Terror from the Deep was brilliant as well, which figures since it was pretty much the same game with different colours. Those Tentaculat' s, the brains with tentacles (which looked more like Testaculats) were hard!
Each mission was procedurally generated so every one played out differently. And sometimes the role of the dice was so ruthless. Once I' d built up the ultimate team of soldiers, pinpoint accuracy at shooting, hard as nails, high-tech state of the art full-body armour made from planes, and an unstoppable armoury of weapons (blasterbomb launcher!!). I had one clear leader of my group of 12 soldiers who was legendary and had been there since the beginning whilst others perished (each playthrough could last months in real world time), and one second in command.
During one alien ship crash landing at night, I suddenly faced a new enemy - the Ethereals - mysterious floating cloaked aliens. My leader steps out of the aircraft after landing at the site, and without me realising, disappears into the darkness. The rest of my crew are obviously mortified at losing their leader and morale suddenly drops (morale is an in-game stat which affects everything else).
So they split up to start flushing the area out carefully. Suddenly my second in command spots an enemy, and when I scroll over to see it - its my commander standing in the dark (each of your controllable crew get a radius of light to symbolise field of view) unselectable and looking evil. My commander, mind controlled by the computer, then procedes to systematically wipe out my entire crew (like a scene from Predator) and all attempts to take him down fail. I crap myself because I made him and I know how hard he is.
The last guy left was a rookie who had just joined the elite crew, pumped up with armour and weaponry but no battlefield experience. He shits himself drops all his stuff and tries to leg it (you lose control of the characters when they panic), so I spend the next 5 minutes just ending my turn as this kid runs around the battlefield. He eventually stops, but then comes face to face with the Ethereal race of aliens, and before he can turn around gets blasted in the face. Game over.
When thats your first experience of proper gaming, you can' t help but compare every action, shooter and rpg to it after and feel something' s missing!
< Message edited by choupolo -- 1 May 08 1:35:20 >