You Defeated! XCOM: Enemy Unknown

It's been a while since my last post. Time to burn those pages again and get back into the habit of writing. Let's kick it off with a recent  personal experience I had in the world of video games.

At long last, the elusive victory over XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been achieved. XCOM EU, for those that don't know, is a turn-based strategy game that came out in 2012. I won't go into the details about it as I outlined them in a review and if you want to know more, you can always find sites on the net about them, like this one.

I picked up XCOM around its launch and, until now, have never completed the base campaign. That's not to say that I haven't played it at all since its release. It's been an on-and-off affair mostly, but if you asked anyone in my house, they'd say that they'd seen me play it enough to have codenames for the game as well as the situation I was in; the most common term was Broadside-of-a-Barn, which meant my soldiers were missing easy shots and dying as a result. So if I played that much, why did it take so long for me to finally beat the game?

Late Bird Review: XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Originally posted December 2012

Strategy games (turn-based or otherwise) usually have their own niche market. Sure, there are the Blizzard strategy games that have a wide appeal and the franchises like Civilization that have been around for decades. With no new Starcraft experience till next year, and the popularity of the first-person shooter ever increasing, it was unlikely there were going to be any big strategy games in time for the holidays. Yet the people at Fireaxis were able to deliver the goods. It may not have been a new Civilization game, but XCOM: Enemy Unknown is still a true gem of this year along with a franchise name about as old as the Civilization games. But is this gem a perfect diamond, or do the cracks make the edges too sharp to hold?

Late Bird Review: Assassin's Creed

Written January 2011

So this is obviously a well-overdue review. But having played it several times now and with Brotherhood having spent enough time in the ether, it seemed right to revisit the original game and go on the journey through the franchise, much like how the character Desmond Miles must travel through history. Throughout the journey, the big improvements and small tweaks have made the franchise much more interesting and “bearable,” however, there are some rough beginnings.

At the time of its initial release, Assassin’s Creed was praised with being innovative and exceptional. The graphics were unlike anything anyone had seen with gameplay like no other. It was the fact that it was so different and new that made it so forgivable at the time, whereas just a few short years later the praise would have been replaced with scoffs.