2K Marin... honestly, what the hell?

BEHOLD, THE NEW X-COM TRAILER!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNlC19Vcvrw&feature=channel

NOW, BEHOLD MY OLD POST ABOUT THE NEW X-COM GAME
http://weaversgameblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-new-x-com-game-wont-work-out.html


What did I say again? Something like:
However, the concern I've been reading on the net is that the game is more or less going to just be a re-skinned Bioshock and I don't think these concerns are completely unwarranted.

Well hot damn do I ever love being right because that's exactly what this game appears to be. Let's go over the points of the trailer one by one.

1) FIND THEM
So it seems the place to find them is in the 1950's. This is surprising as the original X-com games take place in the fucking future so I really don't know what we're doing in the 1950's. Oh wait, yes I do; it's so you can re-use everything you've 50's styled from Bioshock in this game. What I really hope this means is that we need to root out aliens in suburban environments. This would be a great throw back to the terror missions in the original X-Com games where aliens invaded a suburb and you needed to try to kill the aliens and save the civilians.

The flip-side to this, I really hope that isn't ALL the game is. Just wandering a suburb waiting for randomly generated aliens to happen to pop into houses for you to kill. Somewhere along the line gaming studios got into their heads that doing something that's pretty fun about a million times never gets repetitive. Let's hope this isn't the case, yes?

2) STUDY THEM
Hmm, this seems awfully familiar. You use a camera, and you take pictures of enemies. Just like in Bioshock... and let me guess, it gives you bonuses against the enemies... just like in Bioshock. You could at least TRY to cover your shame.

3) FIGHT THEM
Ah yes, the COMBAT! The core of any FPS game.
So let's see in the video there was a

"6 shooter" revolver


an old 50's shotgun



an electricity gun



a fire making thing

Jeeze, this all seems a bit similar!

Like honestly guys, this just reeks of cutting corners. Maybe the game will amaze me, it's too early to tell. Maybe the story will blow my ass out of the water, maybe it will be really engaging and fun. I don't know, but what I DO know is that I'm really not pleased with this incredibly uninspired design.

One of the things that I get asked from time to time is why I care? If I don't like the game, why go on these big, huge rants about it? Why THIS game in particular?

The answer is that I have a special place for the X-Com series. If this game were called something completely different I would have no qualms with it. It's that your bastardizing an amazing series. It's that you're banking on the popularity of an amazing and ENTIRELY unrelated game. Furthermore, it's because for a lot of new and younger gamers this will be what X-Com means.

That's a large and frightening idea to me. The name X-Com shouldn't be associated with a reskin of the sequel to a system shock 2 clone. It's so much more.