability -> SHUT IT DOWN (whatever 'it' is, and 'shut' sometimes involves diplomacy and sometimes travelling to space, other universes and being very kinetic).
Ordinary Xcom had the alien invasion. XCom Files starts out earlier: you don't have jet fighters and intercontinental ranged VTOL troop transports, you have airline tickets and vans. You go around, abduct farmers, tussle with Men in Black (well, you are technically MiB too, but there's the not-so-prosocial ones), tussle with cultists, fight alien tech smuggling organised crime (most lucrative part of the game really) and so on.
It's a long mod, I'd say 6x-10x longer than the original game, and quite difficult, but you can save & load until you figure out how to do things. Or that you need to fight that particular battle another day.
OpenXcom looks dated, but the battles can be ran at increased resolutions which makes it look somewhat better. There's a lot of extra keyboard only controls for convenience which are nicely documented in the controls menu.
Anyway, except for some sometimes uneven and mildly bad writing in a few reports, I really like it and rate it higher than Xenonauts, which looked a bit nicer but felt somewhat soulless. If any game deserves a proper remake, it's the original Xcom. And no, I don't mind the cringe one they made. Proper scale, no stupid constraints on squad size, actual sloped hills. I can't believe it but forests in the old one look less artificial than in the new one, which doesn't have slopes.)
I enjoyed myself playing the XCOM 1 remake, and especially XCOM 2. I even tried Xenonauts, which is a spiritual successor to the original XCOM, but just didn't like it very much. I guess the 1980s aesthetic and the clunky mechanics weren't to my taste.
(Why hasn't someone made Phoenix Point but good? You can actually aim the weapons yourself! There was granular destructible terrain and cover piercing!)
In a grid-based turn-based tactics game! It's a profoundly shitty idea!
It's optional. You can just order your soldiers to shoot normally most of the time. Fine-aim is complemented by the limb-damage system, where you can wound or incapacitate enemies or destroy their weapons. The accuracy of a sniper makes sense beyond just having long range. I think it's great. Even modern XCOM lets you aim rockets and grenades, this just takes it to the next level. Tactical positioning makes sense on a far more physical level than arbitrary cover or angle bonuses. Enemies with shields actually need to be flanked or chipped away. You can shoot the facehugger mind-controlling your soldier, but make sure you don't use a sniper unless you want to give them another face-hole.
It's, pardon me, superfluous in idea and idiotic in practice.
See: Heavy troopers being unable to fire from rooftops because they hold their guns at hip level. See also: Sniper being unable to take his shot because there's a lamppost halfway in between him and his target, and leaning left or right isn't possible because it's grid-based, dammit.
You can't actually fine-control where things stand relative to each other, yet first-person shooting depends on exactly such fine control. It's the wrong genre for it!
Those are edge cases. Since Phoenix Point has rather granular time units, it is easy enough to make a soldier move a single tile to clear the line of fire, then shoot and scoot back to cover.
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