I mentioned this on the Bombcast a couple weeks ago, and then we played a bit of it on UPF, but if you want to check out what happens at the end of the game, here's a neat video:

Eventually as you play through the game, you begin to research better ships for your crew; the one pictured is the final craft you make, the Avenger. It's got a lot more room than the Skyranger you start out with and can also go to FUCKING MARS when you unlock that mission. Bring a lot of soldiers, because there's no way to go back and get more when you start the mission. This was a totally new tileset, obviously, based a bit on the desert tileset and alien ship interior tilesets that you saw earlier, but with some new building formations and textures.

This guy's playing with a heavy supply of psionic-equipped soldiers, and he's using the same tactic I did back in the day: send out tanks to scout and reveal enemy locations, then use your psionics guys on the ship to mind control them and scout around further with their eyesight. You can either have your MC'ed enemies kill each other, or drop grenades at their feet to kill themselves, or drop their weapons and run towards your soldiers for some easy kills (which helps increase your soldiers' stats). Psionics was incredibly powerful by the time you had a few of those dudes running around in your missions as you could really wreak some havoc in the enemy forces before they had a chance to react.

You can also see a Blaster Launcher shot at around 4:35 up there. He sets a waypoint right in front of him, another one above the enemy disc/tank, and then shoots it down through the enemy to blow it away. Awesome weapon. There might be more uses of it later in the video, I haven't finished it yet!

Also the ending to the Playstation version of the game is pretty rad:

Get your ass to Mars the Moon.

I never really got into XCOM, I remember being all about the Syndicate (and later Syndicate Wars) and kind of looking down on XCOM. Maybe I should remedy that one of these days...

I like how the alien brain is unceremoniously shot mid-speech. No Mass Effect-style moral choice or any thought paid to capture the brain and learn its secrets.

The end of one of the more notoriously difficult and complicated strategy games is shooting the bad thing in the head.

Ah, yes, good old "Cydonia or Bust". As I recall this was the game's first and only multi-stage mission, which took me by some surprise when I got to the end of the first part.

EDIT: Or looking at that video, am I misremembering? Well, maybe it was the final mission of Terror From the Deep.

EDIT2: Yup, I'm thinking of the last mission of Terror From the Deep. Three parts, with no way to turn back or resupply. Ugh.

My father never used Psi guys too much in his runs of Xcom however he did use tanks, blaster launcher and a ton of guys to achieve his victory. He would often pile the skyranger at the start with as many soldiers as possible and who ever survived was a bonus after the first mission.

I like how even that video has the three common ways to die, "Sitting in the dropship....and get shot." "Step out a door....get shot." "Shoot at a guy and he shoots back....only to shoot his own guy in the dark."

To me this is hands down the greatest game ever made. I remember being blown away as a kid that a game so old could have so much depth.

The Surprise! You go to Mars! moment in that game was great.

This is still one of my favorite missions.

Oh wow, never saw that Playstation ending. And I'm sure if I played the Playstation version I would've seen that repeatedly.

I respect the hell out of anybody who could make it that far. I think I usually made it about 3/4's of the way through before inevitably screwing it up somehow.

This was one of those games I loved watching my older brother play but could never get into them myself.

Pro-tip: you can locate the main brain by just hovering your tanks movement cursor on the second floor. The unseen part where the cursor pulses is the main brain.

I love Firaxis XCOM games but boy would OG XCOM break me.

The alien in that PlayStation ending is unsettling as shit. And so is the music. Ugh.

Been playing some og xcom, it's alright. But it really shows its age. Things like micro management of ammo are just archaic, why is it the xcom commanders job to insure that every soldier has an ammo clip and that the skyranger takes off with enough weapons for everyone? It's not even the difficulty that's the problem, it's just the tedium.

It's a shame because the later stuff looks like a neat scenario.

By the way the Blaster Launcher is still quite devastating in both the new Xcoms, albeit it's in a slightly different form, you don't need to set waypoints, but can essentially tell it to go anywhere and it will automatically path around obstacles, through doors and up and down floors, then proceed to explode for major devastation.

@mikemcn: I'd recommend using OpenXCOM if you aren't already. It has a few bugfixes and quality of life tweaks that cut down on some, not all, of the hassle and also has built in support for mods and higher resolutions. Alternatively, there's Xenonauts, which is basically a slightly more modernized version of OG XCOM with its own share of weird issues.

@arbitrarywater: I really wanted to love Xenonauts as much I loved OG XCOM but it just didn't click for me. I think maybe it doesn't have the same sense of dread I would get playing the original. Wandering through corn fields in the night and starting fires with incendiary ammo so that you could see what was happening, it was magical!

Part of me wants to learn how to play and beat Terror of the Deep, but then the more I read about that game it just sounds insanely hard, especially given how dated the UI is.

@paulmako: For UI troubles, the cure is OpenXcom.

@paulmako: A lot of people would disagree, but I think OG XCOM is better than Terror from the Deep. TFTD is extremely hard although now that I think about it, I wonder if that is just because of the bug in XCOM where the difficulty defaulted to easy after the first mission but never told you? Hmmm. Anyway, I would go for the first one if you were going to go back and play one.

In real life higher ups decide what is troopers daily bullet quota, given calories, equipment load, number of pockets on a battle vest and so on. In Xcom it is tactical decision since only 80 items are allowed for each mission and every soldier has item slot and weight limits. Another thing is that aliens can attack your base while your Skyranger is on a mission [and it also dusts off in a case of base defense], so it can be considered a tactical decision (for example) how many blaster launchers you take with you [and store in the Skyranger] and how many you leave for possible base defense.

Oh wow, theres a Android port of openxcom that runs pretty much flawlessly.

Playing xcom on the bus is pretty cool.

@arabes: TFTD is "harder" because original Xcom's bug and research bugs (+decisions) that plague TFTD. On bug fixed versions, TFTD can be way easier after initial hump. This is due to the things like very powerful melee weapons, not as much MC - capable enemy units and so on. TFTD can break you more easily because mission are longer and that can get to be extremely annoying.

@charlie_victor_bravo: Fucking tell me about it man, those goddam cruise ship missions went on forever :) I always wanted a combo game, where you commanded XCOM in the skies, on the land and in the oceans. It would have been magnificent :)

Ironically, my problem with Xenonauts has a lot to do with it not being different enough from original XCOM. Some of the changes it makes are smart, but in other ways I can't help but feel like they literally just made UFO Defense again 20 years later with a slightly blander wrapper and slightly better UI.

Oh man, those cruise ship missions. I would always wind up with one enemy hiding out in a room somewhere and it'd take me forever to find them. That game was brutal for a lot of reasons.

I'm sure that X-Com: Apocalypse's real-time mode was forced on the developers by a publisher who wanted to get in on the RTS fad of the era, but at least it made the end-of-mission sweep period a relative breeze when you knew that there was only one or two enemies left and you could swarm them.

@rorie: XCOM Apocalypse doesn't get the recognition it deserves. It was a pretty fucking cool game, all the different factions, the retro futurism (in retrospect the City looked a lot like Futurama), all the different vehicles you could buy and kit out... They did a lot of really interesting stuff, shame everything in game looked kind of like shit though :) I did really love kitting out a hover bike with a plasma weapon and using it to assassinate those alien cultist fuckers when they flew around in their hover cars. ya it was a cool game.

disappointed this video, didn't have the: mindcontrol, scroll through each guys inventory,till you get to the alien, equip the grenade, prime the grenade for 0 time units, drop grenade on the ground, near all other enemies. That was one of my favorite combos with mindcontrol.

The other thing I recall from TFTD was that most some of the tech was aimed for underwater missions, and some of the missions were on land, which caused some of that tech to be useless.I think the diving suits which allowed for "flying" like the flying suits of the OG xcom, were uesless on land. In any event I played all 3 and agree that the OG one was probably the best. Also those lobstermen were big assholes.

The first and only time I made it to Mars in this game was a disaster and I never finished the game. As I recall it, my first soldier off of the ship got mind controlled by a Sectoid and turned around and lobbed a grenade right into the middle of the rest of the squad. And people say XCOM 2 is too difficult.