The Exquisite Corps: XCOM: Enemy Within - Part 02

Hooray!

If they win, this series will take more than a year at this rate. Howlongtobeat.com says playing this game leisurely will take 43 hours to do the main story. With half hour episodes every week that is 86 weeks, which is almost 20 months. So they will finish in March of 2019.

Great production on that intro with the letter and summary though.

Nothing better to come home to.

Nice :)

BEST INTRO EVER

The "Handover Report" is everything I was hoping it would be.

Let's see if Alex's first episode goes any better than Abby's....

e: Abby refering to the death as "Abby", but the survivor as "you" raises some questions. Did she send a decoy on the first mission?! :p

This intro is already FANTASTIC. LOVING this feature GBEAST!

That intro was sublime.

I love this feature! I hope you guys can do more than once a week for the sake of the commanders' uhh battle memory. Knowledge. Skills. And things.

This is already a trainwreck of misinformation and I love it.
"So Dan is a Support now so he can sprint." "I better take the medkit away from me, who is definitely not a Support."

From the looks of it, can I propose an idea for season 2? Yes? Here it is.

Abby, Alex and Dan can have their own squad fill with rookies. So they don't "accidentally" get each other killed.

Thanks for listening.

Yeah. Those introductory narrations are easily going to be the best part of this feature. I love it when the production crew is afforded the time to get creative 'round these parts.

I'd love (once finished with xcom of course) if they expanded this idea to other games. The presentation and "gimmick" give this feature a unique feel for what is essentially a playthrough.

Send a plane over Asia to support the satellite. I'm sure Dan will clean up all of Vinny's mistakes and bad advice.

Great series, but I wish the episodes were longer - this way every week each commander will have just enough time to remember the basics and then get a three week-ish break to forget everything again (and continue on a save which was played by two other people in the meantime), the chance of success is aproaching zero but hey, I'll look forward to watching this trainwreck no matter what!!

This is glorious trainwreck and I wouldn't want it any other way.

16:51 has a lot of questionable decisions made in one move.

Hopefully Dan comes in next week and sweeps up the current mess that is the early layout of the facilities.

But overall, this turn came out ok, good job with the arc thrower.

I really hope you guys consider having longer episodes in the future.

Holy hell what an intro!

I'm not even done with the intro but I can tell Vinny is having too much fun doing this.

Can't wait for Dan's "performance" with the intro introduction.

@existence said:

I don't know; so much Giant Bomb premium content is 90+ minutes, so it's nice to have a series that is much easier to get through. Plus it's a tighter experience overall due to the time constraints.

Really good episode. The only complaint is that there isn't more of it, once a week for a game this long is going to be long. Handover report was great, I hope they are individually stylized to reflect each commander's personality and/or status at the end of their time.

Ken Burns watched that intro and immediately retired.

Edit: Oh god, Alex flew off on the mission without assigning new research and it's driving me crazy.

That intro was awesomee!

For the sake of wanting this feature to last longer than 7 episodes: PLEASE learn the rules of flanking, at least. Don't leave yourself exposed (out of cover) in the direction where the enemies are.

Also, never ever ever ever move your guys into a position with zero cover at all. Any movement by another squad mate could reveal enemies who then have a perfect shot on you. Just never do it. Ever.

What fun would this be?

I have to imagine every time Squaddie Caravella opens up with his machine gun he unleashes his battle cry of "ABBONDANZA!"

The production value is incredible. LOVE IT! Keep it up BEASTERS! :)

It's weird that Abby had to do 2 battles (and a fuckton of cutscenes) while Alex only did 1. Progress, though!

Don't get me wrong, I want them all to die! Just not quite so soon. Not like they're going to survive Mutons or Chryssalids anyway.

Oh dear, this is frustrating to watch, so many bad decisions and misinformation, yikes!

Though it surprisingly worked out.

<SPOILER>

I had a moment of panic (Alex missing out on satellite adjacency bonus), followed by joy (Alex realised he had another free construction site), then depression (Alex built the workshop in the space under the satellite uplink).

<SPOILER ENDS>

If Vinny is checking this out, note for ya: get 'em to read the text a bit more and rely on you less. Satellite Uplink's text describes its adjacency bonus (I.e. bonus for when two satellite uplinks are built beside one another) which is very, very useful and could be critical to the health of your mission to shoot the alien people.

Other than that, I love this. However, can I recommend you do two battles per episode?

If you guys complete this, it's gonna go on way too long. I reckon two battles will take every episode to around about an hour which, in all honesty, is still totally fine and shorter than other serials you do.

Later missions do take longer, but you could cross that bridge when you reach it.

I love this feature! XCOM is still one of my favorite games and its great to see the GB east team diving in. The only thing that concerns me a little bit is the length of the episodes. Of course Id love them to be more often because I love watching them but I think maybe doing hour + long episodes like yakuza might be a better format as, like IggNight mentioned, doing one 30 min episode a week will take a very long time.

P.S The handover report from abby was great, maybe she gets resurrected in a future episode by harnessing the alien technology?

I love this website.

The green alien pod things do not explode and AFAIK aren't destructible at all, making them some of the better cover you can get in this game.

Holy SHIT that intro. Absolutely GD amazing

Vinny's production values are best in class. Perfecto.

Though in the wait after episode 1, I may have started replaying EW myself. Classic, non-ironman. That base defence mission was... somewhat harder than I remembered. And by harder I mean everyone died.

Three mechtoids spawn on their first turn, and there's me with no MECs of my own. I don't know how to deal with them via conventional combat rifles.

Episode 38: Thin Man Autopsy.

Fighting the urge to reinstall xcom everytime i watch one of these..

This series has already turned me into a pillar of salt. I love my new pillar life!

@dudeglove: I suspect it might be a font, since it's very precise (for example, the three d's in "kind and today" all have the exact same descender and ascender height). I don't know what font it is, though.

Being bad at video games, X-COM was pretty frustrating to me - but this series has made me reinstall and try again. Fun so far :)

Love this series! The extra production values are great. Research laser weapons! :)

While not bad advice, history has shown that no-one at the current giant bomb staff is capable of reading an on-screen prompt.

@quipido said:

Yeah, either that or have more frequent episodes, because at this rate it's going to be a constant series of people having forgotten everything again.

Love it! Now let's see if Serious Gamer Dan or Dan Dan appears next episode. Lives are on the line.

I wish gbeast had more production power so that stuff like this can come out more frequently

By that time you should have more advanced weapons/Heavies with the anti-mech abilities, or you're pretty much screwed yeah. I remember having to start over at least once there, for the same reason.

Good job, Alex!