Howdy,
Sectiplave here hailing from a country that is "interestingly" represented in Xcom's geoscape, and appears to be missing an entire island, little New Zealand
I first encountered Xcom Enemy Unknown by watching my older brother play the game in the late 90's (I would have been 10-11) as a kid who grew up playing with toy tanks, buckets of little plasic army men, and G.I JOE figurines the game immediately captured my attention.
It wasn't until a year or two later that I was deemed fit for duty by my older brother and allowed to play the game, it goes without saying since I'm posting here the game left a huge impression on me and to this day is one of my all time favorite games which I come back to every few years for another play through.
Playing the vanilla DOS version very heavily from a young age I simply came to accept the games bugs as the game itself, I also picked up the habit (people can argue if it's good / bad / human nature) of save scumming my way through tough missions instead of learning how to play in a tactical fashion.
A few years later when I had just started what we refer to as high school my brother got us a copy of Terror From the Deep. I always found Xcom EU to be a tense atmospheric game, but for me TFTD and the theme of the unknown deeps really clicked with me and I went absolutely bonkers on this title. I'll often remember back in school competing with a friend for the most "Hardcore" TFTD player, we played as much as possible for months before calling it, and he took the crown with his number of USO's in the thousands and colonies in the hundreds! (I've messaged this friend and reissued the challenge via OpenXcom just today)
I am a gaming addict, but regardless how much time has gone by I find myself returning to what I consider gaming classics time and again. Each time I come back to play the Xcom titles I find my approach is less about abusing RNG seeding, and more about how to use the tools provided to get the job done.
I discovered the UFO / TFTD extender projects in 2013 when I came back for my Xcom fix and really enjoy playing the game minus all the bugs I had taken for granted as well as adding some mods that I would consider "quality of life" improvements. This time around I seem to have come back at the perfect time, not only have I never had the pleasure of using OpenXcom with it's keybinding and battlescape scaling awesomeness, it now supports TFTD!
I've been playing via OpenXcom TFTD for the past 3 days and I feel like a kid back in high school eagerly awaiting my next play session. I truely do look forward to the mods that the community will bring to the game to extend it's life even further. It's times like this I'm sure I'll be 60 years old and still coming back to this game
Aside from my fanatical addiction to Xcom and old games, I'm currently playing FF14 (the time sink aspects of MMO's drain me and I may unsubscribe from this) and also really enjoy roguelike games and have an absolutely silly number of play hours in The Binding of Isaac rebirth. I also play through many of the AAA titles, while I enjoy the experience there are few games I ever feel the urge to return to.
That's me, my passion is gaming as a whole and Xcom is one of my pinnacles of the passion. Wow this got long fast :S Cya around!
