Part 60

In an alternate reality...





March 7, 2084

*BEGIN RECORDING*

My name is Otto Zander. I was born March 3rd in a small town in Austria. I was a soldier recruited by X-COM to fight the alien menace in the First Alien HOLY MOTHER OF CRAP WHAT IS THAT?!

SHIT! The aliens are attacking with everything they have!

We've only got a stock Valkyrie Interceptor and two hovercars to deal with this!

Don't they know they're supposed to send a few crappy ships, followed by waves of slightly stronger UFOs before sending their best ships?

Don't these aliens know anything about tactics and warfare?

I guess we're doomed before our first mission.

Otto Zander, signing off.

*END RECORDING*

So here's what happens when you bend the game's save files to your whim.

First up, you can use the aliens weapons! Left to right we have Psimorph's Mindbender, Megaspawn's weapons, spitter funnel, multiworm spit, alien egg spit, hyperworm bite, Queenspawn tentacles, popper bomb and "alien artifact". Wait, go back one - Popper bomb?

Was I doing everything the sucker way? Let's click on that popper bomb...

Goddammit, I wish I found that earlier. Less risk of friendly casualties from dropped grenades, no unsightly corpses left strewn about, and no morale penalty. Why is that?

Because you don't lose your characters when you use a popper bomb! I had to replay those missions a lot because after a while everyone's moral was so low they wouldn't do anything.

There's a couple of new, broken, X-COM weapons too, plus you can now use brainsuckers as ammo. The gun would show up, but you have to hack it to put ammo in there. Had I know this I would have brainsucked the "missing soliders" in the alien dimension and fought them, instead of rescuing them.

What do we get in the way of new ships?

Fuck yes!

The game really doesn't like it when you have UFOs on your side.

They exit the base like normal. I'll give the programmers props for getting this right.

You can equip the ships as well, even though the game protests it a little bit. You can't attach personnel or cargo modules though.

And that's it! I'll see you all next time for UFO Defense unless someone can finish a thread of that in the meantime. At least I know I won't get beaten to Enforcer.



Thanks to everyone for reading and posting in here. It makes all the effort worthwhile. Specific shout-outs:

Demota for starting off the X-COM LP train
GetWellGamers for making Soup-Bot, and allowing me to twist him into an inhuman killing machine
Jade Star for all the PMs and continuing the LP
Coolswa for killing teammates
Mindfish for reaching unprecedented levels of awesomeness. I actually tried sending him into dangerous situations to get himself killed. He ended up killing everything anyway, and turned into even more of a badass.
Staplegun for being a murderous traitor
Psion for being a good sport and starting the human popper idea
Sam Hall for the one picture he sent me of sectoids attacking the city
From Earth for archiving this once I send it to him (at least I hope he will)
Whoever for buying me platinum
Everyone else I should name but forgot to

And a very special fuck you to Marcade for suggesting "Welcome From Earf" as a ship name. I hope you're happy.

It's been an honor!